Howard Rheingold Quotes

We didn't even have email when I was in college.

Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat ... ('you're breaking up' is the cry of our time).

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.

Technology has changed the fan/actor interaction quite a bit. Now it's really easy to communicate with a large group of people in a really short time, and that... opens a lot of possibilities. You can do a lot of things with it that you couldn't do before. It's kind of fun to figure out how that can be employed.

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

Everywhere we look, technology has changed our daily lives - from the way we pay our bills, to the way we buy plane tickets or keep in touch with friends and family.

The Internet has transformed many parts of our daily lives, touching everything from how we find information to how we go shopping, get directions, and even stay in touch with friends and family.

Down on the ground, we seem to do anything but make lengthy, robust monologues. We can communicate in an instant almost anywhere. Gone is the slow old letter - itself a monologue, a sort of considered performance of best self - and in its place is the e-mail, the text, the SMS, the tweet.

The way communication works is changing.

What the Internet is great at is building networks.

I'm not a real big text guy. I'm not really into this new age stuff. I don't twit or tweet, but I think face-to-face is a man thing.

Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook, it's so amazing because years ago, when I was growing up and watching movies, there was no way for us to interact with filmmakers at all. You could send a letter, and you'd never know if you were going to hear back or not.

As the world grows and technology grows, it's getting harder to communicate and for kids to socialize.

I'm very aware that when my friends and I sit around over dinner these days, the conversation invariably turns to how crass the world has become. Tweeting? It's one of the silliest things ever.

At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television - by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

I think there's been a gigantic shift in the way we talk to each other, and the way that we communicate with each other. So as a filmmaker, the stuff's always been really interesting to me, and I sort of considered a lot of my films horror films, the ones that were relationship dramas, because I feel like it was very easy to look at modern communication and the Internet and cell phones and all that stuff as horror movies, basically.

The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.

In theory, the Internet should bring us all closer together and slowly eliminate our differences.

Smart phones and social media expand our universe. We can connect with others or collect information easier and faster than ever.

I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in.

People simply don't make eye contact anymore.

In this age of media and Internet access, we are much more talkative than ever before.

Human beings are human beings. They say what they want, don't they? They used to say it across the fence while they were hanging wash. Now they just say it on the Internet.

I still use quill and parchment. I do e-mails, and I write, but I don't go around surfing too much.

Just as characteristic, perhaps, is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post, telegraph, telephone, and popular press.