Bill Gates Quotes

Ever since I first used a computer in the early '80s, I've thought of it as a fundamentally new medium for the dissemination of ideas which can transform people's lives and the society we live in.

The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

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.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Libraries are at a cultural crossroads. Some proffer that libraries as we know them may go away altogether, ironic victims of the information age where Google has subverted Dewey decimal and researchers can access anything on a handheld device. Who needs to venture deep into the stacks when answers are but a click away?

This is a very different world. Much of it is new. What has happened is that information technology has politicized the world…It’s a world where most of the big problems spill over national boundaries.

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilization. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.

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.

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

The computer age has arrived, and it influences everything: analysis, preparation, information. Now a different talent is required - the ability to synthesize ideas.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.

At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television - by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

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

Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away.

With the revolution in information technology, with the revolution in transport technologies, I think just geography has lost its all significance.

I think this is the kind of thing where we're rapidly moving toward an age where most of the populace will be almost unable to imagine life without an Internet component interlocked with it.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think.