There's a direct relationship between how difficult it is to send a message and how strongly it is received.
— 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.
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.
It's kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.
We like technology because we don't have to talk to anybody.
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.
Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn't before possible, new kinds of politics emerge.
We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.
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.
Advertising in the past has been predicated on a mass market and a captive audience.
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.
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.
By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the Internet, it is assumed people are in business to sell out, not to build something they can pass along to their grandkids.
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.
I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they're participating in some meaningful political action.
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.
Any virtual community that works, works because people put in some time.
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.
