“I’m a writer by profession and it’s totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don’t. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please.”The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking … we’d be getting somewhere.”I’m working on it.”

“I can’t blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I’ve spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I’ll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.”

“In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person’s existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person’s existence would return to nothingness.How very clean.Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond.”

“Listen to your own inner voice not the voices from television of the internet.”

“Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.”

“We are seeing the potentiality when it comes to technological optimism; the internet used in the correct way is an educational fountain of knowledge. Our social networking platforms can be turned into insightful articles about scientific marvels, medical breakthroughs, engineering tutorials, philosophical discussions and debates, nature documentaries, religious questions, news relating to politics or current activism going on around the world… The list goes on and on yet the access (depending on where you live) is unprecedented and vast.”

“Kompjutersko doba i internet omogućili su ti da brzo i lako dođeš do informacija, ne i do znanja. Nisu sve informacije istine, ali svaka istina treba da postane informacija. Internet ti pomaže da glasno izgovoriš istinu, ali i da izmisliš laži u koje želiš da veruješ. Internet je dobra škola za radoznalog đaka. Internet je ludnica sa neograničenim brojem mesta za dijagnoze za koje nisi ni slutio da postoje. Na internetu možeš biti bilo ko, bilo kada i bilo gde. Na internetu se ostavruju snovi. Internet… Pomoći će ti da prespavaš život, verujući da si budan. Nisi. Nažalost, nisi.”

“People used to build great libraries to symbolize man’s quest for knowledge, now we have the Internet which is both more powerful and wonderful. The men who used to get their information from the library were considered scholars but the men who get their information from the Internet are considered idiots, or worse, thieves.”

“The internet is far more knowledgeable than any doctor.”

“And people turn to internet with the hope that in this virtual world, where real identity need not be disclosed, they will find someone before whom they could be their true self,without any pretensions and get an opportunity to release the pent-up emotions and feel light.”

“Trivia are not knowledge. Lists of facts don’t comprise knowledge. Analyzing, hypothesizing, concluding from data, sharing insights, those comprise knowledge. You can’t google for knowledge.”

“Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It’s how I feel after a good dinner. That’s why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That’s something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant. ”

“Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.”