Yeardley Smith Quotes

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

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.

I have closely noted that people who watch a great deal of TV never again seem able to adjust to the actual pace of life. The speed of the passing images becomes the speed the aspire to and they seem to develop an impatience and boredom with anything else.

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.

Kids are no longer interested in reading comic books; they've got television and the electronic games that they can bury themselves in like ostriches. They don't have to pay attention to what's going on in the world around them.

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

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

... people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.

Social media has taken over in America to such an extreme that to get my own kids to look back a week in their history is a miracle, let alone 100 years.

Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.

I'm a TV junkie.

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.

The average teen today spends about 35 hours a week in front of a screen of some kind: iPod, movie, TV, video. And a lot of it is good, but a lot of it's not. And so I think you've got that five hours a day of media coming into your kid's head that's creating a lot of havoc out there.

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

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.

Do some research on the effects of television and your brain, and I promise you you'll have a decision to make when it comes to television, especially with what you watch.

I have three boys. Sometimes my wife and I really have to battle to keep video games from encroaching.

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

I think what's at risk is kids losing touch with being a kid. Being a kid is being defined differently than it was when you didn't have all this stuff you could put in front of your face.

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

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

All the world's combined knowledge is at our fingertips. But the same technology that makes this possible is robbing us of deeper insight.

Everyone has a really short attention span, and you have to bombard them with content, content, content.