Science & Tech Quote by Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel comes at the Internet sideways: not as a gadget to master, but as a civic rumor worth taking seriously. "I'm not up on the Internet" isn’t false modesty so much as a strategic posture. He’s the oral historian of the 20th century admitting he doesn’t speak the newest dialect, then immediately claiming the only thing that matters about it: its potential to widen who gets to speak to whom. The line carries his lifelong suspicion that official institutions hoard authority while ordinary people quietly stockpile wisdom.

The phrase "democratic possibility" is doing heavy lifting. Terkel isn’t praising the Web’s efficiency; he’s testing whether it can serve the old American promise of participation, the kind he spent decades recording in factories, union halls, kitchens. He hears connection and imagines solidarity, not branding. That’s the subtext: networks could become a public square rather than a shopping mall.

Then he turns from technology to the real subject: a leadership vacuum. "People are ready for something" suggests a latent mass consciousness - not rage, not apathy, but readiness - paired with a bleak diagnosis that elites have stopped offering credible direction. The final imagined chorus, "Yes, we are part of a world", reads like pre-9/11 globalization talk with moral stakes: an invitation to graduate from parochial identity into shared fate.

Terkel’s intent is less prediction than provocation. He’s asking whether the tools of connection can produce the missing bridge between private longing and public action - or whether the moment will be squandered by leaders who can’t, or won’t, name what people already feel.