Quotes About Virtual

Email did more than facilitate the exchange of messages between two computer users. It led to the creation of virtual communities, ones that, as predicted in 1968 by Licklider and Taylor, were "selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.

The strangers we encounter on the web are abstractions, not a physical presence—we are interfacing with them, not interacting.

As more and more technologies develop that enable us to communicate without touch (from phones to email to phone sex to virtual surgery), it seems likely that touch will become more and more stigmatized as a vehicle for contamination, both literal and symbolic.

Face-to-face, real-time connection to others feels fraught and awkward compared to the safe distance of digital communication. We maintain intimate virtual contact with strangers but seem increasingly isolated from our closest friends and family members.

Welcome to the X-Files meets The Twilight Zone meets the Information Superhighway.

For all the spectacle of CGI, there's something alien and unreal about that domain, like a videogame.

I'm developing some high-frame-rate 3-D processes that are going to be, I hope, indistiguishable from reality. This will be quite an unusual cinematic event - you don't just tell an ordinary story, it's more of a first-person experience where the melodrama doesn't get in the way. Being inside the movie rather than looking at the movie.

For the millions of us who live glued to computer keyboards at work and TV monitors at home, food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.

I don't think that the Internet creates feelings that aren't there, nor does it provide an outlet. On the contrary, what I have thought about things like computer games - what has disturbed me about them - is that they appear to stimulate feelings of aggression without providing any physical release.

We're living in a high-tech world. So much of our stimulus and entertainment comes from things that are quite abstract and disembodied.

When I was talking to strangers over the Internet in the 1990s, there would be a much more intense connection because they're disembodied, so it's just your brain and your soul interacting with this other person, and it just frees you up in this incredibly empowering way.

That's how it is online—there's no time in cyberspace. It's almost like everything physical evaporates, and it's just your mind and the different sites floating in a void.

Online is another way for all of us to reach people.

A lot of people have put their lives online and are using MySpace to manage their social lives.

Online communities are an expression of loneliness.

No, playing online is an entirely different experience and classical chess events never happen online.

There is something not entirely satisfying about an online memorial.

Oh, I'm online all the time now. I'm not an outdoorsy type.

The Muslim community is completely fractured - it doesn't really exist anymore; the only place it does exist is online.

It's a deeper connection when you meet someone online and talk to them every day.

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1

The screen shows me Portugal. The screen shows me Cairo. They have a thing where you can wander the streets. I can go anywhere I want is what the screen keeps telling me. Try this. Try there. Go around here. The world's wide open. You can wander anyplace and you'll be alone there, too.

With the e-reader, the whole book was on the same virtual page. One could not feel the depth of the pages on the left side increase as those of the right side diminished, the gradual progression from beginning to middle to end, the sense of where one stood in the journey of the story.

Long time ago I used to have a life, until someone told me to create a Facebook account.