Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We are delighted to have our own Howard Rheingold (hlr) with us to
talk about his new book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.

Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) will be leading the discussion; and a number of
alumni from Howard's  online class, MindAmp, through his Rheingold
University (http://www.rheingold.com/university/), will be chiming in.

Expect this to be wide-ranging and extremely practical. Those of us
who have had the good fortune to come under Howard's tutelage can all
attest to his mastery of the subject.
  

    
Hello, Howard! And thanks for the intro, Ted!

There are many books about the Internet, digital media, and digital
culture. What, in your opinion, sets this book apart from the others?
What do you hope readers of this book will take away that they can't
find elsewhere?
  

    
I don't know of any other books that explain how individuals can do
better for themselves and for the rest of the world by knowing how to
use social media effectively and mindfully. And I don't mean how to
market your product more effectively. Technology has developed much
faster than education about the literacies afforded -- compelled -- by
mobile phones, search engines, virtual communities, smart mobs,
disinfotainment, misinformation, and all the other good and bad
innovations that digital media have introduced into our lives.

This book, like all my others, is supported by abundant evidence. I
did my share of armchair philosophizing about life online until I was
called on it by others and reflected on it myself. If you are going to
make claims, show the evidence you base them on. In my case, 500
footnotes, most of them with URLs. Unlike my other books, I am the
central (but not the only) expert I consulted. And unlike my other
books, this one is prescriptive -- full of practical advice about how
individuals can personally thrive online and, at the same time, improve
the health of the digital commons.

As you know, I've been writing about digital media for more than 25
years. Tools for Thought was published in 1985
(http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft), the same year the WELL started.
The Virtual Community, 1993 (http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book), grew
out of my experiences on the WELL (and my travels, physical and
virtual, to online communities around the world). Smart Mobs, 2012
(http://www.smartmobs.books), grew out of my interest in the
convergence of the mobile telephone, the personal computer, and the
Internet. In each case, I was asked by critics, scholars, and by
myself: "Is this stuff you are forecasting any good for us as
individuals and as a society?" In 1985, the "stuff" I forecast referred
to personal computers that were less powerful than today's throwaway
toys. In 1993, "stuff" meant social communication via computer
networks. In 2001, "stuff" meant trillions of text messages,
netroots-organized political demonstrations, streaming video from
phones. 

Finally, after a lot of thought and study, I've concluded that the
answer to "is this stuff any good for us?" is: "It depends on how many
of the billions of people who carry printing presses, broadcasting
stations, political organizing tools in their pockets learn how to use
these media effectively and mindfully."

I've beta-tested the final book on a couple of dozen people I consider
to be pretty savvy, and every one of them told me they learned
something from it. The reviews haven't come in yet, but at a certain
point in a writer's career, he either trusts his instincts or he
doesn't. I trust my instinct that this book gives readers a deeply
thought-out and empirically buttressed set of actual practices to
improve their infotention, participation, collaboration, crap
detection, and network awareness skills.
  

    
I don't know of another book that is comprehensive in the same way,
and I think that's because you approach the subject as a literacy and
not as a tool for marketing or an overview of a particular niche. I
think it's useful that you start with a discussion of attention, which
is a fundamental of communication and media, and in digital
environments is challenged by an abundance of both tools and
information. You describe a meditation practice that seems to be
inspired by Buddhism, but is offered as a kind of survival skill, a
practice of attention management. Can you describe your own methods for
getting grounded and managing attention? And possibly sources - what
references do you commonly site for cultivation of attention?
  

    
I think we're all aware that always-on, everywhere-available media are
challenging both the cognitive aspects of attention (e.g., research by
Nass et. al. demonstrates that media multitasking degrades performance
for 955 of the population) and social norms (Pew Internet and American
Life survey reveals that one in six Americans admit to bumping into
something or someone while texting and walking; Sherry Turkle warns
about the damage of looking at your smartphone while your child is
trying to talk with you; professors need to deal with students who are
looking at their laptops in class). From reflection on my own practices
to study of the scientific literature, my own meditation practice, and
8 years of experimentation in "attention probes" with my college
students, I've come up with some simple and well-documented ways to
manage attention.

Unlike those who have been claiming that social media compel
distraction, I believe that social media don't compel distraction but
afford it -- and the difference has to do with whether one takes any
steps to manage attention. That's where mindfulness comes in. The term
is familiar to many who practice Buddhist meditation, especially simple
awareness of awareness. In terms of Buddhist-oriented literature, I
recommend Thich Nhat Hanh's "The Miracle of Mindfulness." In terms of
neuroscience-based literature, I recommend Siegel's "The Mindful
Brain," Dahaene's "Reading and the Brain," and Wolf's "Proust and the
Squid."

I wrote a short piece about managing attention to information, which I
call "infotention" in an old blog post, which was expanded in the
book. The key idea is simple: just as in meditation, the breath is used
as a tool for bringing attention back to awareness -- paying attention
to attention -- I use visual reminders to enable people to begin
developing a kind of inner observer, to develop an awareness of where
one is directing attention at any moment, and whether that is serving
one's own priorities.

Two simple, perhaps oversummarized methods I present at greater length
in the book.

1.  Only you know your priorities -- where you ought to be directing
your attention most of the time. So at the beginning of the day, write
down a few goals for the day on a piece of paper (use the old right
brain -- handwriting and paper) and place the paper at the periphery of
your vision, near your computer screen.

2.  Whenever your gaze falls on that piece of paper, simply ask
yourself where you are directing your attention and how that relates to
your goals for the day. This is meant to be a gentle means of
developing mindfulness -- or if that is too spiritual a word,
metacognition (Wikipedia has a good entry on metacognition and I cite
further resources in the book for those who want to dig deeper).

In terms of my own practices, I do spend a great deal of time in front
of my screens. Every day, before lunch, I do some yoga and meditation
-- in the winter, on the floor of my office, but for the rest of the
year on the lawn in my garden. And I walk my dogs in the Marin
countryside every day for an hour or two, and when I get to the
off-leash area, I turn off my audiobook and pay attention to my breath.
  

    
Though it's there between the line, I don't recall an explicit
reference to attention economics in the book. We're coming from an era
of mass media, where scarcity of media meant abundant attention which
could be sold to advertisers - but with abundant media and
scattered/scarce attention, that model breaks down. This is outside the
focus of your book, but having just attended a conference for
journalists and experienced their bewilderment over the future of their
profession, I wonder if you have wisdom to offer about the future of
media as business, based on the conceptual territory you've covered in
the book?
  

    
I dealt with a couple of aspects of attention economics, but of course
I had to make many decisions about what to leave out. I think one of
the facts of life that every young person ought to know when they get
online is that marvelous tools such as search engines are both public
goods that come without a financial price tag, but they are paid for in
terms of our attention, which search engines sell to advertisers. I
don't believe this is necessarily evil. As you can recall, Jon, I was
the editor of Whole Earth Review for four years, a worthy publication
that struggled and finally failed financially because of our
ideological opposition to advertising revenues. Face it -- advertising,
not subscriptions, is what pays for most cultural publications. And I
don't have to attend to those ads or click on them. But I think people
need to be aware of the way websites seek to keep ("stickiness) our
attention or channel it to advertising. Another issue is what is
sometimes called "playbor" -- the fact that Flickr or Facebook might
give me a cost-free account to share my photographs, but exploit my
labor by making money from the use of my material without compensating
me financially. Personally, I am happy with this exchange, but I
believe the critical uncertainty is whether people understand that
their labor is accruing profit to others -- what is known in the
medical world as "informed consent." 

In regard to the future of journalism, if I had a clue to how
journalistic enterprises and journalists will be supported financially 
in the future, I would have started a for-profit or non-profit
organization to pursue that clue. So, while as you can see I am happy
to pontificate about issues I know something about, I am reluctant to
offer solutions to this problem. I will say, however, that while the
Internet's abundant sources of news and Craigslist's disintermediation
of the classified ads in newspapers are important contributors to their
demise:

1.  It was the rise of malls and the downfall of department stores
that started the decline in revenues for newspapers.

2.  The consolidation of thousands of local newspapers into a few
large syndicates, and the public ownership of those syndicates,
transformed the news-reading public into news-reading markets -- and
markets are fickle.

3.  Newspapers were among the most profitable enterprises you could
get into (c.f. Hearst, Pulitzer, McClatchy, Knight, etc, ) and they had
plenty of time to prepare for digital delivery (see the book
"Digitizing the News") which they frittered away by spending billions
of dollars on "teletext" experiments that disempowered the consumers of
news and simply extended the broadcast model to a new medium.
 
  

    
Increasingly desperate to attract attention that can be monetized,
news organizations sensationalize or entertainment-ize news, and this
entails distortion and misrepresentation to make stories more saleable.
Recently Bill Maher on HBO screened a short by Alexandra Pelosi
showing news reports in the wake of the Trayvon Martin suggesting that
Black Panther and neo-Nazi tension in Sanford, Florida is media-created
mythology: http://youtu.be/mgre4ROq1Wo. I think this is illustrative
of the unfortunate state of contemporary media. In your book you talk
about media complexity, especially given the proliferation of channels
and voices on the Internet. You quote Hemingway: "Every man should have
a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him." What are
some of your thoughts about crap detection? How do we know what's real?
  

    
I'm not going so far as to advise people about how to tell what's
real, but I do provide some guidance about checking out information
that you find or which is provided to you by others online.

1.  Think like a detective. Look for clues.
2.  Look for an author, search on the author's name. If you don't find
an author for a website,  use whois and search on the names that turn
up there. In the book, I give advice about using several different
utilities to check out those who claim to have scientific, medical, or
scholarly credentials.
3.  Triangulate -- look for three separate sources on reports before
you pass them along.
4. Make an effort to pay attention to sources you don't agree with,
both people and media. If there aren't people in your personal learning
network who regularly annoy you because you so strongly disagree with
your opinions, you may be in an echo chamber.

I wrote a blog post before I wrote the book: Crap Detection 101
(http://blog.sfgate.com/rheingold/2009/06/30/crap-detection-101/) and I
made a video to accompany it
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHVvGELuEqM)
  

    
Some (like Nicholas Carr) feel that the relatively shallow, short
burst (or what I call drive-by), interrupt-driven nature of social
media is making us "dumber." Do you agree with that assessment? 
  

    
Back to attention for a moment...can you talk about multi-tasking?
There's a lot of theory and debate about it; is it real, is it
effective, are there generational differences as to how it is
incorporated? How does it play into attention? 

And maybe later, as we get into practical literacies, how can I get my
devices to multitask for me?
  

    
I liked Nicholas Carr's book a lot. He's a compelling writer and,
unlike many, offers citations of empirical evidence to back up his
claims. However, in my book I take his argument to task in several
dimensions. One claim that is clearly specious to any writer is his
overdramatized fear of social media as the writer's great distraction.
Any writer can tell you that distraction existed in many dimensions
long before social media. We writers have the best-weeded gardens, the
neatest offices, the most well-washed dishes, the sharpest pencils. The
entire world is a potential distraction to a writer and the only real
protection is the will to manage one's attention. Which brings me to my
first point: If we fear that our use of social media is making us
shallow, then why not teach more people how to swim so we can all
explore the deep end of the pool. Which is precisely the point of my
book: knowing HOW to use social media and HOW to manage one's attention
is the critical  uncertainty. In regard to the use of social media
changing our brains, Carr and I both note that learning to read changes
our brains. We are changing our brains all the time. Education and
meditation are behavioral tools for managing that change in a
productive manner. Maybe Carr is right and we are all dumbing ourselves
down. I know that believing that Carr is right is probably going to
become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think we are all the descendants
of creatures who thought "there must be some way out of this
impossible-looking situation," rather than "the situation looks bleak;
I guess I'm doomed." Does mass-media make us dumber? Without a doubt --
if we consume it uncritically (as, unfortunately, so many do). Will
social media use make us dumber? Perhaps. But why not try out ways to
use these extraordinarily powerful tools to extend our intelligence?
Maybe it will work. Maybe it won't. But not trying will almost
certainly lead us to either misuse or underuse the power of online
media.
  

    
Multitasking. First, people need to be aware of the work by Cliff Nass
et. al. at Stanford and other supporting research that provides strong
evidence that 95% of media multi-taskers are actually degrading their
productivity in the component tasks. Multitasking as a more efficient
way to work is, for most people, an illusion. Focus for 20-30 minutes
on one task, and then switch to multitasking. I also think it's
important to recognize that productivity is not the sole criterion.
There are instances in which multi-tasking gives us a systems view, a
way of perceiving connections, that focused attention does not provide.
Metacognition involves not only becoming more aware of the state of
one's attention, but becoming knowledgeable about one's mental tools
and developing the ability to deploy the best tool for the task at
hand. Sometimes, focus is best. Other times, multitasking is best.
Developing the ability to recognize and act on the difference is the
skill I'm hoping my book will help people learn.
  

    
Speaking of dumbing down, in a way. One of the depressing thoughts I had 
on reading your book (which I loved, and from which I think I learned a 
lot) is that the people I think most need it are the least likely to read 
it. For starters, I am noticing how few book readers I know these days--if 
it can't be condensed to a blog post, does it fit people's lives?

Once that was true, but more hidden--I can't count how many homes I have 
been in that seem to have no bookshelves to complement expensive and 
clearly well-used TV, er, entertainment centers.

So, I guess my question is how the book will penetrate outside of the 
sphere of people studying social media in your own classes, and those of 
us who know enough that many of the topics in the book expand knowledge, 
but aren't necessarily where we first started learning it?
  

    
Each one teach one! Give the book to an open-minded but clue-impaired
parent of a young person who is just getting online -- give it to the
young person.

I created a college syllabus for this book and related material that
other college professors are free to modify and use, and I hope it gets
modified for high school use:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1whawicjQdSDh1ohWF4-CDnSrrpkjfFtnpc6632vGBv
g/edit
  

    
Just want to note that we've set up a short url for this discussion:
http://bit.ly/rheingold-inkwell  Distribute far and wide!

Also note: you don't have to be a member of the WELL to add a question
or comment - just send to inkwell at well.com, and someone will post
for you.
  

    
You can just use the form at the bottom of the most recent comment,
even!   
  

    
Yes, forgot about that!

Back to the question of "dumbing down": I think we've all noticed the
very human tendency to assume that an intelligence not-like-ours is a
subpar intelligence. So I wonder whether, instead of dumbing down,
we're evolving a different kind of "smarts"?
  

    
That's the chapter I had to leave out because I ran up against the
word limit in my contract. I'm going to start this very day on a mini
e-book for the new TED editions about the possibility of using media in
ways that make us smarter, building on the "extended mind" theories of
Robert K. Logan, David Chalmers, and Andy Clark. Clark points out that
our minds have been in many ways external to our brains for a long
time -- try multiplying two five-digit numbers without pencil and
paper. The pencil, the paper, and the knowledge of arithmetic
procedures are tools that make people smarter. And of course Doug
Engelbart ignited the train of innovation that led to personal
computers in his 1962 book, "Augmenting Human Intellect." 
  

    
I know Engelbart influenced you quite a bit. Where would we be now, if
he hadn't existed? And how much was he influenced by another inventive
thinker, Vannevar Bush?
  

    
Engelbart told me that he had been a radar operator in the Pacific in
WWII and was sitting in an open-air palm-leafed hut in Manila, awaiting
orders for deployment to the invasion of Japan when he read Vannevar
Bush's "As We May Think" in the August, 1945 issue of the Atlantic.
Later, when he started working at Ames Electric in Mountain View,
driving through what was then the world's largest fruit orchard, he
thought about what to do with the rest of his life. He recalled Bush's
article and remembered from his radar experience that patterns could be
painted electronically on CRT screens. What if computers could be
harnessed to paint those patterns and people could use these devices to
solve problems together? Keep in mind that computers of that era, the
early 1950s, had less RAM than is used today to paint an icon on a
smartphone screen. And don't forget Licklider's article on
"Man-Computer Symbiosis." Licklider later funded Engelbart's
Augmentation Research Center at SRI. I interviewed Doug Engelbart in
person for Tools for Thought and Licklider over the telephone. A couple
summers ago, I had Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbert over to my place for
dinner. Here's a short video:
http://blip.tv/howardrheingold/doug-engelbart-ted-nelson-come-to-dinner-404221
3
  

    
Also, here's a link to Howard's Net Smart site, for those of you who
have not had an opportunity to get his book...yet!!!

http://www.rheingold.com/netsmart
  

    
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12827&mode=to
c
  

    
What led you to acquire your first computer? Were you aware that
computers could be used for communication? Or were you originally just
looking for word processing capability?
  

    
Sometime in the early 1980s I was jazzed to read Alan Kay's 1977
Scientific American article on "Microelectronics and the Personal
Computer,"
(http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/microelectronicsandthepersonalcompute
r)
and was particularly intrigued by the idea that I could use a screen
and mouse to edit text. I had been writing with an electric typewriter
that could erase an entire line at a time but I still had to retype
pages after revising them. I was working as a staff writer at the
Institute of Noetic Science at that time and one of the trustees was a
really interesting guy, Henry Dakin, who died a few years ago. Henry
was a geek. He donated a CP/M machine to IONS. At that time, IONS was
located in a house in Pacific Heights and they put the CP/M machine in
the drained hot tub in the basement. So I climbed into this hot tub,
put on my Walkman headset, and happily typed away in Wordstar. I tell
this story in Net Smart: I thought that Xerox PARC, where Alan Kay
worked when he wrote that article, was the coolest place for a writer
to work, so I bugged them until I got a writing job. I commuted to Palo
Alto so I could write on an Alto. This was before the Macintosh. PARC
led me to Doug Engelbart, and those experiences led me to write Tools
for Thought. Some time in the early 1980s I got a modem to use MCI
Mail. Then I discovered BBSs. One in particular, Skateboard, had a
community that met at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, which is
where I met David Hawkins before the WELL started. So yes, I was just
looking for a word processor, but it became clear to me when I
encountered Engelbart and Licklider that this was not just a better
typewriter but had been designed as a mind amplifier.
  

    
How did you come to the WELL? Were you a member before you become
Whole Earth Review editor?