Howard Rheingold

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“On the Internet, it is assumed people are in business to sell out, not to build something they can pass along to their grandkids.”

“I'm somebody who seems to stumble into things 10 or 20 years before the rest of the world does.”

“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.”

“Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”