Mary Douglas Quotes

Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.

We are in an age of technology where we sit in our little cubicles and we IM each other and Skype each other and never connect as human beings.

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.

I have this pet thing about how global communications are moving so fast now, throwing information at you, making everything available to you, and yet I feel it's leaving us more and more isolated.

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.

It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life.

So technologies, whether it is a telephone or an iPhone, computers in general or automobiles, television even, all individualize us. We all sit in front of our iPhones and communicating but are we really communicating?

Our technology promises the magic of constant connectedness. Yet we feel loss in being atomized on separate screens, trapped in filter bubbles of belief, bobbing in a sharing economy in which the technologists seem to own all the shares.

Historically, industrial revolutions haven't been kind to poor people. Despite the potential benefits technology can offer, the immediate impact on the lowest-paid members of society has often been negative.

What we can say with confidence is that the technological revolution is worsening inequality, due mostly to mechanisms that limit free markets. It is also bringing about disruptive change that is intensifying insecurity and may indeed lead to large-scale labor displacement.

As the world has changed through globalisation and technology, it has left many feeling left behind.

Everything is so tech now; everyone is so connected that way.

Men who are scandalized at the lack of freedom in Russia do not ask themselves how real is liberty among the poor, the weak, and the ignorant in capitalist society.

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

I think there's a tendency for modern man to become dominated by gadgets and machines, taking us further and further away from the things I've been talking about.

In this century of hyper-postmodern ideals, with the digital future, we're segmented into different people, places, and things in a constant state of change.

We live in an increasingly technological world where the issues are quite complex and based on some complicated science.

Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world.

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.

We have more media than ever and more technology in our lives. It's supposed to help us communicate, but it has the opposite effect of isolating us.

We are effectively living in a world of communications and information abundance.

Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.

Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.