Howard Rheingold Quotes

Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.

In this fragmented world, with such short attention spans, you've got a couple of episodes to make an impression. And if you don't, you start to lose your audience in a big way.

I'm not really one for reading books. I have a very poor attention span. I'd rather listen to music, play games or watch films on my iPad.

Children from like 8 and even up to the college age - Spider-Man appeals to a fairly broad demographic but, like I said, a mean age probably of 12 is a good mark - they process information so quickly and it's not because of attention deficit or short attention span.

I don't think people really do listen. We plug into music, and we have short attention spans. We tend to download individual tracks from iTunes rather than a whole album. We buy music DVDs and watch them once, and then they disappear into a drawer, or we loan them to a friend, and we never watch it again.

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

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

The news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.

The newspapers and magazines, the theaters and the social reform movements, are more and more made for a public which looks only to be entertained and which has lost the power of sustained attention.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

President Reagan brought us to the ultimate: America As Total Television. During his governance the printed word simply ceased to matter. White House dynamos had once telephoned newspapers to complain about unfair reporting. Not anymore. Now they telephoned network bosses. Even then it wasn't poor reporting they complained about, but poor pictures.

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

I don't really read a lot. I got a few Booker Prize books and some others and thought I'd try this but quite quickly I just stick them down. I do like some Stephen King books but with some of them I just put them down as well. But I'm like that with telly stuff as well and films or music.

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.

Lots of folks still do watch TV, but I think understanding the future of politics means understanding where folks' attention is being paid and delivering your message and your ideas in that space.

No one reads anything. They just look at images.

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

The generation we live in, we're constantly entertained - we turn our heads this way, and there's something else to entertain us. Sitting down in one seat for two hours may not be enough anymore.

People have a very short attention span when it comes to television, but nobody forgets the movie you do.

I'm a product of the 1970s, so I have a short attention span. You know, I grew up on cartoons and half-hour shows. So the stories that I'm interested in grab my attention very quickly, and they have to keep my attention.

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.

I am not the type of person who believes everything she reads, but I like to look at photos and see what people are wearing.

People's attention spans are a little shorter these days. Same thing with food and movies.

Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and that it doesn't now. They also tend to believe that it really matters someplace else - in very improbable places often. Russia is someone's idea of a place where literature really counts.

The accepted ideas of any period are singularly those that serve the dominant economic interest...What economists believe and teach, whether in the United States or in the Soviet Union, is rarely hostile to the institutions - the private business enterprise, the Communist Party - that reflect the dominant economic power. Not to notice this takes effort, although many succeed.