Interview with Howard Rheingold!
hideListen to the Interview:
Nora's full interview with Howard Rheingold is now available as an MP3 on the blog: http://www.cbc.ca/spark/blog/2008/01/howard_rheingold.html
Interview Prep
Focus statement: what is the relationship between new forms of participatory media (Web 2.0 tools) and collective action, (political, but also social or cultural)
PRE-INTERVIEW: can we post this to the blog?
1. Howard, this is our collaboration show. We made it with some of our listeners, using a wiki. I notice that you have a wiki for the media course you teach at Berkeley. How has that changed the class?
2. In your book Smart Mobs, you talked about the way mobile technology like cellphones helps people form ad hoc networks, whether that's for socializing or for political action. That was in 2002. Since then there's been an explosion in "social" media, like social networking sites, where anyone can publish content, and others can contribute to it, comment on it etc. What do you think those tools in particular add to collective action?
2b. At the wiki page we made in preparation for this interview, listener/contributor Kirby McInnis wondered whether it's the speed of organizing that the technologies make possible....
3. Are these participatory media tools better suited to some kinds of collaborative action than others? Shorter vs. longer term? Poltical vs. cultural?
3b. At the Howard Rheingold wiki page we made, Luke Closs wanted to know if you could think of a situation where protests initiated via social media would REALLY make a difference?
4. What do you think of the potential for virtual worlds like Second Life in collective action....whether that's political movements or just coming together, say, for a concert or a book club?
5. One concern I have is that these tools are supposed to be so democratic, but there's a real disparity in how confident and comfortable people are in participating. How do we address the fact that right now, a hard core of vocal users can exercise way more than their share of influence? (literacies)
6. One trend I see is social media that are connected to real places in the physical world....for instance, Facebook groups used to organize meetings in a particular city. Do you think we could start to see a more fluid relationship between the "real world" and the "online" world of participatory media?
PROMPT: Is that because as humans we really do want to be in physical time and space with other people?
7. Because of my job, I try out a lot of different social media, and I've wondered if it's possible to be too social? If all that twittering and linkedIn-ing, and blogging is taking us away from deeper connections, or more meaningful collaboration. What do you think?
8. As I mentioned, we posted this interview to our wiki. Farrell McGovern, wanted to know whether you thought the open source software movement was an extension of the memes that the Whole Earth Catalogue put out (which you were involved with, and which had the headline "access to tools"). What do you think...is there a through line?
Thanks very much
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Interview Question Invitation
I'm really looking forward to interviewing Howard Rheingold in a couple of weeks. As you may know, Rheingold is the author, most famously, of Smart Mobs, a prescient book about how our 'always connected' age is starting to change the culture and allowing groups of people who are geographically dispersed to act collectively. He can also speak to topics like collaborative media, citizen journalism, and the use of the "social web" (collaborative, social web-based tools like social networking sites or this wiki), in building community.
I'm planning on interviewing Howard and I'm hoping you'll help. Add your suggested questions, issue areas, points to debate here and we'll include as many as we can in the interview. All I'm committed to now is talking to him about collaborative media and community. The interview is January 23rd.
--Nora
Resources
- Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs blog
- Howard Rheingold's Website
This is where you come in: Questions
Please brainstorm your questions below. If you want it to keep it as a separate entity and register your name, use the "comment" function. We'll do some filtering and grouping later on, closer to the interview.
- How can smart mobs collaborate to "take back" the government? * It seems that "the people" could create tools to mirror what the government is doing - to bring discussion and web 2.0 tools to the closed, private activities of the government. They may not be able to directly change the bureaucratic machine, but may be able to indirectly change it by mirroring and exposing the information and processes. Do you have any thoughts on this? Is this a good path to follow? --Luke Closs
- Does fact checking and editing have any role to play in participatory media? --Ed Hawco Comments
- What is it about this phenomenon that he thinks is significant? --Kirby
- if he sees the Open Source Software movement as extension of the memes propagated by the Whole Earth Catalog? --Farrell
Discussion
Ed Hawco Comments
Howard Rheingold's current "vlog" entry (http://vlog.rheingold.com/) is "A (re)slice of life online," an update to a 1992 article in the Whole Earth Review. In the text that introduces the video, he says "Twenty years ago, I wrote 'A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community'..." referring to that 1992 article. Um. 1992 was 15 and a half years ago, not twenty. (In the 1992 article, he mentions a different article from 1988, but the article in question is from 1992.)
At the beginning of the vlog video, he says “In the late 1980s I tried to convey a sense of the latent culture that was emerging even then, nearly 20 years before the advent of the Web.” Um. The “advent of the Web” was around 1994-95. That’s nine or fewer years before “the late 1980s,” not “nearly 20 years.”
It's not that his unusual concept of time is the worst thing I've seen this week or anything. But when you see glaring errors like that right out of the gate, it casts doubt on everything else that follows.
I'm not posting this to be bitchy, and I have nothing against Howard Rheingold. But I do believe that people involved in participatory/social/citizen (etc.) media should set high standards for themselves. I slam badly written blogs all the time, and criticize citizen journalists who play fast and loose with reality, so I was saddened to see Rheingold, who should be a high water mark for this stuff, being just as "first draft = ready" as a lot of third rate bloggers. Maybe you should ask him about it. ;-)
contributed by Ed Hawco
The issues of fact checking and editing are important to me, too often I read an online blog/comment/letter that presents information as fact when it is really nothing of the kind. Often it is a misunderstanding of another article, a snippet taken out of context or even just wishful thinking. It has gotten to the point where unless the writer has cited his references I assume that he made up the facts. This lack of credibility renders much of the value of citizen comment/blogging worthless, at least to me. I read them for their entertainment value but don't expect or believe they have much to do with reality. It reminds me a lot of reading a newspaper article that reports a news release or official statement from a think tank with a lofty sounding name
but is in fact a special interest organization trying to promote its own agenda. The newspaper doing the reporting never seems to bother mentioning that the "Centre for <insert name here>" is really an entity entirely funded by a particular special interest group and that its publications just might be somewhat biased in their facts and their presentation.
contributed by on Jan 17 12:57pm
I haven't read the book but I was surfing about the concept. Seems like a flash mob but with a purpose...
About the "take back" the gov't...I'd be curious to know if he can think of a situation (in N. America) where this kind of collaboration would REALLY make a difference. So far, protests about Iraq don't seem to have made a whole lot of difference. If this kind of technology had been prevalent in 2001, would it have stopped the Patriot act? (I'm not sure that's a sensible or even valid question given the psyche of the American people at that point in time - just "thinking out loud" on this).
Hey Kirby. I was thinking about this concept more tonight. After reading a blog post about some problems with the Vancouver school system by a friend, I cleaned up a page called Public Copyright Consultation about how this could possibly work for the current Canadian copyright (non-)debate. A snippet:The meta idea here is to build a public resource that is the yin of the opaque process that is the yan of our government or an organization. The objective should not be to "win", or to promote some agenda. The objective is to help a community listen to each other and build a shared understanding from which to work from.Now I'm not sure that such a wiki would help the copyright situation. My point is just that anyone of us can create such things with tools available today.
Some of us have been using these new internet tools (blogs, wikis, forums, facebook, ...) for a few years now, but I don't think we've yet figured out how to make them useful to us in the government context. While "the youths" and the alpha geeks have figured out ways of using the tools for things such as bar camps and wikipedia, only now are companies starting to effectively use the tools - aka Enterprise 2.0. Is it any surprise that the government is the last to benefit? :)
-- Luke Closs at 2009-01-22 05:31:13 GMT
Also, why that name - smart mobs? it's kind of an oxymoron, isn't it? A mob seems to imply anything but intelligence. The summary on his web page mentions the "battle in Seattle", which, with its general level of violence and vandalism, certainly didn't make the mob seem intelligent. How much "collateral damage" do smart mobs (like smart bombs) create?
What is it about this phenomenon that he thinks is significant? is the use of the technologies and the apparent speed with which these groups can form and move? I was reading about the Luddites, and they were basically a slower incarnation of this almost 200 years ago. It wasn't until the gov't started bringing in military and offering large rewards that they were able to stop the damages to factories.
Not sure if any of this will help. I've been sitting here a while trying to form cohesive questions, but don't think I got that far.
On a related note, I know a great song for this. It's called Liberty Valance by Carbon/Silicon. They sing about texting pictures and updating blogs to speak of revenge, and mobs in the street. I can send it to you so you can listen to it. I know they won't mind me sharing since they released all of their music on their website for public downloading (heck, they wrote a song called MP-Free). If you think it's a good fit, I guess you would have to contact them to get their permission for broadcast use. Not creative commons, I know, but a great fit.
contributed by on Jan 20 8:47pm
hey Kirby,
Thanks for that. Re: the music. I think Dan, who among other things picks the music and mixes the show, would need specific permission from the group. (We need to make sure we're obeying the letter of the law when it comes to using music online). I'll send him the link and he can follow up.
Re: interview questions. Because Smart Mobs is a few years old, I think maybe it would be good to narrow the scope of the interview so that it's about how things have evolved since he wrote the book.
I think your question about defining what it is that he thinks is significant is a great clarifying way to start the interview.
_contributed by on Jan 21 9:16am _
Although many may only know of Mr. Rheingold through the Smart Mob thingy, he has had a huge influence on the social structure & perception of society in both Cyberspace and Meatspace. One of the other "best know" contributions that he has made to popular culture was the Whole Earth Catalog, which was subtitled "access to tools". I would ask Mr Rheingold if he sees the Open Source Software movement as extension of the memes propagated by the Whole Earth Catalog?
ttyl
Farrell
contributed by on Jan 21 11:38am
Ah, why not try some questions that aren't just pandering, that challenge Rheingold's many many assumptions?
- You're famous for popularizing the idea of "virtual community", but it's been criticized both for failing to recognize the fact that communities organize at least in part for mutual self-defense against real threats to real life and limb, and for encouraging the kinds of power structures and organizing that one sees in real world communities, such as cops and judges, which are easily abused to bully or exclude people who are merely unpopular. Some also think that raising online forums to a status equal to that of the real world community or family encourages social exclusion or computer addiction. What's your response to all these criticisms?
- Silicon Valley is famous for taking innovations from universities and other nonprofit institutions and getting them to the public, but now it seems often to take already-working innovations and privatizing them. Wiki, for example, caught on among collaborators working on a nonprofit basis and now there are hundreds of proprietary wikis that don't interoperate and don't use the same data format as the larger public wikis. Is this actually helping anyone to collaborate, or is it just another example of a tragedy of the commons where a few private companies hijack the concept and eventually defeat the whole point of wiki based collaboration?
- With all the popularizing you've done of collaboration, how come you don't write your books in a wiki or put them under a Creative Commons license?
contributed by on Jan 23 7:18pm
I think the interview went well. Craig, those are great questions. Unfortunately, I didn't see them before going into the interview, which was 12:15ET on the 23rd. I did ask him though, about the fact that they are places where individuals can sometimes exert excessive influence, in spite of the language of democracy that surrounds these communities (question 5) and about whether all that time online takes us away from deeper, real world community (Q7)
Actually, Rheingold is not nearly as much of a 'booster' of web 2.0, the Internet, and collective action as you might think. He raised quite a few concerns, for instance about whether all this spontaneous action gets in the way of deliberation and reflection.
_contributed by on Jan 24 7:17am _
Hello
I teach a third year accounting information systems course at Nipissing University, Ontario and this semester, I have included a 'class wiki'. So far the students like the platform, however we are using an offsite wiki (PBwiki) and it is somewhat limited in respect to certain applications (online chat - IM- or a discussion area), however I wanted to start the introduction process with students. I have conducted some personal research in the area of Web 2.0 and education and I am truly excited with the potential. Unfortunately, it must also be mentioned that to truly 'unlock' these Web 2.0 tools we need to ensure that faculty members have the skill set in place to operate or realistically to even discover the capabilities of Web 2.0.
I am a big supporter of colloboration in education and in business, however the fire has not yet taken hold with the masses.
I would like to highlight the 'class wiki' on the colloboration show - great exposure for a small Northern Ontario university - Nipissing!!
Dianne
give your opinion or make remarks on the topic. Ideally you should be bold and edit / append your ideas into what others have written already. If not someone will do it for you.
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contributed by on Dec 4 4:54pm
