Top 50 Howard Rheingold Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to.”

— Howard Rheingold

2. “Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.”

— Howard Rheingold

3. “Any virtual community that works, works because people put in some time.”

— Howard Rheingold

4. “You can’t have an industrial revolution, you can’t have democracies, you can’t have populations who can govern themselves until you have literacy. The printing press simply unlocked literacy.”

— Howard Rheingold

5. “Knowing of how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is, like it or not, an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century.”

— Howard Rheingold

6. “Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.”

— Howard Rheingold

7. “Mobile phones amplify human talents for cooperation.”

— Howard Rheingold

8. “Democracy is not just voting for your leaders; it’s really premised upon ordinary citizens understanding the issues.”

— Howard Rheingold

9. “People’s social networks do not consist only of people they see face to face. In fact, social networks have been extending because of artificial media since the printing press and the telephone.”

— Howard Rheingold

10. “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

11. “You can’t assume any place you go is private because the means of surveillance are becoming so affordable and so invisible.”

— Howard Rheingold

12. “Finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence, of making it possible for people to see a pattern where they didn’t see anything before.”

— Howard Rheingold

13. “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

14. “We must take responsibility for educating ourselves. Being part of a ‘smart mob’ doesn’t guarantee that you’re a responsible participant or collaborator.”

— Howard Rheingold

15. “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

16. “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

17. “I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they’re participating in some meaningful political action.”

— Howard Rheingold

18. “Young voters are crucial. The trend over recent years has been for them to drift away. So anything that gets young voters interested in the electoral process not only has an immediate effect, but has an effect for years and years.”

— Howard Rheingold

19. “Its not a global village, but we’re in a highly interconnected globe.”

— Howard Rheingold

20. “If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool.”

— Howard Rheingold

21. “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

22. “In the broad sense design means thinking about what the function or purpose of things or processes are, and translating that into action.”

— Howard Rheingold

23. “Flash mobbing may be a fad that passes away, or it may be an indicator of things to come.”

— Howard Rheingold

24. “Humans are humans because we are able to communicate with each other and to organize to do things together that we can’t do individually.”

— Howard Rheingold

25. “Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn’t before possible, new kinds of politics emerge.”

— Howard Rheingold

26. “The two parts of technology that lower the threshold for activism and technology is the Internet and the mobile phone. Anyone who has a cause can now mobilize very quickly.”

— Howard Rheingold

27. “We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.”

— Howard Rheingold

28. “Markets are as old as the crossroads. But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies, such as the joint-stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double-entry bookkeeping.”

— Howard Rheingold

29. “I’ve spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.”

— Howard Rheingold

30. “Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy.”

— Howard Rheingold

31. “Craigslist is about authenticity. Craig has paid his dues, and people respect him.”

— Howard Rheingold

32. “Communicating online goes back to the Defense Department’s Arpanet which started in 1969. There was something called Usenet that started in 1980, and this gave people an opportunity to talk about things that people on these more official networks didn’t talk about.”

— Howard Rheingold

33. “I think there are two aspects to smart environments. One is information embedded in places and things. The other is location awareness, so that devices we carry around know where we are. When you combine those two, you get a lot of possibilities.”

— Howard Rheingold

34. “Mindfulness means being aware of how you’re deploying your attention and making decisions about it, and not letting the tweet or the buzzing of your BlackBerry call your attention.”

— Howard Rheingold

35. “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

36. “It’s kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.”

— Howard Rheingold

37. “The AP has only so many reporters, and CNN only has so many cameras, but we’ve got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access.”

— Howard Rheingold

38. “Any disease support community is a place of deep bonds and empathy, and there are thousands if not tens of thousands of them.”

— Howard Rheingold

39. “A lot of people use collaborative technologies badly, then abandon them. They aren’t ‘plug-and-play.’ The invisible part is the social skill necessary to use them.”

— Howard Rheingold

40. “You can’t pick up the telephone and say, ‘Connect me with someone else who has a kid with leukemia.’”

— Howard Rheingold

41. “It’s more important to me to get an e-mail that says, ‘I saw your page and it changed my life,’ than how many hits the page got.”

— Howard Rheingold

42. “I’m somebody who seems to stumble into things 10 or 20 years before the rest of the world does.”

— Howard Rheingold

43. “Like most modern Americans, I assume individuality is not only a fundamental value, but a goal in life, an art form.”

— Howard Rheingold

44. “Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.”

— Howard Rheingold

45. “One thing we didn’t know in 1996 is that it’s very, very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a culture with online advertising.”

— Howard Rheingold

46. “Journalists don’t have audiences – they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.”

— Howard Rheingold

47. “By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.”

— Howard Rheingold

48. “Advertising in the past has been predicated on a mass market and a captive audience.”

— Howard Rheingold

49. “A phone tree isn’t an ancient form of political organizing, but you have to call every person.”

— Howard Rheingold

50. “If the rule of thumb for attention literacy is to pay attention to your intention, then the heuristic for crap detection is to make skepticism your default.”

— Howard Rheingold