“You can’t have an industrial revolution, you can’t have democracies, you can’t have populations who can govern themselves until you have literacy. The printing press simply unlocked literacy.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Democracy is not just voting for your leaders; it’s really premised upon ordinary citizens understanding the issues.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Any virtual community that works, works because people put in some time.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires. And it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks; marks on clay in that time.”
― Howard Rheingold
“I want to be very careful about judging and how much to generalize about the use of media being pathological. For some people, it’s a temptation and a pathology; for others, it’s a lifeline.”
― Howard Rheingold
“You can’t assume any place you go is private because the means of surveillance are becoming so affordable and so invisible.”
― Howard Rheingold
“By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.”
― Howard Rheingold
“It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We’re entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Personal computers were created by some teenagers in garages because the, the wisdom of the computer industry was that people didn’t want these little toys on their desk.”
― Howard Rheingold
“We think of them as mobile phones, but the personal computer, mobile phone and the Internet are merging into some new medium like the personal computer in the 1980s or the Internet in the 1990s.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Mindfulness means being aware of how you’re deploying your attention and making decisions about it, and not letting the tweet or the buzzing of your BlackBerry call your attention.”
― Howard Rheingold
“When designers replaced the command line interface with the graphical user interface, billions of people who are not programmers could make use of computer technology.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, war, buy, sell, govern and create.”
― Howard Rheingold
“We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Although we leave traces of our personal lives with our credit cards and Web browsers today, tomorrow’s mobile devices will broadcast clouds of personal data to invisible monitors all around us.”
― Howard Rheingold
“One thing we didn’t know in 1996 is that it’s very, very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a culture with online advertising.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn’t before possible, new kinds of politics emerge.”
― Howard Rheingold
“People’s social networks do not consist only of people they see face to face. In fact, social networks have been extending because of artificial media since the printing press and the telephone.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Soon the digital divide will not be between the haves and the have-nots. It will be between the know-hows and the non-know-hows.”
― Howard Rheingold
“A lot of people use collaborative technologies badly, then abandon them. They aren’t ‘plug-and-play.’ The invisible part is the social skill necessary to use them.”
― Howard Rheingold
“We like technology because we don’t have to talk to anybody.”
― Howard Rheingold
“I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they’re participating in some meaningful political action.”
― Howard Rheingold
“It’s kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.”
― Howard Rheingold
“The AP has only so many reporters, and CNN only has so many cameras, but we’ve got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access.”
― Howard Rheingold
“There is an elementary level of trust that is necessary for community. You have to be able to trust that your neighbors aren’t going to look into your mailbox.”
― Howard Rheingold
“The two parts of technology that lower the threshold for activism and technology is the Internet and the mobile phone. Anyone who has a cause can now mobilize very quickly.”
― Howard Rheingold
“On the Internet, it is assumed people are in business to sell out, not to build something they can pass along to their grandkids.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Advertising in the past has been predicated on a mass market and a captive audience.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Technology no longer consists just of hardware or software or even services, but of communities. Increasingly, community is a part of technology, a driver of technology, and an emergent effect of technology.”
― Howard Rheingold
“People’s behavior will change with technology. I know very few young people who can’t type out a text message on their phone with one thumb, for instance.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Young voters are crucial. The trend over recent years has been for them to drift away. So anything that gets young voters interested in the electoral process not only has an immediate effect, but has an effect for years and years.”
― Howard Rheingold
“There’s a direct relationship between how difficult it is to send a message and how strongly it is received.”
― Howard Rheingold
“The Chinese government tried to keep a lid on the SARS crisis, but there were 160 million text messages in three days sent by Chinese citizens. These are early indications that it’s going to be difficult for people who used to have control over the news to maintain that level of control.”
― Howard Rheingold
“It’s more important to me to get an e-mail that says, ‘I saw your page and it changed my life,’ than how many hits the page got.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Craigslist is about authenticity. Craig has paid his dues, and people respect him.”
― Howard Rheingold
“You can’t pick up the telephone and say, ‘Connect me with someone else who has a kid with leukemia.’”
― Howard Rheingold
“People move from place to place and job to job, but they no longer need to lose touch.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Kids automatically teach each other how to use technology, but they’re not going to teach each other about the history of democracy, or the importance of taking their voices into the public sphere to create social change.”
― Howard Rheingold
“The Orwellian vision was about state-sponsored surveillance. Now it’s not just the state, it’s your nosy neighbor, your ex-spouse and people who want to spam you.”
― Howard Rheingold
“The more material there is, the more need there is for filters. You don’t need a printing press anymore, but you do need people who know how to cultivate sources, double-check information and put the brand of legitimacy on it.”
― Howard Rheingold
“A forecasting game is a kind of simulation, a kind of scenario, a kind of teleconference, a kind of artifact from the future – and more – that enlists the participants as ‘first-person forecasters.’”
― Howard Rheingold
“The idea that your spouse or your parents don’t know where you are at all times may be part of the past. Is that good or bad? Will that make for better marriages or worse marriages? I don’t know.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Markets are as old as the crossroads. But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies, such as the joint-stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double-entry bookkeeping.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we’ve known them.”
― Howard Rheingold
“People look at me, and I dress a little unusually and they think, ‘Oh you must be from California.’ Of course, people in California think, ‘Oh you must be from from Mars,’ so, you know, your next-door neighbour is not necessarily the person that you are going to make a connection with.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Its not a global village, but we’re in a highly interconnected globe.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Inexpensive phones and pay-as-you go services are already spreading mobile phone technology to many parts of that world that never had a wired infrastructure.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Journalists don’t have audiences – they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Attention is the fundamental instrument we use for learning, thinking, communicating, deciding, yet neither parents nor schools spend any time helping young people learn how to manage information streams and control the ways they deploy their attention.”
― Howard Rheingold
“A phone tree isn’t an ancient form of political organizing, but you have to call every person.”
― Howard Rheingold
“I think there are two aspects to smart environments. One is information embedded in places and things. The other is location awareness, so that devices we carry around know where we are. When you combine those two, you get a lot of possibilities.”
― Howard Rheingold
“We already know that spam is a huge downside of online life. If we’re going to be spammed on our telephones wherever we go, I think we’re going to reject these devices.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Communicating online goes back to the Defense Department’s Arpanet which started in 1969. There was something called Usenet that started in 1980, and this gave people an opportunity to talk about things that people on these more official networks didn’t talk about.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Any disease support community is a place of deep bonds and empathy, and there are thousands if not tens of thousands of them.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Schoolchildren are not taught how to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate information online – surely there are ways to design web-browsers to help with this task and ways to teach young people how to use the powerful online tools available to them.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Entire books are being written about the distractions of social media. I don’t believe media compel distraction, but I think it’s clear that they afford it.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Humans are humans because we are able to communicate with each other and to organize to do things together that we can’t do individually.”
― Howard Rheingold
“I’m somebody who seems to stumble into things 10 or 20 years before the rest of the world does.”
― Howard Rheingold
“There is never going to be a substitute for face-to-face communication, but we have seen since the alphabet, to the telephone and now the Internet, that whenever people find a new way to communicate, they will flock to it.”
― Howard Rheingold
“I’ve spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Flash mobbing may be a fad that passes away, or it may be an indicator of things to come.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Technology is my native tongue. I’m online six hours a day.”
― Howard Rheingold
“The Amish communities of Pennsylvania, despite the retro image of horse-drawn buggies and straw hats, have long been engaged in a productive debate about the consequences of technology.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Until fairly recently, Amish teachers would reprimand the student who raised his or her hand as being too individualistic. Calling attention to oneself, or being ‘prideful,’ is one of the cardinal Amish worries. Having your name or photo in the papers, even talking to the press, is almost a sin.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Like most modern Americans, I assume individuality is not only a fundamental value, but a goal in life, an art form.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Technologies evolve in the strangest ways. Computers were created to calculate ballistics equations, and now we use them to create amusing illusions. Creating amusing illusions is a big business if you play it right.”
― Howard Rheingold
“Unlike with the majority of library books, when you enter a term into a search engine there is no guarantee that what you will find is authoritative, accurate or even vaguely true.”
― Howard Rheingold
“As for Twitter, I’ve found that you have to learn how to make it add value rather than subtract hours from one’s day. Certainly, it affords narcissism and distraction.”
― Howard Rheingold
“What person doesn’t search online about their disease after they are diagnosed?”
― Howard Rheingold
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