Shawn Amos Quotes

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

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

With social networks these days, everyone needs to know everything all the time. But the problem is, people are so used to short snippets of information that no one has any attention span anymore. I don't, anyway.

Under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations, emails, relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and tweets and tags, we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place: ourselves.

People are always looking at their phones and computer. It's the first place people turn in the morning and where everyone's keeping in touch and getting their news.

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.

We need to be smarter than our smart phones and realize the people we are with are more important than the people we aren't with, and way more important than the strangers we hope will tweet and like and share and Instagram whatever we're sending out into the cybersphere.

I think we have the attention span of a gnat. You know, with cell phones and Twitter.

The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.

We are all amateur attention economists, hoarding and bartering our moments - or watching them slip away down the cracks of a thousand YouTube clips.

To be clear, I worry as much about the impact of the Internet as anyone else. I worry about shortening attention spans, the physical cost of sedentary 'surfing' and the potential for coarsening discourse as millions of web pages compete for attention by appealing to our base instincts.

[W]e spend so much time staring at our phones and screens, texting and tweeting about how busy we are, we no longer have the time to consume any primary material. We rely instead on the casual observations of our “friends” or the people we “follow” […].

I hear the same anxieties over and over again. Everything is too fast; everything is too precarious. We have more access than ever to the people we are trying to reach, thanks to social media and mobile technology, and more information than we know what to do with.

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

It is true that a lot of people are easily distracted online. As a result, too many of us have given up on digital audiences for ambitious work, and this is a mistake.

The kids are fixing their eyes on social media, and the stories they're looking at may not be the most important things. I'm guilty of that, too. Do you want to look at Instagram or the news? It's a difficult, and weird, situation.

I'm scared of the Internet. That's not real, but it is. I'm worried about what it's doing to us.

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.

In my head, I'm a purist that doesn't require anything but a group of good friends and a bottle of wine. In reality, I'm co-dependent on my iPhone and fully conscious of the fact that my attention span is corroding.

I feel conflicted about my relationship with social media.

There’s no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion, without a force to balance it, creates the hole in the boat — draining our ability to pay attention, to think clearly, to be productive and creative.

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.

For me, even with my Twitter and Facebook, I'm not on it all the time. I don't Twitter every day.

I deliberately decided not to go on Twitter. I've read about how much stress it can cause. I don't think it's healthy.

I'm not really about spending every second on social media. I think there's a lot more useful things you can do with your time.