Ross Douthat Quotes

My personal view about how people should use Twitter is less relevant than our goal to provide the infrastructure for a new kind of communication and then support the creativity that emerges.

Twitter is a blessing and a curse at the same time.

Now, admittedly, Twitter can be entertaining on occasion, as it turns out that 140 characters offers a great chance to be misunderstood - and an even greater chance one will expose his inner troglodyte.

The Web provides a very easy way to immediately grasp what's going on. It really offers the transparency, so you can see, especially with the search engine, how people are using Twitter at one glance. The phone doesn't allow for that.

The world cannot live on 140 characters alone.

The nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and this is one of the big changes that was really introduced by Flickr, was this wonderful idea that you can follow somebody without their permission. Recognizing that relationships are asymmetrical, unlike facebook where we have to acknowledge each other otherwise we can’t see each other.

I have to say, I worry about Twitter. Not that it will survive - they don't need my blessing for that - but that it will stay the kind of open, community-enhancing-and-enabling site that made it flourish at the outset.

I was really excited by the idea that people were sharing information now and discovering information in a totally new way on the Internet via Twitter and Facebook, yet that experience was pretty clunk and just lots of bit.ly links.

Twitter was a mere prototype in 2006; now, many of us have become adept at saying all we have to say in 140 characters.

I am no technophobe. I like being able to calibrate communication, depending on the situation - texting for the simple and immediate; email for business or when I want to put some lag time into the exchange; Twitter to promote something; Facebook to draw a crowd.

I don't tweet. I prefer face-to-face communication and sometimes Instagram.

If it doesn't come through the Internet, it's not really compelling to me.

The younger generation has embraced Twitter and Facebook massively, and they spend most of their time on there. So if I want to reach new fans or keep in touch with my current, I try to use Twitter and Facebook as much as possible.

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people - and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

Twitter can be great and very bad.

Twitter has been my life's work in many senses. It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what's going on in them right now.

It's just madness. First email. Then instant message. Then MySpace. Then Facebook. Then LinkedIn. Then Twitter. It's not enough anymore to 'Just do it.' Now we have to tell everyone we are doing it, when we are doing it, where we are doing it and why we are doing it.

I love sharing photographs and websites, I'm for all of these things. I'm for Facebook. But to say that this is sociability? We begin to define things in terms of what technology enables and technology allows.

I know very little about the viral, electronic world, but I use Twitter to communicate not only information that I think some of the fans want to hear about but also ideas.

The Internet enables us to share the ideas we have without having to create another hierarchy.

I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. There are moments I feel like 99 percent of the people who write stuff are the sweetest people, and then one crazy guy or girl spoils the whole thing.

Social media is its own sort of thing: Twitter and Facebook have changed the way everyone perceives everything.

We just think that there are all these different ways that people want to share, and that compressing them all into a single blue app is not the right format of the future.

Even with all the negativeness of the whole social media thing, I still think it's leaps and bounds more positive.

I love when people on Twitter give advice.