Quotes About Technology

I'm not on Twitter or Facebook and don't even use email. I don't trust computers: one day they'll all break down, and everyone will be knackered.

If man could apply half the ingenuity he's exhibited in the creation of weapons to more sensible ends, there's no limit to what he might yet accomplish

Can any traditionally organized government withstand the ideological forces of a technologically empowered proletariat? Call them tweetmobs, blogmobs, txtmobs or simply citizen publishers—everyone has a voice, and no matter how the government tries to silence them, in the Information Age, information will find a way.

Not even computers will replace committees, because committees buy computers.

Life must have sucked growing up without TV." "Back then people could wait a few days to learn about all the things they couldn't control. . . Nowadays we're much more impatient for our impotence.

MANUFACTURER: mnm.MOD

Do you realize it's been only a century that we've been able to go from house to car to office to car to wherever, with the heater on, and the defroster on, protected from the rain and the cold? It hasn't been much longer than that we've had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out there, all that mystery that we've turned into well-lighted concrete bunkers, safe and warm and dull.

Electricity. The high priest of false security.

They went back there, looked at all the computers, asked me to come in and tell them what all the computers were for specifically so they knew how to dismantle the network I had been running.

I am on the power toothbrush train and I'm asking people to try to using an Oral B power toothbrush. I just started using one and I cannot believe that I waited this long to use a power toothbrush. It's so much easier than using a manual toothbrush.

Fuck you, God. Nothing gets through HY-80

We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

The feeling that 'no one is listening to me' makes us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.

If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely.

Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.

We expect more from technology and less from each other.

Texting offers just the right amount of access, just the right amount of control. She is a modern Goldilocks: for her, texting puts people not too close, not too far, but at just the right distance. The world is now full of modern Goldilockses, people who take comfort in being in touch with a lot of people whom they also keep at bay.

But if we don't have experience with solitude—and this is often the case today—we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness.

Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We'd rather text than talk.

People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.

Phones have become woven into a fraught sense of obligation in friendship. . . . Being a friend means being "on call"—tethered to your phone, ready to be attentive, online.

When Thoreau considered "where I live and what I live for," he tied together location and values. Where we live doesn't just change how we live; it informs who we become. Most recently, technology promises us lives on the screen. What values, Thoreau would ask, follow from this new location? Immersed in simulation, where do we live, and what do we live for?

we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.

We fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream.