Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

In every public space, everyone has their head down on their phone. Including me.

On the Tube, you never see anyone looking you in your eye. They're all looking down at their screen.

I hate people walking down the street listening to the soundtrack of their lives which responds to them but not their setting. I hate the overspill of sound which metro and subway riders are oblivious to because they notice no one and nothing around them.

For most of us, starting off in the morning, your iPhone wakes you up, you immediately start checking emails or texts or whatever, and you're up and running until you go to bed.

It's the smartphone that has turned adults and children alike into tech-addicted zombies, dumbly swiping and jabbing at their screens, oblivious to the world around them.

You walk into a restaurant these days, and what you see is everyone with their phone next to them. That is terrible. Instead of concentrating on the relationship, on the needs and activities and interests of the other person, they are constantly looking at their phone.

You go to a restaurant with a friend for lunch and the next table, two people are sitting opposite each other. They don't talk! All they do is look at the screens of their cell phones and show it to the person that they're with. And when people do that to me, they want me to look at pictures on their cell phone? I can't even look at little things like that. I think it is all crazy.

All the research shows that the presence of that phone will do two things to the conversation. It will make the conversation go to trivial matters, and it will decrease the amount of empathy that the two people in the conversation feel toward each other. That phone is a signal that either of us can put our attention elsewhere.

I can't stand when I walk into a room and everyone's not talking to each other and just on their phones.

Then everyone leaves, and you are left, each night, to your own devices with a crowd of interesting people - most of whom you don't know - sitting in the dark.

If you look at people out on the street, if you look at people at restaurants, nobody's having conversations anymore. They're sitting at dinner looking at their phone, because their brain is so addicted to it.

You sit or stand in the subway, and you look around - I do, because I don't have a phone so I'm not playing a game - and you see people.

I don't like phones. You can't be sure people are paying attention to you when you're talking to them.

The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

I feel like people just let each other live a little more in New York.

I'm like the trunk of a cactus... I take in a dose of culture and time with friends, then I retreat and go live on it for awhile until I get thirsty again.

I just realized that with the invention of the iPhone and others you now get to see the top of people's heads.

My favorite sign here says, "I care about you." In a culture that trains people to avoid each other's gaze, to say, "Let them die," that is a deeply radical statement.

I just have one of those faces. People come up to me and say, 'What's wrong?' Nothing. 'Well, it takes more energy to frown than it does to smile.' Yeah, you know it takes more energy to point that out than it does to leave me alone?

Usually what happens is somebody grabs me and they always pull me off to the side. Nobody ever does it publically. They say, "I didn't want to be here." Or, "I don't usually like people like you." Or, "I didn't believe the things you actually talked about would work. I'm here to tell you that you converted me." That happens a lot.

All through the nineties I met people. Crowds of people. Met and met and met, until it seemed that people were born and hastily grew up, just to be met.

People don't talk to each other. You're alone with your television set or internet. But you can't have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call "secondary organizations," places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don't do it alone.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.

I'm so happy to be around people. I just really like people, and being a freelancer can be lonely during the day, when you're at home trying to write anything you can.

That's one of the surprises in the research, that's it's not young people who are smitten with their phones. It's their parents who are not paying attention to them.