Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Howard Rheingold - Page 2

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

What person doesn't search online about their disease after they are diagnosed?

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.

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.

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.

Technology is my native tongue. I'm online six hours a day.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Pay attention to what you're paying attention to.

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

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.

Mobile phones amplify human talents for cooperation.

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.

The body is just the vehicle for something else.

You know back when there were light shows, there was this thing for people to sync into together. And the more people got synced into it, the more sync started happening. I guess it's just the size of the venue, and traveling around and so forth that it doesn't happen anymore. I don't know why.

If 80,000,000 polygons per second is reality, what happens to you when you live in a world 160,000,000?

Technological civilization has now dominated the earth to the point where there is a big question what is going to happen next.

We've got a planet in which we don't want to have everybody having sex, and most people are lonely anyway.

Now of course like, you know fancy go to the opera and see drama and they regard them as high culture. And these, are really people for the most part who get uptighter. The idea that people you know might take their clothes off and dance in the street.

The areas of the brain that have to do with speech are very connected with the same parallel processors that have to do with the kind of ballistic calculations you need to hit small game with a rock.

What is it about sex? Is it the sensations, or is it the meanings and the communication game that's tied into that.

There is the global teenager hypothesis, that what happened in the '60s in America was that there was, the baby boom cohort grew up at the same time that television and popular music grew up, so that we had this carrier frequency that we all tuned into that gave us the feeling of a common culture, even though I was in Phoenix and someone was in Des Moines. That now we are getting the global cohort at the same time we have our first global communications. MTV is everywhere.

We don't have a revolution, and we don't have the time for evolution, where does it come from? It must come from some kind of shared experience that everybody agrees with.

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.

We must take responsibility for educating ourselves. Being part of a 'smart mob' doesn't guarantee that you're a responsible participant or collaborator.

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.

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.

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.

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

The industrial revolution took the father out of the home and put the kids in school. And then everyone had their own little scene.

There are actual communication systems being built to enable eye surgeons to get inside the eye, and vascular surgeons to get inside the arteries. You could see a social reaction in which people would want to regulate this technology because they are threatened by it, and thereby cause a lot of harm. There are several scenarios that are happening at once. The other scenario is that the Japanese are going for this in a big way.

Telecommuting has its advantages and it has its limits. I think we need to find that sweet spot in between where it helps the environment, it helps people, but it doesn't alienate us and it doesn't cause our organizations to fall apart by centrifugal force.

The world is restructuring, and all of the enemies that used to exist are kind of gone, so now they are looking out for new enemies.

My mission is to try to get a lot more global view.

The entire human race faced a singularity when one small group discovered, ooh, technology. We can live a different way. Eventually, that spelled the death of the old way of life.

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 the one thing humans are is language wizards.

There are always a few people who are hyper-normal.

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

Humans are language machines, computers are language machines.

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

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.

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

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."

The mediated world has approached us from a lot of different directions and we have freely chosen our automobiles and our skyscrapers and our televisions and our telephones and our computers because they have given us power and freedom. Now we are beginning to notice there's a price to pay for them. It's all interconnected, the good stuff and the bad stuff comes together.

There is sort of a continuing problem of putting a moral template on the future that is based on the morality of today.

We are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.

All you have to do is mate.

The neural network is this kind of technology that is not an algorithm, it is a network that has weights on it, and you can adjust the weights so that it learns. You teach it through trials.

The great power of the Internet is it allows people who don't know each other... to connect with people with shared interests. The shared interests might be that 'I have a kid with leukemia.' Or, 'I'm a Nazi.' It gives marginalized people more power.

It's quintessentially American to transform your family.

The audience is a big part of the show.