Howard Rheingold Quotes

I don't believe in simulationism, I believe that the word is already old-fashioned. As I see it, new technologies are substituting a virtual reality for an actual reality. And this is more than a phase: it's a definite change.

Virtuality will destroy reality.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

The practice of photography is no longer a means for recording reality. Instead, it has become reality itself

The true problem with virtual reality is that orientation is no longer possible. We have lost our points of reference to orient ourselves. The de-realized man is a disoriented man.

The world in your mind is as real as the world outside of it.

Reality isn't what it used to be.

The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

You can play with the reality and the 3D is a tool to play with it.

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

Those who are awake all live in the same world. Those who are asleep live in their own worlds.

The private experience that you perceive forms your world, period. But which world do you inhabit? For if you altered your private sensations of reality, then that world, seemingly the only one, would also change. You do go through transformations of beliefs all the time, and your perception of the world is different. You seem to be, no longer, the person you that you were. You are quite correct — you are not the person that you were, and your world has changed, and not just symbolically.

We are now able to create virtual realities on computers. Are we all living in one created by someone in the future?

The artificial world that we create through images will essentially become real.

The world is a lie...not you and me.

We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.

Mr. Bush, I don't recognize the world you paint. I find your speech a form of sheer propaganda, having almost no relationship to reality. ...You can't 'stay the course' because you don't have a course.

Magic [makes] possible today what science will make a reality tomorrow.

These new technologies try to make virtual reality more powerful than actual reality, which is the true accident. The day when virtual reality becomes more powerful than reality will be the day of the big accident. Mankind never experienced such an extraordinary accident.

I believe that Virtual Reality will hit it big time. I know that some of my colleagues disagree, but I believe in it.

There's a new reality born every minute. Unless one is a believer in predestination (in which case I'll call the prestidigitator), or other puppet-like restraints on our powers, one is free to imagine and effect changes on the world. And if enough people do it, there are big changes. These things happen. Anything can.

Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.

The digital and physical worlds are starting to come together more seamlessly - it's only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's coming.