some choice quotations below:
"Do I want to be presented in a way that I would like to be seen? Of course, but 'the way I would like to be seen' would almost certainly be an inaccurate, delusional depiction of who I actually am." (p. 16)
"I fear that most contemporary people are answering questions not because they're flattered by the attention; they're answering questions because they feel as though they deserve to be asked. About everything. Their opinions are special, so they are entitled to a public forum. Their voice is supposed to be heard, lest their life become empty. This, in one paragraph (minus the technology), explains the rise of New Media." (p. 19)
"But how do we tell the difference between an instrument and its sound? And - more importantly - what if we're uninterested in accepting that distinction?" (p. 44)
"If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word coincidence exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists. So, sure, comparing [Kurt] Cobain and [David] Koresh is a little unfair. Although I'm not sure which one it's unfair to. I feel sorry for both of them. I can see it both ways. That's my problem." (p. 45)
"There is no linear continuation: The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. I cannot be traversed." (p. 52)
"It doesn't matter what you can do if you don't know why you're doing it." (p. 56)
"Every time I learn the truth about something, I'm disappointed." (p. 87)
"The more we know, the less we are able to feel." (p. 91)
"There's a visceral, physiological change that only comes from unknown pleasures." (p. 91)
"As a critic, I have more things to say about the depiction of reality on MTV than about the depiction of reality in reality." (p. 94)
"The upside to knowledge is that it enriches every experience, but the downside is that it limits every experience." (p. 94)
"I would simply be seeing something I could not control and would never understand, and I'd be cognizant of a reality we all consciously realize but rarely accept - that almost all of the world happens without us." (p. 99)
"If you know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated. Yet most lives are the same, 95 percent of the time. And most lives aren't extrinsically meaningful, unless you're delusionally self-absorbed or authentically Born Again." (p. 101)
"Everyone sincerely believed that this was the one movie absolutely no one wanted. However, we couldn't agree on who the audience wasn't, so it became a marketing problem." (p. 102)
"Sometimes it's hard to tell if things that happened in your life only happened to you or if they have happened to everyone." (p. 147)
"The mere recognition of an extrinsic reality damages the intrinsic merits of one's own reality. In other words, it's a mistake to (consciously) do what everyone else is doing, just as it's a mistake to (consciously) do the opposite." (p. 151)
"I am open to the possibility that everything has metaphorical merit, and I see no point in sardonically attacking the most predictable failures within any culture. I always prefer to do the opposite, even if my argument becomes insane by necessity." (p. 161)
"If you watch any episode of Seinfeld, you can be 100 percent confident that somebody chuckling in the background is six feet underground. I assume this makes Larry David ecstatic." (p. 164)
"Watch The Daily Show in an apartment full of young progressives and you'll hear them consciously (and unconvincingly) over-laugh at every joke that's delivered, mostly to assure everyone else that they're appropriately informed and predictably leftist." (p. 173)
"One of the principle functions of mass media is to make the world a more fathomable reality - in the short term, it provides assurance and simplicity. But this has a long-term, paradoxical downside. Over time, embracing mass media in its entirety makes people more confused and less secure." (p. 173)
"Watching Mad Men makes me want to trick housewives into buying Tide." (p. 182)
"Conversations between couples are theatrical and symbolic; the first thing anyone realizes the moment they enter a serious relationship is that words (especially during fights) never represent their precise definitions." (p. 206)
"The only people who think the Internet is a calamity are people whose lives have been hurt by it; the only people who insist the Internet is wonderful are those who need it to give their life meaning." (p. 224)
"The degree to which anyone values the Internet is proportional to how valuable the Internet makes that person." (p. 224)
"We are living in a manner that is unnatural. We are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity, and we have unknowingly constructed a simulated world. The benefits of technology are easy to point out (medicine, transportation, the ability to send and receive text messages during Michael Jackson's televised funeral), but they do not compensate for the overall loss of humanity that is its inevitable consequence. As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now." (p. 228)
"Instead of confronting reality and embracing the Experience of Being Alive, I will sit here and read about Animal Collective over the Internet. Again. I will read about Animal Collective again." (p. 229)
