Jim Yong Kim Quotes

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.

What we have found is that because of smartphones and access to media, and because everybody knows how everyone else lives, you have no idea where the next huge social movement is going to erupt.

Everyone has a voice. I mean, that's the good side to the Internet Age and social media. Obviously, there's negatives to it, but I think that the fact that everyone has a voice now is a tool that we can use for good.

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.

You can’t blame the message on the medium, not exactly. But maybe, all things considered, arming everyone with pocket supercomputers, and then filtering most of human experience through social-media feedback loops, wasn’t the greatest idea…however glorious modern communications may be, they’ve also empowered a cast of goons, crooks and jihadists to build audiences and influence world-wide.

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.

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

Through all aspects of society be it art, design, the financial markets, government, technology or communications we are witnessing unprecedented global transformation - the result of which is impossible to predict.

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

I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected.

The evolution of social media into a robust mechanism for social transformation is already visible. Despite many adamant critics who insist that tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are little more than faddish distractions useful only to exchange trivial information, these critics are being proven wrong time and again.

I think there's been a major shift in grass roots media because of the Internet and because the geeks and nerds rule the world. They are in control in so many ways.

Saudi Arabia has also changed. People today are connecting with each other all across the world through small gadgets and television. It's a different society.

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.

I come from the school who thought the Internet could be the great democratising force, that getting rid of the gatekeepers was a positive move.

Technology and social media have brought power back to the people.

We now have powerful technology, which allows us a voice across boundaries, which was unimaginable at the time of the Greenham Protest, a protest that pre-dates the Internet and the mobile phone.

We're living in an era of unprecedented change, and I want to be a part of documenting it.

I think the Internet and technology in general has changed everything. We can see it overseas even more with the Arab Spring and so forth.

We're seeing an enormous amount of global upward mobility that's quite rapid and quite sudden, and undiscovered individuals have a chance - using the Internet, using computers - to prove themselves very quickly. So I think the mobility story will be a quite complicated one.

The power of social media is it forces necessary change.

Young Egyptians, gazing through the windows of the Internet, have gained a keener sense than many of their elders of the freedoms and opportunities they lack. They have found in social media a way to interact and share ideas, bypassing, in virtual space, the restrictions placed on physical freedom of assembly.

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.

This is the conundrum of the present regimes in the Arab world. They still want to control youth; they want to be in control as they did in the 1950s and '60s. But that doesn't work anymore. Now with just a Wi-Fi link, you can understand what's happening in the world.

I happen to be one of the people who believe that the Internet is a force of good, and I'm very optimistic about it.