Paul W. S. Anderson Quotes

It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.

For kids, multitasking electronically is common. But they are totally focused. You can tell a good story, and they listen.

Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.

If the first lady is concerned about this Internet cycle, what would she have done during the heyday when there was 12, 13 editions of a paper in one day? What would she have done with that news cycle?

I'm not really one for reading books. I have a very poor attention span. I'd rather listen to music, play games or watch films on my iPad.

For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.

I feel like my competition is everything else that's competing for people's attention, not just other print magazines, newspapers and cable. It's your kid's report card and the games you want to play, all the things that compete for people's time.

We live in such an age of chatter and distraction. Everything is a challenge for the ears and eyes.

We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.

There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there's just millions of voices and people want to be heard.

I'm constantly being visually stimulated.

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.

We're living in this world where we have so much media all the time. We have access to imagery all the time.

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.

No one reads anything. They just look at images.

I love the web, but man, I look at my browser, and there are, like, twenty tabs up there, all jostling for space and time, all framed by a mosaic of other apps, other work, other entertainment... so even when I really am paying attention to something on the web, there's this peripheral haze.

The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information.

In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them -- those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can enver focus enough to learn.

Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.

I think the Internet has definitely made it easier for people to have stuff seen, but it's also encouraged a level of ADD, where you see so much that if it doesn't make an impact on you immediately, you don't look at it.

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters.

With our growing attachment to the online universe comes a refined ability to keep tabs on several things at once, to watch stories unfold on parallel planes.