Guess quote

Howard Rheingold [1947-0] American

Rank: 101
Critic

Howard Rheingold is a critic, writer, and teacher; his specialties are on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities.

Computers, Technology, Change, Communication, Design, Trust, War, Wisdom

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.		101
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.	Change, War	102
We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.		103
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.	Communication	104
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.		105
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.		106
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.		107
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.		108
Its not a global village, but we're in a highly interconnected globe.		109
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.	Technology	110
You can't pick up the telephone and say, 'Connect me with someone else who has a kid with leukemia.'		111
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.		112
Like most modern Americans, I assume individuality is not only a fundamental value, but a goal in life, an art form.		113
It's kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.	Trust	114
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.		115
By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.		116
Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.		117
Democracy is not just voting for your leaders; it's really premised upon ordinary citizens understanding the issues.		118
Any virtual community that works, works because people put in some time.		119
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.	Technology	120
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.		121
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.		122
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.		123
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.'		124
You can't assume any place you go is private because the means of surveillance are becoming so affordable and so invisible.		125
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.		126
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.		201
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.		202
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.	Computers, Wisdom	203
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.		204
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.		205
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.		206
Soon the digital divide will not be between the haves and the have-nots. It will be between the know-hows and the non-know-hows.		207
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.		208
We like technology because we don't have to talk to anybody.		209
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.		210
There is an elementary level of trust that is necessary for community. You have to be able to trust that your neighbors aren't going to look into your mailbox.		211
Advertising in the past has been predicated on a mass market and a captive audience.		212
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.		213
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.		214
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.		215
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.		216
Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy.		217
A phone tree isn't an ancient form of political organizing, but you have to call every person.		218
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.		219
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.		220
Any disease support community is a place of deep bonds and empathy, and there are thousands if not tens of thousands of them.		221
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.		222
I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.		223
Technology is my native tongue. I'm online six hours a day.		224
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.	Computers	225
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.		226
What person doesn't search online about their disease after they are diagnosed?		301
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.		302
Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn't before possible, new kinds of politics emerge.		303
I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they're participating in some meaningful political action.		304
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.		305
On the Internet, it is assumed people are in business to sell out, not to build something they can pass along to their grandkids.		306
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.		307
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.		308
There's a direct relationship between how difficult it is to send a message and how strongly it is received.		309
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.		310
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.		311
Craigslist is about authenticity. Craig has paid his dues, and people respect him.		312
People move from place to place and job to job, but they no longer need to lose touch.		313
Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.		314
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.		315
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.		316
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.		317
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.		318
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.	Design	319
I'm somebody who seems to stumble into things 10 or 20 years before the rest of the world does.		320
Flash mobbing may be a fad that passes away, or it may be an indicator of things to come.		321

The script ran 0.019 seconds.