My group was given a subject to research on for our future post on Niki. We were told to research on Howard Rheingold and our group managed to come out with really interesting facts about him. A critic, writer, and teacher. He specializes in the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities. I stumbled upon a video on Youtube, and thought it’ll be nice to share it with you guys.

In this video, Howard Rheingold joined Mamie Rheingold in a conversation about his latest book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. While we are living in a society with an overload of too much information,  he believes that knowing how to make use of the online tools  is essential to our personal success in the 21st century. How can digital media empower us rather than being just passive receivers? In this book – Net Smart that he talks about in the video, he shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully

“If we believe that or fear that our use of social medium is making us shallow, why not teach people how to swim and explore the deep end of the pool.” – Howard Steingold

Prior to my latest post about online personas, I found an academic reference (Virtual Reality: Exploring the Brave New Technologies) that Howard Steingold wrote about that I found was relevant to the topic discussed.

In this piece, he shares with us about his sense of what kind of place cyberspace is, makes it hard to tell whether the person you are communicating with shares the same model of the system within you are communicating. To him virtual communities are very much like communities in some ways, deceptively so to those who assume that people communicate via words on a screen are in some way aberrant in their communication skills and human needs. To those who assume that people who communicate via words on a screen necessarily share the SAME LEVEL OF COMMITMENT to each other in real life as more of traditional communities.