Howard Rheingold: I ended up creating a course called “social media issues” around my book Net Smart. My answer to Is this any good for us? has been, it depends on what people know, that it’s no longer a matter of hardware or software or regulation or policy. It has to do with who knows how to use this medium well. And I felt that if you mastered these five fundamental literacies or fluencies, that you would do better. 

Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling the Web, a podcast of the Web Science Trust. I am Noshir Contractor and I will be your host today. On this podcast we bring in thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society, and how society in turn is shaping the web. My guest today is Howard Rheingold, who you just heard talking about how we can use media responsibly.  

Howard is an American critic, writer, and teacher. He specializes in the cultural, social, and political implications of modern communication media, such as the internet, mobile telephony, and virtual communities. In the mid 80s, he worked on and wrote about the earliest personal computers at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center or Xerox PARC, for short. He was also one of the early users of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or The WELL, an influential early online community. And in 1994, he was hired as the founding executive director of HotWired. He is the author of several books, including The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Welcome, Howard. 

Howard Rheingold: Good to be here. 

Noshir Contractor: Howard, you were one of the folks who was there, even before the birth of the web, and certainly at the birth of the personal computer and the very first online communities. Take us back to what things were at Xerox PARC, where so many important things were invented that helped shape the web that was yet to come.

Howard Rheingold: I found my way to Xerox PARC because I heard that you could edit writing on a television-like screen with a computer. And I had been a freelance writer for 10 years at that point, and my technology was a correcting electric typewriter, which meant that you could white out the last line that you wrote. And people who lived through that era know that you marked up your pages, and sometimes you literally cut and paste them, and then at a certain point, you had to retype them, which is really a pain. If you’re going to write a book of 400 pages, you probably retyped 3000 pages. I found an article in the 1977 Scientific American titled “Microelectronics and the Personal Computer” by Alan Kay, and it had images of what he called a Dynabook of the future, pretty much an iPad. I called and asked if there was any writing jobs that they needed at PARC. Eventually, I got the job of roaming around and finding interesting people and writing about them, and then the Xerox PR department would place it in magazines. I drove half an hour from my home in San Francisco every day so that I could work on their computer there. 

When ARPA decided they only wanted to do defense-related research, all of these smart young researchers came to Xerox, because they hired Bob Taylor and they gave him $100 million in 10 years before he had to produce anything, and so he got all of these superstars, really superstars, in one place. I mean, they ended up creating not only the visual interface for the personal computer we know today, but also the laser printer and the local area network. My research tools were a typewriter, a telephone, and a library card. I was interested in extending those capabilities. And then I met Doug Engelbart. Engelbart was talking about using the computer to extend human cognitive capabilities – augmentation, he called it. I’m interested in the intersection of technology and the mind. 

It occurred to me in 1983, I think it was, Time magazine made the personal computer the person of the year, and I thought, boy, there’s a much bigger story here to be told. So I wrote a book called Tools for Thought. And I wrote a chapter about what was happening online. The internet didn’t exist yet. The ARPANET did. And I got a modem, and I plugged my telephone and my computer into it. And that’s when I discovered the WELL, which had been started by the Whole Earth people. The WELL was like three dollars an hour. And I got totally sucked up into that. And I tell the story in my book, my wife became concerned that I was spending so much time having fun online. And I wrote an article for the Whole Earth Review in 1986 or 1987 on virtual communities. And I wrote that because so many people had been saying, or implying to me, that there’s something pathological about communicating with people you don’t already know through computer networks. And I had seen that all the things that happen in a real face-to-face community, you know, people meet and fall in love and get married, people get divorced, there were funerals and parties, and we passed a hat when people were having hard times, we sat by people’s bedsides when they were dying. So that’s why I wrote about virtual community. I discovered that this diverse group of people I could connect with through a computer, not because we knew each other, but because we had similar interests, could really serve as an online think tank for me and help amplify my ability to learn about the things that I was writing about. So I became interested professionally with this as a tool, but also as a writer, I became interested in where is this all leading? What is this all doing to us as individuals and as communities and societies? 

And because I wrote enthusiastically back then, a lot of people since then have set me up as kind of a straw man utopian. But in fact, if you read the last chapter of my book The Virtual Community, it’s called Disinformocracy. I’ve been writing about what might go wrong as well for a long time. And I think it’s important to have a nuanced view of technology, that it’s okay for someone who’s critical to also be enthusiastic. Another thing I’ve always been interested in is how can you look at the signals that we see today and make some kind of extrapolations about the future? So, back in The WELL, we thought, what we were very enthusiastic about, a few 100 people, that this was going to be a big deal someday. And back then it was like words on the screen. But we knew that someday there would be the processing power and the bandwidth for us to have audio and video and graphics. And so I’ve just had a fortunate position in time and space being in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and 1980s to be a participant observer.

Noshir Contractor: And you were not alone. There were so many other people. I mean, you had this fascination for using the tools for your own trade, but then also using that same curiosity to project further not just how it was going to help you at that point in time, but how these tools, the computers, the mouse, what was happening at Xerox PARC and The WELL, had the potential to transform society. Several people were in a similar situation to you. What do you think motivated you to say, no, I really see something special happening here, and I’m going to write about it, whether it’s to evangelize, or as you point out also, point out cautionary aspects about it. 

Howard Rheingold: I thought, here is something very important happening. People recognize something important is happening. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, they knew what Xerox PARC was doing. They adopted it. I thought it was very important because this was our consciousness and our capacity to think and communicate meeting our ability to build technologies that are very powerful. And you know, one thing that I think we the human race noticed from the nuclear physicists and the bomb was that human ability to create powerful technology seems to be racing ahead of our ability to know what to do with them morally and ethically. And so it struck me that big changes were going to come. When I was writing The Virtual Community, I found a graduate student at UCLA, his name was Marc Smith, a sociologist. He was studying Usenet, and I asked him, why do people give information away to other people that they don’t really know? He said, “knowledge capital, social capital, and communion.” That was a great lens for looking at things. 

So fast forward to 1999, 2000. I’m in Tokyo. I noticed that people are walking around looking at their telephones. They’re not listening to them, they’re looking at them. A couple of weeks later, I happened to be in Helsinki, other side of the world, and I noticed some teenagers looking at their phones and showing their phones to each other. What was going on here? Those were signals. 1999, the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle was disrupted by protesters who used the internet to coordinate. In the Philippines, Joseph Estrada, the president, was deposed after mass demonstrations were organized spontaneously using SMS, which wasn’t happening in the U.S. in 2000. It really took off after the iPhone in 2007. So I asked Marc, what’s going on here? And he said, it looks like the merger of the telephone and the internet was lowering the barriers for collective action. So, you know, like any good freelance writer, I went and did some research. Trying to find social scientists to help me understand what the signals meant was really part of this process of looking at the future. 

I was saying, the computer, the telephone and the network are merging into a new medium. We don’t really have a name for it yet. Well, now we call it the smartphone. But that ability, I thought, would signal another kind of phase change in the world in which people were able to organize collective action in the physical world through their connection online. I guess you would say that the insurrection of January 6th was an example of that, as well. So again, throughout this process, the question of Is this stuff any good for us? kept arising. I started teaching, I guess about 2005, because I saw college students were using these. But the universities, you couldn’t take a course on What does it mean? anywhere. They invited me to teach this course on digital journalism at Stanford. I noticed that there were very few teachers using forums and wikis and blogs. Because I was teaching about social media, you know, it only made sense that we use that social media in the process of doing. I ended up creating a course called Social Media Issues around my book Net Smart. My answer to Is this any good for us? has been, it depends on what people know, that it’s no longer a matter of hardware or software or regulation or policy, it has to do with who knows how to use this medium well. And I felt that if you mastered these five fundamental literacies or fluencies, that you would do better.

Noshir Contractor: And when you said how to use a social media well, you parse that into how to use the social media intelligently, humanely, and above all, mindfully.

Howard Rheingold: Yeah. So what are these five essential literacies? Attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network awareness. I start with attention. The bad news is that the business model of the web has to do with attracting and engaging and maintaining your attention so that they can sell you things. And the people who are engineering these apps are very good at doing that, and we’re all suckers. The good news is that there’s ample evidence both from millennia-old contemplative traditions and from neuroscience that you can begin to understand how to deploy your attention more productively, something called metacognition. So one of the things I taught my students was, you know, becoming aware of where you put your attention is important. 

So that was the first chapter, but then I told the story of my daughter when she was in middle school, this was before Google, but she was using search engines. She was beginning to put queries in to do her homework. And I sat her down and said, I showed her a website called martinlutherking.org. I think that they’ve changed their identity. But it’s actually run by white nationalists. And I showed her how to find that out, that you can go to the library and get out a book, and that book was edited, it was published, it was purchased for your library, it was assigned by your teacher. Each of those were kind of gatekeepers to kind of guarantee that what you’re reading is accurate. You can now ask any question anywhere, anytime and get a million answers in a second. But it’s now up to you to determine which of those are accurate information, because a lot of them are wrong. So crap detection comes from Hemingway saying every journalist should have a good internal crap detector. 

And then the next one was participation. And we really wouldn’t be having this conversation about the web if it wasn’t for participation. It was created by millions of people who put up websites and put up links to other websites. From the Google twins to Mark Zuckerberg, people invent things in their dorm rooms, and it changes the world. And part of that is the miracle of the architecture of the internet. You don’t have to get permission to start a new search engine or social network, as long as it operates according to the technical protocols of the internet. You just need people to come to your website. 

So when I wrote Smart Mobs, I became interested in dynamics of collective action. How humans cooperate and what the barriers to cooperation are is probably at the root of our most significant global problems, from climate change to nuclear weapons to interstate conflict to land management. Elinor Ostrom won her Nobel Prize because she came up with design principles that if a group that was managing a scarce resource used these design principles, they would succeed. 

Noshir Contractor: You were amongst the first who introduced or at least popularized the term collective intelligence: when all of us can be smarter than any of us. Today, there’s a lot more interest in collective intelligence. There are conferences on the topic, centers around the world studying it. But again here, there was a signal that you picked up on before others.

Howard Rheingold: It was pretty obvious even back in The WELL. You got a group of people together, you could solve problems together online. Going back to Engelbart. Engelbart was not primarily interested in hardware and software. He was interested in, – and he used these words, “increasing the collective intelligence of organizations,” collective IQ, he called it. 

Noshir Contractor: Net Smart talked about five fundamental digital literacies. And we talked about attention, crap detection, participation, collective intelligence. Can you talk a little bit about the fifth one – the network smarts?

Howard Rheingold: Although we’re used to the term “social network” in response to Facebook, social networks are something that precede technology by a long ways. The way I would describe it is, well, your family, your friends, your teachers, your neighbors, those are your community. The person you buy coffee from, the stranger you see when you’re walking your dog, the people you communicate with online, those are your network. They don’t all know each other. In a community, people know each other. Way back when Marc Smith told me about knowledge capital, social capital, and communion, one of the things that I taught my students was how social capital is cultivated and harvested online. The traditional definition of social capital is the ability of groups of people to get things done together outside of formal mechanisms like laws, governments, corporations, and contracts. If you are a farmer and you have good relationships with your neighbors and you break your leg, your neighbors will come in and help you with your harvest. Well, there’s a lot of social capital to be had online if you know what you’re doing. I learned this way back in The WELL. I learned, if somebody has a question and I have the answer, even if I don’t know that person, doesn’t cost me anything to give them the answer. Well, if you get several hundred people together who have different kinds of expertise and they all do that, suddenly, everybody is empowered. But you know what, people aren’t gonna give you answers unless you give answers yourself. I think anybody who is in a support group online knows about that. 

Noshir Contractor: You can’t go there and simply want to take things from other people and not also then contribute to the public good.

Howard Rheingold: Oh, that’s right. When you study human cooperation, what’s called altruistic punishment is a big part of that. It’s not just laws that enable people to live together, it’s norms. Why do you get angry when someone cuts ahead of you in line? It’s because they’re breaking the norm, and you feel that you need to enforce that. 

Noshir Contractor: Yeah. So in closing, then Howard, I want to go back to something that you’ve done so well over the last several decades, and that is detect signals and use those to project what’s coming down the pike. What are the signals that you’re detecting today that might tell us about what is going to happen in the next couple of decades?

Howard Rheingold:  I think the most important one is the disintegration of consensus about what’s real and what’s not. Misinformation seems to travel much faster than corrections. The anti-vax movement worldwide is a good example. You know, the Enlightenment came along and said, well, let’s not have theological arguments about what causes disease, let’s use microscopes and see if we can discover the physical causes of it, so relying on science and coming to some kind of consensus about what we all agree it’s real. That seems to be in big question. That’s a very troubling signal to me. 

Noshir Contractor: Does this also have implications for another term that you spent a lot of time thinking and writing about: virtual reality or augmented reality? And what is real or not real in that context?

Howard Rheingold: I spent some time in Second Life, which is not immersive, but a kind of metaverse. There were people doing very interesting things, but it was not the next big thing. I don’t think people are gonna want to have avatar meetings and buy avatar groceries and socialize to the degree that the Metaverse vision from Facebook is promulgating. I just don’t think it’s going to appeal to everybody that way. I also think that there’s some problems. In Second Life, there were what were called griefers. You would be having a seminar and a bunch of flying penises would disrupt it. I think we’re going to see that kind of disruption in the Metaverse, and we’ve seen that Facebook has been unable to moderate even in its two-dimensional form. What would be really interesting in something like that would be a molecular biologist taking you through a walkthrough of a ribosome, an archaeologist taking you on a walkthrough of the pyramids to do things in three dimensions that you can’t do any other way. And I know that they’re using it for things like protein folding these days. And I think that being able to navigate and manipulate a three-dimensional world has research and educational implications that really have not been tapped.

Noshir Contractor: It’s been a real delight, Howard, hearing from you as somebody who was witness to the birth of many of these technologies, and you have done a great job of envisioning so many of the phenomena that we have been experiencing and perhaps we should have paid more attention to you when you first raised it, then we might not have found ourselves in some of the predicaments that we do today. I also obviously want to thank you for all your work as an educator, helping to make the next generation more network smart than we were. So thanks again for joining me today, Howard. It’s been a real pleasure.

Howard Rheingold: Mine too. 

Noshir Contractor: Untangling the Web is a production of the Web Science Trust. This episode was edited by Susanna Kemp. I am Noshir Contractor. You can find out more about our conversation today in the show notes. Thanks for listening.