Misha Glenny Quotes

If you look at the history of communication, new technologies like the phone and e-mail didn't just let people do things faster; it fundamentally changed the scope of the kinds of projects people dared to take on.

Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.

Sadly, e-mail has triggered the decline of the handwritten note; I have seen its near-disappearance in my lifetime.

When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.

Unlike then, the mail stream of today has diminished by such things as e-mails and faxes and cell phones and text messages, largely electronic means of communication that replace mail.

Who would know but ten years ago that kids would be texting each other all the time, that that would be one of their main forms of communication. And so many times, these kids know more about the technology than their parents. And so many times, we're putting kids in very adult situations and expecting them to behave like they're 40 years old.

In the past, before phones and the Internet, all communication was face-to-face. Now, most of it is digital, via emails and messaging services. If people were to start using virtual reality, it would almost come full circle.

We are more and more into technology. Everything is texting, and everything is instant. Flowers are completely impractical as a method of communication when you could just send a text.

The more technologically advanced our society becomes, the more we need to go back to the basic fundamentals of human communication.

I wouldn't be surprised if history records Tim Berners-Lee as the second Gutenberg.

Here, all of a sudden, we have a revolution in - in communication, and it is - it is really, truly big. Internet is as big as the introduction of fire to the human race, or the introduction of electricity into our lives.

The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet.

No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.

It's OK to offend people with the Gospel, but, good grief- let's don't offend them with something else.

Nothing matters more to AA's future welfare than the manner in which we use the colossus of modern communication. Used unselfishly and well, it can produce results surpassing our present imagination.

Gossip is only the lack of a worthy memory.

Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.

The man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.

The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

The automobile, practical since 1906, was proceeding to disintegrate and stamp anew the pattern of communication, manners, and city life in the United States, by 1918; before long, men would begin to see that the automobile, and the mass production techniques which made its possible, could alter the national character and morality more thoroughly than could the most absolute of tyrants. As a mechanical Jacobin, it rivaled the dynamo. The productive process which made these vehicles cheap was still more subversive of the old ways than was the gasoline engine itself.

When the print revolution occurred 400 years ago, human beings lost a certain mental capacity, including a sense of memory. In Africa today, you meet people who still carry everything in their heads, the way we used to. We rely on telephone books, address books. We have to look up everything.

Technology has a lot to do with how the world is developing at the moment because there are very raw and pure and primal emotions that people are communicating to each other over the Internet.

Cars are changing and so is the way we communicate about them.

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.