View video interview here: http://www.collaborativesociety.org/2016/04/05/howard-rheingold/
Network Awareness
Who is Howard Rheingold?
I'm a person who's spent my life pretty much resisting fitting into categories. So rather than give you a title I can tell you what I do. I learn, I try to make sense of what I see around me and I try to communicate that to others. Well I sure that my obituary will note that I came up with the term "virtual community." The expression virtual community came about when I tried to explain to people that you didn't have to be either an Electrical Engineer or some kind of pathologically antisocial person to use computers to communicate. Because I knew, from my own experience, that there are real people behind those words on the screen and most people visit you in the hospital, they pass the hat when you lose your job, they babysit for your kids -- all the things that people in physical communities do. I use the word "physical" rather than "real" because I think some physical communities are not so real and some virtual communities are pretty real.
But I think if you look at my work throughout the last few decades, it's been about trying to make sense, in a broad inter-disciplinary sense, of what has been happening to use with all these rapid changes from the first toy personal computers in the 1970's to now with smartphones and the web moving a such a terrific pace. So within that context I write, I teach, I talk, about primarily how are we going to improve our conversation about technology given how important it is and how swiftly it is changing and how much it changes our lives to participate in it. I'm often accused of being an optimist but actually I am a realist. I think that maybe we don't have anything that we can do about the way technology influences and shapes our lives. But believing that makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe we do have something to do with it. So if we do have influence, if all humans have some way of influencing what's going to happen to us, maybe getting a clue about it would help us do that.
The Mind Amplifier
So I was a writer in a room alone. That's what writers do, with a typewriter: ancient technology that you don't plug into a wall, for 10 years. I started in my early 20s. And I heard somewhere in the late 1970s that these personal computers that you could write with them. Instead of retyping the page every time, you could just move words around and do it on a screen. So I went on a little quest to find out about that. It turns out personal computers actually could not do that in the late 1970s, at least the kind most people had access to. But there was a place called the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, not far from where I lived, that had machines that used this thing called a "mouse" and screens that you could write on so I talked my way into a job there and swiftly discovered that these were not just better writing machines but these were machines to think with in ways that we were unable to think before we had access to these machines. Not just a better typewriter but a mind amplifier.
So as a writer I began inquiring and it turns out Doug Engelbart, maybe the single person most responsible for the technology that we use to access the web today, was nearby. So I started talking to him. I ended up writing a book that was published in 1985 called "Tools For Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Amplifying Technology". In the process of writing that book I got a modem which is an archanic technology that you used to plug your personal computer into your telephone and using sounds, using tones, communicate over computer lines. And I got very, very interested in computer-mediated communication, if you want to be really formal about it, way back in the olden days: the early 1980s. The ARPAnet, which became the Internet, wasn't really accessible to me but there were these BBSes all over and eventually the WELL, all of which consisted of communicating by typing words which appeared on the screen which showed nothing but text, no graphics or videos or sounds or links or the things that we're accustomed to today.
So I became interested, as a writer who had written about a lot of things, about this technology, what it meant, what it was doing but also as a user of the tool. I'm interested in how we can influence the future of the media that are growing up around the Internet.
The Focus Barriers
What Sherry Turkle fears that our increasing interest in communicating with people through a mediating technology, whether it's the screen of your phone and you're texting people or whether it's the screen of your desktop computer and you're Skypeing with them, that that detracts from our face-to-face connection as humans. And I think that that's an important cautionary note. I think that I would differ from Turkle in thinking that mediated communication can be as deep and meaningful as any other kind. I know that to be the case. If you've ever sat with someone as they were dying because they were someone on a network that decided to support them or if you have ever been a patient with a very serious disease and networks of people online organized to bring you the treatments then I think you would not be such an absolutist about the superiority of the strictly face-to-face connection.
But again, I said cautionary note because I think that the screen is a distracting influence and it's important to control it. If there's one thing Turkle brought up that I think is very important is that if you're a parent, you should look at your child when you're talking to them. Don't be on your Blackberry. They know that you are splitting your attention with somebody else. It's up to us to learn how to and when to control our attention. I think the good news is that it's much less expensive to teach people how to use what's available than it was to create smartphones and to create a worldwide network. But I think the fact that we have these tools does not guarantee progress. It doesn't guarantee that the human condition will be necessarily better 10 years from now. I very much see a continuum between humans emerging as animals who were able to communicate symbolically and where we are today: humans who have very, very powerful, sophisticated, global communication media. What we do with that, the kinds of cooperation, the kinds of collaboration, the kinds of collective action we organize, that's what the future of our species depends on at this point.
The 5 Elements of Web Literacy
Your attention is the fundamental building-block of your thinking and your communicating and it is severely challenged by all of the screens that we have around us. So mindfulness is really the fundamental element of the five literacies I talked about in my new book "Net Smart": attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration and network awareness are what I think broadly are the categories of the literacies that would enable individuals to do better for themselves, to empower themselves, to compete in the world today. But also I think the more people who understand those literacies the higher the quality of information online, the healthier the knowledge commons, and perhaps the healthier the political/public sphere will be.
Network Structure
The network's particular structure is important because the shape and dynamics of the network influence or even determine the kinds of things that the nodes in that network can do. Now in the most general sense when you say network you could mean the network of life forms in ecology. You could talk about the enzyme reactions in the human immune system or you could talk about the human social network. Human social networks preceded Facebook certainly by a couple of 100 thousand years. The emergence of the human, of homo sapiens, very much had to do with our capacity for sociality and our ability to do things in concert with others, sometimes in hierarchies, with the leader of the hunters and the followers, but very often in networks: my cousing or the person I go gathering with.
That preceded the Internet for a long time, I mean, microorganisms have always caused disease but humans have known that only in the last couple hundred years. Before that it was foreigners or witchcraft or sin or some other invisible force. The ways in which networks permeate our world, not just socially but in many other ways, have always been in effect, it's just very recently network scientists have begun to discover what a small world network is, for example, and how they are formed or what that has to do with the power law or the long tail. These are terms we're beginning to hear people apply to online networks. We've also known for a longer time than the Internet has been available that sociologists can study human social networks and how people are connected to each other. It turns out that there are characteristics of social networks that hold true in the physical world that hold true in the online world in an identical way.
So if you're talking about the way an idea spreads or the way a disease spreads then it's not so much how many people you know, how many Facebook friends you might have, how many people there are in your social network, it's how many people have to connect through you to get to each other. So social network analysis calls that centrality. Centrality is very good if you want to get the latest ideas. Centrality is very bad if you don't want to catch a disease that's running rampant as an epidemic. So understanding how the shapes of networks influence behaviors in those networks has become very important. There are all kinds of aspects to understanding networks. So there's the network structure that network scientists have been talking about, there are social networks that sociologists have been talking about, there's networked society that people like Manuel Castells talks about, about the way networks are the forms in which people are getting things done these days in ways we did not so much before because there are limits on what humans can do with our social networks. It's impossible without communication technology to have someone in Denmark in my social network on a daily basis.
It's now possible for a considerable portion of the human race to be in touch with people on the other side of the world or even to be in touch with people that they didn't know before but who share a political goal or a particular interest. The network structure of the Internet is all-important. It's why we have the web. It's why college students can start industries in their dormitory rooms. So I think the person who knows some of these little things about networks, they don't have to be a network scientist or a sociologist, but the person who knows these things is going to be better off in the world today.
Is Modern Science a Social Network?
The connection of social networks among scientists and the network of information that's available online and the speed with which you can spread knowledge and your ability to link and to search is adding up to a kind of networked science that is capable of doing things that the pre-Internet networked science was unable to do at that pace or that scale or with that kind of interdisciplinary connection. Newton said himself, quoting actually somebody else that "if I have seen further it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants" and Einstein certainly had unique and mathematically-describable insights into the behavior of the universe but it was based on a whole network of findings, the experiments with the speed of light that Michelson and Morley had done, the observations of radiation that the Curies had done, the work of Niels Bohr, the work of Enrico Fermi. A lot of what went into Einstein's thought had been questions that were unanswered by people before him. So I think genius will always continue to exist. And genius always feeds on what it knows. And knowledge is increasingly a networked phenomenon so I don't see it as entirely separable. I think that there's a genius of the network and there's the genius of the individual and they co-evolve. There are only a few individuals like a Newton or Einstein but there are many, many, many more people who can contribute in science and data to a much larger enterprise.
A New Chapter in Human History
A new chapter in human history is emerging because really for the first time most of the human race has access to tools that build upon all of the mind-tools that we've created since we were humans, starting with speech then with writing, the alphabet, the automation of the alphabet with print, the global network that started with the telegraph, the Internet becoming the medium of media, the web becoming a web of knowledge that anyone can contribute to, the convergence of the telephone, the personal computer and the Internet in the smartphone. All those things have happened very, very quickly. In the last 20 or 30 years it's gone from a laboratory, maybe this would work, to what is it I think 5 billion mobile telephone subscriptions in the world, 2 billion Internet users. That's not only an extremely rapid spread of a new literacy, it took some more decades for literacy to spread in the wake of the printing press for example, but the power of print versus the power of the hand-written alphabet is nowhere near as much of a leap as the power of the multimedia web in everybody's pocket.
Which Networks are Most Likely to Create Innovation?
Some of the recent empirical work seems to indicate that when you're talking about innovation in networks or generation of knowledge that the diversity of the network is more important than the size or the individual expertise of the members. I think that's a very important finding. A sociologist by the name of Ronald Burt studied what he called "structural holes" in social networks again years before the Internet. And he found that people who connect different networks are in a great position to innovate and the people who can introduce different networks to each other can gain advantage by it and so can those networks. So I think diverse networks and networks that have bridges that interconnect them, I mean after all the Internet was in the beginning just a connection of all the many different networks that existed online in the olden days -- an inter-network.
Is There a Risk to the Diversity of the Networks?
Well of the billion people on Facebook, how many of those people think Facebook is the Internet? Who think Facebook is the web? Who don't know that they can start a blog or publish a web page or join a virtual community or work on Wikipedia or do any of the things that millions of individuals have contributed to that make for all the value that we find in the web. So there's one company that's really trying to define itself as the Internet. We also see a lot of big companies, Google, Amazon, Apple, who are trying to define the Internet or the web as their brand. We also see the entertainment industry using local government legislation and international agreements to extend copyright law to control the content that people can put online. We're seeing the move by the companies that transmit the bits that make up the Internet getting into the business of selling content and trying to control what kind of bits can travel over their network, what's referred to as the "net neutrality" debate.
So there a number of different conflicts that are really battles for control over innovation and in the future your children, maybe they'll be able to start Google or Facebook in their dormitory room, or maybe they'll have to work for Google or Facebook in order to innovate. So I think that that's very much in question.
CollaborativeSociety.org is a site which explores the thinking of researchers, academicians and thought-leaders on the topic of collaboration, among other things. Thanks to Alfred Birkegaard and Katja Carlsen for providing the video content. The contribution of The Collaboration Project is these transcripts.
