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About This Episode
We live in a time defined by the agency of what author, critic, and teacher Howard Rheingold famously described as “tools for thought” — media that expand our minds and enhance our ability to learn and collaborate, both for good and ill. But just because we’re on the Web doesn’t make us “net smart”, another term from Rheingold’s extensive catalogue of pithy idioms.
As anyone with a pocket supercomputer can attest, having information on tap doesn’t necessarily result in better attention management, boost our critical thinking, or confer a greater capacity to engage in prosocial collective action…but we can choose to allocate ourselves to developing the skills we need to thrive on this electronic frontier. And who better to help us than Rheingold himself, a legendary figure whose reporting and counsel from the frothy edge can teach us all great volumes about how to deepen our humanity in technologically-augmented worlds.
Disclaimer: the audio and video on Howard’s end of the recording drifted unevenly and sometimes minutes away from each other…and while I put in several extra days of effort to repair it all, you will notice moments where they don’t line up.
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Chapters
0:00:00 - Teaser
0:01:50 - Intro
0:07:15 - Howard’s Story
0:15:59 - Technology as Psychedelic & The New Selves of The Web
0:26:42 - Attention Management as A 21st Century Literacy
0:39:29 - Making Life Online a Lucid Dream
0:52:17 - New Architectures of Participation
1:01:51 - The Importance of Art & Play
1:12:16 - Making Room for Innovation
1:17:05 - Howard’s Guest Recommendations
1:18:24 - Thanks & Announcements
Howard’s Links
Website | Patreon | X | Mastodon | Wikipedia
Attention: And Other 21st Century Literacies
Net Smart @ Google Tech Talks (video)
Tools for Thought: The History & Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (also on Digital Library for The Commons)
Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (also on JSTOR)
The Peeragogy Handbook (also public domain)
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (PDF here)
Virtual Reality (also on Internet Archive)
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on The Electronic Frontier (also on Internet Archive)
Pataphysics.us
Mentioned Books & Papers
Douglas Engelbart - Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework
Linda Stone - Beyond Simple Multi-Tasking: Continuous Partial Attention
Jacques Ellul - The Technological Society
Regina Rini - Deepfakes and The Epistemic Backstop
Puja Ohlhaver, Vitalik Buterin, Glen Weyl - Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul
Joseph Henrich - The Secret of Our Success
Elinor Ostrom - Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
J. Stephen Lansing - Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali
Ananyo Bhattacharya - The Man from The Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann
Garrett Hardin - The Tragedy of The Commons
Manuel Castells - The Rise of The Network Society
Annie Murphy Paul - The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain
Mentioned People & Institutions
Timothy Leary
Joe Kamiya
Alan Kay
Clay Shirky
Richard Doyle
Ray Kurzweil
Linda Stone
Iain McGilchrist
Clifford Nass
Stanislas Dehaene
Tim O’Reilly
Cory Doctorow
Andreas Wagner
David Pasiak
Dave Snowden
Mircea Eliade
Ed Catmull
John Lasseter
Alan Turing
Xeroc PARC
Scientific American
The WELL
The Whole Earth Review
The Institute For The Future
The Macarthur Foundation
Napster
Burning Man
Hewlett Packard
Pixar
Industrial Light & Magic
Lucasfilm
Stanford Institute for Innovations in Learning
Guest Recommendations
Joe Henrich
Annie Murphy Paul
Brian Alexander
Athena Aktipis
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