Quotes About Technology

A small bubble-shaped craft sat on two legs that ended in what looked like oversize duck feet. The bubble was made of green-tinted plastic. There was a small propeller at one end. "Are you kidding me?" Dan asked. "Did you buy that at Target?" "I designed it myself," Alistair said, patting it.

Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? –Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs

Nowadays, we never allow ourselves the convenience of being temporarily unavailable, even to strangers. With telephone and beeper, people subject themselves to being instantly accessible to everyone at all times, and it is the person who refuses to be on call, rather than the importunate caller, who is considered rude.

Psychologists confirm that humans are incapable of giving their full attention to two tasks simultaneously.37 What people actually do is switch their attention from one task or platform to the next, and such task switching leads to a host of issues, including attention difficulties, poor decision making, and information overload.

Zeros now have a place, and they displace the phallic order of ones.

I question this stereotype of the technologically tethered worker with no control over his time. Instead, the use of information and communication technology (ICT) for both work-related and personal matters is shown to have positive, as well as negative, implications for men and women workers. The contemporary office has by my account morphed into a ubiquitous technoscape, and this has reconfigured the very nature of working time.

I begin by describing the saturation of everyday life by media technologies, for example, how people are meshing multiple devices. I then present some of my own research on the mobile phone's role in shifting the boundaries between work and home. The main use of the mobile phone turns out to be social, with much value placed on the enhanced ability to microcoordinate the timing of complex family activities. In this way, I argue, mobile phones have become a new tool for intimacy.

other words, technologies only come to life and have meaning as people adopt and use them.

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!

The driver of an automobile on a lonely road is a set of perceptions mounted in the forehead of a mechanical monster.

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

The switch from sales ladies behind each counter in five-and-dime stores to checkout lines, from waiter-served to self-service and fast-food restaurants, from full-service to self-service gasoline stations are among the responses to higher labor costs. So, too, are the absence of movie theater ushers and the wide use by restaurants of plastic utensils and paper plates, because they do not require dishwashing.

What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?

I have a strong emotional respect for Steve.

Steve Jobs: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, "Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.

I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.

I'm in favor of any technology that makes my work available to the reading public at a reasonable price.

the technology of personality transfer is imperfect--sometimes bits get left behind: memories, abilities, traits, that might be useful. A full succession of bodies can mean successive senility.

Porn mainlined to the forebrain, electric orgasms courtesy of induction, screaming synthetic highs circuited to the mind, technicolor power fantasies jabbed right into one's primal need.

These were mixed with parts that, when assembled, transformed themselves into a custom-made long-barreled pistol, made entirely of an advanced plastic that would pass most detectors and which fired recoilless, near-silent cartridges with self-consuming casings, He'd brought the ammunition himself on the Earth shuttle.