Howard Rheingold Quotes

American families don't work. There is an illusion that they do.

It's quintessentially American to transform your family.

There may be a jump on electronic LSD with virtual reality, and the problem just with saying LSD, enough time has gone by that there is no distinction between psychedelics and other drugs.

Mindfulness means being aware of how you're deploying your attention and making decisions about it, and not letting the tweet or the buzzing of your BlackBerry call your attention.

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.

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 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.

Any virtual community that works, works because people put in some time.

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

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.

Humans are language machines, computers are language machines.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The body is just the vehicle for something else.

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

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

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

When the Appollonian strain took over in Greece, they made them into theaters and the original dramas.

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

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

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

There actually are buildings that existed in cyberspace before they built it.

Pay attention to what you're paying attention to.

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

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

Mobile phones amplify human talents for cooperation.

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

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

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