10 Inspiring Howard Rheingold Quotes (Free List)

Howard Rheingold quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Howard Rheingold has a lot to say. In this list we present the 10 best Howard Rheingold quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!

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Howard Rheingold quotes

It is up to us to decide what human means, and exactly how it is different from machine, and what tasks ought and ought not to be trusted to either species of symbol-processing system. But some decisions must be made soon, while the technology is still young. And the deciding must be shared by as many citizens as possible, not just the experts. In that sense, the most important factor in whether we will all see the dawn of a humane, sustainable world in the twenty-first century will be how we deal with these machines a few of us thought up and a lot of us will be using.

— Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology


Mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, war, buy, sell, govern and create.

— Howard Rheingold


There is never going to be a substitute for face-to-face communication, but we have seen since the alphabet, to the telephone and now the Internet, that whenever people find a new way to communicate, they will flock to it.

— Howard Rheingold


Personal computers were created by some teenagers in garages because the, the wisdom of the computer industry was that people didn’t want these little toys on their desk.

— Howard Rheingold


Technologies evolve in the strangest ways. Computers were created to calculate ballistics equations, and now we use them to create amusing illusions. Creating amusing illusions is a big business if you play it right.

— Howard Rheingold


Schoolchildren are not taught how to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate information online – surely there are ways to design web-browsers to help with this task and ways to teach young people how to use the powerful online tools available to them.

— Howard Rheingold


Technology no longer consists just of hardware or software or even services, but of communities. Increasingly, community is a part of technology, a driver of technology, and an emergent effect of technology.

— Howard Rheingold


Inexpensive phones and pay-as-you go services are already spreading mobile phone technology to many parts of that world that never had a wired infrastructure.

— Howard Rheingold


When designers replaced the command line interface with the graphical user interface, billions of people who are not programmers could make use of computer technology.

— Howard Rheingold


The Amish communities of Pennsylvania, despite the retro image of horse-drawn buggies and straw hats, have long been engaged in a productive debate about the consequences of technology.

— Howard Rheingold


A forecasting game is a kind of simulation, a kind of scenario, a kind of teleconference, a kind of artifact from the future – and more – that enlists the participants as ‘first-person forecasters.’

— Howard Rheingold