“Though they can be, strangers aren’t always strange. They’re often just people, a lot like you.”— Giancarlo DiTrapano, thoughtcatalog.com
“I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be stimulated, I wanted to be in contact and I wanted to retain my privacy, my private space. I wanted to click and click and click until my synapses exploded, until I was flooded by superfluity. I wanted to hypnotize myself with data, with colored pix…”— Olivia Laing, amazon.com
“In the age of algorithms and social media, can we create an enclave where creative and intellectual sophistication still matter?”— Chris Lavergne, techcrunch.com
“I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.”— LCD Soundsystem, open.spotify.com
“I've spent 45 minutes putting my outfit together this morning and have brought my SLR camera to lunch, just so we can perfectly capture how casual and spontaneous I look today.”— Michael Buchinger, vice.com
“Life, I suspect, is better when you're living the kind that attracts followers on Instagram.”— Michael Buchinger, vice.com
“Driving while purposely taking your eyes off the road is absolutely insane. You are moving at a high speed in a metal contraption filled with combustible liquid, and you deliberately avert your eyes from the road in order to respond to a text message? Wow! That text message must hold a lot of promis…”— Tommy Rosen, amazon.com
“Many people cannot remember the last time they went to the bathroom without bringing their cell phones with them. It seems like they are going to be missing something if they just sit on the toilet without a cell phone.”— Tommy Rosen, amazon.com
“Why should Apple shareholders be getting rich while working journalists are getting fired? This is an unjust situation, and the libertarians in Silicon Valley are either moral idiots or liars.”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.com
“I think the tech corporations are like the nineteenth-century coal magnates, and the freelance writers are like the people slaving in the mines, the only difference being that the tech corporations can't stop congratulating themselves on how they've liberated everybody.”— Jonathan Franzen, amazon.com
“Maybe sex, in its shocking intimacy and unavoidable closeness, can act as a balm for all that digital distance. Maybe if you start to see other people as merely their profile pictures and Tinder bios, it can bridge the digital-analog gap to see their face twist up in pleasure, hear their moans and s…”— Kate Sloan, theestablishment.co
“Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body. But it's not impossible to imagine losing my appetite for those things; they aren't always easy, and they take so much time. In twenty years I'd be interviewing air and water and hea…”— Miranda July, amazon.com
“I have no desire for my Twitter feed to be filled with a bunch of people screaming ad hominem attacks against anyone who voiced something different from how they feel.”— Lin-Manuel Miranda, rollingstone.com
“The internet and social media have become the main stage of our culture. As the television was once our culture’s chief mode of communicating ideas and news, turning everything it touched—from war to politics to art into entertainment—today, social media has control of our culture exactly as televis…”— Samir Nazim, thoughtcatalog.com
“The reason relationships are falling apart in modern times, is because we now have choice. And we’re choosing to be scared. We’re choosing to run from our own vulnerability. We’re choosing to blame others instead of seeing the truth – the opportunity to look inside and grow.”— Kiara O'Leary, thoughtcatalog.com
“The problem is not in the girl who needed too much from him or the guy who exuded a fake arrogance to hide his vulnerability. The problem is that these people are mirroring back to us our own issues, and we keep switching people, but WE are the one common denominator. Their neediness, their arroganc…”— Kiara O'Leary, thoughtcatalog.com
“We’re too busy staring at our smart phones and iPads that we don’t even know who we really are. We are over-stimulated, externally-focused and too scared to look inside and find out what lights us up inside, what our fears are, and who we are when the world feels like it’s closing in from the outsid…”— Kiara O'Leary, thoughtcatalog.com
“But because we have grown up in an age where everything is at our fingertips, when we reach out and it’s not easy and it scares us a little – we pull our hands back in and keep moving on. Looking for the next easy thrill in a new connection, not putting in the time to really see and love deeply.”— Kiara O'Leary, thoughtcatalog.com
“It is the absence of action from our lives that is rendering us incapable of being able to form an individual human being with traits that inspire, and take us on a journey towards self improvement.”— Haseeb Sultan Abdul, thoughtcatalog.com