ATTENTION Quotes

“IF ANYTHING DISTINGUISHES MY GENERATION of American writers, it’s that everyone in my generation became a writer, simply through the act of going online. More words have been written, more words have been read, by my generation than by any other generation in human history.”
― Joshua Cohen, ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction

“The online moguls have tried to persuade us that we’re not losing a nation, we’re gaining a world. Pynchon proposes that both are mere second lives, fakes. Only family is real.”
― Joshua Cohen, ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction

“MEMOIR The genre of an age that’s lost all hope of a biographer.”
― Joshua Cohen, ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction

“The average computer user of good faith who seeks regularly to read the news online now has to exercise the type of critical acumen that scholars of literature have always reserved for the analysis of texts: an intense engagement that seeks out secret meanings, hidden biases, hidden agendas. And what’s more, our fictional average computer user of good faith who seeks regularly to read the news online has to do so even as the news reads him, or her, and modifies itself accordingly.”
― Joshua Cohen, ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction