Todd Gitlin Quotes

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

We live in such an age of chatter and distraction. Everything is a challenge for the ears and eyes.

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

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.

Everyone nowadays lives through too much and thinks through too little: they have a ravenous appetite and colic at the same time so that they keep getting thinner and thinner no matter how much they eat.--Whoever says nowadays, "I have not experienced anything"--is a simpleton.

Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions.

We are so caught up in our media, in our jobs, in our gossip, and in our consuming that we genuinely feel like we don't have the time or energy to bother ourselves with the tribulations of nations near and far.

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.

People's - most people's job is talking about the future or like money not even in the present tense. It's not even paper.

An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.

Life is so fast these days, and we're exposed to so much information. Television makes us a witness to such misery.

I'm constantly being visually stimulated.

I think people are sick of trends changing every six months - not because we're tired of them, but just for the sake of change. There is so much junk in the world: junk TV, junk movies, all those junk magazines with the same people on the cover.

Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn't have a choice.

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

The whole world, it's a problem that there's too much stuff being produced. We don't have time to reflect on the important things in life.

I love the web, but man, I look at my browser, and there are, like, twenty tabs up there, all jostling for space and time, all framed by a mosaic of other apps, other work, other entertainment... so even when I really am paying attention to something on the web, there's this peripheral haze.

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.

They import and they consume reality.

A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.

We live in media, as fish live in water.

Americans are used to being pandered to and spoon-fed everything. In a culture that needs caffeine-free cherry chocolate diet Coke, you'd best deliver information with entertainment.