Quotes About Technology

For one woman, a college sophomore, "It's very special when someone turns away from a text to turn to a person." For a senior man, "If someone gets a text and apologizes and silences it [their phone], that sends a signal that they are there, they are listening to you.

When one becomes accustomed to "companionship" without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.

We now expect more from technology and less from each other.

Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.

We work so hard to build our online connections. We have so much faith in them. But we must take care that in the end we do not simply feel alone with our devices.

I've talked so much about virtuous circles; here is a vicious cycle. Knowing we have someplace "else" to go in a moment of boredom leaves us less experienced at exploring our inner lives and therefore more likely to want the stimulation of what is on our phones.

Often it is children who tell their parents to put away the cell phone at dinner.

What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent? At a café a block from my home, almost everyone is on a computer or smartphone as they drink their coffee. These people are not my friends, yet somehow I miss their presence.

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.

Ray, twenty-eight, comments on what it's like to have a relationship when you compete with screens: "I think the way we're going, a lot of people are getting the feeling that even though the person they're with is there, you don't get the feeling of real connection. You just have information.

Computers brought philosophy into everyday life.

She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber.

My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me.

If you feel it right now, on the Internet, you can tell them right now; you don't have to wait for anything.

A classical view of people as "rational animals" gave way to a new idea, people as "emotional machines.

The idea of the original had no place.

So, instead of doing your email as you push your daughter in her stroller, talk to her. Instead of putting a digital tablet in your son's baby bouncer, read to him and chat about the book. Instead of a quick text if you find a conversation going stale, make an effort to engage your peers.

It's too late to leave the future to the futurists.

The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.

Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.

Once we become tethered to the network, we really don't need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY.

Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed— and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.

Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and I'll show you someone who is looking for a person and can't find one.

Sometimes you don't have time for your friends except if they're online," is a common complaint.