Alan Coren Quotes

Exponential growth in access to the Internet, satellite television and radio, cell phones, and P.D.A.'s means that breaking news now reaches virtually every corner of the globe.

People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

The telegraph annihilates space and time. Every morning every part knows what every other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing.

When you stop to realize that Abraham Lincoln was probably never seen by more than 400 people in a single evening, and that I can enter over 40 million homes in a single evening due to the power of television, you have to admit the situation is not normal.

The institutions are working better now, the banks are much more functional. At this time, 1997, there were no mobile phones! It's a whole different thing now with mobile phones: technology has created a form of regulation, because people can actually talk to each other a lot more.

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.

I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the President had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone. It's a larger anthropological shift in my mind than even the tattoo age in the United States.

My inspiration is really very simple: I'm struck by things that I want to know more about. I really do react just as a curious person: who is this person? What's the story behind this situation? Why do people like this or dislike this thing?

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.

And connected is helping people stay in touch and maintain empathy for each other, and bandwidth.

A Masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of Kenya has better mobile comm than President Reagan did 25 years ago.

People are always going to need physicality; they're going to want to meet other people even more. I've got faith in the physical angle. People have their needs. They won't forget about them.

Information technology has brought people much closer together than ever before, providing a democratizing and mostly stabilizing influence.

If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.

It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.

I’m not a scholar or a psychologist, so I don’t really think about why. But I do think about what it means to sing to and with people, to offer music to them, and to ask them to spend time with me.

When the air balloon was first discovered, some one flippantly asked Dr. Franklin what was the use of it. The doctor answered this question by asking another: "What is the use of a new-born infant? It may become a man."

What's odd about it is that I see it as these moments and then other people, I'll reply to someone, and they're like, "Follow me back, let's be friends!" and I'm like, "See, on the train you have a great conversation between stops and you don't necessarily exchange phone numbers. It's not that deep, actually. Why can't the moment just be what it is?"

She was struck by the simple truth that sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doing them with the right people.

The globe is shrinking, the information age is bringing a lot of changes. People are anxious about their future and their children's futures.

I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.