Cory Doctorow Quotes

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

Sometimes, a new toy, a new technology, will focus you. The world is always trying to draw you out, so you always have to remember to go in.

It's amazing how much information is coming at us most of the time through technology, the media and the busyness of the world around us. I've decided that the world probably isn't going to change, so I have to change. I'm learning how to keep my mind on what I'm doing, rather than thinking about several things at once or what I want to do next.

I think we are definitely suffering from an information overload, but I believe that there is going to be better and better ways of organizing that information and processing it so that it will enhance your daily life. I just think that technology and information, it's overwhelming at the moment, but it's really going to make life better.

There is always more information than attention

People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.

The Internet is a big distraction. It's distracting, it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

Sometimes my husband has to literally pull me away from the computer.

I think we live in delusional times, whether it's with a great ability to totally distract ourselves with technology, or with speed and the velocity of life.

The moment of drifting into thought has been so clipped by modern technology. Our lives are filled with distraction with smartphones and all the rest. People are so locked into not being present.

One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens.

It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them.

I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.

With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.

I'm always interested in whatever I can do to not look at my phone.

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.

'Sleep' is a project I've been thinking about for many years. It just seems like society has been moving more and more in a direction where we needed it. Our psychological space is being increasingly populated by data. And we expend an enormous amount of energy curating data.

I am a very lucky person because I am not focused on social media and all that happens around.

I think I'm generally more inspired when I'm away from technology. Whether that is on a beach somewhere or just in your room with your phones and screens shut off, I think that quietness is often very inspiring.

We have got so caught up in an insular world that swings between our phones, our computers and our heads that we have forgotten to look out of the window, and say, 'Hey! It's raining.'

We are too connected. There's noise in our heads all the time.

In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude. E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age. Cloth, paper, ink: For these read helmet, cuirass, shield. They afford a degree of protection and make possible a less intermediated, less fractured experience. They guard our aloneness. That is why I love them, and why I read printed books still.

Though there is something cruel about being in Hawaii and you have a computer in front of you the whole time.