Cliff Chiang Quotes

When I grew up, there was no TV, nothing. The guitar could be my whole life. The kids today have Internet and TV and games and all that stuff.

It seems like I always wrote, I just didn't think of it as a career choice. I just liked to tell stories ... to myself, to pen pals (I had a lot of them, all over the world). Of course this was in the days before computers were everywhere, and anyone could access the Web. You had to make an effort keeping up a correspondence, and the arrival of the mail once a day was a big deal. I think if modern technology had been around when I was a kid, I would never have left my bedroom except to take the dogs out for their run three times a day.

Prior to the internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table

I think the technology today is so much more advanced that it gives kids a lot more freedom... Back then it was a lot different.

I look at my son and his relationship to technology, and I think back to when I was six and how wildly different the world is in that regard. I see him using an iPhone and all this stuff, and then I think back to when I was six. We didn't even have computers in our houses at all yet. This is a huge gap between our experiences as children.

Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them.

I'm just hoping my children will get enough of a foundation to remember what it was like before technology, how good that feels. Because I remember.

One thing that I notice that is changing, you don't see kids on Sunday. Most of them are home. The kids are having much more virtual childhoods instead of childhoods. They don't play ball or hang out with the wrong people or get in fistfights, all the things that once made childhood. I don't know how it's going to turn out.

It would be ridiculous to ignore the speed and possibilities of the digital landscape.

Advances in technology and the Internet have dramatically changed the way we communicate, live, and work.

Growing up in the '90s was the coolest thing to me.

I think the days before cell phones, when it was dirt clod wars at construction sites, was a lot more wholesome and productive, to be perfectly honest.

I'm not electronically geared at all; I'm really a 19th century cartoonist. I have a 15-year-old daughter, and what she's attracted to is of course iPod and this pod and that, I mean stuff I don't even begin to know - I never learned how to type for Christ's sake! I can't get in her head and find out what she would do if she had the kind of talent I had, I don't have a clue. Every generation comes up with its own quirkiness and its own culture which gets its inspiration from what's in the air at that time.

I think kids are fairly similar. It's just really the technology. Like, you won't find kids in the 60s, or anyone for that matter, having mobile phones, texting, watching YouTube, and being absorbed in their technology.

What's society going to be like when the kids today are phenomenally good at text messaging and spend a huge amount of on-screen time, but have never gone bowling together?

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

Way, way back in the day, like in the 1990s, if you wanted to tell everyone you ate waffles for breakfast, you couldn’t just go on the Internet and tweet it out. There was only one way to do it. You had to go outside and scream at the top of your lungs, 'I ate waffles for breakfast!' That’s why so many people ended up in institutions. They seemed crazy, but when you think about it, they were just ahead of their time.

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.

I grew up in the countryside . But there's a danger of us romanticizing that. Because when I was a kid in 1982, that's what my parents were saying to me about television and comics and computer games!

Information technology has brought people much closer together than ever before, providing a democratizing and mostly stabilizing influence.

I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.

Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.

It's just people who grew up in that time are suddenly old enough to be creators themselves, but I think they have a little perspective. I'm 40 now, and I have children of my own. Before I forget my own childhood completely, I want to take some time to take a look at the '80s and think back.

It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.

Surely it isn't illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.