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.

Ethan Zuckerman

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.

Ethan Zuckerman

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.

Ethan Zuckerman

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.

Ethan Zuckerman

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.

Ethan Zuckerman

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

Ethan Zuckerman

Creativity is an import-export business.

Ethan Zuckerman

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

Ethan Zuckerman

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

Ethan Zuckerman

It's my fond hope that social networks such as Facebook will help users broaden their perspectives by listening to a different set of people than they encounter in their daily life. But I fear services such as Facebook may be turning us into imaginary cosmopolitans.

Ethan Zuckerman

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

Ethan Zuckerman

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.

Ethan Zuckerman

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

Ethan Zuckerman

The uptake on mobile phones in Africa is phenomenal.

Ethan Zuckerman

Google doesn't really forget.

Ethan Zuckerman

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

Ethan Zuckerman

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.

Ethan Zuckerman

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

Ethan Zuckerman

On the Internet, information from Indiana and India is equally cheap and easy to access.

Ethan Zuckerman

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

Ethan Zuckerman

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.

Ethan Zuckerman