John McGahern Quotes

Fibre optic is becoming like electricity. If you look at how electricity spread around the globe 100 years ago, that's what's happening now.

India lives in several centuries at the same time. Every night outside my house I pass a road gang of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber optic cables to speed up digital revolution. They work by the light of a few candles.

In the 20th century, we had a century where at the beginning of the century, most of the world was agricultural and industry was very primitive. At the end of that century, we had men in orbit, we had been to the moon, we had people with cell phones and colour televisions and the Internet and amazing medical technology of all kinds.

It was government investment that led to the creation of the Internet.

A country’s Internet infrastructure, just like it’s physical infrastructure, is essential to its economic competition and growth.

There's been resistance to every new technology that's ever been introduced. When books came out hundreds of years ago, there were complaints that it would destroy the oral tradition. Some of those fears were justified, but it didn't stop the rise of the written word. And books have proven to be incredibly useful.

Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

The Internet creates as well as destroys. Social networks, search advertising, and cloud computing are multibillion dollar industries that didn't exist 10 years ago. They are products of the same force that has rendered the Postal Service's core business obsolete.

The city of Tehran is a very modern metropolis, and there's an emphasis in the Islamic republic on science and advancement and technology.

The mobile industry changed Africa.

There's a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It's a difference in degree that's so enormous it becomes a difference in kind.

The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we've learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago.

Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

The '90s will be looked back on as ushering in an era of comfort.

Whenever culture has gone through a radical change, as ours has - from industrial age to information age - there are people who will deny that things have changed; they resist it and refuse to change.

Throughout U.S. history, competent public investments have been an essential complement to private investments - from the Louisiana Purchase, to land-grant colleges, to the Interstate Highway System, to the Internet.

I don't know when network executives will get out of the Dark Ages.

We are so reliant on power and technology for everything.

The remote area today is more proximate to economic potential. A fiber-optic cable can go where no road or rail ever has.

The global economy and its technologies can be hugely liberating for those in a position to take advantage of them.

Marx never saw an electric light bulb.

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

In the information age, when tradition, propriety, formality or culture clash with informational ease and utility, the traditional forms must … yield.