Quotes About Technology

No; I want to send a telegram, if there's any electric fluid in this old tomb.

Something we once loved, and love now, in the shape of a book. Maybe eBooks are going to take over, one day, but not until those whizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or two and allow the plastic tablet to fall open at a favorite page.

I'm pretty healthy and I don't mind the idea of dying, but I also don't want to get mowed down by some freaky high school kid in a trench coat who's high on Zoloft and has traded in his Xbox for a semiautomatic.

Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms. So this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life.

Maybe this is what it's like when you die. Your inbox stays empty. At first, you just think nobody's answering, so you check your SENT box to make sure your outgoing mail is okay, and then you check your ISP to make sure your account is still active, and eventually you have to conclude that you're dead.

There's nothing sadder than cyberspace . . . but I've already said this.

As someone who has to teach for a living, I shouldn't be saying this, but the planet can do quite well without books.

Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention?

I hate email. It's so slow. On email it's never now. It's always then, which is why it's so easy to get lazy and let your inbox fill up.

noise-canceling headphones

email on his iPhone.

He sat perfectly still, studying his hands in his lap. "I know it is a stupid idea to design a weapon that will refuse to kill," he said. "But maybe I could make the killing not so much fun.

What is the half-life of information?

I love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.

Americans love to mess about with the brain--that's why they are at the forefront of neurosurgery.

what has made it possible for us to remain ourselves in spite of so many wars, invasions and occupations, is our spiritual, not our material, strength--our poetry, and not out technology; our religion, and not our factories.

Here it is different, here the past is as alive as the present, the unpredictable cruel Stone Age coexists with the calculating, cool age of electronics—the two eras live in the same man, who is as much the descendant of Genghis Khan as he is the student of Edison… if, that is, he ever comes into contact with Edison's world.

O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of...

Anybody who's spent any time with machines at all,' he added, 'and baby, that's us all, knows first and foremost there's only one thing certain about them, computer or bicycle. They go wrong.

what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was...it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight...

The problem is not technological," he said. "And there is no technological solution to it. The problem is human, human nature in general, male human nature in particular

the age of information, my dear," my mother said with justifiable pride when they had done their work at their computers, "everyone's garbage is on display for all to see, and all you need to know is how to look.

Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had be lost in the static of the airwaves.

Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses.