Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

I've always had an uneasy relationship with technology and how it insinuates itself into our lives: for example. I always prefer talking face-to-face with friends than texting or calling, and if I want to get updates on their lives, I don't go to Facebook but meet them in person.

We do spend too much time on the telephone, and you know something? We love it.

I see people putting text messages on the phone or computer and I think, 'Why don't you just call?'

I had no idea that social networking would be as prominent as it is today. And it's important to understand what that phenomenon is. If you text someone, you get an immediate response; if you e-mail them, you probably never hear from them.

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

Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chat and social media messages and emails, what you're really talking about is the full extent of human communication.

Bridging the virtual world with the physical word is really when social media channels come to life and the magic happens. Because whoever coined the term 'social media' didn't do us any favors. It's not really media. It's more like the telephone, less like the TV.

I was a little late in the game for Twitter and Facebook and everything because I thought, 'Oh, I don't know. I just don't have time.'

Our generation's grown up with the Internet, so it's an extension of our social lives; it's an extension of us. It makes perfect sense for me to use that medium.

I don't want no mail. Send me a Facebook message.

Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them.

People live too much of their lives on email or the Internet or text messages these days. We're losing all of our communication skills.

Who wants to talk on the phone? If you want to talk to me, text me. Or if we must, let's meet in person.

The personal contact is a personal thing. The fact that some people don't know their neighbors, I don't think that technology is at fault. You don't lose anything with technology. You gain other avenues of understanding.

We go into restaurants, and people aren't talking anymore. They're texting. While they are sitting at a restaurant with each other. So we're losing this intimacy that we need to have as human beings.

It's amazing how little you can see people but still stay in regular contact.

People are doing too much e-mail. The basic thing is eyeball-to-eyeball. Business relationships are made to be personal. The more people get away from it, the more they are going to lose that personal relationship. That's what I learned - to develop personal relationships with people.

You can have a real ongoing dialogue through social media that wasn't possible before.

The sole forms of social interaction I was aware of as a kid involved a jungle gym and a sticker book. It was only in high school that ICQ - a prehistoric form of instant messaging - was first incorporated into my cultural vocabulary.

We all think we are connected to the world now, but we are not talking to our neighbours any more.

History has shown that there needs to be some agora, or public spaces, and I think that we already live a lot of our life on a laptop, or even smaller devices that we hold in our hands.

Social media is just more media.

Relationships are so important to me. Talking to someone, listening to them, and even writing a handwritten note or giving someone a picture in a frame has become a lost art because we are inclined to just do it all through technology.

Doesn't it seem ironic that people fear that we might become alienated by communicating with each other through computers, when we are already staring at these boxes in our living rooms for seven or eight hours a day, slack-jawed and saying nothing to anyone on either side and not talking back to it.

I certainly think we're losing a lot of our connections with other people. I fear in my most pessimistic moments that the computer is simply another step down the road which we have already taken quite a few steps on. We're talking to each other on computers because we don't talk across the fence.