Ray Bradbury Quotes

I feel like my competition is everything else that's competing for people's attention, not just other print magazines, newspapers and cable. It's your kid's report card and the games you want to play, all the things that compete for people's time.

It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.

Who of us does not recognize that the life we live, however larded with brave talk about values and thought and ideals, is not actually a life dedicated to immersion in the endless torrent of images, songs, sounds and stories?

We are such a sound-bite culture; people are so accustomed to flipping through their television so quickly that we only have just a few seconds to grab someone's attention.

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters.

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

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

An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.

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.

As incredible as television has become, it often feels like a sideshow in what has become a daily three-ring media circus.

I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.

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.

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

A modern audience is capable of processing just so much information because they're used to visual media that's on overload.

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 think the American people are bombarded with information from all directions, all day long.

Now...in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

Mass communication--wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued--presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)

When television is good, nothing - not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers - nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.