Words matter. These are the best Howard Rheingold Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Craigslist is about authenticity. Craig has paid his dues, and people respect him.
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.
Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we’ve known them.
Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.
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.
People look at me, and I dress a little unusually and they think, ‘Oh you must be from California.’ Of course, people in California think, ‘Oh you must be from from Mars,’ so, you know, your next-door neighbour is not necessarily the person that you are going to make a connection with.
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.
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.
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 are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.
A phone tree isn’t an ancient form of political organizing, but you have to call every person.
It’s kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People’s behavior will change with technology. I know very few young people who can’t type out a text message on their phone with one thumb, for instance.
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.
We like technology because we don’t have to talk to anybody.
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.
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.
By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.
Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn’t before possible, new kinds of politics emerge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although we leave traces of our personal lives with our credit cards and Web browsers today, tomorrow’s mobile devices will broadcast clouds of personal data to invisible monitors all around us.
There’s a direct relationship between how difficult it is to send a message and how strongly it is received.
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.
Advertising in the past has been predicated on a mass market and a captive audience.
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.
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.
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.
