Robin Sloan Quotes

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

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

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

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.

I think we have the attention span of a gnat. You know, with cell phones and Twitter.

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

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

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.

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

I'm not suggesting that the entire nation can't be successful, but there's something to it when you have 150 cable channels and the Internet at your fingertips and video games and all kinds of ADD-addled devices like my iPhone and your BlackBerry and things that keep us busy.

For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.

It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.

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

That's what the internet is: it's like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It's like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square.

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

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.

When I'm using the Internet, I have 25 tabs open, and even if somebody sends me... something interesting, odds are I'll forget about it, or it'll get kind of lost in the shuffle.

I think that we get so distracted with our smartphones... It takes your body and your brain time to switch between tasks. If we can focus on what we're doing, we'll be more productive at that task.

There are too many distractions on a computer.

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

I think the American people are bombarded with information from all directions, all day long.

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.

Digiphrenia - how technology lets us be in more than one place - and self - at the same time. Drone pilots suffer more burnout than real-world pilots, as they attempt to live in two worlds - home and battlefield - simultaneously. We all become overwhelmed until we learn to distinguish between data flows (like Twitter) that can only be dipped into, and data storage (like books and emails) that can be fully consumed.

I can spend a lot of time on the internet as a substitute for TV. This is part of the reason why I'm not a good girlfriend - you can't sit down with me and watch a movie. I hate being strapped down to stay with something.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.