Quotes About Digital

more diamonds and pearls of electricity

My great-great-grandchildren will be born with prehensile texting thumbs, no vocal cords and zero capacity to read human facial expressions.

So for online people, death doesn't happen. People go online to hide from death and wind up hiding from life.

Wayne didn't interact with nature. He took pictures of it with his iPhone and then bent over the screen and poked at it. His favorite thing about the lake house was that it had Wi-Fi.

Content is not only King, it's Ka-Ching

It's ironic that while we enjoy easier access to information than ever before, we are falling behind in real knowledge. We are replacing books with blogs, and essays with tweets.

The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen.

Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.

started to think again about a book I had read ten years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr—a landmark work that really alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis.

We touch our phones 2,617 times every twenty-four hours.

Their business model," he says, "is screen time, not life time.

Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.

whenever something is provided by a tech company for free, it's always to improve the voodoo doll. Why is Google Maps free? So the voodoo doll can include the details of where you go every day. Why are Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hubs sold for as cheap as $30 (£22), far less than they cost to make? So they can gather more info; so the voodoo doll can consist not just of what you search for on a screen but what you say in your home.

The web, by contrast, is "less than ten thousand days old.

Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015), 42.

Reading books trains us to read in a particular way—in a linear fashion, focused on one thing for a sustained period. Reading from screens, she has discovered, trains us to read in a different way—in a manic skip and jump from one thing to another.

Many Silicon Valley insiders predicted that it would only get worse. One of its most famous investors, Paul Graham, wrote: "Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next forty years than it did in the last forty.

Life is like the Internet: sometimes is almost impossible to connect.

Life is like Twitter: nobody wants to sign off.

Overloading attention shrinks mental control. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control.

Well, I've been a fan of videogames all my life.

People are very reluctant to talk about their private lives but then you go to the internet and they're much more open.

I was told having a website would help me. I have yet to figure out why my life story needs to be on the web.

Even with a computer, I can't get rid of all the papers in my life.