“As he drove, he was conscious of the web around him. The web of streets, of people, of places, and of things. The other web, too, the new world. This parallel place, with email address private driveways, it sdotcom marketplaces. You could find out so much there, running reality through your hands likea god's. Everything on the web is information; but everything is on the web, these days; so the world has become information. Everything has become an utterance of this thing, of this bank of words and images: everything is something it is saying, or has said. It's about buying, and looking, about our habits and desires, about contact with others, about voyeurism and aspiration and addiction. It is us boiled down — our essence, for better or worse. It is no longer passive. It is telling the story of us, and sometimes that story needs work.”

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 16

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "As he drove, he was conscious of the web around him. The web of streets, of people, of places, and of things. The other…" by Michael Marshall Smith?
Michael Marshall Smith photo
Michael Marshall Smith 26
British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer 1965

Related quotes

Donald J. Trump photo
John Updike photo

“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Speech at the Book Expo America Saturday Book & Author Breakfast (26 May 2006) https://web.archive.org/web/20080807154650/http://bookexpocast.com/2006/05/26/bea-2-john-updike-speech/

Terry Gilliam photo
Tim Berners-Lee photo

“If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

developerWorks Interviews: Tim Berners-Lee (podcast/audio plus transcript) http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html
Context: Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

Tim Berners-Lee photo

“Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

developerWorks Interviews: Tim Berners-Lee (podcast/audio plus transcript) http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html

Chief Seattle photo
Chris Anderson photo

“The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers.”

Source: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006), Ch. 5, p. 70

Sergey Brin photo

“We came up with the notion that not all web pages are created equal. People are – but not web pages.”

Sergey Brin (1973) President of Alphabet Inc.

Guest lecture, UC Berkeley http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7582902000166025817 Oct. 5, 2005 – 40 min.

Brewster Kahle photo

“Here’s the problem with the web — this is so cool, it’s worth it. The internet is decentralized in the sense that you can kind of nuke any part of it and it still works. That was its original design. The World Wide Web isn’t that way. You go and knock out any particular piece of hardware, it goes away. Can we make a reliable web that’s served from many different places, kind of like how the Amazon cloud works, but for everybody? The answer is yes, you can. You can make kind of a pure to pure distribution structure, such that the web becomes reliable. Another is that we can make it private so that there’s reader privacy. Edward Snowden has brought to light some really difficult architectural problems of the current World Wide Web. The GCHQ, the secret service of the British, watched everybody using WikiLeaks, and then offered all of those IP addresses, which are personally identifiable in the large part, to the NSA. The NSA had conversations about using that as a means to go and… monitor people at an enhanced level that those are now suspects. Libraries have long had history with people being rounded up for what they’ve read and bad things happening to them. We have an interest in trying to make it so that there’s reader privacy”

Brewster Kahle (1960) American computer engineer, founder of the Internet Archive

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on Recode Decode https://www.recode.net/2017/3/8/14843408/transcript-internet-archive-founder-brewster-kahle-wayback-machine-recode-decode (March 8, 2017)

Related topics