Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

We are drowning in information.

With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.

People assume that the smarter your home, the better your life, but in reality, technology so often gets in the way of leading a good life.

I am so sorry to see the state of reading in such decline. I think it says something really scary and terrible about us as a culture. I think it does have to do with everyone's total global embrace of technology.

With technology, there is so much isolation with people now, that there are very few places where you can connect.

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

It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.

We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.

I refuse to this day to do e-mail because everybody I know that does it, it takes another two or three hours a day. I don't want to give two or three more hours away.

Kids have so much screen time, and it's a concern. I know how overloaded I can feel sometimes.

Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we're too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.

People live too much of their lives on email or the Internet or text messages these days. We're losing all of our communication skills.

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

I spend so much time on the screen when I am writing, the last thing you want to do is spend more time on the Internet looking at a screen. That's what I hate about all this technology.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The unlimited amount of information that I have access to has also given me an unlimited threshold for how I need to be stimulated.

With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.

That's why I'm not on Twitter and don't have an iPhone. It's not because I'm superior to it: it's because I would be a slave to it, and I don't want that to happen.

I don't think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.

Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

I don't use e-mail; I phone and fax. I think people who are hunched over their computer screens all day should get a life.

In today's knowledge-based economy, what you earn depends on what you learn. Jobs in the information technology sector, for example, pay 85 percent more than the private sector average.

Information has become the fundamental element of modern life.

The liberating force of scientific knowledge is objectively expressed in the great achievements of technology. Whoever possesses technology has power of the earth and men. As a result of this, hitherto unknown forms of inequality have arisen between those who possess knowledge and those who are simple users of technology.