Howard Rheingold Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.'

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.

You wash the roots very carefully before you plant.

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.

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

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

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

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

There is sort of a continuing problem of putting a moral template on the future that is based on the morality of today.

I think the one thing humans are is language wizards.

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

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

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

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

I guess music in general is the transportation business.

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

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.

1947 America blasted off.

Kerouac was this kid who exemplified something happening.

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

The audience is a big part of the show.

All you have to do is mate.

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

We are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.

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.

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