Howard Rheingold Quotes - Page 3

A phone tree isn't an ancient form of political organizing, but you have to call every person.

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.

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

The first art in caves were really psychedelic experiences, and the reason that they were is because the tribal encyclopedia, the amount of information that people needed to know in order to move to a new way of life, suddenly increased over that period of time.

It's kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 actually are buildings that existed in cyberspace before they built it.

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.

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.'

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

You can't assume any place you go is private because the means of surveillance are becoming so affordable and so invisible.

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.

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

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.

Finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence, of making it possible for people to see a pattern where they didn't see anything before.

By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.

Mobile phones amplify human talents for cooperation.

Any disease support community is a place of deep bonds and empathy, and there are thousands if not tens of thousands of them.

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.