Quotes about the Internet
Don Olivier
> Anyone know any good quotes about the Internet or resources for them?
>
> Looking for stuff which sums up good and bad stuff about it - ie free
> speech/illegal activites - or just anything about the effect it has had on
> society in general.
1. Roots
I want to see the writings of Herodotus, Nostradamus, and Matthew
Brann as accessible as those of Rod McKuen, along with the art of
the Renaissance and movies of tomorrow-- an all-encompassing
picture-book encyclopedia tumult graffiti-land, the Whole Works.
-- Ted Nelson
I don't have the reference, but I think that one is from the 1960s or
early 70s, when the Internet was only the glimmering of an idea in the
minds of a few people (like Ted Nelson).
2. The present
The Internet is like a freight train roaring along while people are
laying tracks in front of it. It's not just gaining on those laying
tracks; it's gaining on the steel mills.
-- Matt Mathis
The Internet can no longer ignore the real world because it is
rapidly becoming the real world.
-- Robert Shaw, BNA Daily Report for Executives 27 Sep 96
The net is an informal place, every day is casual day in cyberspace,
and one of the key features of successful non-official sites is
irreverence.
-- Steve Shipside, Internet Magazine, Oct 98
Think of Usenet as a large house with many rooms. In one room
they're discussing Rilke; in the next they're snorting nitrous and
setting fire to the couch.
-- ?
Go not unto Usenet for advice, for the denizens will say both yes,
and no, and maybe, and I don't know, and fuck off, and....
-- ?
Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants ... -- massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
-- Gene Spafford
3. The future
And then there are the inexplicable pleasures of information itself,
the joys of learning, knowing, and teaching; the strange good feeling
of information coming into and out of oneself. Playing with ideas is a
recreation which people are willing to pay a lot for, given the market
for books and elective seminars. We'd likely spend even more money for
such pleasures if we didn't have so many opportunities to pay for
ideas with other ideas. This explains much of the collective
``volunteer'' work which fills the archives, newsgroups, and databases
of the Internet. Its denizens are not working for ``nothing'', as is
widely believed. Rather they are getting paid in something besides
money. It is an economy which consists almost entirely of information.
This may become the dominant form of human trade, and if we persist in
modeling economics on a strictly monetary basis, we may be gravely
misled.
-- John Perry Barlow
* In the absence of the old [physical] containers, almost everything
we think we know about intellectual property is wrong. We're going
to have to unlearn it. We're going to have to look at information
as though we'd never seen the stuff before.
* The protections that we will develop will rely far more on ethics
and technology than on law.
* Encryption will be the technical basis for most intellectual
property protection. (And should, for many reasons, be made more
widely available.)
* The economy of the future will be based on relationship rather
than possession. It will be continuous rather than sequential.
* And finally, in the years to come, most human exchange will be
virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the
stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be
conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns.
-- John Perry Barlow
We were frustrated with computers a decade ago, we are frustrated
with them now, and will continue to be frustrated in the future. As
long as technology offers enticing new products and services, we
will continue to live on the edge of intolerable frustration.
...
If the level of frustration is not going to decrease, is there any
point in developing new technologies, and in paying any attention to
ease of use? There certainly is. We will still be frustrated, but
at a higher level of functionality, and there will be more of us
willing to be frustrated.
-- Andrew Odlyzko, "The visible problems of the invisible computer:
A skeptical look at information appliances" (1999)
4. "Decency"
The Internet also presents perhaps one of the greatest threats to
morality and decency that we face today ... it has the power to
corrupt absolutely....
-- Leo J. Hindery, Jr., President, TCI
[The Internet] carries material ... inducing sin.... This is most dangerous.
-- Abdulla al-Hajri, Kuwaiti parliament, 1996
The Singapore government isn't interested in controlling
information, but wants a gradual phase-in of services to protect
ourselves. It's not to control, but to protect the citizens of
Singapore. In our society, you can state your views, but they have
to be correct.
-- Ernie Hai, coordinator of the Singapore Government Internet Project
5. Free speech
Indeed, the Government's asserted `failure' of the Internet rests on
the implicit premise that too much speech occurs in that medium, and
that speech there is too available to the participants. This is
exactly the benefit of Internet communication, however. The
Government, therefore, implicitly asks this court to limit both the
amount of speech on the Internet and the availability of that
speech. This argument is profoundly repugnant to First Amendment
principles.
-- Judge Stewart Dalzell, ACLU v. Reno, 1996
(ACLU v. Reno was the case that overturned the Communications Decency
Act)
Cutting through the acronyms and argot that littered the hearing
testimony, the Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending
worldwide conversation. The Government may not, through the CDA,
interrupt that conversation. As the most participatory form of mass
speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection
from governmental intrusion.
True it is that many find some of the speech on the Internet to be
offensive, and amid the din of cyberspace many hear discordant
voices that they regard as indecent. The absence of governmental
regulation of Internet content has unquestionably produced a kind of
chaos, but as one of plaintiffs' experts put it with such resonance
at the hearing:
What achieved success was the very chaos that the Internet is.
The strength of the Internet is that chaos.
Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of
our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered
speech the First Amendment protects.
For these reasons, I without hesitation hold that the CDA is
unconstitutional on its face.
-- Judge Stewart Dalzell, Opinion in ACLU v. Reno, June 12, 1996
Without thought police and censorship, the flowers round the privy is
what we should aim for terms of information cleanup, realistically
speaking. Educating kids to think is the best inoculation against
information pollution.
-- Bonnie Nardi, interview in _First Monday_
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Don Olivier 2049 Dorchester Ave. d...@hsph.harvard.edu
The Boston Home Boston, MA 02124 (617) 288-0388
The Sanity Inspector
shared with usenet this thought:
[...]
Great job, Don.
--
bruce
The dignified don't even enter in the game.
--The Jam