Quotes About Technology

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don't really "need" anything new, so we only create what we want.

The only people who think the Internet is a calamity are people whose lives have been hurt by it; the only people who insist the Internet is wonderful are those who need it to give their life meaning.

Once consumers experienced free music, they came to view music as something that was supposed to be free.

If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren't soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.

I don't understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway," sci-fi novelist Ray Bradbury told an audience of college students in 1995. "Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?

machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he's a morlock — but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for

The nineties were a golden age for metropolitan newspapers and glossy magazines, yet most copies were destroyed or recycled within a month and never converted to digital files. It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.

Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner.

As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn't own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don't own a TV simply means you're poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-year span, high-end television usurped the cultural positions of film, rock, and literary fiction.

An author I know once explained why writing became so much more difficult in the twenty-first century: "The biggest problem in my life," he said, "is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us.

There are entrenched ideas (both positive and negative) about what the internet is, conceded even by those who disagree with the veracity of the assertions: the way it refigures politics and social organization, the degree to which it alters the experience of adolescence, its contradictory ability to connect and estrange simultaneously, and its overall acceleration of the news cycle.

It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome. The United States experienced a prolonged period of economic growth without the protracted complications of a hot or cold war, making it possible to focus on one's own subsistence as if the rest of society were barely there.

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.

A person native to the twenty-first century can't really reconcile why anyone would pay $13.25 for twelve fixed songs that could only be played on specific high-end electronics serving no other function; the majority of all recorded music can now be instantly accessed anywhere for less than $10 a month.

The primacy of a landline connection dictated how life was lived, with such deep-rooted universality that its role in shaping humanity was virtually unconsidered. It was the single most important feature of every home, and nobody cared.

Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. There was no other option.

Like so many modern people, my relationship with technology makes no sense whatsoever: It's the most important aspect of my that I hate.

Most live video footage was not permanently saved, often taped over to reduce costs (some of the only material that remains from this period was recorded by one private citizen—Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who compulsively recorded and stored over 40,000 VHS tapes of news broadcasts between the years of 1979 and 2012, eventually donating the collection to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive).

Y2K was the maturation of a criticism whose echo would become normative and unyielding: We've lost control of what we have built, and we need to go back. But the road at our heels was already gone. Forward was the only way out.

The possibility of parents and children sharing the same cultural interests has increased dramatically over the past twenty-five years; today, the central bifurcation is how that communal culture is accessed and interpreted and experienced.

There's even an 1892 novel called Golf in the Year 2000 that (somewhat incredibly) predicts the advent of televised sports.

the slow cancellation of the future and the fast homogenization of the past]

It sometimes seems like 1995 was the year the future began. This is particularly true if the last book you happened to read was W. Joseph Campbell's 1995: The Year the Future Began.