James Gleick Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“As for memes, the word 'meme' is a cliche, which is to say it's already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene.”

“Children and scientists share an outlook on life. 'If I do this, what will happen?' is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.”

“It's important with any new technology to try to pay conscious attention to what the drawbacks might be. We choose to multitask. Sometimes our choices aren't the wisest of choices, and we regret them, but they are our choices. I think it'd be wrong to think that they're automatically bad.”

“Memes can be visual. Our image of George Washington is a meme. We don't actually have any idea what George Washington looked like. There are so many different portraits of him, and they're all different. But we have an image in our head, and that image is propagated from one place to another, from one person to another.”

“Patent battles have become a strong catalyst for mergers, reducing competition in various domains. The largest corporations, with gigantic patent portfolios, routinely enter into cross-licensing agreements with their largest competitors.”

“People worry about Twitter. Twitter is banal. It's 140-character messages. By definition, you can hardly say anything profound. On the other hand, we communicate. And, sometimes, we communicate about things that are important.”

“Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money.”

“The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level - an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.”

“Cyberspace as a mode of being will never go away. We live in cyberspace.”

“Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”