Shoshana Zuboff Quotes

#1. Computer mediation seems to bathe action in a more conditional light: perhaps it happened; perhaps it didn't. Without the layeredrichness of direct sensory engagement, the symbolic medium seems thin, flat, and fragile.

Shoshana Zuboff

#2. As information technology restructures the work situation, it abstracts thought from action.

Shoshana Zuboff

#3. Technological change defines the horizon of our material world as it shapes the limiting conditions of what is possible and what is barely imaginable. It erodesassumptions about the nature of our reality, the "pattern" in which we dwell, and lays open new choices.

Shoshana Zuboff

#4. Authority is the spiritual dimension of power because it depends upon faith in a system of meaning that decrees the necessity of the hierarchical order and so provides for the unity of imperative control.

Shoshana Zuboff

#5. Ordinary experience has to be made extraordinary in order to become accessible to reflection.

Shoshana Zuboff

#6. The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.

Shoshana Zuboff

#7. Labor came to humanity with the fall from grace and was at best a penitential sacrifice enabling purity through humiliation. Laborwas toil, distress, trouble, fatigue
an exertion both painful and compulsory. Labor was our animal condition, struggling to survive in dirt and darkness.

Shoshana Zuboff

#8. Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can't meet.

Shoshana Zuboff

#9. Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

Shoshana Zuboff

#10. Technology represents intelligence systematically applied to the problem of the body. It functions to amplify and surpass the organic limits of the body; it compensates for the body's fragility and vulnerability ...

Shoshana Zuboff

#11. Life is good when you live from your roots. Your values are a critical source of energy, enthusiasm, and direction. Work is meaningful and fun when it's an expression of your true core.

Shoshana Zuboff

#12. Technology makes the world a new place.

Shoshana Zuboff

#13. Computerization brings about an essential change in the way the worker can know the world and, with it, a crisis of confidence inthe possibility of certain knowledge.

Shoshana Zuboff

#14. Learning has replaced control as the fundamental role of management.

Shoshana Zuboff

#15. Skilled workers historically have been ambivalent toward automation, knowing that the bodies it would augment or replace were theoccasion for both their pain and their power.

Shoshana Zuboff

#16. We know how to punish retailers and manufacturers that don't provide quality and value. But we're lousy at fighting effectively for what we really need - reliable insurance policies; affordable health care; safe, healthy food.

Shoshana Zuboff

#17. Earlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks. In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual content of work at all levels. Work comes to depend on an ability to understand, respond to, manage, and create value from information.

Shoshana Zuboff

#18. Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.

Shoshana Zuboff