For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future – a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined. James Gleick Read Quote
For a brief time in the 1850s, the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams – in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities for history! James Gleick Read Quote
Despite the metadata attached to each tweet, and despite trails of retweets and ‘favorite’ tweets, the Twitter corpus lacks the latticework of hyperlinks that makes Google’s algorithms so potent. Twitter’s famous hashtags – #sandyhook or #fiscalcliff or #girls – are the crudest sort of signposts, not much help for smart searching. James Gleick Read Quote
Nanosecond precision matters for worldwide communications systems. It matters for navigation by Global Positioning System satellite signals: an error of a billionth of a second means an error of just about a foot, the distance light travels in that time. James Gleick Read Quote
In cyberspace, the Wikipedians never stop gathering: It’s a continuous round-the-clock rolling workfest. James Gleick Read Quote
Granted, I’m more interested in technology than most people, and less interested in politics than most. But I don’t like to think about categories. I really see myself as a general non-fiction writer. James Gleick Read Quote
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. James Gleick Read Quote
The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species. James Gleick Read Quote
