Rebecca Solnit Quotes

There is never going to be a substitute for face-to-face communication, but we have seen since the alphabet, to the telephone and now the Internet, that whenever people find a new way to communicate, they will flock to it.

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.

We didn't even have email when I was in college.

Small changes can magnifiy. 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.

At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television - by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

I see people putting text messages on the phone or computer and I think, 'Why don't you just call?'

Who would know but ten years ago that kids would be texting each other all the time, that that would be one of their main forms of communication.

Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chat and social media messages and emails, what you're really talking about is the full extent of human communication.

You know, kids text a lot today. It's phenomenal.

We are more and more into technology. Everything is texting, and everything is instant. Flowers are completely impractical as a method of communication when you could just send a text.

… the telephone was only a convenience permitting Americans to do more orally and with less effort than what they had been doing before.

Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook, it's so amazing because years ago, when I was growing up and watching movies, there was no way for us to interact with filmmakers at all. You could send a letter, and you'd never know if you were going to hear back or not.

Digital communication is completely different from in-person, face-to-face conversations. One will give you surface insights, and the other really gives you depth.

Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal - be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever - human solitude will increase in direct proportion.

Communication has changed so rapidly in the last 20 years, it's almost impossible to predict what might occur even in the next decade. E-mail, which now sends data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light, has replaced primitive forms of communication such as smoke signals, which sent data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light.

I'm very aware that when my friends and I sit around over dinner these days, the conversation invariably turns to how crass the world has become. Tweeting? It's one of the silliest things ever.

I think there's been a gigantic shift in the way we talk to each other, and the way that we communicate with each other. So as a filmmaker, the stuff's always been really interesting to me, and I sort of considered a lot of my films horror films, the ones that were relationship dramas, because I feel like it was very easy to look at modern communication and the Internet and cell phones and all that stuff as horror movies, basically.

Things like email, and Twitter, and Facebook, and text messaging - they all work reasonably well. But we use them because they're convenient, and cheap, and easy, not because they're the best way to communicate with somebody.

We're sharing things in our lives everyday that we wouldn't have picked up the phone to talk about ten years ago.

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.

Communications are better now than in my Vietnam days.

Smart phones and social media expand our universe. We can connect with others or collect information easier and faster than ever.

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.

People simply don't make eye contact anymore.

On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance.