Howard Rheingold Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I certainly think we're losing a lot of our connections with other people. I fear in my most pessimistic moments that the computer is simply another step down the road which we have already taken quite a few steps on. We're talking to each other on computers because we don't talk across the fence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

We must take responsibility for educating ourselves. Being part of a 'smart mob' doesn't guarantee that you're a responsible participant or collaborator.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy.

Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.

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.

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

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.

Every big company has some little guy who is an enthusiast off in the corner working on technology. In Japan, it is integrated into their high-level strategy. They see it as a communication medium, because for them, just the words  -  and this is the problem that they have with Americans  -  just the words they say to you is not the complete message. Their facial expressions, their body language, there is a lot of context. Also, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well.

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

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.

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

Humans are language machines, computers are language machines.

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.

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

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.

Doesn't it seem ironic that people fear that we might become alienated by communicating with each other through computers, when we are already staring at these boxes in our living rooms for seven or eight hours a day, slack-jawed and saying nothing to anyone on either side and not talking back to it.

There are performances in which the people who have the best muscle skills and musical history may be on the stage, but it's not  -  like a Dead show is not like a usual sit-down performance; the audience does participate.

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

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

It's quintessentially American to transform your family.

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.

We know where the television is - everything has to be a sound bite; everything has to be an image; ideas are okay as long as they don't take more than four or five seconds to explain; candidates and issues are commodities that are sold like cans of soup; entertainment is limited to what a few people believe the lowest common denominator is; and you can't talk back to it.

I think that most people really do need the sort of community you find in an office. Most people are always going to go into an office. If you are a member of a working group and you are not there physically, decisions are made without you.

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.

We can design things that learn, so you can grow an intelligence by creating an environment and creating things that just do it a million time faster than we do.

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.

Active people to revitalize what is really the root of democracy: citizens communicating with each other. Democracy is not just about voting, it's about citizens talking with each other about the issues which concern them. We've lost a great deal of that in the age of the mass media.

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

What the Japanese are, are the Americans of the 21st century. Essentially what is objectionable about them is what was objectionable about Americans when we had the ball. However, they are committed in a way that American technology is not.

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