Pico Iyer Quotes

There's all these ways to instantly communicate - cars, computers, telephone and transportation - and even with all that, it's so hard to find people and have an honest communication with them.

People simply don't make eye contact anymore.

Email, instant messaging, and cell phones give us fabulous communication ability, but because we live and work in our own little worlds, that communication is totally disorganized.

We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.

We all think we are connected to the world now, but we are not talking to our neighbours any more.

In this age of media and Internet access, we are much more talkative than ever before.

I think there's a fear of disconnect sometimes; communication is a huge issue for all of us, from adults to kids, as far as our face-to-face time and our ability to interact with each other without isolating itself to a phone. I think that has to be something that's very challenging.

From my time at Nokia, I've seen the 99% positive and occasionally negative impact that communication tools can have on people.

The Internet has changed everything. We expect to know everything instantly. If you don't understand digital communication, you're at a disadvantage.

I keep thinking I should get a phone, because everyone's got one and it becomes increasingly difficult to exist in a society where everyone else has moved ahead and you haven't.

Tech is all about building human connections.

Though 'Fat City' was written long before cellphones or the Internet, its human apparatus is state of the art.

We go into restaurants, and people aren't talking anymore. They're texting. While they are sitting at a restaurant with each other. So we're losing this intimacy that we need to have as human beings.

Social media is so huge.

As the world grows and technology grows, it's getting harder to communicate and for kids to socialize.

I'm very aware that when my friends and I sit around over dinner these days, the conversation invariably turns to how crass the world has become. Tweeting? It's one of the silliest things ever.

When you give people ability to stay connected with all the people they care about, and you make it so they can express new things about themselves or in communication with other people who they care about, then you just open up new possibilities. You make it so people can stay connected in ways that they couldn't before.

If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite.

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.

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

We can be incredibly disconnected in this day and age with computers and cell phones.

Smart phones and social media expand our universe. We can connect with others or collect information easier and faster than ever.

Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.

Human beings are human beings. They say what they want, don't they? They used to say it across the fence while they were hanging wash. Now they just say it on the Internet.

Technology has changed the fan/actor interaction quite a bit. Now it's really easy to communicate with a large group of people in a really short time, and that... opens a lot of possibilities. You can do a lot of things with it that you couldn't do before. It's kind of fun to figure out how that can be employed.