Noam Chomsky Quotes

Anyone familiar with the marvels of the Worldwide Web can hardly fail to see that we have entered a new era in communications on a scale perhaps comparable to the invention of the Gutenberg press.

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. So you don't have to wait for a letter to get to England in six weeks, you have almost instant communication. That was an enormous shift.

The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, "It's the biggest thing since Gutenberg," and then someone else said "No, it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing."

I think the Internet has changed the world.

The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

The Internet has changed everything. We expect to know everything instantly. If you don't understand digital communication, you're at a disadvantage.

Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.

The moment instant communications was within the grasp of all, America was bonded and annealed into an almost indivisible one.

By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.

We changed the world many ways with the Internet.

Like the invention of the printing press before it, the Internet has been the greatest instrumentality of free speech and the exchange of ideas in the history of mankind.

We didn't even have email when I was in college.

People are always saying it's the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, it's a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, it's a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.

When I was growing up, I had three channels, and I didn't know what happened in the Philippines instantly if it happened. Now you can be on the Internet and find out what's going on in Zimbabwe. It's changed.

A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible-indeed, inevitable-the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.

I think there's been a gigantic shift in the way we talk to each other, and the way that we communicate with each other. So as a filmmaker, the stuff's always been really interesting to me, and I sort of considered a lot of my films horror films, the ones that were relationship dramas, because I feel like it was very easy to look at modern communication and the Internet and cell phones and all that stuff as horror movies, basically.

The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years.

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.

The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.

This whole thing called the internet and all this other kind of stuff is about to go crazy. It's all going to change. But, you know what's not going to change? The talented people.