Clive Thompson Quotes

I try to stay away from all the blogs and messages boards.

There's tons of junk food for your mind on the Internet. You can sit there for three or 10 or 20 hours a day getting in online arguments with other people who also choose to waste their time.

A novel is too much of a commitment. I tend to peruse Twitter - I check to see if I had any mentions and read the latest messages.

I don't have a Twitter or a Facebook, but that doesn't mean I'm any more productive than the rest of the world.

I admit that I look at my social media when I'm killing time, like on a plane and such. It's just less embarrassing getting caught on Twitter than getting caught playing Candy Crush.

The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions.

I tend to not only read reviews, but also every little stupid thing online. It's a very bad idea, and there's a lot of angry people in the world. And it's weird to absorb all that weirdness.

The devices that our kids use are shipped from the factory with every possible audio, visual or vibration alert switched on. Each new app, website, tweet and message adds another layer of intrusion - each intrusion is cynically designed to get a response, and each response creates an appetite for another intrusion.

The internet to me is kind of like a black hole, and I never really go on it.

We're all posting and clicking and sharing, but we're not devoting enough attention to get anything meaningful from it all.

Sleeping with your phone in your bedroom is never a good idea, but it's even worse when you're bullied online because it's too tempting to stay up all night trying to 'fix' the situation - which isn't possible anyway.

I completely understand social media as a method of promotion and digesting information, but it just seems like a colossal waste of time to me, and there's a million other ways I'd rather waste my time.

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.

When you're on social media, your brain is being rewired.

With Twitter and Tumblr, it's easy to get lost in the tidal wave of feedback from fans.

I'm really glad I'm not on Twitter. Because I'd have to be answering things that I didn't really know anything about, and I'd rather just wait for the dust to settle and then say something.

I'm not a Twitter fan. I do it because I feel responsible to the two million people that follow me, but Twitter to me is just another thing I have do. And it's mostly a place for people to attack and abuse you. I don't really get much out of it, personally. I get hundreds of demands to answer the kind of medical questions that require three years of treatment to assess, yet people are furious when I don't solve their problems in 140 characters. It's really stunning.

I'm on it pretty much all the time. I edit Wikipedia every day, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter, I'm reading the news. During one of the US elections, I actually went through my computer and I blocked myself from looking at the major newspaper sites and Google News because I wasn't getting any work done.

Sometimes I go and I'll look at people's comments and then responses, covers, choreography and fan videos and after a couple hours it's like, uhhh this is a little like...I'm like don't indulge in right now.

This is what you do now to give your day topography--scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.

I try and stay away from my comment section on Twitter. But for the most part, the response that I get usually is very positive - and so it's nice.

I've used Twitter now and again to try to figure something out; it's an amazing resource. But I think you have to use it judiciously: it's a self-selected group, so it's important not to start thinking of it as the whole world.

Television is obviously an enormous intruder. Quite often people say they have no time, but in fact they waste a lot of time on things that are not healthy.

I'm not one to go on blogs and things like that, but we do have our own personal Twitter profiles, so we get a lot of tweets, and they are pretty passionate. It's fun. I like it.

Everything also calms down with the influx of social media, there's so much happening all the time.