Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.

The reduction in compassion that happens when we're all behind computer screens is not good for the world.

While the digital age has done so much to improve our world, it has dramatically changed our social structure, often further isolating us from each other.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

The Internet is especially adept at compressing humanity and making it easy to forget there are people behind tweets, posts, and memes.

We can be incredibly disconnected in this day and age with computers and cell phones.

The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone.

I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.

Technology, we find, amplifies behaviours. If you want to be anti-social, technology allows you to be. And vice versa.

What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.

The more social media we have, the more we think we're connecting, yet we are really disconnecting from each other.

We didn't need the Internet for Nazi Germany to happen. But I feel like there's this lack of humanity because of it.

Everyone talks about how the anonymity of the Internet allows people to behave badly, but I think it's the other way around, that the anonymity removes the 'self' from the people we're talking to online. Other people lose their humanity in our eyes. The system is set up to dehumanize.

I feel like kids are getting more and more used to communicating through a glass screen than they are face-to-face, and that worries me a little.

Apps have made it easier to meet people but harder to connect.

Social media is making us more anti-social.

As the world grows and technology grows, it's getting harder to communicate and for kids to socialize.

We're in a hyper-connected world, and there's a crisis of connection. The first thing that God says about woman and man in the Bible is that it's not right for humans to be alone. Social media interaction cannot take the place of face-to-face interaction. If anything, it prevents us from doing that. We're staring into our screens for so long that we're forgetting to look at the people directly in front of us.

With technology, there is so much isolation with people now, that there are very few places where you can connect.

I don't do Facebook and I don't do Twitter, and already I notice that, with some of my friends, there's a whole sphere of conversation that I'm completely on the outside of, and that's my choice. But, to a greater extent, that's what the whole of life is like.

With the Internet, we can communicate instantly across the globe, but the net also makes it possible for us to shrink ever further into our own skins - a state of being that neither suits the human temperament nor provides ground for further growth.

We live in a world where many of us have a lot of friends on Facebook but yet we have lost human connection.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone's inside virtually going everywhere they want to go, virtually having relationships, virtually traveling across the neighborhood, virtually going to that island.

Facebook has woven itself into the fabric of our lives and the foundation of the Internet. I think everything will be redefined because people are using their real identities on the Internet.

I particularly like Facebook because it straddles the gap between seeing people and not seeing them.