Quotes About Communication

Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better.

As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.

when you add verbiage to a page, you can assume that customers will read 18% of it.

We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. 'Writing and print and the computer,' writes Walter Ong, 'are all ways of technologizing the word'; and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized.

When we speak with emoji, we're speaking a language that machines can understand.

Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.

the Web transformed the Internet from an intellectual meeting-house into a commercial enterprise.

The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. That's not only a result of its ability to display many different kinds of media simultaneously. It's also a result of the ease with which it can be programmed to send and receive messages.

Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.19

Mothers, wrote Bellamy, would no longer have "to make themselves hoarse telling the children stories on rainy days to keep them out of mischief." The kids would all have their own indispensables.

But intellectually, our ancestors' oral culture was in many ways a shallower one than our own.

The earliest examples of reading and writing date back many thousands of years. As long ago as 8000 BC, people were using small clay tokens engraved with simple symbols to keep track of quantities of livestock and other goods.

McLuhan believed that preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense "sensuous involvement" with the world. When we learned to read, he argued, we suffered a "considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.

As we've entered the computer age, however, our talent for connecting with other minds has had an unintended consequence.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I Zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski

That same year, the futurist Edward Bellamy suggested, in a Harper's article, that people would come to read "with the eyes shut." They would carry around a tiny audio player, called an "indispensable," which would contain all their books, newspapers, and magazines.

the amount of information a communication medium supplies is less important than the way the medium presents the information and the way, in turn, our minds take it in.

What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.

According to one estimate, the number of books produced in the fifty years following Gutenberg's invention equaled the number produced by European scribes during the preceding thousand years.

Social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous that one has to ask what purpose they serve.

Yeah, I know, and he can't hit in any of them. Dave Harris, Senators' outfielder, when told that catcher Moe Berg spoke seven languages.

Even underwater they could hear him laughing.

Knowing is the easy part; saying it out loud is the hard part.

Look after each other. As a couple. When you have kids, you'll want to put them first. Don't. Marriage is like a plant. To keep it alive you've got to water it and feed it. If you don't, when the kids are gone, you'll look in the corner and it'll be dead.