Howard Rheingold Quotes

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.

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.

The body is just the vehicle for something else.

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.

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

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

All you have to do is mate.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

You know back when there were light shows, there was this thing for people to sync into together. And the more people got synced into it, the more sync started happening. I guess it's just the size of the venue, and traveling around and so forth that it doesn't happen anymore. I don't know why.

When the Appollonian strain took over in Greece, they made them into theaters and the original dramas.

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

The mediated world has approached us from a lot of different directions and we have freely chosen our automobiles and our skyscrapers and our televisions and our telephones and our computers because they have given us power and freedom. Now we are beginning to notice there's a price to pay for them. It's all interconnected, the good stuff and the bad stuff comes together.

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.

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

We don't have a revolution, and we don't have the time for evolution, where does it come from? It must come from some kind of shared experience that everybody agrees with.

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.

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.

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