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Michael Harris QUOTES

Michael Harris QUOTES

1 " When we think we're multitasking we're actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing - quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we're being productive. We are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we're simply giving ourselves extra work. "

― Michael Harris

2 " If solitude feels painful, it's only because we don't know how to be alone. "

― Michael Harris

3 " Perhaps we now need to engineer scarcity in our communications, in our interactions, and in the things we consume. Otherwise our lives become like a Morse code transmission that's lacking breaks - a swarm of noise blanketing the valuable data beneath. "

― Michael Harris

4 " Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice. First notice the difference. And then, every time, choose. "

― Michael Harris

5 " Never forget that you live in an ecosystem designed to disrupt you and it will take you for a ride if you let it. "

― Michael Harris

6 " If you believe that some opinions are in fact better than others, then you, too, are an elitist of sorts. "

― Michael Harris , The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

7 " The psychologist Geoffrey Miller, when pondering why we haven’t come across any alien species as yet, decided that they were probably all addicted to video games and are thus brought to an extreme state of apathy—the exploratory opposite of the heroes in Star Trek who spend all their time seeking out “new life and new civilizations.” The "

― Michael Harris , The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

8 " The psychologist Geoffrey Miller, when pondering why we haven’t come across any alien species as yet, decided that they were probably all addicted to video games and are thus brought to an extreme state of apathy—the exploratory opposite of the heroes in Star Trek who spend all their time seeking out “new life and new civilizations.” The aliens “forget to send radio signals or colonize space,” he wrote in Seed magazine, because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissim. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. . . . They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels . . . ever so good. "

― Michael Harris , The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

9 " we aren’t lonely because we are alone; we are lonely because we have failed in our solitude. "

― Michael Harris , The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

10 " When we grip our phones and tablets, we’re holding the kind of information resource that governments would have killed for just a generation ago. And is it that experience of everyday information miracles, perhaps, that makes us all feel as though our own opinions are so worth sharing? After all, aren’t we—in an abstracted sense, at least—just as smart as everyone else in the room, as long as we’re sharing the same Wi-Fi connection? And therefore (goes the bullish leap in thinking) aren’t my opinions just as worthy of trumpeting? "

― Michael Harris , The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

11 " At the end of that Roger Ebert essay, he says he decided to force himself to do the reading that he knew, deep down, his brain wanted and needed. When he gave himself the proper literary diet (and found a room in the house where his Wi-Fi connection failed), “I felt a kind of peace. This wasn’t hectic. I wasn’t skittering around here and there. I wasn’t scanning headlines and skimming pages and tweeting links. I was reading. . . . Maybe I can rewire my brain, budge it back a little in the old direction. "

― Michael Harris , The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

12 " Experiment. Live a little. And remember that the fear of absence is the surest sign that absence is direly needed. "

― Michael Harris

13 " As we embrace a technology’s gifts, we usually fail to consider what they ask from us in return—the subtle, hardly noticeable payments we make in exchange for their marvelous service. We don’t notice, for example, that the gaps in our schedules have disappeared because we’re too busy delighting in the amusements that fill them. We forget the games that childhood boredom forged because boredom itself has been outlawed. Why would we bother to register the end of solitude, of ignorance, of lack? Why would we care that an absence has disappeared? "

― Michael Harris , The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

14 " As the twenty-first century lurches forward, though, we find that love letters—so awkward, so slow, so exhausting to compose—are an endangered species. We forget that romantic connections benefit from solitude nearly as much as the beloved’s company. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

15 " Despite the universality of this change, which we’re all buffeted by, there is a single, seemingly small change that I’ll be most sorry about. It will sound meaningless, but: One doesn’t see teenagers staring into space anymore. Gone is the idle mind of the adolescent. "

― Michael Harris , The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

16 " In reality, life outside of orderly institutions like schools, jobs, and prisons is lacking in “gold star” moments; it passes by in a not-so-dignified way, and nobody tells us whether we’re getting it right or wrong. But publish your experience online and an institutional approval system rises to meet it—your photo is “liked,” your status is gilded with commentary. It’s even a way to gain some sense of immortality, since online publishing creates a lasting record, a living scrapbook. This furthers our enjoyable sense of an ordered life. We become consistent, we are approved, we are a known and sanctioned quantity. "

― Michael Harris , The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

17 " The difference between Before and After is that today we need to safeguard our inner weirdo, seal it off and protect it from being buffeted. Learn an old torch song that nobody knows; read a musty, out-of-print detective novel; photograph a honey-perfect sunset and show it to no one. We may need to build new and stronger weirdo cocoons, in which to entertain our private selves. Beyond the sharing, the commenting, the constant thumbs-upping, beyond all that distracting gilt, there are stranger things waiting to be loved. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

18 " Our best thinkers may also crave solitude because, as Storr notes, “ideas are sensitive plants which wilt if exposed to premature scrutiny.”25 "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

19 " Our generation seems to be facing a crisis of critique. We want to know what’s best, we want to know where to eat and what movie to see, but we’ve begun to forget that real opinion, real critique, must always come out of an absence of voices—from a singular subjective viewpoint. You "

― Michael Harris , The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

20 " nervous hive mentality; it reminds us the self is no monster after all. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World