Pete Cashmore Quotes

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

The whole Twitter phenomenon is really indicative of what's happening in this country. And I say this in condemnation of myself as much as anyone else - we are growing into a nation that has no time, desire or capacity for truth. All we can handle is 140 characters of knowledge.

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

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

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.

That's what the internet is: it's like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It's like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square.

For all the sophistication of a world in which most of our waking hours are spent consuming or interacting with media, we have scarcely advanced in our understanding of what attention means.

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

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

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

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

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.

With our growing attachment to the online universe comes a refined ability to keep tabs on several things at once, to watch stories unfold on parallel planes.

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs.

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 tweet, therefore my entire life has shrunk to 140 character chunks of instant event and predigested gnomic wisdom. And swearing.

We're living at a time when attention is the new currency We're all publishers now, and the more we publish, the more valuable connections we'll make. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Fitbit and the SenseCam give us a simple choice: participate or fade into a lonely obscurity.

Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

We're living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.

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.

Any person that you would want to watch your movie or see your show or read your book, there's a million other things that they could be watching or reading or doing.

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

I don't really pay attention to much online.