Katherine Ryan Quotes

Texting is addicting. Once you get emotionally involved with constant outside stimulation assaulting your brain, it is hard to stop looking at your machine every two minutes. Without rapid fire words appearing on a screen, you feel bored, not part of the action.

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.

Our generation, unfortunately, is stuck to our phones - and, like, Twitter - constantly, which I have no problem with. I'd say we're not describing the children of America or anything like that, but there is something to take from it: It is kind of sad how we can't go thirty minutes without checking our phone.

Entire books are being written about the distractions of social media. I don't believe media compel distraction, but I think it's clear that they afford it.

When you're directed by social media, I think it's very easy to lose a sense of agency. And you can see it when you go to any subway station, you walk down any street in a city, you will see 70-80 percent of people staring into their phones as they walk or stand.

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.

Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions.

There's something really terrible about having your BlackBerry next to your bed or having your laptop in the living room when you're talking to someone. The biggest source of stress in my life is the screen, the blogging.

Teenagers talk about the idea of having each other's 'full attention.' They grew up in a culture of distraction. They remember their parents were on cell phones when they were pushed on swings as toddlers. Now, their parents text at the dinner table and don't look up from their BlackBerry when they come for end-of-school day pickup.

We're so connected, kind of ever-presently, with technology now. People are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much.

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

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

I have a phone obsession. It's really hard on set sometimes because I'll be checking Instagram, and then I have to remember, 'Oh, crap, I have to shoot a scene or rehearse.' Every now and then, I have to turn it off and live my life.

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

I see a lot of moms and dads frustrated because their kids have their devices at the dinner table and they can't seem to get their attention as much as they used to.

The iPad is becoming the babysitter… Silicon Valley programs these things to be addictive.

Look around you in any restaurant, and you will see couples, families, and friends glued to their phones.

Social media can be so addictive.

Kids are so accustomed to technology that it's upsetting to watch them without their phones. They don't know what to do. Sometimes I feel like I'm like that, too - if I get my phone taken away because I'm grounded, I don't know what to do. So I just have to sit in my room and stare blankly at the ceiling.

With social networks these days, everyone needs to know everything all the time. But the problem is, people are so used to short snippets of information that no one has any attention span anymore. I don't, anyway.

In every public space, everyone has their head down on their phone. Including me.

When we are trying to have a normal dinner out people with their Instagram accounts are relentless and it's profoundly obnoxious at times.

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.

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!