Howard Rheingold Quotes

I feel like kids are getting more and more used to communicating through a glass screen than they are face-to-face, and that worries me a little.

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.

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.

People simply don't make eye contact anymore.

I have a grandson who is 20. He's a computer guy. I'm worried that he can't communicate without his machine. They have no personal contact with people. That's the bad part of technology.

As efficiently as our phones connect us to one another, and as much as we take advantage of that, we must remember that they have the power to alienate us, too.

Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal - be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever - human solitude will increase in direct proportion.

The more people are reached by mass communication, the less they communicate with each other.

The reduction in compassion that happens when we're all behind computer screens is not good for the world.

With technology, there is so much isolation with people now, that there are very few places where you can connect.

We can be incredibly disconnected in this day and age with computers and cell phones.

We're getting so pulled in by computers and technology, and our kids have their face in the computers all day. The human relationship is being diminished by this.

Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don't look at the users on the other side as people. They aren't - they're just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles.

We live in a world where many of us have a lot of friends on Facebook but yet we have lost human connection.

As connected as we are with technology, it's also removed us from having to have human connection, made it more convenient to not be intimate.

I think there's a fear of disconnect sometimes; communication is a huge issue for all of us, from adults to kids, as far as our face-to-face time and our ability to interact with each other without isolating itself to a phone. I think that has to be something that's very challenging.

What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.

I think, as people, we're isolating ourselves. We're talking to each other through our phones, arguing... those divisions freak me out.

We go into restaurants, and people aren't talking anymore. They're texting. While they are sitting at a restaurant with each other. So we're losing this intimacy that we need to have as human beings.

When I was young as a teenager, that was the biggest mystery in the world to me: Why don't people connect?

We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers.

Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.

Twitter is the perpetual cocktail party where everyone is talking at once but nobody is saying anything.

[Internet] technology, like anything else that mankind creates is a tool and that tool can be used for good or for evil, like a light saber. Technology is supposed to bring people together, streamline things and make life easier and in a lot of ways it does that. However, technology can also disconnect you from other people and break down the social network, the real social network of family and friends and interpersonal communication, and isolate people, make them feel alone, make them feel small. So it's a tool that needs to be used correctly.

And connected is helping people stay in touch and maintain empathy for each other, and bandwidth.