Quotes by Howard Rheingold

“[American cell phone operators] pitched SMS to 30-year-old executives instead of 15-year-old girls, and this was a mistake.”

“SMS was commercially an accident ? it was not originally seen as a revenue-producing service, but today 100 billion SMS messages are being exchanged every month.”

“The great power of the Internet is it allows people who dont know each other... to connect with people with shared interests. The shared interests might be that I have a kid with leukemia. Or, Im a Nazi. It gives marginalized people more power.”

“When it comes to technology, youre in a position of your children having to teach you. How often do kids have any power or authority? How often do parents come to them and listen to them? But it takes a parent with some courage to admit they dont know and want to learn.”

“There needs to be more involvement between mainstream media and the digital world. If you dont learn from an editor or a newsroom, where do those values of journalism come from?”

“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.”

It is up to us to decide what human means, and exactly how it is different from machine, and what tasks ought and ought not to be trusted to either species of symbol-processing system. But some decisions must be made soon, while the technology is still young. And the deciding must be shared by as many citizens as possible, not just the experts. In that sense, the most important factor in whether we will all see the dawn of a humane, sustainable world in the twenty-first century will be how we deal with these machines a few of us thought up and a lot of us will be using.

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.

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.

Personal computers were created by some teenagers in garages because the, the wisdom of the computer industry was that people didnt want these little toys on their desk.

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.

Schoolchildren are not taught how to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate information online - surely there are ways to design web-browsers to help with this task and ways to teach young people how to use the powerful online tools available to them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.