Howard Rheingold

Pioneering Thinker on the Future of Technology and Society

BIG IDEAS

• Key Literacies for the 21st Century
  Do you and your employees know how to summon your social networks to assist you personally and professionally, organize political movements, and impact markets online? Do you collaborate to solve problems, participate in online discussions as a form of civic engagement, share and teach and learn to their benefit and that of everyone else? Or, knowing that the online world is a bewildering puzzle to which you have few clues, is the internet a dangerous neighborhood where identities can be stolen, a morass of spam and porn, misinformation and disinformation, urban legends, hoaxes, and scams?
  
  After more than twenty five years of participation, observation, and analysis, Howard Rheingold is convinced that the future tenor of online culture depends now on whether new literacies spread far enough, fast enough in the next few years.
  
  The most important critical uncertainty today is how we learn to use digital media and networks effectively, reasonably, credibly, collaboratively, civilly, and humanely. This difference is a matter of literacy--the norms of behavior as well as the skills of encoding and decoding blogs, wikis, forums, vlogs, microblogs, search engines, text messages, and whatever a local teenager cooks up tomorrow in her basement or dorm room.
  
  The five key elements to digital literacy are:
  Attention / Participation / Collaboration / Critical Consumption (Crap detection) / Network Awareness
  
  In this presentation Howard explores the future of the social media and how we understand and participate in it. How can you learn to critically consume and collaboratively create online media? From laws, to regulations, to technical infrastructure changes, and economic barriers, Howard reveals the strategies that can help you and your business succeed.
• How to find the answer to any question--and how to determine whether what you find is true
  In recent years, as so many people have started to rely on the web for such vitally important forms of information as news, medical information, scholarly research, and even investment advice, the lack of general education in how to evaluate the information found online is turning into a public danger. There is unfiltered information everywhere on the web. How do you gauge what photos, tweets, videos, and news stories are authentic? How do you find out if the data you are pasting into your memo, presentation, or research report might be fabricated?
  
  The first thing you need to know about information online is how to detect crap, a term Howard uses for information tainted by ignorance, inept communication, or deliberate deception. Crap detection is the art of consuming critically, judging what you are reading and, ultimately, thinking like a detective. Learning to be a critical consumer of information on the internet is not rocket science. It's not even algebra. But it can be hard to know where to start.
  
  The part that requires the most work is learning to do your own judging. To get started, ask some simple questions--who is the author? What is the design of the website? Is the site a .gov or .edu? Have others linked to this page, and if so, who are they? Have you checked multiple sources?
  
  Using relevant and current examples, Howard helps audiences understand how to responsibly decipher the difference between crap and fact. With his usual humor and spark, Howard will equip you and your organization with the tools and services, many of them free, that will help you gauge the accuracy of the content that you both consume and rely on.
• Social Media and the Organization
  One the first technologists to identify and embrace the "social" aspect of the web, Howard presents how social cyberspaces enhance organizational communication that can empower people and transform organizations. In this speech, Howard shows others how to tap the power of many-to-many media.
• Technologies of Collaboration
  Howard's latest exploration is into what he calls the "technologies of cooperation"--a new wave of tools that are enabling ever more complex forms of collective human action. There has been a long co-evolution of the technologies we create and the communication media we use these technologies to build, Howard says. Human populations create media from technologies that were often not designed with those media in mind, but we've been using those media to organize collective action on scales and with people and in places and at speeds that we were not able to before. In this presentation, Howard explores why this is true, and where we might be going next. What are the dynamics and the structure of humans organizing collective actions in the years ahead?
• Smart Mobs: The Third Technological Revolution
  The untethered Internet won't be the Net as we know it, presented on telephones as we know them, but a new medium, more powerful and disruptive than the PC and Internet revolutions. Howard takes audiences along on the worldwide quest that led to his best-selling Smart Mobs, including his experiences since the book was published. Every industry, family, community will be affected. Howard tells you how your world will change, and helps you learn what to do about it.

SNAPSHOT BIO

There are a lot of voices talking about social media today, but Howard Rheingold defined the field before it existed. A noted author and commentator, Rheingold has a proven record of accurate technology and social forecasting, over two decades of syndicated columns, best-selling books, and pioneering online enterprises.  His latest research and forthcoming book focuses on 21st century literacies -- how individuals and organizations learn to use digital media effectively and credibly.  He coined the term "virtual community" in 1987

An acknowledged authority on the marriage of mobile phone, PC, and wireless internet, Rheingold's previous work reveals how this convergence has changed the way we meet, mate, entertain, govern, and conduct business. His book Smart Mobs, named one of the “Big Ideas books of 2002” by The New York Times, chronicles the new forms of collective action and cooperation made possible by mobile communications, pervasive computing, and the Internet.

Rheingold is the recipient of a 2008 MacArthur Knowledge-Networking Grant through the Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Competition. He was founding Executive Editor of Hotwired, the first commercial webzine where the web-based discussion forum and the online banner ad were invented.  Rheingold has appeared on Today, Good Morning America, ABC Primetime Live, CNN, CBS News, NBC News, Macneill-Lehrer Report, NPR’s Fresh Air and Marketplace. He currently teaches at Stanford University.

A Closer Look at Howard

FOCUS AREAS
What's on Howard's current research agenda?

Howard continues to be interested in and consulted on:

• Social software and virtual communities—the individual, institutional, and social impacts and uses of online communication media. He’s teaching courses around these subjects at UC Berkeley and Stanford.
• Smart mobs—the way people organize new forms of collective action (social, political, cultural, and economic) around the merger of the mobile telephone, the personal computer, and the Internet.
• He has also been working on the Cooperation Project with the Institute for the Future. New knowledge about the nature of cooperation could alleviate suffering and create wealth. Toward those ends, the Cooperation Project catalyzes interdisciplinary study of cooperation through workshops, seminars, and online knowledge communities; maps the findings emerging from the cooperation studies onto graphical representations and visual interfaces; educates the perceptions of practitioners in person and online with workshops, conceptual toolkits, games, and simulations; and applies this knowledge to real world problems in partnership with practitioners.

ENGAGEMENTS
How have other organizations utilized Howard's expertise, and what's ahead on his schedule?

Organizations retain Howard for multiple reasons, including (but not limited to):

• keynote presentations;
• day-long brainstorming workshops; and
• long-term consulting projects.

Howard also runs brainstorming programs and scenario workshops with Global Business Network and Institute for the Future. He recently finished teaching a course on "Participatory Media and Collective Action" at UC Berkeley, and currently offers the "Digital Journalism" course at Stanford.

Additionally, Howard serves as an advisor and visiting professor to De Montfort University’s Institute Of Creative Technologies (www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk).

Finally, he is working on his next book on cooperation.

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Who shapes Howard's thinking and inspires his work?

Howard was (and continues to be) influenced and inspired by Kevin Kelly, Paul Saffo, Larry Brilliant, and Manuel Castells.

RECOMMENDED READING
What's on Howard's must-read list?

For fun, Howard recommends Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire.

To understand more about the way cooperative strategies are influencing the production and distribution of culture, he suggests Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (Editor).

MIND FUEL
Which blogs, web sites, and industry events does Howard tap into to feed his mind and fuel his creativity?

Howard is an avid user of del.icio.us and has about 100 blogs in his Bloglines aggregator. BoingBoing, BuzzMachine, Collision Detection are at the top of his list. Last year, his favorite events were O’Reilly's FOO Camp and TED.

OUTREACH
What are Howard's pressing questions, and on which topics does he seek your feedback?

Howard is eager to speak to anyone who has stories about cooperative strategies in their organizations or industries.