Howard Rheingold: Artist, Writer, Professor, 63 Year Old Dude Who Doesn't Need Help to Check His E-Mail

In place of our scheduled guest speaker, the class was treated to a TED talk where Howard Rheingold spoke about Collaboration in the Digital Media Age. The presentation began by tracing the development of different forms of cooperation throughout human history, and its associate wealth and technology developments. Planning and agriculture led to stable cities, the alphabet enabled taxes to be recorded and collected, and larger governments to grow. The printing press was associated with widespread literacy, and the development of social and thought revolutions included millions of people where previously only the elite were in charge of dictating these ideas.

Howard Rheingold was then able to move on to talk about what has been his life's work, and that is the new forms of cooperation available throughout the internet, as well as predicting and guiding the new technologies and forms of wealth that will arise from its widespread availability. While this talk was recorded in 2005, before the invention of twitter, it made many predictions about the viability of open-sourcing given his then-available examples, about the rapid mobilization of groups of people in response to disasters, internet commerce, and people travelling with their connected devices. Honestly, this isn't that long ago, but things are evolving quickly, and many of his predictions seem to accurately reflect the direction our society is travelling in. Smartphones and other mobile internet devices are becoming more widespread every year. Twitter is used with hashtag metadata to function in many more examples as a mobilization medium for large groups of people, such as the San Diego forest fires of 2007 http://twitter.pbworks.com/Hashtags.

His ultimate goal was to start a widespread study about collaboration. A collective scientific exploration of the topic would yield a very large payoff, and whether or not the Scientific Method is being applied to the new methods of collaboration, these methods are being created and deployed to the boon of human society.