Noreena Hertz Quotes

When I go a stretch without tweeting, I will occasionally get an email from my mom, checking in. I always find this amusing but also gratifying: Thanks to Twitter, I can keep in touch with my parents and let them in on what I'm doing in a way that even the regular phone calls of a doting daughter can't do.

In this age of omniconnectedness, words like 'network,' 'community' and even 'friends' no longer mean what they used to. Networks don't exist on LinkedIn. A community is not something that happens on a blog or on Twitter. And a friend is more than someone whose online status you check.

The Internet has introduced me to some of my closest friends.

Online is another way for all of us to reach people.

People are not just going to bars and meeting people; they're connecting through social media.

I like to have met someone in real life before being their Facebook friend.

I don't want to get into extended conversations with people on MySpace, because there are friends I have extended conversations with every day.

I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.

There is nothing wrong with Facebook in itself, except that it is not a very good tool to express the quality of your relationships.

It's amazing how directly you can connect with people via social media.

I usually try to stay off my phone and enjoy the world, but when I am on my phone, it's always for social media - to talk to my bros and my fans and my friends.

Between Twitter and Facebook and how close you can be with your fans and how close they can be to you these days is, I think, quite miraculous. It's like getting a greeting card every single day.

On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. But the truth is life is being lived there. When they smile - right, you've seen people stop - all of a sudden, life is being lived there, somewhere up in that weird, dense network.

The biggest communities in which young people now reside are online communities.

We all live every day in virtual environments, defined by our ideas.

The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost.

We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.

For most of our users, the vast majority of their MySpace friends are also offline friends. They're just connecting through a different medium when they're on MySpace.

As for my friends, I do have friends that aren't in the entertainment world at all but do interact on social media. I think that's an innate human thing now, to connect via those channels.

We didn't expect it to be cool, with people trading URLs instead of phone numbers.

I'm not on any social media. I know people who have met on Twitter and through Facebook. I had a friend, someone liked her photos on Instagram, and they started direct messaging each other and went out on a date! That's so foreign to me.

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.

The Internet is especially adept at compressing humanity and making it easy to forget there are people behind tweets, posts, and memes.

Everyone talks about how the anonymity of the Internet allows people to behave badly, but I think it's the other way around, that the anonymity removes the 'self' from the people we're talking to online. Other people lose their humanity in our eyes. The system is set up to dehumanize.

I think technology gives the illusion that you are connecting with people, social media particularly.