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. – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
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.’ – Howard Rheingold
You can’t assume any place you go is private because the means of surveillance are becoming so affordable and so invisible. – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
Advertising in the past has been predicated on a mass market and a captive audience. – Howard Rheingold
Kids automatically teach each other how to use technology, but they’re not going to teach each other about the history of democracy, or the importance of taking their voices into the public sphere to create social change. – Howard Rheingold
People move from place to place and job to job, but they no longer need to lose touch. – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
You can’t pick up the telephone and say, ‘Connect me with someone else who has a kid with leukemia.’ – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they’re participating in some meaningful political action. – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
It’s kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens. – Howard Rheingold
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. – Howard Rheingold
