Joichi Ito Quotes

For some reason, I grew up generally believing that Japan and Korea were quite friendly. I do know that there is some bad history and the extremists on both sides are unreasonable.

I have had a great deal of interaction with Koreans and feel a fairly strong bond with Korea.

I agree that it is not just the extremists who harbor bad thoughts or engage in bad acts, but they are usually the source of the polarization and try to keep education and communication of the main stream from moving forward.

If we destroy human rights and rule of law in response to terrorism, they have won.

In a world where discovery is more important than delivery, it's the people who find, remix and direct attention to old stuff that should be rewarded, not the people who deliver it or sit on it waiting for someone to show up.

Internet penetration in Italy is quite low and the Berlusconi media machine controls most of what people see.

Education is what people do to you. Learning is what you do to yourself. Focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware and super present.

Liberty, freedom and democracy are very fuzzy words, but human rights is very specific.

Want to increase innovation? Lower the cost of failure.

I have always viewed my role as a sort of ambassador or bridge between groups to help provide a dialog.

I talked about the barriers created by monopolies. I said that it was the role of government to break up these monopolies and that we couldn't do it alone.

Consequently, the only thing I learned in school was typing. In the old days, people like me who don't have college degrees had a hard time thriving in society. But today, the ability to learn on your own or from your peers has become really easy. I think this change is leading to a fundamental disruption in education. Independent and lifelong learning are really starting to peak - there is an inflection point coming around how people learn.

I definitely feel like my blog is going edgy to broad and boring.

My whole life has been about connecting things that aren't connected.

Education is something that other people do to you. Learning is something you do for yourself.

We have a long way to go before we are able to hear the voices of everyone on earth, but I believe that providing voices and building bridges is essential for the World Peace we all wish for.

The US constitution's First Amendment rights only cover Americans, but I believe that in a democracy the competition of ideas and free speech should combat beliefs that it does not agree with - more speech and debate, not censorship.

Now that our media companies and it appears are policies are traded for cash, what is there to check the continuing consolidation of power and diminishing of democracy?

I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process [of] establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.

Most creative work is a process of people passing ideas and inspirations from the past into the future and adding their own creativity along the way.

Question authority; think for yourself. Talk to people, do things unrelated to school - to come up with your own framework for living. The world is too complex and people are too different to be overly prescriptive about the details.

I just believe that the cost of marketing is going to increase and the cost of delivery is going to decrease as the Net gets stronger and mass media gets weaker.

I noticed that democracy was broken and tried to work on fixing that in Japan. Then I realized that it was broken all over the place and decided to work on that too.

When there is a huge force pressing down on freedoms, sub-cultures with more creativity and power are likely to form.

Upholding human rights is not merely compatible with fighting terrorism, it is essential.

Google is in an amazing position to be the target of tons of lawsuits that will set precedent for many important things for us on the Internet.

It would be easy to define terrorism as attacks against human rights and international humanitarian law forbids attacks against innocent non-combatants which is often the definition used for terrorism.

I don't like the word 'futurists.' I think we should be 'nowists.'

Consent of the Networked will become the seminal book firmly establishing the responsibility of those who control the architecture and the politics of the network to the citizens who inhabit our new digital world. Consent of the Networked should be required reading for all of those involved in building our networked future as well as those who live in it.

You're not going to be on top of mountain all by yourself with a #2 pencil What we need to learn is how to learn.

If the cost of figuring out whether to do something is more than just doing it, then just do it!

The idea of trying to fight against extremism was written off as naive.

The most important thing I learned in school was how to touch type.

Money creates a power relationship between the payer and the payee.

There's a new power of pull. Pulling resources from the network JUST when you need them.

In the old days, you became an adult when suddenly your life went from learning to doing the same thing for the rest of your life, but today you can't afford to do that.

The cost of assessing risk is now often greater than the cost of failing.

LinkedIn allows you to search histories and CVs in your network - it's great for finding people who work in a particular company, or who have worked with someone you know. It's also an interesting way to find references for people or companies you're getting to know.

We discussed the history of postwar Japan and how Japan had missed an opportunity to build a more functional democracy because of the focus on fighting communism driven in large part by the American occupation.