Jean-Francois Lyotard Quotes

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.

I am hoping, though, that many of them have kids, who, when they have a moment to take a break from their iPods, Internet, or Google, will explain to their parents running the country just how the world is being flattened.

The explosion in access to mobile phones and digital services means that people everywhere are contributing vast amounts of information to the global knowledge warehouse. Moreover, they are doing so for free, just by communicating, buying and selling goods and going about their daily lives.

Computation, storage, and communications capacity are in the hands of practically every connected person - and these are the basic physical capital means necessary for producing information, knowledge and culture, in the hands of something like 600 million to a billion people around the planet.

What the Internet has done is it has decentralised power.

In this century of hyper-postmodern ideals, with the digital future, we're segmented into different people, places, and things in a constant state of change.

TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.

People are naming it the Third Wave, the Information Age, etc. but I would say those are basically technological descriptions, and this next shift is not about technology - although obviously it will be influenced and in some cases expressed by technologies.

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

People always ask me if I could live in any other era what would it be, and I tell them none! I feel so lucky to live in an age where technology has changed and continues to change and make life so much more exciting. It keeps everyone young and constantly learning new things.

We have at our fingertips information that 500 years ago would have made the poorest man a prince.

Modernity is disruptive, and I endorse that.

In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.

A global society is coming into being, a global society that is made out of information that was not intended to be ours, but is ours, by the mistaken invention of computers and the printing press, information is power, and information has spilled by the clumsy hands of the dominator culture so that the information is everywhere, never before has the situation been so fluid, we might be able to finally have a crack at this

21st century is the century of knowledge and the world has always looked at India whenever knowledge finds prominence. Emergence of knowledge society is no more a slogan but has become a reality. Knowledge will be the fountainhead of all the activities that happen in human development.

By now, it seems as if everyone has already read Thomas L. Friedman's 'The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.' It changed the way we think about global business, competitiveness and the implication for far-flung economies, governments, education and more.

I am so sorry to see the state of reading in such decline. I think it says something really scary and terrible about us as a culture. I think it does have to do with everyone's total global embrace of technology.

For many societies, the journey to modernity has been painful and costly.

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

I think there's a gigantic generation gap in terms of how people understand the Internet and how much they think technology is an important factor in social change.

What's interesting about the shift from an industrial age to a technological age is that we keep inventing new media: movies, records, radio, television, the Internet, and now ebooks - and one of the things that's most interesting about the invention of a new medium is watching it reinvent itself as it penetrates the culture.

The social world is transforming the way we create wealth, work, learn, play, raise our children, and probably the way we think.

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.

The Internet has made some phenomenal breakthroughs that are still only poorly understood in terms of changing people's ideas of us and them. If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite.