Timothy Noah Quotes

With the profusion of images and the Internet, you can get any truth you want.

I think the American people are bombarded with information from all directions, all day long.

Never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.

What a culture we live in, we are swimming in an ocean of information, and drowning in ignorance.

We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

It's a good thing I was born in this century, when superfluous television seems to be part of the economy.

The Age of Information, Has turned out to be the Age of Ignorance.

The world is really run by the Web. There's so much information out there that you can click and keep going down the rabbit hole finding stuff.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

There's so much information and journalism on television. We have too much to absorb.

We're living in this world where we have so much media all the time. We have access to imagery all the time.

The tragic thing about the Internet is that you can find out way too much, way too quickly.

. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

I honestly think I'm going to rot my brain with all the news. I'm a news junkie.

Technology has become such a big part of our humanity. We have the Internet on 24 hours a day, even when we're sleeping.

We're living in a society where there's a cacophony of noise and opinion.

Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you're just unable to focus.

There's an apparent freedom, an apparent liberty of access to everything, but you can't use it because it's too much. Everything is at the same level. You even have fake news. You have to go through fake news to make up your mind. Facts and lies are treated as equal. There are even people who are against the idea of climate change.

There's so much information accessible to everyone now because the Internet is so powerful; social media is so powerful.

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

It's not as if Trump is addicted to the best-researched, most in-depth, meticulously sourced material in the world. If he were, we'd all be better off, right?

Just remember, in 1973, we had no digital cameras, no personal computers, no Internet. The thought of putting a billion transistors in a cell phone was ludicrous.

The phone's never far away. The TV's always on. We are constantly on the news cycle; either watching the news, making the news, talking about the news.

One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.