Quotes About Digital

The new technologies allow us to "dial down" human contact, to titrate its nature and extent.

In all of these cases, we use technology to "dial down" human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. People avoid face-to-face conversation but are comforted by being in touch with people—and sometimes with a lot of people—who are emotionally kept at bay. It's another instance of the Goldilocks effect. It's part of the move from conversation to mere connection.

One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.

A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: "it's like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.

As technology became our lifeline, we realized how much we missed the full embrace of the human.

Our new media are well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other.

Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.

In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, "Today, everything exists to end in a photograph." Today, does everything exist to end online?

We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. Yet

when technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections.

I said that we use digital "passbacks" to placate young children who say they are bored. We are not teaching them that boredom can be recognized as your imagination calling you. Of

Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.

We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve. And

Connectivity becomes a craving.

When habitual structures dissolve, so do boundaries between people.

We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer's memory.

I said that we use digital "passbacks" to placate young children who say they are bored. We are not teaching them that boredom can be recognized as your imagination calling you.

This give-and-take prepares children for the expectation of relationship with machines that is at the heart of the robotic moment.

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

Now, relational artifacts pose these questions directly.

We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely

Despite the seriousness of our moment, I write with optimism. Once aware, we can begin to rethink our practices. When we do, conversation is there to reclaim. For the failing connections of our digital world, it is the talking cure.

In my studies I found that children were most likely to see this new category of object, the computational object, as "sort of" alive—a

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