Howard Rheingold quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Its not a global village, but we're in a highly interconnected globe.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.'

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • A phone tree isn't an ancient form of political organizing, but you have to call every person.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • It's kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.

  • Like most modern Americans, I assume individuality is not only a fundamental value, but a goal in life, an art form.

  • Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn't before possible, new kinds of politics emerge.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Any disease support community is a place of deep bonds and empathy, and there are thousands if not tens of thousands of them.

  • I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Democracy is not just voting for your leaders; it's really premised upon ordinary citizens understanding the issues.

  • There's a direct relationship between how difficult it is to send a message and how strongly it is received.

  • 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,

  • Finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence, of making it possible for people to see a pattern where they didn't see anything before.

  • Craigslist is about authenticity. Craig has paid his dues, and people respect him.

  • Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.

  • 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.

  • Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads.

  • Knowing of how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is, like it or not, an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they're participating in some meaningful political action.

  • Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Advertising in the past has been predicated on a mass market and a captive audience.

  • Flash mobbing may be a fad that passes away, or it may be an indicator of things to come.

  • 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.

  • You can't pick up the telephone and say, 'Connect me with someone else who has a kid with leukemia.'

  • 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.

  • We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.

  • By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.

  • Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy.

  • 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.

  • Technology is my native tongue. I'm online six hours a day.

  • 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.

  • On the Internet, it is assumed people are in business to sell out, not to build something they can pass along to their grandkids.

  • 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.

  • 1947 America blasted off.

  • All you have to do is mate.

  • American families don't work. There is an illusion that they do.

  • Americans love technology, like jet planes and hot rods and televisions. It's a real conflict between the denial of, "gee this is going to break people out of their regular frames," and "gee it's a new technology I have got to have it."

  • Any virtual community that works, works because people put in some time.

  • Back in the really early days, the men went out hunting, the women stayed home with the kids, and would hold the kid in one arm against the heart, so that's the left, and with the right arm they would throw. And it turns out you cannot make that calculation in real time. You have to have an algorithm set up. So these brain mechanisms evolved in order to do that, and when they evolved, the thing is that where there is a useful capability it often adapts to places it wasn't evolved for.

  • 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.

  • Dinosaurs grew feathers for heat regulation, but the ones that started flying started becoming birds.

  • Essentially pursuit of happiness is saying, everything's allowed until we come down on it.

  • Everything is danger, but we pretend that it's not.

  • Everything is removed. You're actually doing something dangerous when you get in your car, when you're getting on an airplane, or having sex.

  • Human beings were human beings anatomically for several hundred thousand years, wandering around, hunting and gathering. And then suddenly, at the same time they started painting in caves they started multiplying.

  • Humans are language machines, computers are language machines.

  • Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.

  • I guess music in general is the transportation business.

  • I think the one thing humans are is language wizards.

  • 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.

  • I usually try to check quotes with people just to make sure things work out.

  • If 80,000,000 polygons per second is reality, what happens to you when you live in a world 160,000,000?

  • If you depend on where the chestnuts are going to be, and where the deer are, you have to be attuned to the outside world.

  • If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool.

  • I'm somebody who seems to stumble into things 10 or 20 years before the rest of the world does.

  • In Japan, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well. So they have problem communicating with computers, so they really feel that what's missing from telephones and computer interfaces is this ability to move around in three-space.

  • In Japanese organizations, before you have a meeting and you've got an idea that you want to get across, you go talk to everyone and list them. And then the meeting, you don't do it American style where everyone gets up and advocates and conflicts and decides, you get up and formalize agreements.

  • In the broad sense design means thinking about what the function or purpose of things or processes are, and translating that into action.

  • It's too late by the way, with virtual reality. You can't put the genie back into the bottle.

  • Kerouac was this kid who exemplified something happening.

  • Let's cut loose what you were given and find what you can seek.

  • Make your own fun. As opposed to consume fun like a package of Spam.

  • Maybe there is no objective experience, but there is a certain way of interacting with all the subjective experiences.

  • Mobile phones amplify human talents for cooperation.

  • My mission is to try to get a lot more global view.

  • Now of course like, you know fancy go to the opera and see drama and they regard them as high culture. And these, are really people for the most part who get uptighter. The idea that people you know might take their clothes off and dance in the street.

  • One of the things we know now that we didn't know then, is that revolutions are very painful to a lot of people. And that at the stage that we have evolved to now, a revolution would be extremely painful.

  • Pay attention to what you're paying attention to.

  • See technology used to be our friends. But now, nobody is quite so sure.

  • Technological civilization has now dominated the earth to the point where there is a big question what is going to happen next.

  • Technology is knowledge of how the universe works that enables you to change the world.

  • The areas of the brain that have to do with speech are very connected with the same parallel processors that have to do with the kind of ballistic calculations you need to hit small game with a rock.

  • The audience is a big part of the show.

  • The body is just the vehicle for something else.

  • The entire human race faced a singularity when one small group discovered, ooh, technology. We can live a different way. Eventually, that spelled the death of the old way of life.

  • The first art in caves were really psychedelic experiences, and the reason that they were is because the tribal encyclopedia, the amount of information that people needed to know in order to move to a new way of life, suddenly increased over that period of time.

  • The great power of the Internet is it allows people who don't know each other... to connect with people with shared interests. The shared interests might be that 'I have a kid with leukemia.' Or, 'I'm a Nazi.' It gives marginalized people more power.

  • The industrial revolution took the father out of the home and put the kids in school. And then everyone had their own little scene.

  • The manufacturing and packaging of homogeneous experience is what politics in America is about.

  • The neural network is this kind of technology that is not an algorithm, it is a network that has weights on it, and you can adjust the weights so that it learns. You teach it through trials.

  • The Western model for a meeting is you have an agenda and you come in and everyone says things.

  • The world is restructuring, and all of the enemies that used to exist are kind of gone, so now they are looking out for new enemies.

  • There actually are buildings that existed in cyberspace before they built it.

  • There are actual communication systems being built to enable eye surgeons to get inside the eye, and vascular surgeons to get inside the arteries. You could see a social reaction in which people would want to regulate this technology because they are threatened by it, and thereby cause a lot of harm. There are several scenarios that are happening at once. The other scenario is that the Japanese are going for this in a big way.

  • There are always a few people who are hyper-normal.

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