Digital Age Quotes

1. "The next time you feel yourself giving in to the sometimes overwhelming urge to panic about the fate of literature in the digital age, follow this simple remedy: remember that you dream. For that is ironclad proof . . . that literature—that narrative art in whatever form—will never die. Humans, strange creatures that we are, make sense of our lives by telling stories. In the space between each day and the next, we refresh our minds by concocting the most fantastic and elaborate fictions. We spend roughly a third of our lives thus, re-arranging our scattered experiences into stories. That we do it at all is bizarre and inexplicable. But as long as we do it, we will crave stories—human stories, stories that speak to us—in our waking life. The Internet, powerful as it is, cannot change that."
Author: Adam Hammond

2. "Digital for storage and quickness. Analog for fatness and warmth."
Author: Adrian Belew

3. "In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?"
Author: Al Gore

4. "We haven't lost romance in the digital age, but we may be neglecting it. In doing so, antiquated art forms are taking on new importance. The power of a handwritten letter is greater than ever. It's personal and deliberate and means more than an e-mail or text ever will."
Author: Ashton Kutcher

5. "What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop."
Author: Bono

6. "Digital imaging allows both groups to rise above the limitations of mess and clutter and mechanics, and apply our talents to creating images limited only by our imaginations."
Author: Buffy Sainte Marie

7. "When I look at a digitally acquired and projected image, it looks inferior against an original negative anamorphic print or an IMAX one."
Author: Christopher Nolan

8. "Industrial capitalism brought representative democracy, but with a weak public mandate and inert citizenry. The digital age offers a new democracy based on public deliberation and active citizenship."
Author: Don Tapscott

9. "Our enthusiasm for digital technology about which we have little understanding and over which we have little control leads us not toward greater agency, but toward less...We have surrendered the unfolding of a new technological age to a small elite who have seized the capability on offer. But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing press by force, today's elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest."
Author: Douglas Rushkoff

10. "I don't know a single person who is not immersed in the digital universe. Even people who are strongly anti-technology are probably voicing that view on a Web site somewhere. Third-world villagers without electricity have cellphones."
Author: George Dyson

11. "Last time I checked, the digital universe was expanding at the rate of five trillion bits per second in storage and two trillion transistors per second on the processing side."
Author: George Dyson

12. "The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy."
Author: George Packer

13. "Troops are everywhere in their modern, digital camouflage, designed to blend in anywhere at any time. Yet at night we wear bright yellow reflective belts."
Author: Glenn Dean

14. "My job as artistic director at the Brighton digital agency Lighthouse is all about trying to show that digital culture is about more than just tools and gadgets - it's about perceiving the societal transformations being brought about by technology."
Author: Honor Harger

15. "Writing in Library Journal, Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of Book envisioned a digital ecology in which "parts of books will reference parts of other books. Books will be woven toghether out of components in remote databases and servers." Kevin Kelly wrote in The New York times Magagzine: "In the the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages."
Author: Jeff Jarvis

16. "As with sound, images are subjective. You and I may not see the same color red as red, but we will probably agree that the image on the screen is a digital image or film image, based on contrast, bit depth, and refresh rate."
Author: John Dykstra

17. "Once the image was in the digital environment, one of the problems was, we had no means to reproduce the color spectrum, grey scale, and contrast that film produces, without converting the digital file to film, evaluating it, then going back and changing the digital image."
Author: John Dykstra

18. "The digital age was dragging older lawyers like the Boones into the world of paperless files and storage, and not a minute too soon... Why destroy so many trees to produce much paper that becomes useless almost as fast as it is filed away?"
Author: John Grisham

19. "If these artist were trying to convince me that the pursuit of love in the postdigital age was more exciting, more mysterious, more…. well, everything love should be, they'd failed."
Author: Kate Klise

20. "Art has to ask questions and make you care. Nothing I saw elicited even the slightest emotional response. But maybe that was the point. Maybe love was impossible in the postdigital age. Maybe passion was passé."
Author: Kate Klise

21. "You are the strangest girl I've ever met," he said, like he thought I was joking. He picked up his water bottle and gave me a sideways glance. "Have you ever kissed anybody?" he asked, and took a sip.I smirked. "There aren't a whole lot of opportunities in the digital world. I did practice on my hand once. It didn't do anything for me."Justin coughed on the water he was swallowing and I slapped my hand over my mouth."Did I just say that out loud?" I mumbled.He was half coughing, half laughing. "Yes, you did," he managed to say."Delete, delete, delete," I said, and pushed an imaginary button in the air. "I really miss that feature.""No, that's the good stuff. People always want to delete the good stuff." His eyes lit up. "That's a cool idea, though. What would you say, right now, if you could immediately delete it, so no one read it?"
Author: Katie Kacvinsky

22. "Have you ever kissed anybody?" he asked and took a sip.I smirked. "There aren't a whole lot of opportunitiesin the digital world. I did practice on my hand once. It didn't do anything for me".Justin coughed on the water he was swallowing and I slapped my hand over my mouth."Did I just say that aloud?" I mumbled.He was half coughing, half laughing. "Yes, you did", he managed to say."
Author: Katie Macvinsky

23. "People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We've learned to use digital technology—laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet—as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we're at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue."
Author: Ken Robinson

24. "The bibliographer in the digital age returns to the revelatory practice of her medieval forebears. Librarians, like those scribes of the Middle Ages, do not merely keep and classify texts; they create them, in the form of online finding aids, CD-ROM concordances, and other electronic texts, not to mention paper study guides and published bibliographies."
Author: Matthew Battles

25. "Now that digital lifestyle devices, tablets, wireless phones, and other Internet appliances are beginning to come of age, we need to worry about presenting our content to these devices so that it is optimized for their display capabilities."
Author: Mike Davidson

26. "When a printed book—whether a recently published scholarly history or a two-hundred-year-old Victorian novel—is transferred to an electronic device connected to the Internet, it turns into something very like a Web site. Its words become wrapped in all the distractions of the networked computer. Its links and other digital enhancements propel the reader hither and yon. It loses what the late John Updike called its "edges" and dissolves into the vast, rolling waters of the Net. The linearity of the printed book is shattered, along with the calm attentiveness it encourages in the reader."
Author: Nicholas Carr

27. "I bristle a little when the argument for film gets put into the nostalgia ghetto. Film is still the highest quality and best-looking image capture medium available. I don't think it always will be. The digital image will get better, and it will eventually surpass the quality of the film image, but it isn't there yet."
Author: Rian Johnson

28. "Words are the oldest information storage and retrieval system ever devised. Words are probably older than the cave paintings in France, words have been here for tens of thousands of years longer than film, moving pictures, video, and digital video, and words will likely be here after those media too. When the electromagnetic pulse comes in the wake of the nuclear blast? Those computers and digital video cameras and videotape recorders that are not melted outright will be plastic and metal husks used to prop open doors. Not so with the utterances of tongues. Words will remain, and the highly complicated and idiosyncratic accounts assembled from them will provide us with the dark news about the blast. The written word will remain, scribbled on collapsed highway overpasses, as a testament to love and rage, as evidence of the wanderers in the ruin."
Author: Rick Moody

29. "Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don't want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons."
Author: Roman Payne

30. "The advent of digitally enhancing images - and the fact that actresses weren't protesting against that - created an environment where big corporations felt like they had total ownership over the bodies of actresses."
Author: Romola Garai

31. "So we should preserve it. I don't think that digital storage is necessarily a good thing, but I definitely think that digital manipulation is interesting."
Author: Sean Booth

32. "The digital communications technology that was once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination, in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irradiating data, has instead generated a much murkier and verification-free habitat where a google-generated search will deliver an electronic page on which links to lies and lunacy appear in identical format as those to truths and sanity. But why should we ever have assumed that technology and reason would be mutually self-reinforcing? The quickest visit to say, a site called Stormfront will persuade you that the demonic is in fact the best customer of the electronic."
Author: Simon Schama

33. "Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing."
Author: Steve Grand

34. "Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face to face meetings. " There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,"he said."Thats crazy, Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say ' Wow, and soon your cooking up all sorts of ideas." So he had the Pixar building planned to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. " If a building doesn't encourage that, you'll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that's sparked by serendipity,"he said."
Author: Walter Isaacson

35. "Build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering."
Author: Walter Isaacson

36. "The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet."
Author: Will Christopher Baer

37. "...all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else mechanically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them."
Author: Zadie Smith

38. "Root cause of inequality is the mass scale digital disruption advantage as means of wealth creation is concentrated."
Author: Ziad K. Abdelnour

Digital Age Quotes Pictures