Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

The whole Twitter phenomenon is really indicative of what's happening in this country. And I say this in condemnation of myself as much as anyone else - we are growing into a nation that has no time, desire or capacity for truth. All we can handle is 140 characters of knowledge.

Everything is so fast now, everything is so disposable now, there's no time to build up a career like we used to have in the past.

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.

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.

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.

Our whole society is instantaneous.

The speed of change today is faster than the human psyche seems able to handle, and it's increasingly difficult to reconcile the rhythms of our personal lives with the rapidity of a twenty-four-hour news cycle.

Kids don't know what life was like without cell phones.

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.

I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes.

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

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

We often hear that the digital age has resulted in a devaluing of time, space, and place. But I wonder if theseclaims are exaggerated.

Everything also calms down with the influx of social media, there's so much happening all the time.

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

I am not offering this is a critique of the internet, its just that there are a lot of factors involved. It does offer plenty of possibilities. It also has, it can have, a cheapening effect and I think both exist and I think its true of everything. You could say that about the printing press.

When you look at things like social media, that's an immensely powerful tool that I'm all in favor of. I think it's amazing. It's a powerful tool, and it's one that we're, as a species, still grappling with learning to use. It's like we've grown an extra tail and we inadvertently lash out and knock over all of the furniture.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

One day the virtual world might win over the real world.

The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.

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

By the end of the 20th Century there will be a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen quire of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone... and to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine.

The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

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?