Howard Rheingold to speak at An Unco Site! on 9th August 2010
The Confraternity of Neoflagellants are pleased to announce that Howard Rheingold will be speaking to us from California at An Unco Site! on 9th August 2010 at Inspace, University of Edinburgh.
Howard Rheingold's Story
I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension, then plugged my computer into my telephone and got sucked into the net. In earlier years, my interest in the powers of the human mind led to Higher Creativity (1984), written with Willis Harman, Talking Tech (1982) and The Cognitive Connections (1986) with Howard Levine Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of Memes (1988), Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990), with Stephen LaBerge, and They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and phrases.(1988).
I ventured further into the territory where minds meet technology, via the subject of computers as mind-amplifiers, and wrote Tools for Thought (1984) [New edition from MIT Press, April 2000]. Next, Virtual Reality (1991) chronicled my odyssey in the world of artificial experience, from simulated battlefields in Hawaii to robotics laboratories in Tokyo, garage inventors in Great Britain, and simulation engineers in the south of France.
In 1985, I became involved in the WELL, a computer conferencing system. I started writing about life in my virtual community and ended up with a book about the cultural and political implications of a new communications medium, The Virtual Community(1993 [New edition to be published by MIT Press in 2000]). I am credited with inventing the term "virtual community." I had the privilege of serving as the editor of The Whole Earth review and editor in chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (1994). Here's my introduction to the Catalog, my riff onTaming Technology and a selection of my own articles and reviews from both publications
In 1994, I was one of the principal architects and the first Executive Editor of HotWired. I quit after launch, because I wanted something more like a jam session than a magazine. In 1996, I founded and, with the help of a crew of 15, launched Electric Minds. Electric Minds wasnamed one of the ten best web sites of 1996 by Time magazine and was acquired by Durand Communications in 1997. Since the late 1990s, I've cat-herded a consultancy for virtual community building.
My 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. The weblog associated with the book has become one of the top 200 of the 8 million blogs tracked by Technorati, and won Utne Magazine's Independent Press Award in 2003. In 2005, I taught a course at Stanford University on A Literacy of Cooperation, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective actionthat I have undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. The Cooperation Commons is the site of my ongoing investigation of cooperation and collective action. I teach Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information, Digital Journalismand VirtualCommunity/Social Media at Stanford University, am a non-resident Fellow of the Annenberg School for Communication, and am a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. In 2008, I was a winner in MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning competition and used my award to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom. I have a videoblog that covers a range of subjects. Most recently, I've been concentrating on learning and teaching 21st Century literacies. I've blogged about this subject for SFGate, have been interviewed, and have presented talks on the subject.
