Community Space & Cyberspace Keynote: Howard Rheingold
Author of Virtual Reality and The Virtual Community.
Editor of Millennium Whole Earth Catalog.
Former editor of Whole Earth Review. Former Executive Editor of HotWired
"Tomorrow" column syndicated internationally by King Features
Founder of Electric Minds
Howard Rheingold, internationally syndicated author of the weekly Tomorrow column, author of best-sellers Virtual Reality and The Virtual Community, editor of best-seller The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, takes audiences on a journey through the human side of the technology-shaped future. Rheingold is on the Board of Directors of a well-regarded online community, the WELL, and he was the founding Executive Editor of HotWired, the pioneering online publication launched on the World Wide Web by Wired magazine. He's a participant-observer in the design of new technologies, a pioneer, critic and forecaster of technology's impacts, and a speaker who involves his audience in an interactive adventure in group futurism.
Electric Minds, San Francisco, CA
"Virtual community" is currently a big buzzword in Internet business circles. Read David Kline’s article in the latest "Upside." I recently attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where there was a great deal of talk about the economic prospects of virtual communities. There is a new book coming out from Harvard Business School press called "Net Gain," that is all about the topic. But many of the people who are jumping onto the idea use the word "consumer" a great deal. I had to point out in Davos that I don’t know anyone who would describe himself or herself as a "consumer." We are human beings who fill many roles: citizens, parents, spouses, neighbors, and, yes, consumers. But the human relationships come first.
You can’t build a business unless you first understand that you need to create a means for humans to fulfill their human communication needs. And if you plan to make money by using information you gather about those people, you need to be honest with them, you need to regard their privacy as a sacred trust, and if you try to deceive them, they will leave your place of business.
Are virtual communities going to be demonstrably powerful tools for revitalizing the public sphere? Can people who communicate via computers get out from behind their screens and start rebuilding civil society in their neighborhoods and cities? That, of course, is the subject of Doug Schuler's book, and of more recent publications. But the question is becoming more acute: Can we get the message out about the importance of online communication as PUBLIC space before the mall-builders gain momentum?
Most people who have heard of the Internet but have not participated in online communication have the wrong idea, because most of the discourse in the mass media has concentrated on sensational but peripheral concerns. Every minute of air time, every column inch of newspaper, devoted to more discussion of pornography on the Internet is a minute that is not spent talking about democracy and civil society, privacy concerns, intellectual property problems, the role of citizen-to-citizen communication in local government, the question of how to finance and support civic networking.
The burden of communication and proof is upon those of us who believe in the positive potential of many-to-many media. The mass media are not going to educate the public for us, and now that the mall-builders are appropriating the term "virtual community," we have a limited amount of time to demonstrate and communicate the public importance of this new medium.
What can we do? I'm not going to stand up and preach, because I don't know the answers. What works? (The Seattle Community Network supports the web page for the Seattle Community Voicemail project which uses voicemail as a social tool is one example. What are others?) What doesn't work? What are we fooling ourselves about?