Howard Rheingold Quotes

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.

Technological 'revolutions' don't really overthrow anything - they simply append a new and dynamic market to that which went before.

I think technology and smartphones created a huge paradigm shift that we can't fully comprehend, and I think in a lot of ways things are changing faster than we can really process.

If you want to move through a virtual reality it’s called a video game, it’s been around forever.

There was a very consistent creation of a virtual reality, and eventually it collided with our old-fashioned, ordinary reality.

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.

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

The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.

Virtual Reality is going to be an important technology. I am pretty confident about this.

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

Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.

One day the virtual world might win over the real world.

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.

Lasting social change unfolds from inside out: from the inner to the outer being, from inner to outer realities.

We often hear that the digital age has resulted in a devaluing of time, space, and place. But I wonder if theseclaims are exaggerated.

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.

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

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

The biggest effect of the personal computer revolution has been to allow millions and millions of people to experience computers themselves decades before they ever would have in the old paradigm.

The crisis is not in the outward technological advancement, but rather in the way we think, and the way we live, and the way we feel. I think that is where a revolution must take place.

Sex times technology equals the future.

Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.

The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief.

Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority.