Daniel Levitin Quotes

We are drowning in information.

We're not in an information age anymore. We're in the information management age.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

People sometimes announce that we have entered 'the information age' as if information did not exist in other times. I think that every age was an age of information, each in its own way and according to the available media.

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.

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

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

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.

I think it's true we look forward to enormous amounts of information, but I think we would be better off if we thought about the kinds of wisdom and thoughtfulness that we need in order to handle the amount of information ahead.

I'm kind of fascinated by this idea that we can surround ourselves with information: we can just pile up data after data after data and arm ourselves with facts and yet still not be able to answer the questions that we have.

I think something that's really understudied and misunderstood is the use of information.

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.

When everybody has access to an avalanche of information, becoming a master thinker is very important in your life-long security.

People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.

The more we can organize, find and manage information, the more effectively we can function in our modern world.

The level of ignorance is declining, and the ability to accumulate data and manipulate it for various ends is increasing.

Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit.

Collecting intelligence information is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. You know, in hindsight It's great. The problem is there's a million dots at the time.

When people have too many choices, they make bad choices.

Here's the thing: If you're monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. How are you going to process that amount of information?

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.