Steve Martin Quotes

Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance - the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest.

The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.

E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They're still all letters, basically, and they've come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now.

Now we're e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and it warbles to alert me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook or a reply or direct message on Twitter, but it rarely ever rings.

If you look at the history of communication, new technologies like the phone and e-mail didn't just let people do things faster; it fundamentally changed the scope of the kinds of projects people dared to take on.

Through historical accident, we've ended up with a global network that pretty much allows anybody to communicate with anyone else at any time.

The way communication works is changing.

The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

In the past, before phones and the Internet, all communication was face-to-face. Now, most of it is digital, via emails and messaging services. If people were to start using virtual reality, it would almost come full circle.

We didn't even have email when I was in college.

My father and a bunch of my cousins and uncles, they didn't have the opportunity to use FaceTime or Skype, all these different technologies and advancements that we have.

Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal - be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever - human solitude will increase in direct proportion.

Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat ... ('you're breaking up' is the cry of our time).

Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chat and social media messages and emails, what you're really talking about is the full extent of human communication.

There is never going to be a substitute for face-to-face communication, but we have seen since the alphabet, to the telephone and now the Internet, that whenever people find a new way to communicate, they will flock to it.

I text a lot people, because it's how I stay connected with all my family and friends when I'm on set and traveling.

I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate.

Down on the ground, we seem to do anything but make lengthy, robust monologues. We can communicate in an instant almost anywhere. Gone is the slow old letter - itself a monologue, a sort of considered performance of best self - and in its place is the e-mail, the text, the SMS, the tweet.

Email has explosively supported the growth of letter writing globally.

Email cannot die in the near future because of its universal acceptance.

I do think technology really has changed the way that we communicate with each other and texting can be the way to communicate and to kind of get up the nerve to say things that maybe you wouldn't say in real life, but that also comes with a price.

People no longer write letters. Lacking the leisure, and, for the most part, the ability, they dictate dispatches, and scribble messages. When you are in the humor, you should take a peep at some of the letters written by people who lived long ago.

The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet. So you don't have to wait for a letter to get to England in six weeks, you have almost instant communication. That was an enormous shift.