Ruthie Ann Miles Quotes

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

It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.

Our attention spans have been reduced by the immediate gratification provided by smartphones and social media.

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.

The phone's never far away. The TV's always on. We are constantly on the news cycle; either watching the news, making the news, talking about the news.

People's attention spans are a little shorter these days. Same thing with food and movies.

People just don't sit down and just watch TV at night. Between cellphones, television, video games, the Internet and instant messaging, people are just spending their time in different places.

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

Our society, where we are right now, our minds are junkyards. We watch TV and sit on the computer all day and barely have an original thought.

If I'm extremely bored and I don't have a book with me and I'm being an obnoxious teenager, I'll read 'BuzzFeed' on my phone. But even that just leaves me feeling icky because I think for some reason my comfort zone is to just not really be in the loop about stuff like awards shows or things like that.

Texting is addicting. Once you get emotionally involved with constant outside stimulation assaulting your brain, it is hard to stop looking at your machine every two minutes. Without rapid fire words appearing on a screen, you feel bored, not part of the action.

I don't think people really do listen. We plug into music, and we have short attention spans. We tend to download individual tracks from iTunes rather than a whole album. We buy music DVDs and watch them once, and then they disappear into a drawer, or we loan them to a friend, and we never watch it again.

I have a choice - I can either watch all the dailies, or I can follow the social media. I can't do both.

The average teen today spends about 35 hours a week in front of a screen of some kind: iPod, movie, TV, video. And a lot of it is good, but a lot of it's not. And so I think you've got that five hours a day of media coming into your kid's head that's creating a lot of havoc out there.

The thing about radio is that it's got an intimate feel. What I like is that you don't have to give it your full attention - you can still do something else that the same time, whereas TV is all-enveloping: you have to sit there and pay attention to it, and give yourself over to it. You have to surrender to it, but you don't with radio.

The newspapers and magazines, the theaters and the social reform movements, are more and more made for a public which looks only to be entertained and which has lost the power of sustained attention.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

We live in an age of sound bites and buzz words.

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 get very bored easily. I'm a child of the Internet or whatever; I want more and more of new and interesting things.

Television is on a small screen, inside someone's living room, so you have to grab their attention while they are having dinner or cooking or doing something else.

There was a lot of times when I was busking there were a lot of people in your face, like 'More, more! Go again, again, again!'... People were so used to be able to swipe to see something different to entertain themselves that the patience had diminished.

It's not our fault our generation has short attention spans, Dad. We watch an appalling amount of TV.

Narrative Collapse is what happens when we no longer have time in which to tell a story. Remote controls and DVRs give us the ability to break down narratives - particularly the more abusive ones. This is a great thing for escaping the 'ends-justify-the-means' traps of 20th-century wars and religions, but it can also make it hard to convey values.