Howard Rheingold Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

Flash mobbing may be a fad that passes away, or it may be an indicator of things to come.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's a direct relationship between how difficult it is to send a message and how strongly it is received.

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.

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

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.

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.

Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads.

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.

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.

ngaobera:
a slight inflammation of the throat produced by screaming too much.

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.

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.

Its not a global village, but we're in a highly interconnected globe.

We like technology because we don't have to talk to anybody.

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.

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.

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.

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.

shibui (Japanese)
Beauty of aging. [adjective]

Shibui (shin-BOO-ee), like wabi, sabi, and aware, connotes a certain kind of beauty. Like sabi, and unlike aware, shibui refers to a kind of beauty that only time can reveal. One of the reasons language has such immense emotional power is the way people use symbols to link together several sensory sym-bols to make an emotionally evocative image. Shibui can be used to describe the taste of a certain kind of tea, scenery of a gray, brown, or moss-green color, or the impression a person gets from looking at the face of a certain kind of older person.

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

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

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.

Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy.

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

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.

People move from place to place and job to job, but they no longer need to lose touch.

Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Pay attention to what you're paying attention to.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

If the rule of thumb for attention literacy is to pay attention to your intention, then the heuristic for crap detection is to make skepticism your default.

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

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.