Quotes About Technology

In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

This behavior, of course, is adaptive. In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it. In the twenty-first century, however, new technologies have hijacked this deep drive to create profitable behavioral addictions.

that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

Finally, as detailed in the first part of these book, many of these tools are engineered to hijack our social instincts to create an addictive allure. When you spend multiple hours a day compulsively clicking & swiping, there's much less free time left for slower interactions. And because this compulsive use emits a patina of socialness, it can delude you into thinking that you're already serving your relationships well, making further action unnecessary.

The rapid rise of communication and collaboration technologies has transformed many other formerly local markets into a similarly universal bazaar. The small company looking for a computer programmer or public relations consultant now has access to an international marketplace of talent in the same way that the advent of the record store allowed the small-town music fan to bypass local musicians to buy albums from the world's best bands.

Let's pull together the threads spun so far: Current economic thinking, as I've surveyed, argues that the unprecedented growth and impact of technology are creating a massive restructuring of our economy. In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.

The professors at MIT—some of the most innovative technologists in the world—wanted nothing to do with an open-office-style workspace. They instead demanded the ability to close themselves off. This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported.

Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. We attend to tone & nuance. On the other hand, when we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As a true digital minimalist, Turkle approaches these issues from a standpoint of smarter use of digital communication tools, not blanket abstention. "My argument is not anti-technology." She writes. "It's pro-conversation.

Depth-destroying behaviors such as immediate e-mail responses and an active social media presence are lauded, while avoidance of these trends generates suspicion.

novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote a piece for the Guardian calling Twitter a "coercive development" in the literary world,

For example, you might institute a ban on any Internet use,

As I mentioned in the introduction, I have one such philosophy to propose: Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

It's not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that's how they make their money.

you have duties during the declutter beyond following your technology rules. For this process to succeed, you must also spend this period trying to rediscover what's important to you and what you enjoy outside the world of the always-on, shiny digital.

manifesto titled "A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users' Attention.

this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

When the technology executive Daniel Clough decided to dumb down his phone experience, he didn't trash his iPhone but instead put it in the kitchen cupboard. He likes to use it when exercising so that he can listen to music and run his Nike+ fitness tracking app.

Once you break free from this mind-set, however, and begin seeing new technologies simply as tools that you can deploy selectively, you're able to fully embrace the second principle of minimalism and start furiously optimizing—enabling you to reap the advantages of vaulting up the return curve. Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.

Declaring freedom from your smartphone is probably the most serious step you can take toward embracing the attention resistance. This follows because smartphones are the preferred Trojan horse of the digital attention economy.

A foundational theme in digital minimalism is that new technology, when used with care and intention, creates a better life than either Luddism or mindless adoption.

Das Slow Media Manifest." The English translation reads: "The Slow Media Manifesto.

How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms?

It's instead quite natural once you recognize that the power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.