Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
Interpretation
Television significantly transformed society in ways comparable to historic inventions.
Russell Baker emphasizes the monumental impact of television on human life, likening it to the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press. Each of these inventions altered the course of history and fundamentally changed how people communicate, learn, and interact, positioning television as a pivotal cultural and technological advancement of the century.
In practice
A keynote speech at a technology conference about the evolution of media.
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.
Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
Our whole role in life is to give you something you didn't know you wanted. And then once you get it, you can't imagine your life without it. And you can count on Apple doing that.
Ultimately, it's not going to be about man versus machine. It is going to be about man with machines.
More than anything else, technology will pave the way for innovative change at Starbucks. The bulk of Starbucks' innovation over the next several years will be technology-focused.
There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'.
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