Quotes from Howard Rheingold

People move from place to place and job to job, but they no longer need to lose touch.

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

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.'

Young voters are crucial. The trend over recent years has been for them to drift away. So anything that gets young voters interested in the electoral process not only has an immediate effect, but has an effect for years and years.

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

Attention is the fundamental instrument we use for learning, thinking, communicating, deciding, yet neither parents nor schools spend any time helping young people learn how to manage information streams and control the ways they deploy their attention.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Soon the digital divide will not be between the haves and the have-nots. It will be between the know-hows and the non-know-hows.

The more material there is, the more need there is for filters. You don't need a printing press anymore, but you do need people who know how to cultivate sources, double-check information and put the brand of legitimacy on it.

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.

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.

Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy.

The idea that your spouse or your parents don't know where you are at all times may be part of the past. Is that good or bad? Will that make for better marriages or worse marriages? I don't know.

We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.

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.

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.

Unlike with the majority of library books, when you enter a term into a search engine there is no guarantee that what you will find is authoritative, accurate or even vaguely true.

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.

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.

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