Digital Noise Quotes

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that.

Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you're just unable to focus.

There is always more information than attention

We are bombarded on all sides by a vast number of messages we don't want or need. More information is generated in a single day than we can absorb in a lifetime. To fully enjoy life, all of us must find our own breathing space and peace of mind.

I'm concerned by a deficient technology. In other words, errors or noises. It absorbs me, and I wonder if new cultural currents could emerge from this deficiency.

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

It is now such a complex society in terms of media. It just comes at us from every direction. You kind of have to push it all away.

To me, Twitter seems like a way for people to just let the world know about the most mundane bullshit that crosses their mind.

Anyone with an inbox knows what I'm talking about. A dozen emails to set up a meeting time. Documents attached and edited and reedited until no one knows which version is current. Urgent messages drowning in forwards and cc's and spam.

People do that on Facebook and it's the dumbest thing in the world. I don't care what your dinner looks like. Stop cluttering up the Internet with pictures of your dinner.

Twitter seems just to be constant updates; it seems to me as promotional tool where people talk themselves up, and I don't want it to take over what I'm doing.

I see my tweets as a current joining a bunch of other currents in the world's craziest ocean.

Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.

Anyone can post messages to the net. Practically everyone does. The resulting cacophony drowns out serious discussion.

Every morning as I begin my work day, my computer presents me with the usual array of garbage: email, Twitter, updates on the state of the nation, updates on the state of the sneakers I just ordered.

If E.B. White were writing in 2013, would there be a 'Charlotte's Web' trailer and an @SomePig Twitter account? I doubt it. Yet, in a way, he'd be missing out because I'm beginning to think that some of this noise is worth making - and some of it is worth hearing, too.

Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.

People say we live in an age of information overload. Right? I don't know about that, but I just know that I get too many marketing emails.

I tend not to read reviews; there's too much out there in cyberspace.

We're living in a society where there's a cacophony of noise and opinion.

In a 24/7 landscape of rolling news, social media, phone alerts and notifications it's all too easy to feel numbed by all the shouting.

Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.

Whenever I get a tweet that's trying to promote a thing someone cares about, I'm like, "how annoying!"

The great virtue of the web, its ease of communication, has also become its Achilles' heel in that it has polluted the air with meaningless babble and egomaniacal drivel.