Information Society Quotes

I've been talking about the centrality of libraries in our information society for a while now.

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

The main ingredient of the first quantum revolution, wave-particle duality, has led to inventions such as the transistor and the laser that are at the root of the information society.

It does seem to me, though, that the countries that gained most from World Summit on the Information Society are those that saw it as an opportunity to engage in more diverse discussion about the issues internally and to seek to raise the quality of debate (both in terms of information and understanding).

The concept of the "information society" is both vague and all-embracing. Different participants meant different things by it. In practice, though, World Summit on the Information Society only dealt with a small number of issues: ICTs and human rights (to some extent), ICTs and development (to some extent), infrastructure finance and Internet governance. Very large aspects of what might have been included in the "information society" were not really discussed.

[The currency of being celebrity] used to be only the elect had any manna in the information society and everyone else was a consumer.

The research carried out in the area of language technology is of utmost importance for the consolidation of Portuguese as a language of global communication in the information society.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Kofi Annan described World Summit on the Information Society as the first summit to deal primarily with an opportunity. The range of issues and potential opportunities that might be included in the Information Society is enormous. Compromise texts are very poor at addressing these in any meaningful way, and many governments see little point in trying.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

In general I saw my job as the first president whose full term would be served after the Cold War in a global information society where we were interdependent but not integrated. And therefore, we were vulnerable to the worst, and able to seize the best, of what's going on in the world.

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.

The main drawback, of course, was cost. Participating effectively in World Summit on the Information Society was very expensive for both developing countries and (especially) civil society.

The information society should serve all of its citizens, not only the technically sophisticated and economically privileged.

An efficient telecommunications network is the foundation upon which an information society is built.

It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water. But if you've got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.

We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology.

In a hunting society, children play with bows and arrows. In an information society, children play with information

In an information society, education is no mere amenity; it is the prime tool for growing people and profits.

Summits [World Summit on the Information Society] are meant to help governments reach a global consensus on major issues which has proved elusive in established fora. They do so through the embarrassment associated with failing to sign a summit's final agreement.

It is intolerable that around 1 in 5 of the world's adults are illiterate. How can we build equitable information societies or thriving democracies if so many remain without the basic tools of literacy?