Internet

"I was in the pub last night, and a guy asked me for a light for his cigarette. I suddenly realised that there was a demand here and money to be made, and so I agreed to light his cigarette for 10 pence, but I didn't actually give him a light, I sold him a license to burn his cigarette. My fire-license restricted him from giving the light to anybody else, after all, that fire was my property. He was drunk, and dismissing me as a loony, but accepted my fire (and by implication the licence which governed its use) anyway. Of course in a matter of minutes I noticed a friend of his asking him for a light and to my outrage he gave his cigarette to his friend and pirated my fire! I was furious, I started to make my way over to that side of the bar but to my added horror his friend then started to light other people's cigarettes left, right, and centre! Before long that whole side of the bar was enjoying MY fire without paying me anything. Enraged I went from person to person grabbing their cigarettes from their hands, throwing them to the ground, and stamping on them. Strangely the door staff exhibited no respect for my property rights as they threw me out the door."

"Information paints no picture, sings no song, and writes no poem."

"With the massive amount of personal data on the Internet, Facebook nation has opened Pandora's box of total information awareness in the age of big data. Fortunately, Pandora's box released not only evil but also hope.. The hope is that good will trump evil."

"While we claim to live in an information age, disinformation has become the order of the day."

"It's very sad how in the information age you cannot get information into people's heads — as long as you write something on the internet and do not add LOL — it is true : "I'm not sure he's a Christian." — I'm not sure he's a mammal, Jay. He could be a werewolf."

"Metadata liberates us, liberates knowledge."

"Professional partisans are still playing politics by industrial-age rules. They haven’t woken up to the information age reality. Younger generations have grown up with a multiplicity of choice on every front, which can be tailored to suit their individual beliefs. Politics is the last place where we are supposed to be satisfied with a choice between Brand A and Brand B."

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

"Understanding how maps work and why maps work (or do not work) as representations in their own right and as prompts to further representations, and what it means for a map to work, are critical issues as we embark on a visual information age."

"One nation controlled by the media; information age of hysteria."

"In the information age, the barriers [to entry into programming] just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers."

"The Information age is well upon us in seven major fields — learning, diagnostics, management, physical planning, finance, entertainment and communication."

"The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge, that knowledge is not wisdom, and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these."

"The information revolution reinforced the spread of democracy because it permitted people to inform themselves and react to what they learned more quickly than in the past. It became more difficult during the Cold War to withhold news about what was going on in the rest of the world, as well as to conceal what was happening within one's own country. This kind of "transparency" provided new kinds of leverage against authoritarian regimes, as the Helsinki process dramatically illustrated. It also brought assurance, where dictatorships had been overthrown, that they would not return."

"The Internet is the technological basis for the organizational form of the Information Age the network."

"We must also promote global access to the Internet. We need to bridge the digital divide not just within our country, but among countries. Only by giving people around the world access to this technology can they tap into the potential of the Information Age."

"Almost everybody is sure... that it is proceeding with unprecedented speed; and... that its effects will be more radical than anything that has gone before. Wrong, and wrong again. Both in its speed and its impact, the information revolution uncannily resembles its two predecessors... The first industrial revolution, triggered by James Watt's improved steam engine in the mid-1770s... did not produce many social and economic changes until the invention of the railroad in 1829... Similarly, the invention of the computer in the mid-1940s... it was not until 40 years later, with the spread of the Internet in the 1990s, that the information revolution began to bring about big economic and social changes... the same emergence of the “super-rich” of their day, characterized both the first and the second industrial revolutions... These parallels are close and striking enough to make it almost certain that, as in the earlier industrial revolutions, the main effects of the information revolution on the next society still lie ahead."

"The Information Age is unfolding just as predicted by many of the sociological prognosticators of this century. Information issues are on everyone’s mind and on multitudes of lips. It is hard to pick up a newspaper or current affairs magazine without seeing a feature on the internet, web pages, e-mail, television terminals or some other new technology. In fact, technology innovation is relentless and escalating and technology stocks continually drive the stock market to high after high. There is no field of human endeavor that is exempt from the onslaught of information technology."

"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."

"Yet today our military is still organized more for Cold War threats than for the challenges of a new century -- for industrial age operations, rather than for information age battles. There is almost no relationship between our budget priorities and a strategic vision. The last seven years have been wasted in inertia and idle talk. Now we must shape the future with new concepts, new strategies, new resolve."

"The information age is an age of permanently getting stuck. Greater and greater speed is demanded. New software, new hardware, new structures, new cultural techniques. Life-long learning? Yes. But the company can't fire the secretary every six months, just because she can't cope with the new version of Excel. They can count their keystrokes, measure their productivity … but! They will never be able to sanction their inability! Because that is immanent."

"In 1980 a law was passed called the . It could have been called the Information Management Act of 1980."

"Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. … The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip."

"We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information."

"Standing here before a mural of your revolution, I want to talk about a very different revolution that is taking place right now, quietly sweeping the globe without bloodshed or conflict. Its effects are peaceful, but they will fundamentally alter our world, shatter old assumptions, and reshape our lives. It's easy to underestimate because it's not accompanied by banners or fanfare. It's been called the technological or information revolution, and as its emblem, one might take the tiny silicon chip, no bigger than a fingerprint. One of these chips has more computing power than a roomful of old-style computers. As part of an exchange program, we now have an exhibition touring your country that shows how information technology is transforming our lives -- replacing manual labor with robots, forecasting weather for farmers, or mapping the genetic code of DNA for medical researchers. These microcomputers today aid the design of everything from houses to ears to spacecraft; they even design better and faster computers. They can translate English into Russian or enable the blind to read or help Michael Jackson produce on one synthesizer the sounds of a whole orchestra. Linked by a network of satellites and fiber-optic cables, one individual with a desktop computer and a telephone commands resources unavailable to the largest governments just a few years ago."

"In the industrialized nations, a technological revolution is taking place—a revolution marked by rapid, dramatic advances in computers and telecommunications."

"Soon, the enterprise of the information age will find itself unhappy if it does not have the ability to tap the information resources within and without its boundaries."

"In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show."

"There's an Internet phenomenon called the Streisand Effect. It happens when a person or company tries to suppress a piece of information and, in so doing, unintentionally popularizes it."

"The logic behind the Streisand Effect, however, does not have much to do with the Internet. Throughout history there has hardly been a more effective way to ensure that people talk about something than to ban discussions about it."

"As the Streisand Effect gradually becomes required textbook material for any student of public relations, it's surprising to see that some organizations and individuals still prefer to operate in the pre-Streisand age of threats and court orders. For better or worse, the Internet does not adequately respond to the threat of legal action: One simply can't sue so many often anonymous individuals from so many jurisdictions."

"Though, the action of the US government was intended to suppress the leaks, the ‘Streisand effect’ made sure that the outcome was exactly the opposite. People all over the world, who hadn’t even heard of the Website, were typing WikiLeaks.org on their keyboards only to find a site-unavailable message, which increased their curiosity. People sympathetic to WikiLeaks, in the meantime, had voluntarily mirrored the website in order to keep it online."

"Say you discover that people aren't just talking about you, they're bashing you. Should you step in and try to stop them? Again, the answer is absolutely no! Leave them alone – you'll only make the problems worse and create a Streisand Effect if you try to hush them up."

"More recently, in May 2011, the use of injunctions to gag the press led to a “Streisand effect” for the litigant footballer who sought an injunction to prevent the publication of details of his alleged affair."

"It fell victim to what is often called the “Streisand effect,” in which an attempt to repress information attracts more attention to it. The controversy over the album cover sparked millions of downloads and distributions of the Virgin Killer image from other sources."

"The phenomenon is known as the Streisand Effect. The term refers to the likelihood that efforts to censor information will draw greater attention to it."

"The “Streisand Effect” describes what happens when an attempt to get rid of content causes it to become even more permanent."

"At the bottom of the homepage is this [disclaimer] … But that hasn't stopped Beck's lawyers from trying to shut down the site -- resulting in more blowback and another manifestation of the dreaded Streisand Effect!"

"Mike Masnick, a blogger for Techdirt, coined the term 'Streisand effect' for events where attempts to remove content from the Internet cause it to spread broadly instead."

"A phenomenon dubbed the Streisand Effect has already sparked attention. Similar to the scarcity principle, when demands are made to remove videos or documents on the Web, hits for those materials increase dramatically. It seems a "forbidden fruit" is all the more attractive."

"No matter how effective your rebuttal may seem to be to you, a response will "bump" the problem into greater prominence and relevance in the search engine results, which then turns your headache into a migraine. This is doubly dangerous since "bumping" the negative information potentially introduces the "Streisand Effect" into the equation, which is something to avoid if at all possible. It is commonly defined as a phenomenon in which an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information on the web backfires, causing greater publicity."

"The inability to erase information has already taken on a name: the Streisand Effect."

"When the Streisand effect takes hold, contraband doesn't disappear quietly. Instead, it infects the online community in a pandemic of free-speech-fueled defiance, gaining far more attention than it would have had the information's original owners simply kept quiet."

"Recently, a judge ordered some leaked documents concerning the Swiss bank Julius Baer to be removed from a Web site. But, instead of hiding the documents from public view, the judge's action drew more attention to them. The episode is the latest example of a phenomenon known as the "Streisand Effect." Robert Siegel talks with Mike Masnick, CEO of Techdirt Inc., who coined the term."

"In Germany, we have a famous children's TV show called "Löwenzahn". It starts with a time lapse sequence of a dandelion flower breaking its way through the asphalt. This is what I've always associated with the MediaWiki logo, technology (brackets) being merely the basis for the growth of something wild and beautiful which transcends it."

"First released in 2002, MediaWiki is one of the top wiki engines and runs most of the wiki hosting sites. The name was a play on “Wikimedia,” and many people find it to be annoyingly confusing."

"MediaWiki (www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) is one of the best publishing wiki engines in existence."

"Some wiki engines try to represent functionality that's more CMS-like (e.g. complex workflows and access controls), while MediaWiki's functionality tends to be driven by the needs of open communities with minimal barriers to entry."

"Clear your mind and build your collective offline memory using MediaWiki (http://mediawiki.org), the same software that powers Wikipedia."

"The main downside of publishing a site using MediaWiki is that it won't give you a great opportunity to use or improve your HTML skills."