Regina Brett Quotes

You used to be able to just call people. You didn't have to be on someone's calendar to have a phone conversation. The telephone was an important and valuable domain of communication, both for casual, friendly chats and for professional exchanges of ideas and information. But no more.

But, we didn't have all the media that we do today.

I grew up in the '70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends.

Kids don't know what life was like without cell phones.

I remember a life before social media. I remember phone boxes, that's what I grew up on.

Smartphones are so fabulous in so many ways that it seems daft to be nostalgic about the days when an image did not go round the world in a nanosecond.

I think that new communications are wonderful and I am delighted to be a part of the Internet generation.

I feel like we were the last generation, and there's this big divide before and after the 1990s. I feel sorry for the kids today. It's all too much.

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

Everyone talks about how we're on our phones all the time, but the fact remains that when I'm away on a film set for two months, I can Skype my family. I remember the phone calls my parents had to make when my dad was away for a while when I was younger - that once-a-week expensive phone call! The time pressure on talking to your father!

There is never going to be a substitute for face-to-face communication, but we have seen since the alphabet, to the telephone and now the Internet, that whenever people find a new way to communicate, they will flock to it.

The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet.

I do not mourn the death of the printed letter in a snobby, East Coast, patrician way - 'Where have our manners gone?' - but because I love objects, I love paper, and I love something that I can hold to my chest for a moment. Still, I bear no grudge against the e-mail form itself.

You have to take into account it was the cell phone that became what the modern-day concept of a phone call is, and this is a device that's attached to your hip 24/7. Before that there was 'leave a message' and before that there was 'hopefully you're home.'

Our songs touch people, and take them back to a time when there was no threat of terrorism, when you didn't have to lock your doors and when Mom and Dad took care of everything.

Saving a letter from an old friend doesn't exist anymore. Everything is texted or emailed.

We do live in this age of new media.

There are so many emoticons these days, I'm kind of old fashioned.

A good example of the modern world is the Eurotunnel. And mobile phones - I like them.

Down on the ground, we seem to do anything but make lengthy, robust monologues. We can communicate in an instant almost anywhere. Gone is the slow old letter - itself a monologue, a sort of considered performance of best self - and in its place is the e-mail, the text, the SMS, the tweet.

The Internet is part of this ongoing, species-long project we've been working on since we climbed down out of the trees in the savanna. We've been working on it without really knowing it.

I was born too late to experience Apollo 11, though I do trek to Dad's house every time there's some space event. There's something awesome about crossing your fingers and watching a tense Mission Control room do their thing.

I think the iPhone was as significant an invention as the Gutenburg press, in terms of the future of humanity.

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

I'm still stuck in the '90s in a lot of ways.