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

Howard Rheingold

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

Howard Rheingold

" Some critics argue that a tsunami of hogwash has already rendered the Web useless. I disagree. We are indeed inundated by online noise pollution, but the problem is soluble. "

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

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

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

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

Howard Rheingold

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

Howard Rheingold

" Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control. "

Howard Rheingold

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

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

" The Chinese government tried to keep a lid on the SARS crisis, but there were 160 million text messages in three days sent by Chinese citizens. These are early indications that it's going to be difficult for people who used to have control over the news to maintain that level of control. "

Howard Rheingold

" 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. "

Howard Rheingold

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

Howard Rheingold

" 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. "

Howard Rheingold

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

Howard Rheingold

" 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. "

Howard Rheingold

" We like technology because we don't have to talk to anybody. "

Howard Rheingold

" Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn't before possible, new kinds of politics emerge. "

Howard Rheingold

" Its not a global village, but we're in a highly interconnected globe. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Howard Rheingold

" I think there are two aspects to smart environments. One is information embedded in places and things. The other is location awareness, so that devices we carry around know where we are. When you combine those two, you get a lot of possibilities. "

Howard Rheingold