Howard Rheingold Quotes

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

Every technology, including the printing press, comes at some price.

We're in a 21st century, transparent and connected world.

We're letting [technology] take us places that we don't want to go.

I am not offering this is a critique of the internet, its just that there are a lot of factors involved. It does offer plenty of possibilities. It also has, it can have, a cheapening effect and I think both exist and I think its true of everything. You could say that about the printing press.

Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.

[Black Mirror] is always about unforeseen consequences and unforeseen problems, it's not usually that someone's created a machine that they want to enslave mankind with, it's someone's invented a new kind of... paperweight that enslaves mankind.

Even things like supermarket self-checkouts, they do mean people's jobs go. It's always worth thinking about the implications of things. Just because something's easier, it doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do.

I don't know how to write a novel in the world of cellphones. I don't know how to write a novel in the world of Google, in which all factual information is available to all characters. So I have to stand on my head to contrive a plot in which the characters lose their cellphone and are separated from technology.

Technology has become such a big part of our humanity. We have the Internet on 24 hours a day, even when we're sleeping.

With the advent of technology the world has surely become a smaller place.

We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the Internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges's 'Aleph.'

It wasn't like I was specifically wanting to write songs about technology. It's just what I lived, what I was experiencing growing up.

I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.

Living in the age of information and technology, everything gets out so easy and so, so quickly.

You can't think of technology as separate from all of our human drama anymore.

We must face the fact that we are on the brink of times when man may be able to magnify his intellectual and inventive capability, just as in the nineteenth century he used machines to magnify his physical capacity. Again, as then, our innocence is lost. And again, of course, the innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The loss demands attention, not denial.

The world is going mad at an accelerating rate and television is the Typhoid Mary of this madness.

Technology is knowledge of how the universe works that enables you to change the world.

I hate the modern day the kids live in. I don't think it's very cool. Everyone's interconnected.

In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs.

We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes--or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.

I think the Internet is the single greatest revolution to come around in a long time. It's so convenient, it's frightening. I can definitely see why some people don't leave their house anymore.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.