Quotes on Information

It turns out your conscious mind - the part you think of as you - is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.

During the Arab Spring, I learned all sorts of things from Twitter. I wouldn't necessarily trust that information, but it gave me ideas about questions to ask. You can really learn things from the wisdom of crowds.

Marketing is becoming a battle based on information than on sales power.

The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.

Information is not knowledge. Let's not confuse the two.

People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.

Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement

I believe the continually advancing Information Revolution will lend us the wisdom and strength to address humanity's previously unsolvable problems and help us make a positive impact on all of society.

If we don't have an informed electorate we don't have a democracy. So I don't care how people get the information, as long as they get it. I'm just doing it my particular way and I feel lucky I can do it the way I want to do it.

I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.

Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

A cardinal principle that we must not stray from - no exceptions - is that your genetic information is your business in terms of who sees it. Nobody should be gaining access to that information without your explicit permission, and nobody should be requiring you to take a genetic test unless you decide that that's what you want to do.

I'm not going to name some of my colleagues who are very well-known for their television presentation, but they wouldn't know new information or how to report a story if it came up and bit them.

Because of media hype and woefully inadequate information, too many people nowadays are deathly afraid of their food, and what does fear of food do to the digestive system? ... I, for one, would much rather swoon over a few thin slices of prime beefsteak, or one small serving of chocolate mousse, or a sliver of foie gras than indulge to the full on such nonentities as fat-free gelatin puddings.

Most of what we know about sales comes from a world of information asymmetry, where for a very long time sellers had more information than buyers. That meant sellers could hoodwink buyers, especially if buyers did not have a lot of choices or a way to talk back.

The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.

The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.

Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.