Samantha Power Quotes

I do all my shopping on the Web. I do much of my research online. I have a blog, too. It is definitely a distraction. It is definitely a blessing. What blessing isn't a distraction, though?

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.

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

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

When I was working office jobs, I was going on Facebook all the time.

The computer is really a useful gadget for consuming time.

The kids are fixing their eyes on social media, and the stories they're looking at may not be the most important things. I'm guilty of that, too. Do you want to look at Instagram or the news? It's a difficult, and weird, situation.

A selfie, like any photograph, interrupts experience to mark the moment. In this, it shares something with all the other ways we break up our day: when we text during class, in meetings, at the theater, at dinners with friends.

I can write in my living room with my wife and kid around.

Our attention spans have been reduced by the immediate gratification provided by smartphones and social media.

I use the Internet a lot - it's a big hobby of mine, just surfing the Internet.

I have no interest in Twitter or Twotter or Twatter. It would never occur to me to use it. People who Tweet during programmes are always asking, 'What happened then?' If you're bloody Twittering away all the time, you miss what is actually going on.

I'll go out to eat and have a really good lunch and try to shut the phone off, but I can't, really, because the social media stuff will start happening.

Everyone has a really short attention span nowadays with social media, our phones. Even me - I can't go without touching my phone every five minutes.

I would not say I was not interested in studies - it just wasn't there in me to pursue academics. I would open a page in the textbook and start thinking about everything under the sun except what was there in the book. I was more into extra-curricular activities and sports like NCC, rifle shooting, aero-modelling, bike racing, etc.

You look out on the street, and everyone has their heads in their phones. Nobody's really looking up at the sky or the buildings and taking the day in. I try to be conscious of it, but everybody falls prey to it.

When you're in a meeting and you pull out your paper notebook, people look at you and go, 'Oh, he's taking a note.' But if you're in a meeting and you pull out your iPad, they go, 'Oh, he's checking Facebook.'

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 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.

I spend most of my time by being at a university, hanging out with very manic, excited 18-year-olds.

There's a lot of reasons I didn't perform the way I could have in college. Going to college, I was a new parent, I lived in another state. I just wasn't mentally into it when I was in college.

I'd like to pretend to be all Olympian and above it, as if this is a phenomenon I'm observing from a great height, nothing to do with my own behavior at all - but the fact is I'm absolutely one of those people in the cafe staring at my phone.

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.

I can't tell you how many times I've been writing and then found myself seven clicks deep into a Wikipedia entry that I don't even care about. Self-distraction appears to be my version of sleepwalking.

I surf the net regularly.