howard on virtual communities
howard rheingold on virtual communities
via bsky [https://bsky.app/profile/hrheingold.bsky.social/post/3lce4cmvguk2u]:
@devonzuegel.com interviewed me for @notion.com about the past and future of virtual communities [https://www.notion.so/blog/howard-rheingold]
notes/quotes:
Howard Rheingold on the past and present of virtual communities
By Devon Zuegel (2021)H: They understood that they were creating a new kind of communication network and in fact, they wrote a paper that I recommend called “The Computer as a Communication Device.” In fact, Licklider called it the Intergalactic Network and they mused about what would happen when most of humanity is online. I think that was like 1978 when they published that and then that will-
HOWARD: Well, I think that’s one of the big issues of the day is, when you’re talking about the tragedy of the commons, or the commons, there’s the enclosure of the commons, the literal common land that the peasants were able to graze on in England was fenced in and if you tried to use it, you were shot or hanged and that’s called enclosure. I feel that Facebook is trying to enclose the internet. They’re trying to make people believe that it is the internet, but we’ve got all kinds of conversations going on in all kinds of places. Just Reddit itself is an ecology full of communities, of people who share a particular interest. So, it’s like, the big companies kind of own the loaf but there’s lots of, lots of raisins inside it and a lot of little communities inside it.
h: At the point where you’ve got a significant portion of the human race online, and not just technical experts and scientists and academics, you’re going to get the full spectrum of human behavior. Some of that is not so pretty and previously, you could hide a lot of that not so pretty stuff.
rather.. whale behavior..
h: when I met Doug Engelbart, that’s when I really understood that this is not just a far better typewriter. This was a *mind amplifier — or as he called it augmenting human intellect and that the future of mind amplifiers was going to explode as the technology did.
doug engelbart.. augmenting human intellect..
*intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
He said, you could get them to do lots of other things. So, he wrote that paper on augmenting human intellect which I taught, to every class that I taught, which I still recommend to people and particularly engineers who are trying to build things today, because they call it the unfinished revolution. Although the paper was published in 1962, everything that he foresaw has not really come to pass yet.
if more augmenting interconnectedness.. we’d have less of the problems we are trying to solve.. in the first place..
HOWARD: Pretty recently, *if you’re talking about the history of education, you’ve got YouTube. You’ve got Wikipedia. You’ve got search. You’ve got forums and chat. You’ve got open educational resources. Why can’t a group of people get together and learn something together, even though they don’t have a teacher or an educational institution? **What’s really missing is knowing how to do that. If you want to learn a subject, how do you find out what are the best sources on that subject? How do you arrange those sources into a syllabus? What media are you going to use? ***How are you going to assess your learning? How are you going to divide the work of being the teacher for the day? So I started a project called Peeragogy. P-E-E-R-A-G-O-G-Y.
*rather than ed.. need to get to the root of problem (not ed/learning, hunger, war)
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
**ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
need to try the unconditional part of left to own devices ness..
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
“So I think part of what people need to learn is not just how to find information online, but how to use these amazing resources to learn together online.”
rather.. how to find each other.. again.. ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
Tools that take all of the little snippets that you’ve gathered and show you ways that they could be organized or which ones might relate to each other are tremendous help. I think that there’s still a long way to go in that.
actually deeper way to go.. all the little itches-in-the-souls of 8b people.. via nonjudgmental expo labeling to get to the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. only way to see the dance dance.. otherwise perpetuating the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. aka: myth of tragedy and lord ness
HOWARD: There’s an enormous value in just playing with things and I think that if we valued fooling around with a new tool, and just seeing what it might do, rather than, I don’t know, being embarrassed by not knowing how to work it, we would all benefit from that. Again, I think it’s social and cultural. I think that if we had a culture of learning from each other, if this begrudged business got embedded in everything, and what stops you from messing with something or asking something how it worked is because you’re afraid of the unknown and you’re going to make mistake, and you’re going to be embarrassed in front of people and you’re going to break something. I think that if we did away with that, and just enabled people to play as they learn, and I think this applies to everything from K-12 to universities, to learning how to operate a computer, we would advance our learning a lot better.
art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
there’s a nother way for all of us to live/be
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from virtual community: art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
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be you. 