Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

I am so sorry to see the state of reading in such decline. I think it says something really scary and terrible about us as a culture. I think it does have to do with everyone's total global embrace of technology.

The age of the book is almost gone.

We have something very powerful in our hands with the Internet, and we still don't really understand fully its power.

So much of the world is digital.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.

I think there's a gigantic generation gap in terms of how people understand the Internet and how much they think technology is an important factor in social change.

I think there's been a major shift in grass roots media because of the Internet and because the geeks and nerds rule the world. They are in control in so many ways.

Digital media has destroyed much of the magic and mystery of the medium.

Obviously technology has become such a big presence in our lives and, I definitely know, in my life.

There's evidence of a social decline in direct proportion to technology and the industrialization of the motion picture industry.

We're living in an era of unprecedented change, and I want to be a part of documenting it.

Before the Internet, we were in a different sort of dark age. We had to wait to hear news on TV at night or in print the next day. We had to go to record stores to find new music. Cocktail party debates couldn't be settled on the spot.

I think technology and smartphones created a huge paradigm shift that we can't fully comprehend, and I think in a lot of ways things are changing faster than we can really process.

Do I think technology is bad? No. I think it's wonderful that the world is so connected now. But I think, as a result, childhood ends a little earlier.

Man no longer dreams over a book in which a soft voice, a constant companion, observes, exhorts, or sighs with him through the pangs of youth and age. Today he is more likely to sit before a screen and dream the mass dream which comes from outside.

For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.

Never before in the history of the planet have so many people, on their own, had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people.

Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream.

Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.

This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy.

We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference to the world.

We've clearly entered a period in which the analog of text is no longer important or relevant. All text will be electronic. I accept that fact. My house has thousands of books in it, and I've started to look at them completely differently. They now seem to me to be like antiquarian objects. Their use value has become negligible to me because I'm perfectly happy to read on an e-reader.

The biggest effect of the personal computer revolution has been to allow millions and millions of people to experience computers themselves decades before they ever would have in the old paradigm.

I'm lucky enough to have been in the age before the internet and now during the internet. I'm grateful to be a witness to that. It's horse and buggy versus car. To see how quickly things change has given me a renewed sense of optimism. Does that make sense?