Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.

Cell phones, mobile e-mail, and all the other cool and slick gadgets can cause massive losses in our creative output and overall productivity.

We are deluged with information. We have to process now three times as much data as we would have done 50 years ago. We're bombarded with tweets, with emails - a state of continuous disruption - and that's bad for our decision making and bad for our thinking.

I have the attention span of a mosquito from multitasking and all the things that have affected my poor little brain.

All the world's combined knowledge is at our fingertips. But the same technology that makes this possible is robbing us of deeper insight.

There’s no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion, without a force to balance it, creates the hole in the boat — draining our ability to pay attention, to think clearly, to be productive and creative.

It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.

For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.

In the modern desktop environment, with multitasking and alerts and constant activity, there are always more distractions. When you're at a computer, your hands are always on the controls.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Now we have to contend with overstimulation and too many opportunities all the time, and too many decisions all the time.

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

With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.

With social networks these days, everyone needs to know everything all the time. But the problem is, people are so used to short snippets of information that no one has any attention span anymore. I don't, anyway.

In a 24/7 landscape of rolling news, social media, phone alerts and notifications it's all too easy to feel numbed by all the shouting.

The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them.

I'm not suggesting that the entire nation can't be successful, but there's something to it when you have 150 cable channels and the Internet at your fingertips and video games and all kinds of ADD-addled devices like my iPhone and your BlackBerry and things that keep us busy.

It's not our fault our generation has short attention spans, Dad. We watch an appalling amount of TV.

There were a lot of distractions in Baltimore, and I think they were a problem for me.

In my head, I'm a purist that doesn't require anything but a group of good friends and a bottle of wine. In reality, I'm co-dependent on my iPhone and fully conscious of the fact that my attention span is corroding.

Since being on television, I have felt that my brain is degenerating.

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

I think that we get so distracted with our smartphones... It takes your body and your brain time to switch between tasks. If we can focus on what we're doing, we'll be more productive at that task.