Lawrence Lessig Quotes

We have to deal in 30 second sound bites. It's not your fault. It's not our fault.

We are such a sound-bite culture; people are so accustomed to flipping through their television so quickly that we only have just a few seconds to grab someone's attention.

The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever you're trying to tell them.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?

The more you say, the less people remember.

For me, whether it's in a book or on T.V., a recipe has to be simple. I have a short attention span, so to open a cookbook and see a recipe that goes on for three to four pages, well, I've lost interest.

People's attention spans don't run too long these days.

When you try to communicate too many ideas, sometimes you wind up communicating nothing.

There is a tendency to try to dumb everything down and turn everything into a one-paragraph press release or even less, just a slogan.

Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.

You cannot communicate complicated information to large groups of people. As you increase the number of people, you have to decrease the complexity of the information.

If it doesn't go [fit] on a bumper sticker, we don't listen.

It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen.

We live in an age of sound bites and buzz words.

People want an easy sound bite.

Everyone has a really short attention span, and you have to bombard them with content, content, content.

I like Twitter because I'm a creature of the short-attention span theater. I can get a lot of sports opinions and other things and Twitter tells me what time it is, but not how to make the watch.

A modern audience is capable of processing just so much information because they're used to visual media that's on overload.

I work on the assumption that in the crowded mass communication field today you have to get in and get out with your message as quickly and simply as possible. You must communicate the maximum with a single glance.

I get very bored easily. I'm a child of the Internet or whatever; I want more and more of new and interesting things.

The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word - and doesn't go any further.

HOBBES: All this modern technology just makes people try to do everything at once.

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.

The result of a public that has a very high consumption rate and turnover rate is people listen to more music but spend less time with individual bits of music. It's made me more likely to put things up quickly and treat it more like a magazine instead of a novel.