George Saunders Quotes

I think that we live in a world - and this is something which living in Pakistan, perhaps, has taught me - and, you know, we live in a world where there is a constant feed from social media, the news, etc., of things that can scare us. And we become so anxious because human beings are meant - are designed to be sensitized to dangerous stuff.

I think sometimes younger people - not necessarily thinkers and intellectuals and the like, but people who are on social media and who are not as informed as journalists or professional thinkers - may get a bit, you know, impatient with the necessity of sustained thinking, sustained argumentation, sustained dialogue.

The Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.

I think we all have a love/hate relationship with the media.

We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.

There's a danger in the internet and social media. The notion that information is enough, that more and more information is enough, that you don't have to think, you just have to get more information - gets very dangerous.

I'm really not aware of much press. I could drive myself mental if I went on the internet. I'd probably overanalyse it anyway. There's so much media that I'd feel bombarded, so I don't pay it much attention.

I guess what's happened is that I've a little bit let go of the idea that we can reach everybody. Certain people... the informational world they live in, it's so distorted that it's hard to get through.

I think if you use Twitter and social media as your main source of information you are an idiot, but I think most people who use it know better, so I kind of enjoy it.

I am not good at dealing with the modern media. I have not felt I have been as effective as I should be.

I think part of the reason that I have been successful, though, despite maybe not always fitting my message into the pre-packaged formulas, is there is this whole other media ecology out there of the Internet and Instagram and memes and talk shows and comedy, and I'm pretty good at that.

If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not. And particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.

Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.

I killed my Facebook page years ago because time clicking around is just dead time. Your brain isn't resting and it isn't doing. I think people have to get their heads around this thing. All this unmitigated input is hurting folks.

I think social media really is a great tool. It fascinates me when I tweet something and right away you get a response almost immediately.

I think social media is a great place to share ideas and to connect with other people.

There's so much active misinformation and it's packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television. If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won't know what to protect.

I think [social media] is fundamentally restructuring the whole nature of information and how it's expressed in America.

These younger kids - I think growing up with social media, they're just savvy.

I'm not very active on social media. I'm not on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, or anything like that. But I think it's wonderful that they're out there. They're fantastic. I have a lot of siblings and friends that use it, and it's great for them. It's such a connected world.

With the Internet there is even more fractioning since we are in echo chambers. With so much propaganda it is hard to calm down enough to listen.

When we look back on this time and we are going to see what the Internet brought us, and social media brought us, I think people are going to say 'how did people know anything in those years, during that particular time in history?' Because there is so much disorganization in the information.

People are morons. I don't do any social media stuff. I have people telling me all the time, "You should do Twitter, you should do this, you should get on Facebook." Are you insane? I'm not doing any of that crap. I stay the hell off that thing. Every once in a while, I send a business email, and that's it.

I think that there's a power in that [information through tweets and sound bites ]. There's also a danger, what generates a headline or stirs up a controversy and gets attention isn't the same as the process required to actually solve the problem.

I think the pressure to be perfect generally in life has amped up massively in the last twenty years: especially for young people with the advent of social media.