Diane Ackerman Quotes

In this day and age, technology has overtaken our lives and we are disconnected from reality.

Everyone is so addicted to their damn phone. It's sad to see the filmmaker's work diminished down to a computer screen.

We live in a time where there's a great deal of navel-gazing with the devices that we have that occupy so much of our time... many subjects of history are lost.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

I had a book of essays out in 1997 in which I talked about the increasing virtuality of our lives. I've always been afraid of that in my own life.

I'm a tek addict myself. No matter where you are, people are looking for something to tear them away from reality, challenge their state of mind.

Social media is great, I guess, but it feels like technology is the sapper of innocence.

You look out on the street, and everyone has their heads in their phones. Nobody's really looking up at the sky or the buildings and taking the day in. I try to be conscious of it, but everybody falls prey to it.

I'm talking about some real subjects and issues in my standup. I'm attempting to make a point about technology and how it's changing our society and our lives, and our addiction to social media, and how it affects marriages and relationships.

The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter.

As fabulous as technology is, it can also make us very anxious.

You'd be surprised how difficult it is relinquish a cell phone.

The smart phone isn't a perfect device, as we all know. It forces the world into a tiny screen. It runs out of battery, bandwidth, and power. It distracts us from the world around us.

Today, our attention is less than the television advertisement. We're looking at six or seven problems constantly. We're living in the disturbed societies of cities. I think modern technology is one of the worst things human beings have invented.

When I tell children that they are far too dependent on their gizmos, they do not deny it. But they really don't care. This is their real life - texting about trivial things; listening to numbing music on their private headphones. The machines block everything out - you create your own little trivial world.

It's traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don't experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It's all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog.

Texting is apocalyptic on some level. It's a reduction of things.

In making certain things easier for people, technology has actually demotivated people from using their brains. We have all these devices that keep us connected, and yet we're more disconnected than ever before. Why is that?

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don't look at the users on the other side as people. They aren't - they're just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone's inside virtually going everywhere they want to go, virtually having relationships, virtually traveling across the neighborhood, virtually going to that island.

As connected as we are with technology, it's also removed us from having to have human connection, made it more convenient to not be intimate.

Kids and adults pay a price for too much tech, and it's not wholesale.

I'm always wondering: Have all these time-saving devices actually saved us any time, or have they just created a million fetishes and obsessions that keep us from the quiet half hour we should be taking to sit and do nothing every day?

The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.