Quotes About Distraction

Our marvelous electronic devices can seduce us into believing we are hard at work, but we are merely sending and receiving insignificant messages, while the real work goes undone, day after day, week after week, year after year. Real thinking and grappling hurt like hell. That's why so many people avoid it like a root canal.

They describe the feeling of being online as a kind of anesthesia that eases the pain of everyday life.

Emails we can read, say no to 'send a receipt', mark as unread, categorise, label and put in a folder whilst drinking tea and thinking about other things. It's hard work making the right noises and facial expressions in response to an in-person reminder.

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions

We rarely talk about television, only about what's on television

Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

Now ... this" idea: the phenomenon whereby the reporting of a horrific event—a rape or a five-alarm fire or global warming—is followed immediately by the anchor's cheerfully exclaiming "Now ... this," which segues into a story about Janet Jackson's exposed nipple or a commercial for lite beer, creating a sequencing of information so random, so disparate in scale and value, as to be incoherent, even psychotic.

Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.

Silence has been replaced by background noise. It's a different world.

Tüketici psikodramalarla yat??t?r?lan bir hastad?r.

Los estadounidenses ya no hablan entre sí, sino que se entretienen recíprocamente. No intercambian ideas, sino imágenes.

Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods—much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping cough—became the content of what people called "the news of the day.

Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil's observation that 'Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.' Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody.

In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.

What did we do before we were so tethered? I

One of benefit of fiction: it puts your mind off your reality when your reality is off-putting.

The great secret of success is to focus the attention on the feeling of the wish fulfilled without permitting any distraction.

It's like if the music is loud enough I won't be able to listen to my own thoughts.

The only escape I had was watching movies. It was one thing that could take me out of myself - let me forget the world I lived in

When I was little, especially when I visited my mom in L.A., the only escape I had was watching movies. It was the one thing that could take me out of myself—let me forget the world I lived in.

We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated.