Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I feel like my competition is everything else that's competing for people's attention, not just other print magazines, newspapers and cable. It's your kid's report card and the games you want to play, all the things that compete for people's time.

Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.

A modern audience is capable of processing just so much information because they're used to visual media that's on overload.

HOBBES: All this modern technology just makes people try to do everything at once.

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

It takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call or an e-mail, researchers have found, and yet the average person receives such an interruption every 11 minutes. Which means that we're never caught up; we're always out of breath, running behind.

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

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

We live in such an age of chatter and distraction. Everything is a challenge for the ears and eyes.

Life is so fast these days, and we're exposed to so much information. Television makes us a witness to such misery.

I have a choice - I can either watch all the dailies, or I can follow the social media. I can't do both.

I have the attention span of a mosquito from multitasking and all the things that have affected my poor little brain.

I think we're glazing eyes all across America.

If you try to multitask in the classic sense of doing two things at once, what you end up doing is quasi-tasking. It's like being with children. You have to give it your full attention for however much time you have, and then you have to give something else your full attention.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

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

Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading.

Even though we think we're getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.

I honestly think I'm going to rot my brain with all the news. I'm a news junkie.

Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you're just unable to focus.

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

I love the web, but man, I look at my browser, and there are, like, twenty tabs up there, all jostling for space and time, all framed by a mosaic of other apps, other work, other entertainment... so even when I really am paying attention to something on the web, there's this peripheral haze.

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.

Who of us does not recognize that the life we live, however larded with brave talk about values and thought and ideals, is not actually a life dedicated to immersion in the endless torrent of images, songs, sounds and stories?