Net Smart: How to Thrive Online
Join us for a discussion with author Howard Rheingold. In his new book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Rheingold asks, how can we use digital media so that they help us become empowered participants rather than passive consumers; grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking neurotics? In Net Smart, he demonstrates how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.
Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he presents a lesson on networks and network building.
There is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our individual efforts wisely, it could produce a more thoughtful society: countless small acts like publishing a Web page or sharing a link could add up to a public good that enriches everybody.
Howard Rheingold is an independent scholar and currently a guest lecturer at Stanford’s department of communication. A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities.
Rheingold’s 2002 book Smart Mobs, which presaged Web 2.0 in predicting collaborative ventures like Wikipedia, was the outgrowth of decades spent studying and living life online. An early and active member of the Well (he wrote about it in The Virtual Community), he went on to co-found HotWired and Electric Minds, two groundbreaking web communities, in the mid-1990s. Now active in Second Life, he teaches, writes, and consults on social networking. His latest passion is teaching and workshopping participatory media literacy, to make sure we all know how to read and make the new media that we’re all creating together.
