Quotes about technology

Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. (p. 36)

At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)

We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 9)

In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)

War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. (p. 102)

The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (p. 8)

We can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent.

We’ve moved beyond our ability to understand our technology.

But the mighty computer is stupid. Thinking with the speed of light but unable to cross the gaps of intuition.

True personalization is now upon us. It's not just a matter of selecting relish over mustard once. The post-information age is about acquaintance over time: machines' understanding individuals with the same degree of subtlety (or more than) we can expect from other human beings, including idiosyncrasies (like always wearing a blue-striped shirt) and totally random events, good and bad, in the unfolding narrative of our lives.