Ethan Zuckerman Quotes

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

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.

The wider world is a click away, but whether we mean to or not, we're usually filtering it out.

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

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 Internet is corporations all the way down.

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

Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance.

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.

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.

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ago, I loved getting on a bus in West Africa and taking off for a city I'd never been to before, relying on advice from out-of-date travel books and fellow passengers on the bus.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.

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

Increasingly, I'm inspired by entrepreneurs who run nonprofit organizations that fund themselves, or for-profit organizations that achieve social missions while turning a profit.

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.

Moments of crisis, like the shooting in Newtown, tend to produce brief spikes of popular interest in gun control. My research on media attention suggests these spikes are extremely short-lived, and that they may be decreasing in intensity.

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.

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

Teenagers try to hide what's really going on in their communication online.

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.

A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.

Creativity is an import-export business.

The uptake on mobile phones in Africa is phenomenal.

The Internet challenges traditional ways of distributing and processing information and so encourages new standards and behavior.

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

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

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.

[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.

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

The Internet has not become the great leveller that it was once thought it could be.

Reddit names are unconnected to real-world identities and it's commonplace for users to create 'throwaway' accounts to reveal sensitive information.

Twitter is my main tool for ensuring news balance.

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.

People who know me well have learned to insist that I commit to obligations by opening my laptop and putting them onto the appropriate calendar or list - a verbal agreement and a promise to remember won't work.

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.

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

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.