Ethan Zuckerman Quotes

A world where everyone creates content gets confusing pretty quickly without a good search engine.

When I'm playing with circular saws, I'm offline (though often listening to podcasts) and when I sit in the cabin to read or write, it's wonderful to be offline for a few hours at a time.

Talking about 'stopping globalization' is unrealistic - and probably not what anti-globalization protesters actually want.

I can read a lot of French newspapers with Google Translate and have them read quite comfortably.

You can make the case that slacktivism is important because it makes people feel affiliated to a movement and be part of it, and talk about it.

Sometimes you need the things you didn't know you needed to know.

People generally pay attention to what they already know about and what they care about.

Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance.

Cute. I'm on the waitlist to beta a new product, and have been offered the chance to move up in the list if I tweet about it. Not doing so.

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.

It's becoming clear that the world is listening, so now we're trying to get new groups of people talking.

If I use Facebook to stay in touch with my high school friends who are church-going Republicans, I may be getting more ideological diversity than in hanging out with secular progressives on the World Politics sub-reddit.

While the Internet is censored in China, the censorship is allowing a level of speech to take place that's unprecedented.

People want to be thought of as something other than a source of money. They want to be thought of as creative, thinking people.

Google doesn't really forget.

The culture around here is much less cutthroat than it is in, say, Silicon Valley, or even within the non-profit culture in D.C..

Engineering serendipity is this idea that we can help people come across unexpected but helpful connections at a better than random rate. And in some ways it's based on trying to reassess this notion of serendipitous as lucky - to think of serendipitous as smart.

Re-tweeting is a pretty common practice on Twitter, but on an average day, we see maybe one out of 20 posts is a re-tweet.

When I was growing up in the U.S. in the 1970s, 35-40% of an average nightly newscast focused on international stories.

It's become relatively commonplace to find corners of Africa that have good cell coverage but no electrical power.

I can imagine Iceland becoming a good place to run a controversial Web site. But ... Iceland may find itself forced to defend controversial speech.

Curators are great, but they're inherently biased. Curators are always making an editorial decision. Those biases have really big implications.

For countries such as Kenya to emerge as economic powerhouses, they need better infrastructure: roads, ports, smart grids and power plants. Infrastructure is expensive, and takes a long time to build. In the meantime, hackers are building 'grassroots infrastructure,' using the mobile-phone system to build solutions that are ready for market.

Now if you're using Twitter or other social networks, and you didn't realize this was a space with a lot of Brazilians in it, you're like most of us. Because what happens on a social network is you interact with the people that you have chosen to interact with.

Creativity is an import-export business.

The Internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces. There's some interface between them, but there's a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space.

The term 'cyberutopian' tends to be used only in the context of critique. Calling someone a cyberutopian implies that he or she has an unrealistic and naively overinflated sense of what technology makes possible and an insufficient understanding of the forces that govern societies.

[According to Twitter] 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That's about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population.

It's fine to have social media that connects us with old friends, but we need tools that help us discover new people as well.

The uptake on mobile phones in Africa is phenomenal.

There's no locality on the web - every market is a global market.

The benefits and consequences of globalization have a great deal to do with whether we're intelligent and thoughtful about how we approach globalization, or whether we're blindly accepting ... or blindly resistant.

On Twitter, if you want to quote someone else, you say, 'RT, re-tweet, that person's name, and then what they said before.' And it's a way of essentially saying, 'I'm not saying this, but my friend said this and I thought this was interesting.'

The Internet is corporations all the way down.

I fear that I can no longer travel without technology. Twenty years ago, I loved getting on a bus in West Africa and taking off for a city I'd never been to before, relying on advice from out-of-date travel books and fellow passengers on the bus. Now, I end up using TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Maps. I probably eat and sleep better when I'm on the road, but I miss the mystery of travel when it was more random and unpredictable.

I'm not nearly as well organized as I would like. I am a creature of to-do lists and calendars - if something doesn't get onto my Google Calendar, I don't show up for it.

I study the ways new media shapes people's perceptions of the world.

If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems?

while it's easier than ever to share information and perspectives from different parts of the world, we may now often encounter a narrower picture of the world than in less connected days.