Esther Dyson Quotes

With YouTube - with the Internet in general - you have information overload. The people who don't necessarily get credit are the curators.

I've built a network that curates interestingness. In my universe, it encompasses thousands and thousands of filters and people, each person being a filter. So it's kinda cool. Like I've created my own utopia, removing the boring stuff and showing only the amazing stuff.

The mass media in the days of newspapers and television it's hard to be able to find a story that's about just what you're interested in at the time you're interested in it.

There is an overwhelming amount of information available to us all on the web each day, not to mention what is shared with us by our family, friends, fans, and followers. This necessitates the need to filter through all that information and to decide for ourselves where to put our attention.

I think the Internet has made it easier for people to connect with things that they really like, as well as provide a more personal experience, of 'I found this!' and then you can pass it to friends.

That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.

There are so many things on Twitter, so many mentions, it's hard to get through all of them.

Blogs are amazing, and I'm so grateful to mine for giving me such a great platform to explore other ideas, but it's just not practical to scroll through 30 pages of blog to find a dinner recipe.

A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.

Basically there's just so much stuff flowing past on the internet now, you have to let most of it go. And I've grown accustomed to the process of not worrying too much about the stuff I'm not getting to, because the important stuff will come back around.

If I want to spend the rest of my life reading one day's output of information, which is about what it would take, OK fine. But I personally prefer calibration from an aggregator or newspaper, where the No. 1 story is one they consider important, [and] they're usually right.

Try to be a filter, not a sponge.

I would like to see us shake-in, instead of a shakeout, in the sense that it's true that there's a lot of junk online, and we have to filter it and so forth.

Word of mouth is the most effective means of communication.

Curation comes up when search stops working.

The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped in these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again.

A handful of us determine what will be on the evening news broadcasts, or, for that matter, in the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Indeed it is a handful of us with this awesome power.And those [news stories] available to us already have been culled and re-culled by persons far outside our control.

For too long, reporters for the big media outlets have been fixated on novelty, always moving too quickly onto the next big score or the next hot get. Paradoxically, in these days of instant communication and sixty-minute news cycles, it's actually easier to miss information we might otherwise pay attention to. That's why we need stories to be covered and re-covered until they filter up enough to become part of the cultural bloodstream.

I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing with the material I’m inundated with that poses the problem.

In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues are less likely to come to our attention at all.

So while it is true that children are exposed to more information and a greater variety of experiences than were children of the past, it does not follow that they automatically become more sophisticated. We always know much more than we understand, and with the torrent of information to which young people are exposed, the gap between knowing and understanding, between experience and learning, has become even greater than it was in the past.

The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.

It's just as valuable to curate content as it is to create it.

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

Learning is the art of ignoring.