Clifford Stoll Quotes

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

I think we are all coming to realize the web in all its manifestations is a sucking time hole.

The Internet is just bringing all kinds of information into the home. There's just a lot of distraction, a lot of competition for the parent's voice to resonate in the children's ears.

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

I love the Internet, and I love wasting time on the Internet - even though it sometimes ends up being not being a waste of time.

The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.

I don't let myself 'surf' on the Web, or I would probably drown.

[W]e spend so much time staring at our phones and screens, texting and tweeting about how busy we are, we no longer have the time to consume any primary material. We rely instead on the casual observations of our “friends” or the people we “follow” […].

Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading.

I spend much too much time on the Web with e-mail and surfing and reading my key sites, and a whole day can go by, and you wonder, 'What did I do today?'

I love the web, but man, I look at my browser, and there are, like, twenty tabs up there, all jostling for space and time, all framed by a mosaic of other apps, other work, other entertainment... so even when I really am paying attention to something on the web, there's this peripheral haze.

I can't tell you how many times I've been writing and then found myself seven clicks deep into a Wikipedia entry that I don't even care about. Self-distraction appears to be my version of sleepwalking.

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.

Everyone has a really short attention span, and you have to bombard them with content, content, content.

The Tamagotchi, I have realized, is everything that is wrong with our smartphone era. Is this what went wrong with millennials?

When I'm using the Internet, I have 25 tabs open, and even if somebody sends me... something interesting, odds are I'll forget about it, or it'll get kind of lost in the shuffle.

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.

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

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.

I have often lost whole days jumping from one Wikipedia article after another in an attempt to understand the full scope of marriage as an institution.

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.

There are too many distractions on a computer.

I was raised before the advent of DVD players in cars and iPads at the dinner table.

I have this horrible habit of just pressing online bookmarks that are at the top of my browser like ad infinitum.

The Internet shows me how limited my interests are - there's everything out there and I'm still looking at what the weather's going to be like in Scotland.