Quotes About Technology

Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.

Tristan taught me that the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention

At the start of the Second World War, the English poet W. H. Auden—when he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humans—warned: "We must love one another, or die.

In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that's a little bit difficult. What's happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that's with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.

We are now exposed to ten times the amount of artificial light that people were exposed to just fifty years ago.

The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking.

Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.

The truth is creepier. It's not that they are listening and then they can do targeted ad serving. It's that their model of you is so accurate that it's making predictions about you that you think are magic.

seeing this as a debate between whether you are pro-tech or anti-tech is bogus and lets the people who stole your attention off the hook. The real debate is: What tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests?

It's that their model of you is so accurate that it's making predictions about you that you think are magic.

started to think again about a book I had read ten years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr—a landmark work that really alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis.

We touch our phones 2,617 times every twenty-four hours.

I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.

We are living, she has come to believe, in a culture where people are not "getting the connections that they need in order to be healthy human beings," and that is why we can't put down our smartphones, or bear to log off. We tell ourselves that we live so much of our lives in cyberspace because when we are there, we are connected—we are plugged into a swirling party with billions of people.

If we don't change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where "there's going to be an upper class of people that are very aware" of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with "fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they're going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.

It said that we are, collectively, experiencing "a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.

Silicon Valley sells itself by articulating "a big, lofty goal—connecting everyone in the world, or whatever it is. But when you're actually doing the day-to-day work, it's about increasing user numbers.

I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.

It's not your fault you can't focus. It's by design. Your distraction is their fuel.

Jarod Lanier - a veteran Silicon Valley engineer - told me he used to be a consultant for loads of dystopian Hollywood movies, like Minority Report, but he had to stop because he kept designing ever-more frightening technologies to warn people of what was coming - and designers kept responding by saying that's so cool; how do we make that?

The study found that "technological distraction"—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers' IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that's twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you'd be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages

Their business model," he says, "is screen time, not life time.

Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.

by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.