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
Any virtual community that works, works because people put in some time.
It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.
Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires. And it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks; marks on clay in that time.
Its not a global village, but we're in a highly interconnected globe.
There is an elementary level of trust that is necessary for community. You have to be able to trust that your neighbors aren't going to look into your mailbox.
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.
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.
People's behavior will change with technology. I know very few young people who can't type out a text message on their phone with one thumb, for instance.
There's a direct relationship between how difficult it is to send a message and how strongly it is received.
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.
Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn't before possible, new kinds of politics emerge.
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.
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.
Unlike with the majority of library books, when you enter a term into a search engine there is no guarantee that what you will find is authoritative, accurate or even vaguely true.
We think of them as mobile phones, but the personal computer, mobile phone and the Internet are merging into some new medium like the personal computer in the 1980s or the Internet in the 1990s.
What person doesn't search online about their disease after they are diagnosed?
I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.
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.
Like most modern Americans, I assume individuality is not only a fundamental value, but a goal in life, an art form.
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.
Soon the digital divide will not be between the haves and the have-nots. It will be between the know-hows and the non-know-hows.
Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.
We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.
Technology is my native tongue. I'm online six hours a day.
You can't pick up the telephone and say, 'Connect me with someone else who has a kid with leukemia.'
Flash mobbing may be a fad that passes away, or it may be an indicator of things to come.
I'm somebody who seems to stumble into things 10 or 20 years before the rest of the world does.
As for Twitter, I've found that you have to learn how to make it add value rather than subtract hours from one's day. Certainly, it affords narcissism and distraction.
Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.
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.
People look at me, and I dress a little unusually and they think, 'Oh you must be from California.' Of course, people in California think, 'Oh you must be from from Mars,' so, you know, your next-door neighbour is not necessarily the person that you are going to make a connection with.
Although we leave traces of our personal lives with our credit cards and Web browsers today, tomorrow's mobile devices will broadcast clouds of personal data to invisible monitors all around us.
Attention is the fundamental instrument we use for learning, thinking, communicating, deciding, yet neither parents nor schools spend any time helping young people learn how to manage information streams and control the ways they deploy their attention.
Any disease support community is a place of deep bonds and empathy, and there are thousands if not tens of thousands of them.
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.
The Chinese government tried to keep a lid on the SARS crisis, but there were 160 million text messages in three days sent by Chinese citizens. These are early indications that it's going to be difficult for people who used to have control over the news to maintain that level of control.
Until fairly recently, Amish teachers would reprimand the student who raised his or her hand as being too individualistic. Calling attention to oneself, or being 'prideful,' is one of the cardinal Amish worries. Having your name or photo in the papers, even talking to the press, is almost a sin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.
We like technology because we don't have to talk to anybody.
I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they're participating in some meaningful political action.
It's kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.
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.
On the Internet, it is assumed people are in business to sell out, not to build something they can pass along to their grandkids.
Advertising in the past has been predicated on a mass market and a captive audience.
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.
