Kris’s comments on Anya Kamenetz being connected to Howard Rheingold, got me rethinking what is Howard up to these days? As per usual, a lot of different things, and as with many people with a lot to say and do online, Howard is distributed around in various locations online.
Howard wrote a book published by MIT press called Net Smart, described at one of his websites here. Table of contents for that book here. Assuming we might have already noted this book, I searched our site using “Net Smart”, and while a lot of very cool posts came up, nothing referring to the book that I could see. Same for searching “Rheingold”.
(admin aside: One goal here is to add “Comment” search capability with plugin someday. There’s lots of good stuff in our comments… imho.)
Howard also has a video blog, where he interviews another precocious “child” doing cool TED talks. Her name is Adora Svitak and she’s 3 years older now than her TED talk age.
A page with Blips collection of Howard’s video blog online videos (he has done a zillion) .
Then there’s Howard’s Online University. And its latest class offering here.
Mr. Rheingold kind of reminds me of Julia Parra our friend and teacher at NMSU, who is so active online, and tries so many things out, and travels, at least partly, down so many online paths, that after a while it becomes fairly impossible to actually find her at any one place at any one time. One also wonders what it “feels like” to live such a distributed identity.
One wonders this, because for all the attempts to have “one ring to rule them all”…tools that bring all our access under one roof…it strikes me that the “problem” of a centralized identity just gets “worse and worse”… Which is to say, more distributed all the time. This implies a great change in what and who we are is underway, and much more of it yet to come.
Perhaps this is short-sighted, or simply wrong, but that’s what it “seems like” to this correspondent. Disagree?
Which is one of the things McLuhan went on about…the disruption brought about when our collective and individual sense of identity gets disturbed, or re written.
Change is full of opportunity, for good, and for not so good, and for things we won’t have any real way of saying whether they are good or not while they are happening. Or even after they are happening. Changes in civilization don’t have an alternate universe of “what might have happened if we did X instead of Y” to use for comparison and contrast. Despite what time travel machines and Star Trek episodes might suggest.
Or are we someday going to be able to model our choices so thoroughly that we could eventually be able to “predict the future” as in “Minority Report”. Seems doubtful, because it’s an endless loop, of if you change this, then you change that…