Exploring mind amplifiers since 1964

Net Smart

The future of digital culture—yours, mine, and ours—depends on how well we learn to use the media that have infiltrated, amplified, distracted, enriched, and complicated our lives. How you employ a search engine, stream video from your phonecam, or update your Facebook status matters to you and everyone, because the ways people use new media in the first years of an emerging communication regime can influence the way those media end up being used and misused for decades to come. Instead of confining my exploration to whether or not Google is making us stupid, Facebook is commoditizing our privacy, or Twitter is chopping our attention into microslices (all good questions), I've been asking myself and others how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and above all mindfully. This book is about what I've learned.

Read More »

Compendium of Podcasts Featuring Howard

November 13, 2022

Someone created this presumably updated compendium of podcasts featuring me, about cooperation, virtual communities, technology, learning, social media literacies.

Read more | No Comments | Tagged: tag, another tag

Support Howard’s knowledge-sharing, art, discourse on Patreon

December 27, 2017

You can support me for $2, $5, $10, $25, or $100 per month and get rewards along with exclusive content: Howard’s Patreon Page Hi! I’m excited about Patreon because it gives me an opportunity and new incentives to engage, converse, co-learn, and co-create with my online public, which I started doing in 1985. I intend […]

Read more | No Comments | Tagged: tag, another tag

The past futures of Howard Rheingold at the Institute for the Future

June 21, 2017

My art-making always has been a subconscious divination ritual that I’ve invoked in parallel with the rational techno-social forecasting I have done for fifty years. Institute for the Future was the perfect place to juxtapose my heretofore private art with my public future forecasting. It turns out that when you look at these twin strands […]

Read more | No Comments | Tagged: tag, another tag

Crap Detection Mini-Course

February 20, 2013

Read more | No Comments | Tagged: tag, another tag

Public Sphere In The Internet Age

February 20, 2013

Read more | No Comments | Tagged: tag, another tag

Network Literacy Mini-Course

February 19, 2013

Read more | No Comments | Tagged: tag, another tag

Recording of my Education 2.0 conversation with Steve Hargadon

April 5, 2012

Steve Hargadon is a great interviewer, and about 80 members of his active Classroom 2.0 community joined via text chat. The recording (use the player controls) includes audio, video, slides, and text chat. You will be asked to allow the download and launch of a Java applet, then use the player controls to play the […]

Read more | No Comments | Tagged: tag, another tag

Net Smart Video and Podcast

April 3, 2012

The video from my Net Smart presentation to New Media Consortium just became available, as did the MIT Press Podcast.

Read more | No Comments | Tagged: tag, another tag

Why “Net Smart?”

January 29, 2012

Digital media and networked publics have emerged so quickly and broadly that our minds, relationships, and societies changed before anyone could get a handle on how they are changing. More recently, both empirical studies and works of criticism have begun to question the trade-offs involved in the transition to an always-on world. Criticism is necessary, […]

Read more | No Comments | Tagged: tag, another tag