Nadine Gordimer Quotes

Radio and films, and now television, open for us a window onto everything that goes on throughout the world: the events—and the ideas too—of all humanity invade our homes day after day

We didn't know about the rest of the world. We just knew the pictures that we saw on TV, and it was so different that we wanted to try to imitate that, to a certain extent.

That's just globalization. It's got good sides as well. But scenes aren't allowed to develop on their own anymore. Everyone knows about everything.

But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet.

The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.

Today, no country can ever truly cut itself off from the global media or from external sources of information. Trends that start in one corner of the world are rapidly replicated thousands of miles away.

Men knew little, formerly, of what was passing beyond ... their own immediate neighborhood, but now, through the ... newspapers ... town and country, state and nation, and the most distant parts of the world are brought together, and whatever is new, rare and important, is conveyed with rapidity to every reader ... set forth in the most succinct manner, and in a style adapted to the comprehension of all.

Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance of his society's manifold connections with the wider world, the fact that prosperity and security at home, for instance, often depend on extensive violence and exploitation abroad.

Communications are making this one world. Back in the day, 400-500 years ago, nobody knew what anyone else was doing. It's on the 6 O'Clock news now. Now we can say, Oh, that's the way they live. Oh, they do that!! Opportunities, the chance to bring about change, it's all based on communication. Communication and jet planes.

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us.

If you were president 50 years ago, the tragedy in Syria might not even penetrate what the American people were thinking about on a day to day basis. Today, they're seeing vivid images of a child in the aftermath of a bombing.

For better or worse, MTV sort of bridges the whole country together almost like the BBC does in England. It's opened up everything so wide that it's possible for everyone to have different ideas.

People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.

I remember being in China and realising how irrelevant not even Britain is, but also Europe. We're just another remote country that hardly impinges on some places at all.

There is a tendency around the world today to copy TV culture. And that is not always a virtue.

It's because we are so flooded with American culture that we're startled when we see ourselves up there on the screen.

You have to travel globally today to know what's going on and maintain an edge.

We've had American TV shows in Britain for years and that hasn't affected our culture at all.

I think it's terribly important to watch TV. I think there's a sort of minimum number of hours of TV a day you ought to watch, and unless you watch three or four hours of TV a day, you're just closing your eyes to some of the most important sort of stream of consciousness that's going on!

The world is far more interconnected today. Hence the need to understand each other is greater than ever before.

The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we're a continent and the world falls away after us. And it's just nonsense.

It's almost as if people think that in Latin America we're not hip to what's happening here.

News, if unreported, has no impact. It might as well have not happened at all.

We talk about globalization today as if it's some great big new thing, that we've all just discovered. But there's really nothing new about it.

Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn't exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.