John Podhoretz Quotes

People tweet before they think, and it becomes obsessive.

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.

I tweet, therefore my entire life has shrunk to 140 character chunks of instant event and predigested gnomic wisdom. And swearing.

I try not to read the social networks too much. I find that way madness lies.

The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone.

People do that on Facebook and it's the dumbest thing in the world. I don't care what your dinner looks like. Stop cluttering up the Internet with pictures of your dinner.

I try to stay away from all the blogs and messages boards.

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

The expansive anarchy of the Internet continues to lull us into believing that, because we can see something, that something should be seen. Because we can say something, there is something that must be said.

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

We're all posting and clicking and sharing, but we're not devoting enough attention to get anything meaningful from it all.

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.

Twitter! It's like being stalked by committee!

That's my favorite part of Twitter: it's instant fan mail.

We're looking at dozens, sometimes hundreds of things every day in articles, videos, and we never look at them again. Even if we do like them, even if we tweet them out to all of our followers on Twitter, we don't return to it.

We're understandably worried that staring at screens all day, and blogging about our breakfasts, is turning America into a nation of narcissists. But the opposite might be true.

I don't get Twitter or social media. I really don't understand it or read it. I see it as a distraction.

Tweeting is something you can do wherever you are, on your phone, on the computer, in an airport lounge. It's easy to do, and I do find it fun to communicate with people. It's quite nice that we can have almost direct contact with anyone in the world at any time. I don't know how important it is in terms of one's career. It seems to be pretty much superfluous in terms of that, but it's nice to communicate.

It now appears that the world is filled with people who believe that everyone should be interested in everything they have to say about anything - people who tweet, you might call them. I find this so astonishing, my own hubris pales in comparison.

I don't think of Twitter as a social network. I think of it as a messaging system that has a lot of social components to it.

An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.

I'm really glad I'm not on Twitter. Because I'd have to be answering things that I didn't really know anything about, and I'd rather just wait for the dust to settle and then say something.

I'm quite a compulsive person-I only worked this out recently - I'm compulsive, but I'm also very indecisive. I don't know what I want, but I know that I want it now.

People want everything quick and now. We live in the age of social media and hyper digital. Tweets are published in less than a second, Safari pages load in less than three seconds.

If it's on Facebook, it all looks the same.