Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

People's minds are overloaded with information.

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.

I don't really like filling my brain with a lot of stuff.

We are deluged with information. We have to process now three times as much data as we would have done 50 years ago. We're bombarded with tweets, with emails - a state of continuous disruption - and that's bad for our decision making and bad for our thinking.

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

Overloading attention shrinks mental control. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control.

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

When you think you're listening to several conversations at once, they tell me, you may really simply be time sharing - that is, listening a little bit to this one, a little bit to that one.

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

Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.

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.

Mobile notifications put people in a state of perpetual emergency interruption - similar to what 911 operators and air traffic controllers experienced back in the '70s and '80s.

The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions.

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

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

Experts say you can't concentrate on more than one task at a time.

Attention for children is so much about input, and the brain can only filter so much - I don't know how many millions of messages that come through the brain, and we can only filter so much through it.

Multi-tasking arises out of distraction itself.

I think, at the end of the day, when you hear the same voice all the time, it goes in one ear and out the other when you're a player.

I think people who multitask pay a huge price. They think they're being extra productive, and I think when you multitask so much you don't have time to think about anything deeply, you are giving the world an advantage you shouldn't do, and practically everybody is drifting into that mistake.

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.

I get mad at myself when I get news from Twitter before I get it from a regular news source. Then I'm off to a bad start: getting the second-hand, filtered experience all day long.

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