Quotes About Technology

It's the outside world that's the prison. The outside world of jobs and cars and cell phones and apartments and grocery stores. Appropriate clothing, plans for a Saturday night, loneliness.

The sense of incredible realism that many people experience when interacting in virtual worlds with virtual people is known as presence.

American inventor Robert Fulton was putting the finishing touches to his latest batch of torpedoes.

In the sinking of the Dorothea, they had seen the future of naval warfare.

With hindsight, Napoleon might have done better to build steam ships

But the French still thought in terms of wooden ships and sail, as did the English across the Channel.

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.

The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory, but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.

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

The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas.

media aren't just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

In a talk at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting, Duke University professor Katherine Hayles confessed, "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore."10 Hayles teaches English; the students she's talking about are students of literature.

There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.

When our brain is overtaxed, we find "distractions more distracting.

lawyer and technology writer Richard Koman, argued that Google "has become a true believer in its own goodness, a belief which justifies its own set of rules regarding corporate ethics, anti-competition, customer service and its place in society.

The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement.

our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot," he wrote. The content of the medium is just "the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind." P 4

In the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it-and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

Technology isn't what makes us "post-human" or "transhuman," as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It's what makes us human. Technology is in our nature. Through our tools we give our dreams form. We bring them into the world. The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning.

The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can't even get started.

A polemicist might put it more pointedly: The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.

Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.

never has there been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to so widely scatter our attention and to do it so insistently.