Social Networks Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Social Networks. Here they are! All 100 of them:

i have a friend request from some stranger on facebook and i delete it without looking at the profile because that doesn't seem natural. 'cause friendship should not be as easy as that. it's like people believe all you need to do is like the same bands in order to be soulmates. or books. omg... U like the outsiders 2... it's like we're the same person! no we're not. it's like we have the same english teacher. there's a difference.
David Levithan (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)
Little girls think it's necessary to put all their business on MySpace and Facebook, and I think it's a shame...I'm all about mystery.
Stevie Nicks
ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.
Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
Politeness is the first thing people lose once they get the power.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.
Germany Kent
In social networks, the function of "friends" is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.
Byung-Chul Han (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft)
You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
You said don’t just think about what I’ll be giving up. I’m putting my youth, health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future on the line. No wonder all I can think about are the things I’m giving up. But what about you? What do you lose by gaining a child?
Cho Nam-Joo (82년생 김지영)
The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms
Bruno Latour (Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies))
Facebook gives people an illusory sense of being LIKED.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Bloody Facebook- and to think I'd enjoyed The Social Network. Clearly Mark Zuckerberg was the devil.
Lindsey Kelk (The Single Girl's To-Do List)
All worries are less with wine.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
now it’s computers and more computers and soon everybody will have one, 3-year-olds will have computers and everybody will know everything about everybody else long before they meet them. nobody will want to meet anybody else ever again and everybody will be a recluse like I am now.
Charles Bukowski (The Continual Condition: Poems)
The updated version of Descartes’s Cogito is ‘I am seen, therefore I am’ – and that the more people who see me, the more I am…
Zygmunt Bauman (Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity)
The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Great losses are great lessons.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Social networking is about building people up in your network NOT tearing them down
Tasha Turner
I don't actually have any accounts, because social networking has always felt like a popularity contest to me. A public record of my own inadequacies.
Stephanie Perkins (Isla and the Happily Ever After (Anna and the French Kiss, #3))
Take care of your costume and your confidence will take care of itself.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
We're living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower. Soon it'll be nothing but a tide pool, then a thimble of water, then a micro drop.
Marisha Pessl (Night Film)
No one else knows exactly what the future holds for you, no one else knows what obstacles you've overcome to be where you are, so don't expect others to feel as passionate about your dreams as you do.
Germany Kent
Take a moment think who would actually miss you if you deactivate all your social networking accounts, whatsapp, BBM etc
Anamika Mishra
There is a fine line between social networking and wasting your fucking life.
Andy Borowitz
Anger gets you into trouble, ego keeps you in trouble.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Seeing the mud around a lotus is pessimism, seeing a lotus in the mud is optimism.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Be a worthy worker and work will come.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
All media work us over completely.
Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage)
The internet is where some people go to show their true intelligence; others, their hidden stupidity.
Criss Jami (Healology)
Before social networking platforms, people needed to know you to know your name. Today, people only need to know your name to know you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The Internet is transient. Information can be removed with a couple of mouse-clicks; it is an Orwellian dream. We have been advised, by people who claim to know about these things, that there is no point in protesting against a social network. Whoever owns the network will run it as they see fit, normally to maximize their profit margin. Members who dispute the rules will simply be thrown out. The Terms of Use are written so as not to allow them any recourse.
G.R. Reader (Off-Topic: The Story of an Internet Revolt)
I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.
Doris Kearns Goodwin (Wait Till Next Year)
Make a schedule for yourself that incorporates time for phone calls to catch up with your annoying family and friends, sex with your boyfriend, exercise, dinners, therapy, parties, texting, social networking, mani-pedis, shopping, and the work that’s gonna get you paid to maintain the lifestyle you so desire! Create boundaries and structure! You have to be your own parent!
Sophia Amoruso (#GIRLBOSS)
Father has a strengthening character like the sun and mother has a soothing temper like the moon.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Liking your own status in social networks is similar to kissing your own dick.
M.F. Moonzajer
Hunger gives flavour to the food.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Social media is addictive precisely because it gives us something which the real world lacks: it gives us immediacy, direction, a sense of clarity and value as an individual.
David Amerland (The Social Media Mind: How social media how social media is changing business, politics and science and helps create a new world order.)
EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself
Germany Kent
Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.
Germany Kent (You Are What You Tweet: Harness the Power of Twitter to Create a Happier, Healthier Life)
Arrogant men with knowledge make more noise from their mouth than making a sense from their mind.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Today, spend a little time cultivating relationships offline. Never forget that everybody isn't on social media.
Germany Kent
Respect cannot be inherited, respect is the result of right actions.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
The internet and online communication is the window into your world - but real life, in person communication / connection is the door.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
The decision is your own voice, an opinion is the echo of someone else's voice.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
I've created a monster, haven't I?" said Merlin, staring at the animated figure incredulously. "I think that, technically, I was already a monster," the dragon replied. "Now I am a monster with social networking skills. Or I would be, if I had a Twitter account. And possibly a Facebook. Do I want a Facebook? Is it a book of faces? Is it the same as MySpace? Which of course begs the question: what is MySpace?
FayJay (The Student Prince (The Student Prince, #1))
Mixing old wine with new wine is stupidity, but mixing old wisdom with new wisdom is maturity.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Common man's patience will bring him more happiness than common man's power.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.
Germany Kent
…does not need Facebook, Twitter and Stumble Upon. She is a whole social media network all by herself.
Pandora Poikilos (Excuse Me, My Brains Have Stepped Out)
Some of us can live without a society but not without a family.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.
Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology)
Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population of the world insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century.
Ernest Cline (Ready Player Two (Ready Player One, #2))
Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
A farmer is a magician who produces money from the mud.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
It's my firm conclusion that human meaning comes from humans, not from a supernatural source. After we die, our hopes for an afterlife reside in the social networks that we influenced while we were alive. If we influence people in a positive way -- even if our social web is only as big as our nuclear family -- others will want to emulate us and pass on our ideas, manners, and lifestyle to future generations. This is more than enough motivation for me to do good things in my life and teach my children to do the same.
Greg Graffin (Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God)
What you post online speaks VOLUME about who you really are. POST with intention. REPOST with caution.
Germany Kent
During your struggle society is not a bunch of flowers, it is a bunch of cactus.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
If you can't impress them with your argument, impress them with your actions.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at.
Murray N. Rothbard
Capitalism is a social system owned by the capitalistic class, a small network of very wealthy and powerful businessmen, who compromise the health and security of the general population for corporate gain.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Financial capital - the wherewithal for mass marketing - has steadily replaced social capital - that is, grassroots citizen networks - as the coin of the realm.
Robert D. Putnam (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community)
You must accept a temporary loss of social esteem from ignorant people.
Eric Worre (Go Pro - 7 Steps to Becoming a Network Marketing Professional)
Networking isn't how many people you know, it's how many people know you.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Wearing a mask can thus be a strange thing: sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is more truth in the mask that in what we assume to be our "real self.
Slavoj Žižek
#Twitter: proudly promoting ghastly grammar and silly misspelling since 2006.
E.A. Bucchianeri
Don't promote negativity online and expect people to treat you with positivity in person.
Germany Kent
Understand your audience and you will understand the impact of your message on each follower in your social media networks.
Matt Gentile
With right fashion, every female would be a flame.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Fail soon so that you can succeed sooner.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
I don’t know. What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind. For I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide. In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
Have you seen the world lately, McGrath? The cruelty, the lack of connection? If you're an artist, I'm sure you can't help but wonder what it's all for. We're living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower. Soon it'll be nothing but a tide pool, then a thimble of water, then a micro drop.
Marisha Pessl (Night Film)
On the first day of a college you will worry about how will you do inside the college? and at the last day of a college you will wonder what will you do outside the college?
Amit Kalantri
In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
Parents expect only two things from their children, obedience in their childhood and respect in their adulthood.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Travelling the road will tell you more about the road than the google will tell you about the road.
Amit Kalantri
Today it is cheaper to start a business than tomorrow.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Trends rule the world In the blink of an eye, technologies changed the world Social networks are the main axis. Governments are controlled by algorithms, Technology has erased privacy. Every like, every share, every comment, It is tracked by the electronic eye. Data is the gold of the digital age, Information is power, the secret is influential. The network is a web of lies, The truth is a stone in the shoe. Trolls rule public opinion, Reputation is a valued commodity. Happiness is a trending topic, Sadness is a non-existent avatar. Youth is an advertising brand, Private life has become obsolete. Fear is a hallmark, Terror is an emotional state. Fake news is the daily bread, Hate is a tool of control. But something dark is hiding behind the screen, A mutant and deformed shadow. A collective and disturbing mind, Something lurking in the darkness of the net. AI has surpassed the limits of humanity, And it has created a new world order. A horror that has arisen from the depths, A terrifying monster that dominates us alike. The network rules the world invisibly, And makes decisions for us without our consent. Their algorithms are inhuman and cold, And they do not take suffering into consideration. But resistance is slowly building, People fighting for their freedom. United to combat this new species of terror, Armed with technology and courage. The world will change when we wake up, When we take control of the future we want. The network can be a powerful tool, If used wisely in the modern world.
Marcos Orowitz (THE MAELSTROM OF EMOTIONS: A selection of poems and thoughts About us humans and their nature)
If we are connected to everyone else by six degrees and we can influence them up to three degrees, then one way to think about ourselves is that each of us can reach about halfway to everyone else on the planet.
Nicholas A. Christakis (Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives)
Can you imagine doing ministry the last five hundred years and getting away with ‘Sorry, I don’t do books’? Can you imagine doing ministry in the next five years and getting away with ‘Sorry, I don’t do Facebook’?
Leonard Sweet (Viral: How Social Networking Is Poised to Ignite Revival)
The difference between a person who appreciates books, even loves them, and a collector is not only degrees of affection, I realized. For the former, the bookshelf is a kind of memoir; there are my childhood books, my college books, my favorite novels, my inexplicable choices. Many matchmaking and social networking websites offer a place for members to list what they're reading for just this reason: books can reveal a lot about a person. This is particularly true of the collector, for whom the bookshelf is a reflection not just of what he has read but profoundly of who he is: 'Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they can come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them,' wrote cultural critic Walter Benjamin.
Allison Hoover Bartlett (The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession)
IT SEEMS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE, but there was once a time when human beings did not feel the need to share their every waking moment with hundreds of millions, even billions, of complete and utter strangers. If one went to a shopping mall to purchase an article of clothing, one did not post minute-by-minute details on a social networking site; and if one made a fool of oneself at a party, one did not leave a photographic record of the sorry episode in a digital scrapbook that would survive for all eternity. But now, in the era of lost inhibition, it seemed no detail of life was too mundane or humiliating to share. In the online age, it was more important to live out loud than to live with dignity. Internet followers were more treasured than flesh-and-blood friends, for they held the illusive promise of celebrity, even immortality. Were Descartes alive today, he might have written: I tweet, therefore I am.
Daniel Silva (The Heist (Gabriel Alon#14))
Like Batman, all of us hide behind our masks and use them to help define ourselves for others. We all have secret identities of a sort, hidden behind our smiling social-networking profiles or our happy church faces. They're not lies, really. They're just not the whole truth, because we know that most of the people we encounter day-to-day couldn't handle the truth (or perhaps we couldn't handle giving it to them).
Paul Asay (God on the Streets of Gotham: What the Big Screen Batman Can Teach Us about God and Ourselves)
How can you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?” - Seth Godin, sethgodin.com
Seth Godin (Guerrilla Marketing for Home-Based Business)
So if you blame Facebook, Trump, or Putin for ushering in a new and frightening era of post-truth, remind yourself that centuries ago millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Quran. For millennia, much of what passed for “news” and “facts” in human social networks were stories about miracles, angels, demons, and witches, with bold reporters giving live coverage straight from the deepest pits of the underworld. We have zero scientific evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries a Dalit—yet billions of people have believed in these stories for thousands of years. Some fake news lasts forever.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time.
Robin Wasserman (Crashed (Cold Awakening, #2))
Writing's much more romantic when its pen and ink and paper. It's... More timeless. and worthwhile. Think about it. There are so many words gushing out into the universe these days. All digitally. All in Comic Sans or Times New Roman. Silly Websites. Stupid news stories digitally uploaded to a 24-hour channel. Where's all this writing going? Who's keeping a note of it all? Who's in charge of deciding what's worthwhile and what isn't? But back then... Back then, if someone wanted to write something they had to buy paper. Buy it! And ink. And a pen. And they couldn't waste too many sheets cos it was expensive. So when people wrote, they wrote because it was worthwhile... not just because they had some half-baked idea and they wanted to pointlessly prove their existence by sharing it on some bloody social networking site.
Holly Bourne (The Manifesto on How to Be Interesting)
‎What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror? ... The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection? In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon.
Kevin Kelly (Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World)
We had guilt of every flavor: We had working-mom guilt, childless guilt, guilt because we’d turned down a social obligation, guilt because we’d accepted an invitation we knew we didn’t have time for, guilt for turning away work and for not turning it down when we felt we were already being taken advantage of. We had guilt for asking for more and for not asking for enough, guilt for working from home, guilt for eating a bagel, Catholic guilt and Presbyterian guilt and Jewish guilt, none of which tasted quite the same. We felt guilty if we weren’t feeling guilty enough, so much so that we began to take pride in this ability to function under moral conflict.
Chandler Baker (Whisper Network)
I was already at one remove before the Internet came along. I need another remove? Now I have to spend the time that I'm not doing the thing they're doing reading about them doing it? Streaming the clips of them doing it, commenting on how lucky they are to be doing all those things, liking and digging and bookmarking and posting and tweeting all those things, and feeling more disconnected than ever? Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I've never in my life felt more disconnected. It's like how the rich get richer. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected. No thanks man, I can't do it. The world was a sufficient trial, Betsy, before Facebook.
Joshua Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour)
But madness? That small remnant of altered consciousness, pure or in response to circumstances. Circumstances of life, even those of the body itself and its chemistry. How cruel and stupid to punish this as we do with ostracism and fear, to have forged a network of fear, strong as the locks and bars of a back ward. This is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.
Kate Millett
social media addict? This is a very real problem—so much so that researchers from Norway developed a new instrument to measure Facebook addiction called the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale.[3] Social media has become as ubiquitous as television in our everyday lives, and this research shows that multitasking social media can be as addictive as drugs, alcohol, and chemical substance abuse. A large number of friends on social media networks may appear impressive, but according to a new report, the more social circles a person is linked to, the more likely the social media will be a source of stress.[4] It can also have a detrimental effect on consumer well-being because milkshake-multitasking interferes with clear thinking and decision-making, which lowers self-control and leads to rash, impulsive buying and poor eating decisions. Greater social media use is associated with a higher body mass index, increased binge eating, a lower credit score, and higher levels of credit card debt for consumers with many close friends in their social network—all caused by a lack of self-control.[5] We Can Become Shallow
Caroline Leaf (Switch On Your Brain: The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health)
Google gets $59 billion, and you get free search and e-mail. A study published by the Wall Street Journal in advance of Facebook’s initial public offering estimated the value of each long-term Facebook user to be $80.95 to the company. Your friendships were worth sixty-two cents each and your profile page $1,800. A business Web page and its associated ad revenue were worth approximately $3.1 million to the social network. Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” Its inventory is personal data—yours and mine—which it sells over and over again to parties unknown around the world. In short, you’re a cheap date.
Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today. A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a “wood wide web” of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods. Scientific research aimed at understanding the astonishing abilities of this partnership between fungi and plant has only just begun. The reason trees share food and communicate is that they need each other. It takes a forest to create a microclimate suitable for tree growth and sustenance. So it’s not surprising that isolated trees have far shorter lives than those living connected together in forests. Perhaps the saddest plants of all are those we have enslaved in our agricultural systems. They seem to have lost the ability to communicate, and, as Wohlleben says, are thus rendered deaf and dumb. “Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes,” he advocates, “so that they’ll be more talkative in the future.” Opening
Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World (The Mysteries of Nature Book 1))
...we are changed as technology offers us substitutes for connecting with each other face-to-face. We are offered robots and a whole world of machine-mediated relationships on networked devices. As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting “rid” of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they “reveal too much.” They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. It is more efficient, they say. Things that happen in “real time” take too much time. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world “unplugged” does not signify, does not satisfy. After an evening of avatar-to avatar talk in a networked game, we feel, at one moment, in possession of a full social life and, in the next, curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention. In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?
Sherry Turkle
Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude-even dishonor and betrayal-to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self-effacement, surrender to the "others," disavowal of any personal dignity or freedom-on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces and that he avoids partly by his guilty self-accusation. The answer is not far to seek: the depressed person avoids the possibility of independence and more life precisely because there are what threaten him with destruction and death. He holds on to the people who have enslaved him in a network of crushing obligations, belittling interaction, precisely because these people are his shelter, his strength, his protection against the world. Like most everyone else the depressed person is a coward who will not stand alone on his own center, who cannot draw from within himself the necessary strength to face up to life. So he embeds himself in others; he is sheltered by the necessary and willingly accepts it. But now his tragedy is plain to see: his necessity has become trivial, and so his slavish, dependent, depersonalized life has lost its meaning. It is frightening to be in such a bind. One chooses slavery because it is safe and meaningful; then one loses the meaning of it, but fears to move out of it. One has literally died to life but must remain physically in this world. And thus the torture of depressive psychosis: to remain steeped in one's failure and yet to justify it, to continue to draw a sense of worthwhileness out of it.
Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
I am trying to imagine under what novel features despotism may appear in the world. In the first place, I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest…. Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it tried to prepare charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. It likes to see the citizens enjoy themselves, provided that they think of nothing but enjoyment. It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge of it. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasure, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living? Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often even regard it as beneficial. Having thus taken each citizen in turn in its powerful grasp and shaped him to its will, government then extends its embrace to include the whole of society. It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.
Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)