Best 103 quotes of Howard Rheingold on MyQuotes

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.

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

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.'

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.

American families don't work. There is an illusion that they do.

Americans love technology, like jet planes and hot rods and televisions. It's a real conflict between the denial of, "gee this is going to break people out of their regular frames," and "gee it's a new technology I have got to have it.

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

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

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

Back in the really early days, the men went out hunting, the women stayed home with the kids, and would hold the kid in one arm against the heart, so that's the left, and with the right arm they would throw. And it turns out you cannot make that calculation in real time. You have to have an algorithm set up. So these brain mechanisms evolved in order to do that, and when they evolved, the thing is that where there is a useful capability it often adapts to places it wasn't evolved for.

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

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.

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.

Craigslist is about authenticity. Craig has paid his dues, and people respect him.

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

Dinosaurs grew feathers for heat regulation, but the ones that started flying started becoming birds.

Doesn't it seem ironic that people fear that we might become alienated by communicating with each other through computers, when we are already staring at these boxes in our living rooms for seven or eight hours a day, slack-jawed and saying nothing to anyone on either side and not talking back to it.

Essentially pursuit of happiness is saying, everything's allowed until we come down on it.

Every big company has some little guy who is an enthusiast off in the corner working on technology. In Japan, it is integrated into their high-level strategy. They see it as a communication medium, because for them, just the words  -  and this is the problem that they have with Americans  -  just the words they say to you is not the complete message. Their facial expressions, their body language, there is a lot of context. Also, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well.

Everything is removed. You're actually doing something dangerous when you get in your car, when you're getting on an airplane, or having sex.

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.

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

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.

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.

I certainly think we're losing a lot of our connections with other people. I fear in my most pessimistic moments that the computer is simply another step down the road which we have already taken quite a few steps on. We're talking to each other on computers because we don't talk across the fence.

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.

If you depend on where the chestnuts are going to be, and where the deer are, you have to be attuned to the outside world.

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.

In Japanese organizations, before you have a meeting and you've got an idea that you want to get across, you go talk to everyone and list them. And then the meeting, you don't do it American style where everyone gets up and advocates and conflicts and decides, you get up and formalize agreements.

In Japan, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well. So they have problem communicating with computers, so they really feel that what's missing from telephones and computer interfaces is this ability to move around in three-space.

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

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

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.

I think the one thing humans are is language wizards.

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.

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

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.

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

It's too late by the way, with virtual reality. You can't put the genie back into the bottle.

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.

I usually try to check quotes with people just to make sure things work out.

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.

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.

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

Make your own fun. As opposed to consume fun like a package of Spam.

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.

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

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.

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.

Mobile phones amplify human talents for cooperation.