Howard Rheingold

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

“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.”

“Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.”

“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.”

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

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

“It is up to us to decide what human means, and exactly how it is different from machine, and what tasks ought and ought not to be trusted to either species of symbol-processing system. But some decisions must be made soon, while the technology is still young. And the deciding must be shared by as many citizens as possible, not just the experts. In that sense, the most important factor in whether we will all see the dawn of a humane, sustainable world in the twenty-first century will be how we deal with these machines a few of us thought up and a lot of us will be using.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”