Quotes About Technology

We love the way screens can, almost magically, absorb our children's attention and give us a few moments of quiet in the car or before dinner.

It's not hard to figure out who has the power in any large gathering in our mediated culture: they are the ones with a microphone, their image projected larger than life above the crowd.

Because make no mistake: the videos we put on for our kids—or the video games we pull up on our phones in our own moments of boredom—are designed, unconsciously or consciously, to produce a bewitching effect. And that effect is achieved by filling a screen with a level of vividness and velocity that does not exist in the real world—or only very rarely. Because it is rare, we instinctively respond to it, and indeed take delight in it.

It is surely not coincidental that all the earliest citations of the word bore in the Oxford English Dictionary—from the mid-eighteenth century—come from the correspondence of aristocrats and nobility.2 They did not have technology, but thanks to wealth and position they had a kind of easy everywhere of their own. The first people to be bored were the people who did not do manual work, who did not cook their own food, whose lives were served by others.

The lilies of the field close up their blooms at night and rest patiently for the next day, but we, cloaked in ghostly light, make tomorrow's troubles today's and tonight's instead. The devices we carry to bed to make us feel connected and safe actually prevent us from trusting in the One who knows our needs and who alone can protect us through the dangers and sorrows of any night.

a vegetable vaporiser

Windows no longer comes in a Windows RT version. If you bought a Windows RT tablet, such as the Surface RT or Surface 2, you can't upgrade it to Windows 10.

For some odd reason, Compact Discs and Digital Video Discs are spelled as discs, not disks.

Windows 10 no longer offers guest accounts. These days, most visitors arrive toting their own smartphones, tablets, or both.

I always think about what it means to wear eyeglasses. When you get used to glasses you don't know how far you could really see. I think about all the people before eyeglasses were invented. It must have been weird because everyone was seeing in different ways according to how bad their eyes were. Now, eyeglasses standardize everyone's vision to 20-20. That's an example of everyone becoming more alike. Everyone could be seeing at different levels if it weren't for glasses.

When I look around today, the biggest anachronism I see is pregnancy. I just can't believe that people are still pregnant.

The phone was her worst enemy and her best friend but she never knew which until she answered it.

Maybe by the time she was a parent there would be automatic diaper-changers

Her second best friend is her computer.

They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene.

And this is a very important point: without the computer, Sam Walton could not have done what he's done.

The Eucharist is the technology God uses for constructing a new society.

sitting at a computer for long

The technologies we have available to challenge abuses of power—from complaints procedures to antidiscrimination policies to equality polices to the very languages of

The system that supports you can also be used to control you

She looks at her watch - a real one, with arms. Those digital ones came and went, thank God. When will people learn that just because you can make something doesn't mean you should?

She looks at her watch—a real one, with arms. Those digital ones came and went, thank God. When will people learn that just because you can make something doesn't mean you should?

When will people learn that just because you can make something doesn't mean you should?

world wars, cold wars, guerrilla wars, and Sputnik