Robin Sloan Quotes

I often think of it this way: The 21st century is going to be a war on the attention of humanity. Where civilization focuses its attention, I mean, that's what defines what the civilization cares about.

The Internet is such a tough marketplace because everyone is a click away from going back to a cat photo, or going back to whatever else they were doing. You have to win them over, and do it quickly, and do it by making something people actually want.

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

Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They're only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.

Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.

We are all amateur attention economists, hoarding and bartering our moments - or watching them slip away down the cracks of a thousand YouTube clips.

We're all posting and clicking and sharing, but we're not devoting enough attention to get anything meaningful from it all.

It is true that a lot of people are easily distracted online. As a result, too many of us have given up on digital audiences for ambitious work, and this is a mistake.

If you tell a kid, 'You've got to pick music or Instagram,' they're not picking music.

Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.'

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

The average human attention span was 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013. A drop of 33%. The scary part is that the attention span of a goldfish was 9 seconds, almost 13% more than us humans. That's why it's getting tougher by the day to get people to turn the page. Maybe we writers ought to try writing for goldfish!

I'm amazed at the amount of time people spend on the Internet.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

If you can command a lot of attention, that's what is valuable, and many in the commercial ecology would like to have a piece of that attention.

The thing that people seem to miss about not just Google, but also our competitors, Yahoo, eBay and so forth, is that there's an awful lot of communities that have never been served by traditional media.

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.

The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can't focus on longer narratives now - even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it's an adventure film.

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

The internet is a wild land with its own games, languages and gestures through which we are starting to share common feelings.

To be clear, I worry as much about the impact of the Internet as anyone else. I worry about shortening attention spans, the physical cost of sedentary 'surfing' and the potential for coarsening discourse as millions of web pages compete for attention by appealing to our base instincts.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: the attention of its recipients.

[…] a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

I get concerned when I see kids on their phones. They don't read enough anymore, anything longer than a tweet.

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