Internet Culture Quotes & Sayings

One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because "people who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners. With more data, everyone gains a better frame of reference. — Henry Kissinger

Is it any surprise that the current center of coffee culture, the city of Seattle, home to the Starbucks coffeehouse chain, is also where some of the world's largest software and Internet firms are based? Coffee's association with innovation, reason, and networking - plus a dash of revolutionary fervor - has a long pedigree. — Tom Standage

In other news, Aang dominates on "Are You Smarter Than the Fire Nation". Bella Swan becomes engaged to her boyfriend of one year, Edward Cullen, and unceremoniously sends Jacob Black to the "friend zone". Pop star Candy Cane trades her controversial career for being a housewife (which was a move that is very unpopular with many of her young fans), and Jacquel Rassenworth is still the Internet's biggest fame-nut (cue APPLAUSE). — Jacquel Chrissy May

In the '80s, I was the only game in town, I was the only one getting that kind of exposure in any rotation on MTV. Now with internet culture it seems like everyone is doing music parodies. And they're not all good! — Al Yankovic

Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago. — Steven Johnson

I come from a culture where the pub is the centre of the community. The pub is the Internet. It's where information is gathered, collated and addressed. — Rhys Ifans

She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber. — Sherry Turkle

Jesus never asked me to give to an organization the kind of exclusive devotion he demands from his disciples. Over and over, Jesus calls people to himself - out of the church, the culture, the economy, and the family. — Michael Spencer

The Internet was always destined to be ... The framework for its invention has always existed so to one day provide a vehicle for Critical Mass Consciousness. Through its speed and convenience, the Internet has the power for global and indeed universal transformation. Critical Mass Consciousness can work with the Law of Attraction to actualize an abundant global paradigm for all. Naturally, there is also an opportunity for misuse. How this medium is used on a personal and mass level will determine this culture's past and future karma ... You're at page ten but I understand the entire evolution. In reality, it's already over. It's a dream. Remember? You're living a dream. It's very complicated to hold the dream and live the dream. You are learning the art of juggling the dream and the world of dreams."-Kuan Yin (from "Critical Mass Consciousness: Kuan Yin Speaks on Humanity's Evolutionary Potential — Hope Bradford

I realized that we're now at a point of self-reference with the Internet culture that there's almost no there left, you know? It's important to make new things. It's important to make culture, rather than simply reference it. I love a good cultural reference, and it's one of the great joys in my life, but it has to all be in balance with the core job, which is to make something new. And that sort of brings me around to why I started talking about my fondness for marijuana. — John Hodgman

Your basic person wants to talk about material culture, internet culture. I think about God, cats, nature. — Billy Corgan

Fans decide what pop culture is. We can define ourselves. Music and the presentation of art nowadays is totally in our control, with the Internet specifically. You no longer need record labels. You no longer need movie distribution companies. You can just make it and put it online, and it will distribute itself to millions of people. The borders and everything have been broken down. It really is in the hands of the people. — Laura Jane Grace

What bothers me is our culture's obsession with nudity. It shouldn't be a big deal, but it is. I think this overemphasis with nudity makes actors nervous. There's the worry about seeing one's body dissected, misrepresented, played and replayed on the Internet. — Rachel McAdams

I'm such a bookworm, and I'm such a people-watcher. It took the Internet a while to catch on in Ireland, because the culture there is, you go to the pub and talk to people there, and that's how you get the news and all the gossip. You just do it face to face. And culturally, you just couldn't understand. — Patton Oswalt

It's good netiquette to look for every opportunity to compliment others online. — David Chiles

I love the idea of the amateur - that's what popular culture is all about. But what the Internet's doing is professionalizing everyone's amateuristic impulses. — Lee Siegel

North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives - or risk having their narratives shaped by others. — Evgeny Morozov

With the Internet and social media being a huge part of today's culture, I think it's super important to promote staying smart online. — G. Hannelius

Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience. — David Foster Wallace

We're into this barrage of pop culture - you know, TV, movies, the Internet. We become creatures that we've made up, made of certain different flotsam from pop culture and certain different personas that are in style. — Gillian Flynn

I'm so fascinated by YouTube culture. I have no idea how it's working, but more and more people are becoming Internet famous, and it is because it allows you to have an atmosphere in which you feel comfortable to be yourself, which you might not get otherwise. — Aubrey Peeples

We're still a long way from knowing where our clicks will lead us. But it's clear that two of the hopes most dear to the Internet optimists - that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote greater harmony and understanding - should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely outcomes. — Nicholas Carr

The counterculture had sought to practice the idea that creative personal expression was the essence of an authentic existence. The WELL, drawing strength from the Internet culture's belief that the market contains all values, put personal expression up for sale. — Lee Siegel

By the 1980's and 1990's, Moore's Law had emerged as the underlying assumption that governed almost everything in the Valley, from technology to business, education, and even culture. The "law" said the number of transistors would double every couple of years. It dictated that nothing stays the same for more than a moment; no technology is safe from its successor; costs fall and computing power increases not at a constant rate but exponentially: If you're not running on what became known as " Internet time," you're falling behind. — John Markoff

In Jump Time's developing hybrid world, capacities once nurtured in separate societies are available to the entire family of humankind. This is a stupendous happening, as important as the discovery of new continents during the time of the great sea journeys. For the first time in human history the genius of the human race is available for all to harvest. These rediscovered capacities may be evolutionary accelerators, now being gathered from many places, times, and cultures to awaken our species to who we are and what we yet may be and do. Often, however, it is not comfortable. We can for a time find ourselves strangers in a very strange land, wishing we could return to the comforts of a more insular and familiar worldview. Yet when we get beyond the shutterings of our local cultural trance, we gain the courage to nurture the emerging forms of the possible human and the possible society. — Jean Houston

Adeline hadn't owned a television since 1992.
She'd suffered fifteen years hearing about how the Internet would transform American culture and open new avenues of expression.
But in the end, it was only more people talking about television. — Jarett Kobek

Vaccine conspiracies, like so much modern cult conspiracy culture, perpetuates itself and lives on indefinitely thanks to the community-building and archiving of the Internet. — Alex Pareene

Anti-black racism is in the culture. It's in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities, and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system. — Claudia Rankine

The Google self and the Facebook self, in other words, are pretty different people. There's a big difference between "you are what you click" and "you are what you share. — Eli Pariser

The Internet, too, has strong attributes of a public good, and has undermined the "private good" attributes of old media. Internet service providers obviously can exclude people, but the actual content -the values, the ideas- can be shared with no loss of value for the consumer. It is also extremely inexpensive and easy to share material. Sharing is built into the culture and practices of the Web and has made it difficult for the subscription model to be effective. — Robert Waterman McChesney

The key is the Internet. The United States is by far the most advanced country in this new digital culture, so we have to be there. The Internet is the heart of this new civilization, and telecommunications are the nervous system, or circulatory system. — Carlos Slim

It seems there is no area in our culture that is not touched, changed, even swallowed by the Internet. It's both medium and message, mass and personal, social and solitary. — John Battelle

Everything is happening faster on the Internet, so advertisers have to be able to respond quickly. If there is a pop-culture topic, a celebrity, event, some amazing viral video, a news story - how do advertisers get close to that so they can take advantage of traffic jumps? — Jason Hirschhorn

Netiquette Rules bring us together. Culture creates great experiences. Share. — David Chiles

Given the growing popularity of pop culture conventions, many of them are selling out, leaving a lot of fans out in the dark and having to trawl the Internet for bits and pieces of news that relate to these events. — Emmett Shear

I'm interested in Internet cultures. I'm interested in what the teenagers who drive the Internet culture are passionate about. I follow their lead - they go to tumblr, I go to tumblr. — John Green

Flame mails and offensive Internet activities are not classy. It doesn't fit with our culture here, where we respect the gender, race, opinions, ear-lobe apparel and choice of clothing of all employees. — David Duffield

RSS, as a format and an idea, grew directly out of an internet culture that many people online today know nothing about: Usenet. — Annalee Newitz

I don't know how a culture is going to evolve, but I think the way the Internet works now is, people go to the Internet to laugh and have a good time. That's why Tumblr feeds and I Can Has Cheezburger and memes get thrown into the blender with real news and sports news and politics and that stuff. — Drew Magary

If you're too young to remember the Time Before Pong, then you probably can't appreciate the momentousness of its arrival. Bear in mind the game emerged in a very different world. It was a time before home computers, cable television, cell phones, game consoles, the Internet--everything we take for granted today. For many of my formative years, we still watched TV in black and white, and had to get up to change the channel. This was the technological Dark Ages. Had we been less culturally enlightened, we would have denounced Pong as witchcraft and burned its inventors at the stake. For those of us who were there--who had never played, let alone seen, a video game--we knew we were witnessing something extraordinary, a groundbreaking achievement in home entertainment. However, none of us knew that we were participating in the birth of a revolution. — Devin C. Griffiths

John Hughes made a certain type of high school movie, and then it stayed static for 30 years. The only thing that changed was that maybe it was found footage or maybe it's a little snarkier, but the actual language that kids live in today, like with texting, motion graphics, the internet and that whole hashtag culture doesn't exist in movies today. It's left on the floor. — Joseph M. Kahn

I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump. I honestly feel that because Steve has passed, you know, it's like when Biggie passed and Jay-Z was allowed to become Jay-Z. — Kanye West

In a culture of electronic violence, images that once caused us to empathize with the pain and trauma of another human being, excite a momentary adrenaline rush. To be numb to another's pain - to be acculturated to violence - is one of the worst consequences our technological advances. That indifference transfers from the screen, TV, film, Internet, and electronic games to our everyday lives. — John Naisbitt

I saw them do it. Chip vandals. Right there on Commerce, behind the main road...They cut his head open. They know I watched. — Anna L. Davis

In '77 there was no Internet, there was no Twitter or Facebook, and I think that, without being some old git who hates anything new, people's attention spans are too short. Back then you had 'Top Of The Pops' and 'Melody Maker,' and you had to make the effort to go to a show so that you absorbed the culture of music. — Steve Jones

The externalization of memory [via the use of external symbolic storage systems] has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think, which is changing the role of biological memory, the way in which the human brain deploys its resources, and the form of modern culture. — Merlin Donald

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part. — Norbert Wiener

I think up until that time a lot of focus on Internet coverage was either sort of the bits and bytes aspect of it, sort of the high-tech aspect of it, and the sociological aspect of it, which is how it was transforming culture. — James Daly

Adeline had moved to San Francisco in 1996, which was a defining moment in the city's history. 1996 was not defined by Adeline's arrival.

1996 as defined by being the year during which the Internet economy exploded into the collective consciousness.

San Francisco had spent much of the Twentieth Century in decline, which meant that it was a bad place for people who liked doing business but a wonderful place for people who were terrible at making money.

San Francisco had been defined by the culture of people who were terrible at making money. It had become a haven for the misfits of America most of who were living in the city's fabulous old houses.

When the Internet economy exploded into the collective consciousness, these people proved that resisting social change was the only thing at which they were less adept than earning money. — Jarett Kobek

Hindi cinema, now often referred to loosely by the term 'Bollywood', is one of the best-known and most widely appreciated features of contemporary Indian culture. It makes its presence felt beyond the screen throughout wider media, whether the Internet, — Rachel Dwyer

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot. — Graham Joyce

Lil B opened up the floodgates for Odd Future, and now rap has a huge Internet culture. — Earl Sweatshirt

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their designs, such as comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.
Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources. — Jaron Lanier

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever. — Umberto Eco

Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. Ralph Waldo Emerson — H.W. Brands

I want to plug back into the hip-hop audience. Whether it be fans who grew up watching 'Yo!', or people who have become familiar with the culture via the Internet. — Fab Five Freddy

Comics are reflective of what's going on in larger culture. Wonder Woman came to be in her position when women were first entering the workplace in numbers during the war. Then Wonder Woman had another rise in the '70s when Gloria Steinem latched on to her as an icon for the [feminist] movement. I think we're seeing another wave of feminism today, a fourth wave characterized by intersectionality and the internet. And I think it falls right in line that we would see another wave of superheroines coming to the fore. — Kelly Sue DeConnick

Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture. — Jane Jacobs

Whenever I hear people clucking about the decline of civilization, what's wrong with young people, how vulgar popular culture is, how confusing and frightening they find the internet, alarms go off. I know I'm around somebody whose hinges are rusting. Death will be bad enough, but for me, this early harbinger is more fearsome, because a part of one's spirit and openness and ability to learn and grow disappears. — Jon Katz

It's a fusion of almost everything, in the way that I think society today tends to take cultural memory. Because there's an internet, it's on there forever. I think that's the way kids see the world today. They actually speak to each other using retro concepts now because the internet culture has kept that memory alive, constantly. — Joseph M. Kahn

Let's talk about rape for a moment. Rape is not what George Lucas did to your childhood. Rape is not what happens when a sports team beats another sports team by a wide margin. Rape is not what happens when your electric bill is higher this month than it was last month. Rape is when a person violates another person in the most despicable, degrading way imaginable and among the myriad of terrible things humans can do to one another, rape is among the worst. I think the casual misappropriation of the concept of rape extending all the way to its widespread comical usage is disgusting even by Internet standards. Off my chest. — Jeffrey Rowland

Companies that were paying attention understood they were witnessing the birth of the "self-directed consumer", because the internet and all the other tools for the flat world had created a means for every consumer to customize exactly the price, experience, and service he or she wanted. — Thomas L. Friedman

If culture did not filter, it would be inane - as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual labor. — Umberto Eco

In the early 2000s, people expected that anonymity on the Internet would be positive for the development of democracy in South Korea. In a Confucian culture like South Korea's, hierarchy can block the free exchange of opinions in face-to-face situations. The web offered a way around that. — Kim Young-ha

Instead of yelling your opinion, or telling people to shut up, or engaging in this clickbait-internet culture, have a dialogue with someone and ask people questions and listen to what they have to say. — Aziz Ansari

What's interesting about the shift from an industrial age to a technological age is that we keep inventing new media: movies, records, radio, television, the Internet, and now ebooks - and one of the things that's most interesting about the invention of a new medium is watching it reinvent itself as it penetrates the culture. — David Gerrold

All under the pretense of military application."
He pouts. "No pretense about it. Remember, the Internet was a military application. And now look at how it's changed our culture. — Chuck Wendig

In a modern Western culture, where the main idol is self; and its main doctrine is autonomy; and its central act of worship is being entertained; and its three main shrines are the television, the Internet, and the cinema; and its most sacred genuflection is the uninhibited act of sexual intercourse. ========== This Momentary Marriage A Parable of Permanence — Anonymous

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information. — Jorge Luis Borges

I can't pretend that I don't subscribe to Internet music culture in that I discover new music and old music simultaneously. — Alan Palomo

I'd been an outcast my entire life. Growing up with technophobe parents in the dawn of a Cyborg Age did that to a person. — Anna L. Davis

We've kind of grown up in a post-Star Wars era, and what Star Wars did to cinema, in terms of an explosion of that kind of blockbuster culture. It's thrown up a generation of geeks. With the evolution of computer games and the Internet, that's all impacted on us as a generation, and affected the creative element of that generation enormously. So whereas the different schools of filmmaking. — Simon Pegg

Reddit, which calls itself 'The Front Page of the Internet,' is more influential in shaping Internet culture than its comparatively small reach would lead you to believe. — Ethan Zuckerman

I think life is a lot different for alternative kids nowadays. Texting and the internet mean that being a Goth or something means you're part of a big social scene, it's an inclusive thing. Back then, we all just went our different ways in the afterglow,wishing each other all the best with the next ten years of bullying. — Frankie Boyle

Both cinematic culture and the culture at large have changed profoundly. We're now in post-cinematic digital culture, and the internet has obviously usurped movies, which are no longer central to our lives, at least not as a collective spectator experience. — Masha Tupitsyn

observes the veteran international pollster Craig Charney, that while the Internet "improves the ability to connect, it is no substitute for political organizations, culture, or leadership - and spontaneous movements tend to be weakest in all of these." Many Arab Awakening efforts ultimately failed because they could not build an organization and politics that could translate their progressive ideas into a governing majority. — Thomas L. Friedman

Technology itself is not to blame. The fault lies in ourselves, because having no means to orient ourselves, we turn elsewhere towards other resources. Heidegger makes the point that our culture lacks something needed to maintain a clearly defined sense of boundaries. In order to fill the vacuum caused by this lack, we turn to the most readily available and powerful technological force accessible to us, and today, this is the Internet — Chris Bloor

Describing passive violence in this culture is kinda like someone who is drowning in the middle of the ocean giving you the low-down on water. The only way you can really understand passive violence is by going somewhere far, far away from phones, news, TV, the Internet. — Inga Muscio

I like the type of culture that the Internet allows to happen. And, of course, for some bizarre reason, that is cats! — Cory Arcangel

Music belongs to everybody. Having a little clique of the industry tell us what our culture is ... I don't think that's healthy. And the Internet is helping us get away from that. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The Internet ethos of diversity and competition runs exactly counter to uniform, gatekeeper-oriented medical culture - the technocratic philosophy of the 'one best way' embodied in our pharmaceutical regulations. On the Net, medical information is abundant, and pharmacies, domestic and foreign, operate on many different models. — Virginia Postrel

When I was 11, I moved to the United States with my two brothers and my mom. We moved to northern New York, up near the Canadian border, from Argentina, and there was nobody there that spoke Spanish, and because there was no internet at the time, not even cable TV yet, I lost the connection with my childhood friends and the culture I had been brought up with for my first decade completely. — Viggo Mortensen

In spite of the phenomenal growth of the Internet and mobile devices, I still believe television will continue to be an incredibly important medium for the Church. After all, over the last century, radio never killed movies, and TV never killed radio. Everything finds its level in the media universe. — Phil Cooke

In 1983 Colonel Burns wrote a poem in which he envisioned how his fledgling communications network might one day influence the world.

Imagine the emergence of a new meta-culture.
Imagine all kinds of people everywhere
getting committed to human excellence,
getting committed to closing the gap
between the human condition
and the human potential...
And imagine all of us hooked up
with a common high tech communications system.
That's a vision that brings tears to the eyes.
Human excellence is an ideal
that we can embed
into every formal human structure
on our planet.
And that's really why we're going to do this.
And that's also why
The Meta Network is a creation
we can love.

Notwithstanding Colonel Burns's failure to foresee that people would use the Internet mostly to access porn and look themselves up on Google, his prescience was admirable. — Jon Ronson

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces? — Michael Lewis

The culture of the Epic Fail, in its rituals of comic sacrifice, is a culture of sublimated predation. — Mark O'Connell

The quintessential exercise of free speech in a culture supposedly built on that concept and dedicated to it, the Internet's development is as historically important to humanity perhaps even more so as Gutenberg 's invention of the printing press. — L. Neil Smith

You're sort of programmed a certain way because of your environment. That's all you know. But we don't have that anymore because of the internet. Because of the internet we're all communicating with each other all across the board, so you're getting information from people all around the world, hitting a much more diverse slice of culture. — Joe Rogan

I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost, because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home, a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture, writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books. — Kevin Smith