Robin Sloan Quotes

There's a lot of noise in the world, and the Internet magnifies that energy.

I love the web, but man, I look at my browser, and there are, like, twenty tabs up there, all jostling for space and time, all framed by a mosaic of other apps, other work, other entertainment... so even when I really am paying attention to something on the web, there's this peripheral haze.

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

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

I feel like my competition is everything else that's competing for people's attention, not just other print magazines, newspapers and cable. It's your kid's report card and the games you want to play, all the things that compete for people's time.

We live in such an age of chatter and distraction. Everything is a challenge for the ears and eyes.

That's what the internet is: it's like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It's like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square.

There's a danger of the Internet just becoming loud, ugly and boring with a thousand voices screaming for attention.

I think we have the attention span of a gnat. You know, with cell phones and Twitter.

I don't let myself 'surf' on the Web, or I would probably drown.

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

I downloaded a Ricky Gervais podcast once at the persistent urging of a friend and found it funny but distracting - if I'm online, I'm surfing, which means I'm distracted from the podcast. So it's a form that doesn't really work for me.

To be honest, what I struggled with in my degree is what's so helpful when it comes to social media in that I lack focus. I'll start reading about evolutionary biology and end up on quantum physics. While that makes writing your dissertation very difficult, for a page like IFLS, that's amazing because I get a wide range of everything.

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

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

Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading.

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.

I have slight attention-span issues, so I will often wander off, and then I will be alerted - in inverted commas - when the smoke alarm goes off. So that's how I work out if a bake is finished.

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

HOBBES: All this modern technology just makes people try to do everything at once.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

There is always more information than attention

I have to always make sure I don't stay in one place and spend too much time one subject. I have my wife tell me [through an earpiece], "Come back! You're taking too long on that subject." I need to be reeled in.

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.

Twitter is the perpetual cocktail party where everyone is talking at once but nobody is saying anything.