“History is the story of how we've learned to come together in ever greater numbers — from tribes to cities to nations. At each step, we built social infrastructure like communities, media and governments to empower us to achieve things we couldn't on our own.”— Mark Zuckerberg, facebook.com
“Camcorders and VCRs gave people the ability to make their own media, and demystified the process through which the media they watched was created. Stars lost some of their allure, commercials lost their impact, and newscasters lost their authority.”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.com
“In preliterate civilizations, people attempted to live their lives and appease their gods with no real sense of the rules. They just did what they could, sacrificing animals and even children along the way to appease the gods they didn't understand. The invention of text gave them a set of rules to…”— Douglas Rushkoff, amazon.com
“The term 'communication' has had an extensive use in connection with roads and bridges, sea routes, rivers, and canals, even before it became transformed into 'information movement' in the electric age. Perhaps there is no more suitable way of defining the character of the electric age than by first…”— Marshall McLuhan, amazon.com
“In AD 1500, Europe was turning out about 200,000 volumes per year, while China had been producing about 800,000 a year for centuries: a million books, say 500 tons of paper. At the turn of the millennium, the world produced some ten billion books a year – about 50 million tons of paper, for books al…”— John Mann, amazon.com
“Homo sapiens has been in existence for between 30,000 and 50,000 years. The earliest script dates from only 6000 years ago.”— Walter Ong, sagasgas
“The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!”— Noam Chomsky, theguardian.com