Gregory Benford Quotes

Message boards are like going to a Halloween masquerade party. Everybody has a screen name.

America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves.

Tech gives people more opportunities to be themselves in front of other people. Sometimes that's great; sometimes it's bad.

I'm a computer freak. I'm on the Internet every night. Sometimes I play dungeons and dragons with 15-year-old boys who think I'm a 15-year-old boy with a weird vocabulary.

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

The internet is like a gossipy girls' locker room after school, isn't it?

Before Twitter or Facebook, all the fandom that I knew about was anecdotal.

I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost, because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home, a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture, writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books.

I really love the internet. They say chat-rooms are the trailer park of the internet but I find it amazing.

The new freedom of expression brought by the Internet goes far beyond politics. People relate to each other in new ways, posing questions about how we should respond to people when all that we know about them is what we have learned through a medium that permits all kinds of anonymity and deception.

Surprisingly, I think if you're known on the Internet, you're probably an introvert.

Our generation's grown up with the Internet, so it's an extension of our social lives; it's an extension of us. It makes perfect sense for me to use that medium.

People reveal so much of their mental processes online, simply because the psychological effect of anonymity just means that a whole raft of inhibitions are left alone when people log on.

I have friends who are majorly into the cosplay culture and have urged me to go to a convention for no other reason than to meet others like me.

The analogy I use is that 'World of Warcraft' is like going to the mall: you see a ton of people there, but you don't really want to interact with them; you just want to know you're part of the human race. And if you get in trouble, you'll know someone else is there.

The internet is a wild land with its own games, languages and gestures through which we are starting to share common feelings.

The Internet is where you can find people who are authentic.

One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us.'

Facebook takes it as a core truth that sharing and connecting is a force that will improve the world.

Reddit offers the opportunity for us as humans to connect on a much deeper, broader level because users have an alter ego and aren't tied to a social network of friends with whom they want to share how perfect their lives are.

I love connected culture.

The problem of online identity is expressed best in an old 'New Yorker' cartoon with a picture of a dog next to a computer, and the dog says, 'No one online knows you're a dog.'

I used to be on the Internet a lot, so all my friends on the Internet were from California.

Trolling can be a great way to engage with the world, a way to regain self-esteem and happiness, or, dare I say it, a way of life.

It turns out that the most powerful use of technology is to connect people together socially.