Best 5 quotes of Adam Alter on MyQuotes

It’s our generation’s crack cocaine. People are addicted. We experience withdrawels. We are so driven by this drugs, getting just one hit elicits truly pecular reactions. I’m talking about Likes. « Rameet Chawla » They’ve inconspicuously emerged as the first digital drug to dominate our culture.

Super Mario Bros. hooks newcomers because there are no barriers to playing the game. You can know absolutely nothing about the Nintendo console and still enjoy yourself from the very first minute. There's no need to read motivation-sapping manuals or grind through educational tutorials before you begin. Instead, your avatar, Mario appears on the left-hand side of an almost empty screen. Because the screen is empty, you can push the Nintendo controller's buttons randomly and harmlessly, learning which ones make Mario jump and which ones make him move left and right. You can't move any further left, so you quickly learn to move right. And you aren't reading a guide that tells you which keys are which--instead, you're learning by doing, and enjoying the sense of mastery comes from acquiring knowledge through experience. The first few seconds of gameplay are brilliantly designed to simultaneously do two very difficult things: teach, and preserve the illusion that nothing is being taught at all.

Tech isn’t morally good or bad until it’s wielded by the corporations that fashion it for mass consumption. Apps and platforms can be designed to promote rich social connections; or, like cigarettes, they can be designed to addict. Today, unfortunately, many tech developments do promote addiction.

the essence of good science writing is not the sharing of particular ideas, but the sharing of general approaches to perceiving the world. A book doesn’t succeed because its readers can cite ten new facts; it succeeds because the next time those readers see a person behaving oddly, or the sun at a particular height in the sky, or two birds engaged in an elaborate courtship ritual, they look at those events differently and perhaps more deeply.

Walter Isaacson, who ate dinner with the Jobs family while researching his biography of Steve Jobs, told Bilton that, “No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.” It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply.