Stephen J. Dubner Quotes

Now we're e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and it warbles to alert me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook or a reply or direct message on Twitter, but it rarely ever rings.

I don't take part in texting and those other things myself, so I don't really know if people put as much thought into messaging as they used to into writing letters.

Social media is the most disruptive form of communication humankind has seen since the last disruptive form of communications, email.

Sure the Internet is the future, but what we do on the Internet is still very primal.

Down on the ground, we seem to do anything but make lengthy, robust monologues. We can communicate in an instant almost anywhere. Gone is the slow old letter - itself a monologue, a sort of considered performance of best self - and in its place is the e-mail, the text, the SMS, the tweet.

Technology is changing the way we interact as humans.

I do think technology really has changed the way that we communicate with each other and texting can be the way to communicate and to kind of get up the nerve to say things that maybe you wouldn't say in real life, but that also comes with a price.

Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow - think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

I don't have any answers as to whether the Internet is a good or a bad thing, but it's certainly an important thing for the novel because novels are so much about communication, and when communication changes, the novel has to change.

I don't use the social media but I can see the effects in my own correspondence. I get a ton of correspondence. It used to be hard copy and now it's a very limited amount of actual letters people write. So it's mostly email.

The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.

Do I think technology is bad? No. I think it's wonderful that the world is so connected now. But I think, as a result, childhood ends a little earlier.

It is the Internet that changes: the Internet is not just a language; it modifies relationships, the way we look at the world.

When computers came online and people found out people weren't mixing there was uproar, and outed. But now that hasn't happened. People don't seem to care.

I think everybody in the future has stopped talking to each other and we all just use emojis.

We all think we are connected to the world now, but we are not talking to our neighbours any more.

History has shown that there needs to be some agora, or public spaces, and I think that we already live a lot of our life on a laptop, or even smaller devices that we hold in our hands.

Apps have made it easier to meet people but harder to connect.

With the blessing of social media and platforms like Amazon Prime and Netflix, you get this broad audience that I don't think we knew about when we were kids.

A lot of our communication has now become digital, and it does not mimic the natural way we have evolved to communicate with each other, so it's almost like we have this muscle, these social-emotional skills, and they're atrophying, right?

The dawn of the 21st century marked the emergence of the social media age.

A lot has changed due to the rise of smartphones and the proliferation of social media: today, visual content is the language of our time.

I've realised that as long as the youth has the ability to use social media, and their voice is there, people can actually cut through the nonsense and see what's really going on.

I always get super confused by the way we look at technology, because since when were all phone calls created equal? It's not like every text is the same or that all texts are human interactions that are compromised. I don't get how conduits somehow dictate sentiment.

Fashion for a long time was very elitist and difficult to get access to. The access I can now provide to my readers live from fashion shows with my iPhone was never, ever possible before.