Magic and Loss Quotes

“As I sat alone at the computer hour after hour it seemed I was learning “computers.” In fact, I was learning culture.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Tweets are not diseased rings of glitchy minds. They’re epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, captions, slogans, and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art

“Cruise through the gargantuan sites—YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo!—and it’s as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web’s aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet’s glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“If all three major American TV networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) had been broadcasting for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for sixty years, they wouldn’t have created the amount of content uploaded to YouTube in two weeks.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“As any American with children knows, our children have at least one bright, clear reason for being: to furnish subjects for digital photographs that can be corrected, cropped, captioned, organized, categorized, albumized, broadcast, turned into screen savers, and brandished on online social networks.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“A seminar topic one day was “the erotics of pedagogy”; around the table we were expected to examine our sexual fantasies about our professor.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Your device may have failed. But everything you care about is in the Cloud.” And with that I discovered the apotheosis of data, the instant when pixels and bytes quicken into divinity. Text, images, film, and music had endured the death of the three-dimensional, time-and-space-occupying matter in which they were engraved. The stuff of consciousness”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Audiophiles now miss vinyl, and I miss those calls.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“I don’t know why the telephone, the analog landline telephone, was never formally mourned. What a many-splendored experience it once was to talk on the phone. You’d dial a number, rarely more than seven digits, typically known by heart and fingers.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Virtual reality was an abject failure right up to the moment it wasn’t. In this way it has followed the course charted by a few other breakout technologies. They don’t evolve in an iterative way, gradually gaining usefulness. Instead they seem hardly to advance at all, moving forward in fits and starts, through shame spirals and bankruptcies and hype and defensive crouches—until one day, in a sudden about-face, they utterly, totally win.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Hurley didn’t seem to care that porn was where the money was, or the innovation. Instead he seemed to see it as I came to: as a pixilated kudzu, a plant charming enough in itself but rapacious in an ecosystem and capable of choking off other kinds of growth. The predator plant I described earlier.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“That’s called “surfing” or sometimes “stalking,” and it may appear unfocused. In fact, as the lexicographer and publisher Lizzie Skurnick puts it, it requires no less than rapt attention not to lose one’s place. Reading a book straight through is much easier. For many of us this kind of Web project is also highly satisfying.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“But every now and then, when the posters on these sites muttered about “lurkers,” I’d shudder like a Soviet mole in the Pentagon. Because, yes, I lurked: I visited boards but didn’t post; I took without giving.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Spritz is for not-real readers, evidently. And here’s where our most sacred class values come in, pounded with a mallet. It’s no surprise that the Atlantic and the New Yorker serve as the old guardians, policing the borders of literacy. Spritz works, they concede, for stuff you have to read—discovery, briefs, memos, and social media “updates” for data merchants and info tradesmen—but not for the pleasure reading of books that defines the bona fide man of leisure and letters. Juxtaposing a moral line on a class line, Spritz, several reviewers argue, is not for virtuous people who like to read. It is for subliterate business types who have to read.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art

“many apps are to the Web what bottled water is to tap:”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Back issues had piled up on my coffee table and then become part of recycling, landfills, and compost. They weren’t culture; they were carbon.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“It’s a gift if you can do it. They say it works even if you don’t believe in it. Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“The program let you practice logical proofs, and it was so beautiful and fast I almost ached to use it.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“For a parent this time-consuming vocation has twin payoffs: it wins you a break from your actual children while bringing you closer to their images. Pictures of kids, like idealized Victorian boys and girls, can be seen but not heard.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“in the Internet age we form families so we can produce, distribute, and display digital photos of ourselves.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“The turn away from the BlackBerry and toward the iPhone is a reckoning with our essential nature and how we currently process, deploy, and enjoy symbolic communication.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Over the past two decades screens have proliferated, filling our purses, pockets, and bedside tables. The living room is no longer configured around a single blazing digital fireplace, the television; instead it flashes with decentralized brushfires: ereaders, tablets, laptops, desktops, smartphones, televisions, refrigerator screens. As for the radios and bookshelves that were supposed to vanish with the digitalization of the American home, they’ve stubbornly remained.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“For days I stayed close to #freeskip, refreshing my search like a drugged monkey.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“It’s no wonder that a discourse around “mindfulness” and meditation has grown up in response to a digital world of wall-to-wall stimulus.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“There’s no place to get a breath in the Twitter interface; all our thoughts live in stacked capsules, crunched up to stay small, as in some dystopic hive of the future. Or maybe not the future. Maybe now.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“If it’s ever fair to say that anything has “changed everything,” it’s fair to say so about the Internet.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“In those days, “Dartmouth sysprog” sounded tantalizing to me—the way “lead singer” sounded to some of my classmates.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet