Digital Dependency Quotes

It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.

Thinking about it, you know, our phones are everything. They're kind of benign.

In making certain things easier for people, technology has actually demotivated people from using their brains. We have all these devices that keep us connected, and yet we're more disconnected than ever before. Why is that?

I do everything through Twitter, YouTube or the Internet somehow.

People thought I was very pro-computer. I was on the cover of 'Wired' magazine. Then things began to change. In the early '80s, we met this technology and became smitten like young lovers. But today our attachment is unhealthy.

I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information.

Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we're too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.

Growing up in the days when you still had to punch buttons to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I'm not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that's probably more than most.

I grew up using maps and having a sense of direction, and now I have a phone. I used to try to remember numbers, and now I... can just call them up instantly. And that's great. But what's happening right now is that we're in a phase of human evolution where we're merging with machines.

I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online.

If we lose our phones, we lose our phone books. You don't memorize numbers anymore.

I was so against social media for such a long time, but now I can't live without it.

I'm a very simple man. You've got to have, like, a computer nowadays to turn the TV on and off... and the nightmare continues.

Call me a nerd if you like, but I do find it hard to leave home without my laptop and a good book.

Surfing the Internet every day has become a habit for many leaders and officials, including myself.

I'll never forget the first time... I got a Blackberry smartphone, and I'm playing with it and I'm going, 'This is really important because my email, my contacts, my calendar. Everything is here and it's synced up with that computer. It's synced up with my assistant's computer.'

I'm an Internet junkie.

I do everything on my phone!

I think there's a danger in how we can get addicted to the things that reaffirm to us who we are. For example, Facebook; people who make these Facebook posts about what's happening to them, just so people will chime in and give them positive reinforcement.

Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.

As we become more codependent with technology, it's not necessarily based on our desire for the technology but our desire for interconnectivity and wanting to stay connected, which is a natural human instinct. The technology itself is kind of emotionally manipulative.

I sense an insatiable demand for connectivity. Maybe all these people have discovered important uses for the Internet. Perhaps some of them feel hungry for a community that our real neighborhoods don't deliver. At least a few must wonder what the big deal is.

We live in a world where losing your phone is more dramatic than losing your virginity

We expect more from technology and less from each other.

I see people with laptops as being enslaved to something they can't live without.