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.
Howard RheingoldInexpensive 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 RheingoldThe Western model for a meeting is you have an agenda and you come in and everyone says things.
Howard RheingoldCommunicating 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 RheingoldThere is the global teenager hypothesis, that what happened in the '60s in America was that there was, the baby boom cohort grew up at the same time that television and popular music grew up, so that we had this carrier frequency that we all tuned into that gave us the feeling of a common culture, even though I was in Phoenix and someone was in Des Moines. That now we are getting the global cohort at the same time we have our first global communications. MTV is everywhere.
Howard Rheingold