Howard Rheingold is truly a digital elder, and I mean that in the most respectful, old-school way. All of the fetishizing of the "digital native" can distract us from the wisdom of those who experienced and shaped the birth of internet culture, and Rheingold was right there, in time and in space. His new TED Book, Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? traces the history of mental augmentation in its social, cognitive and technological forms.
Things were far more idealistic and countercultural in the early days of the digital revolution. I was most intrigued in Mind Amplifier by Rheingold's mention of Ivan Illich's idea of "convivial tools." To be convivial is to be social both inwardly and outwardly—playful and open with oneself and others. "I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value," wrote Illich. "I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members."
Even more pointedly, Illich believed that, "The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies." This is a helpful thought in a society that has placed more attention on the fact of digital technologies (the new iPhone!) than on what we do with them. Rheingold writes that "only a fraction of those who have access to networked mind-amplifiers know how to use them convivially." I asked him if he could give a contemporary example of an online community whose members have a high degree of convivial literacy?
"Any disease support community is a place of deep bonds and empathy, and there are thousands if not tens of thousands of them," Rheingold replied. "I direct my students to a few conversation threads that exemplify substantial, civil, intelligent online discussions. Here is one about online identity. Here is one on Atlantic.com commenting on Nicholas Carr's article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Here is a thread on a blog about The Dark Side of Digital Backchannels. The conversations on edge.org are generally very high quality. Local neighborhood discussions on nextdoor.com are generally, although not always, friendly and informative."
So, he makes clear, there is plenty of intelligent life in the universe, but not in the most obvious places. I thought his raising of disease support communities as a prime example was telling. In general on the internet, good behavior is positively correlated with real name identity. But disease communities often require pseudonymity or anonymity to protect its members, but the participants do not abuse the privilege. The dustup over the weekend where Reddit moderators blocked Gawker posts in retaliation to Adrian Chen's outing of uber-troll ViolentAcrez, pointed out to me how anonymity is more likely to be abused when what is being communicated doesn't really matter. The lives of people in online support groups literally depends on their participation in these "mind amplifiers."
For people who design these tools there is always the question of whether you can make tools that "teach people how to use them" or whether it's better to focus your energy on building social structures that make the use of the tools more "convivial." I asked Rheingold if this a false distinction.
"When most people think of technology, they think about the visible parts—the iPods and aircraft, skyscrapers and power plants—but all technologies, to some degree or another, are enmeshed in what Langdon Winner calls 'regimes,'" he said. "The environmental requirements and effects (mobile telephones require coltan, a 'conflict mineral' that costs lives as well as treasure), the political aspects (from AK-47s to nuclear weapons), the institutions that emerge or are destroyed (think of climate change or epidemiology), and the social arrangements that the technologies necessitate or strengthen or weaken. Surely there will be great benefits when the designers of technologies and those who finance them have some understanding of the potential effects of the tools they create on the physical, social, and mental environments."
"When designers replaced the command line interface with the graphical user interface, billions of people who are not programmers could make use of computer technology," he continued. "The market has driven designers to make smartphones and laptops easier to use, but now we have more complex environments as a result of the Internet as a platform for innovation. Schoolchildren are not taught how to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate information online—surely there are ways to design web-browsers to help with this task and ways to teach young people how to use the powerful online tools available to them. Design of tools has—as Illich pointed out—been accomplished in the absence of any consideration of their effects on social, cognitive, and political regimes. Designers can be better educated. And so can the users of their tools. So although it is not a false distinction, I believe that we'll see better tools with more convivial effects when both design and social institutions are taken into consideration."
But there must be other disciplines outside of computer science and social science that can help us to cooperate in ways that lead to emergent results. I've written a lot recently on music as something that is both an individual and social phenomenon and that encapsulates both openness to process and meta-cognitive self-awareness.
"Music and dance are great examples—and although we have no physical evidence, it is most likely that they preceded even speech," amplified Rheingold. "In fact, William Benzon in his book, Beethoven's Anvil, makes a case that music and dance originated as ways to coordinate human activities, and in turn laid the foundations for speech. The old model of learning—the sage on the stage—is being challenged by cooperative forms of co-learning in which teachers act as facilitators and students use the tools available, from search engines to smartphones, to learn collaboratively, with teachers acting as facilitators. The whole notion of meta-cognition, of treating attention as a trainable aspect of everyday thought, is a potential new discipline—although, of course, the contemplative traditions that teach mindfulness meditation are ancient. The emerging social-technical phenomenon of social production that has enabled the creation of the Web, Wikipedia, and open-source software is one part of an emerging theoretical and practical discipline of collective intelligence."
The notion of open source knowledge and collective intelligence reminds me of my conversations with Lars Hard at Expertmaker in San Francisco. He is developing tools for "knowledge design" that both help individuals capture and manipulate what they know, but that also help connect individual intelligence to different models and sources of knowledge. Lars gave me a demo of the software a few weeks ago and, although I wasn't thinking about it before I read through Mind Amplifier, the tools are indeed convivial. When you apply quantitative tools to your own qualitative knowledge you have to be open to what you don't know and open to what others may know better. I wondered if this was the kind of thing Rheingold is advocating?
"I had not been aware of Expertmaker, but it looks interesting indeed," he replied. "There is a lot of talk about 'big data' in regard to the huge amounts of information collected by services like Facebook and Googleand emerging technologies like sensors. Why not apply the quantitative tools that big data is driving to personal and collective knowledge augmentation?"I'm glad to say that in a recent post, The Knowledge Revolution Is Not About Big Data, It's About Well-Connected Little Data, I come to a similar conclusion. And, as Douglas Rushkoff argues in Program, or Be Programmed, if we don't actively use and shape these new digital knowledge tools for our own human purposes, we will be shaped by them in ways we will only realize later were not in our best interest.In keeping with my ongoing theme about the relevance of musical practice to technology, here is a quote from minimalist composer Philip Glassinterviewd in the context of a collaboration between himself and the pop musician Beck (who, in turn, curated a bunch of other collaborators) on an album of remixes of classic Glass compositions.
When I talk to young composers, I tell them, I know that you’re all worried about finding your voice. Actually you’re going to find your voice. By the time you’re 30, you’ll find it. But that’s not the problem. The problem is getting rid of it. You have to find an engine for change. And that’s what collaborative work does. Whatever we do together will make us different.