The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.
Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.
A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognize ourselves and our commitments.
To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.
Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.
It’s too late to leave the future to the futurists.
The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less foldable, more evil.
One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.
We expect more from technology and less from each other.
We now expect more from technology and less from each other.
Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.
Texting is more direct. You don’t have to use conversation filler.
Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.
The way we contemplate technology on the horizon says much about who we are and who we are willing to become.
Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.
As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts.
She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber.
This is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by “solving” it without addressing it.
Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.
When young people are insecure, they find ways to manufacture love tests – personal metrics to reassure themselves.
Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?
Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself.
We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology’s true effect on us.
We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer’s memory.
We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted of us has the incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotions. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?
Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.
There is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete.
This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected.
Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.
He experiences a connection where knowledge does not interfere with wonder.
A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: “it’s like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.
Face-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine.
When one becomes accustomed to “companionship” without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.
My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me.
Once we become tethered to the network, we really don’t need to keep computers busy. THEY KEEP US BUSY.
Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and I’ll show you someone who is looking for a person and can’t find one.
Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages.
Sometimes a citizenry should not simply “be good”. You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent.
One of the privileges of childhood is that some of the world is mediated by adults.
Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate.
Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life.
When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.
Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?
For him, mastery of the game world is a source of joy.
If you feel it right now, on the Internet, you can tell them right now; you don’t have to wait for anything.
Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.
The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.
Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead.
We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.
He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.
Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.
Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity.
He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.
But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life.
Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.
The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, “We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.
Shakespeare might have said, we are “consumed with that with which we are nourished by.
I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I’m a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day.
Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are.
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.