Digital Culture Quotes

I don't have a Facebook or a Twitter account, and I don't know how I feel about this idea of, "Now, I'm eating dinner, and I want everyone to know that I'm having dinner at this time." or "I just mailed a letter and dropped off my kids." That, to me, is a very strange phenomenon.

My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.

'Cyberspace' as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that, after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix '-electro' to make things cool, because everything was electrical. 'Electro' was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think 'cyber' is sort of the same way.

Look at social media. It's what we do, right?

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.

Twitter is a cesspool but I find I can ignore most of the cess most of the time.

People talk about PlayStations, video games, social network and Twitter; I can't handle it.

If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.

Our mobile devices are so powerful that they don't just change what we do, they're changing who we are.

I was part of the generation that pushed the Internet. In fact, I broke as an artist in the U.S.A. because of the Internet.

Even if it's other people, like on MySpace pages, we're just as collective of enthusiasts now. That seems to be the world we're in.

Downloading and Web 2.0 have famously led to new ways of accessing culture. But these have tended to be parasitic on old media. The law of Web 2.0 is that everything comes back, whether it be adverts, public information films or long-forgotten TV serials: history happens first as tragedy, then as YouTube.

Even if I'm not so into the specific celebrities who are sharing images of themselves looking "bad," I think it's an amazing contribution to the conversations about beauty that we have online.

I was pretty familiar with TikTok: I always thought its videos would be ironically hilarious. When I became a trending topic on there, it was a crazy moment for me. A lot of people will try to downplay it, but I saw it as something bigger.

Living as we do in the age of Facebook, we shouldn't be surprised that some countries are starting to imagine themselves more as social networks than as a physical place.

On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. But the truth is life is being lived there. When they smile - right, you've seen people stop - all of a sudden, life is being lived there, somewhere up in that weird, dense network.

Twitter is more a cultural than a technological change.

I do love Instagram, and my kids are with me, like, 24-7, so it's inevitable that they'll be on there. And honestly, I know it sounds weird, but I look up people all the time on it. Because I find people so interesting, and I'm curious about them. It's a gateway to meet new people. I think the whole concept of Instagram is really cool.

Hackerspaces are the digital-age equivalent of English Enlightenment coffee houses. They are places open to all, indifferent to social status, and where ideas and knowledge hold primary value.

In the information society, nobody thinks. We expect to banish paper, but we actually banish thought.

Wisdom is dead. Long live information.

Will the social networking phenomenon lessen? I don't think so.

As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.

I think it's really great that people share their work [on Myspace] and no one is paying for it. I think that's a very healthy thing and it's not a corporate thing.

Social media is driving the culture, it drives peoples minds literally.