Doug Aitken Quotes

I think relationships are broken up because of the media.

I think if you've got a good idea it will stand out in one of the different mediums. For example, something might happen to me today and it could be something to talk about tomorrow on the radio, or I can write about it, or perhaps it will be best suited to telly.

The advent of the digital age and the immediacy and convenience of digital video and photography allows people to become an integral part of the feedback loop which actively shapes the content we are fed.

More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.

Now we've got the cables. We've got talk radio. We've got the bloggers. I hate the bloggers.

Communication is the most important skill in life. We spend most of our waking hours communicating. But consider this: You've spent years learning how to read and write, years learning how to speak. But what about listening?

"Connected" is the triumphal cry these days. Connection has made people arrogant, impatient, hasty, and presumptuous... I don't doubt that instant communication has been good for business, even for the publishing business, but it has done nothing for literature, and might even have harmed it. In many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there is too much) with ideas (of which there are too few). I found out much more about the world and myself by being unconnected.

Today, when you combine the web with the iPad, you have the most advanced medium for human thought and communication ever created.

Emails get reactions. Phone calls start conversations.

Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.

It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of super sophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.

I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.

Part of what's changed in politics is social media and how people are receiving information.

Ever since I first used a computer in the early '80s, I've thought of it as a fundamentally new medium for the dissemination of ideas which can transform people's lives and the society we live in.

What's important to me is that I put messages out, whether it's a TED talk, whether it's a book.

My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them──by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.

If there's an idea I think is really good and I feel like I can write it, then I'll do it.

It is my firm belief that the solution to all problems lies in dialogue. Earlier, it was believed that force indicates power. Now, power must come through the strength of ideas and the effective dialogue.

The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel and misrepresentation.

I think, in general, it's clear that most bad things come from misunderstanding, and communication is generally the way to resolve misunderstandings - and the Web's a form of communications - so it generally should be good.

I'm always talking to people. It's not that complicated. I just find somebody and say, "Do you have any ideas." If they do, we just start thinking things around.

I've hung around in absolute exhaustion and starvation waiting for an idea to hit, which might have been months. I've talked things over with editors, found out what they wanted, and when they wanted it delivered.

Everything worthwhile is a good idea, but did you ever notice there is more bad ideas that will work than there is good ones?

We've got a major problem, we've got a divide between the left, which understands how vital Hollywood and propaganda in communications is, and a conservative movement that thinks "no, we're the ones who are going to solve all the issues in America, we're congressmen, how could you not trust us?".

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.