taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (10/06/86)
The following is an outline to a report being prepared for the Office of
Technological Assessment, Communications Systems for an Information Age by
Howard Rheingold. Howard is reading this group and, without his knowledge,
but with his consent I'm sure, I'm taking the step of posting the report
outline, with a request for discussion by our readership.
Please feel free to comment on any aspect of this. I should also note that,
in the digest form, this group is also being mailed directly to the OTA.
Anyway....
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NEW TOOLS FOR THOUGHT: MIND-EXTENDING TECHNOLOGIES AND VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES
By Howard Rheingold
A report prepared for Communications Systems for an Information Age, a
project of the Office of Techology Assessment
Outline
Introduction: The Computer Revolution that Hasn't Happened Yet
- Prototypes for the coming Information Age
- The vision of personal computing: why and when
- Where computers came from and where they are going
- Visionaries who build tools because they want to use them
South of San Francisco and north of Silicon Valley, near the place
where the pines on the horizon give way to live oaks and radio-
telescopes, an unlikely subculture has been creating a new medium for
human thought. This emergent communication environment is partially
the result of conscious planning by government and private industry,
but is mostly the result of serendipitous, self-motivated,
unpredictable convergences of lines of thought that had been pursued
by freelancers, crackpots, visionaries and research for reasons
ranging from military necessity to sheer intellectual curiosity.
Technological Convergence and Intellectual Quests
- Planned vs. Serendipitous progress
- Intersecting and converging intellectual quests
- The role of the individual and how not to thwart it
- Theorists, toolbuilders, and technological niches
There is a logic at work in the history of thought-tools, but it is
not wholly identical with the kind of progress that can be planned or
predicted. New knowledge is built on older knowledge, and although
cultures, and institutions attempt to manage technological innovation,
even most sophisticated planning is not sufficient to create the kind
of creative combustion that occurs when intellectual quests collide.
Thinking Tools Lead to Thinking Tools
- Tools to think with: The hierarchy of abstractions
- The Universal Machine changes the nature of the game
- Augmentation and symbiosis
"...The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing
machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting
partnership will think as no human being has ever thought and data in
a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know
today."
Implications of History for the Future
- communities & virtual communities
- side effects of communication technologies
- property versus creative communities
- the distributed community as a testbed
Nobody knows whether the emergence of communication metamedia will
turn out to be the best or the worst thing the human race has done to
itself, because the outcome of this empowerment will depend in large
part on how we react to it and what we choose to do with it. The human
mind is not going to replaced by a machine, at least not in the
foreseeable future, but there is little doubt that the worldwide
availability of fantasy amplifiers, intellectual toolkits, and
interactive electronic communities will change the way people think,
learn, and communicate. The key problem planners and forecasters must
face is the question of how to keep ourselves from squelching the next
step in our intellectual evolution.
An Experiment in Distributed Information-Gathering
- The "Well" conference on the subject of this report
- from Usenet and ARPAnet
This is an invitation to all minds who are in contact by means of this
medium: What do we want technological forecasters to know about how to
nurture the healthy evolution of online communities, especially in
light of the coming revolutions in signal transmission and storage
technologies?
Recommendations
- art of getting out of the way
- versus harvesting creativity
- the enthusiasm of enthusiasts
"About 9000 years ago, prehistoric man was suddenly catapulted into
history as the result of an astonishing social discovery. Previous to
this, small bands of nomadic tribes had roamed...looking for game and
gathering fruits and vegetables wild. Then someone found out that if
one domesticated animals and plants, one could have a ready supply of
food always available. Thus was agriculture and civilization born...
Fortunately we are on the brink of another momentous discovery which
will have even greater impact on cultural personal escalation.
"Heretofore we have harvested creativity wild...
"If we learn to domesticate creativity -- that is, to enhance rather
than deny it in our culture -- we can increase the number of creative
persons in our midst by about fourfold. That would put the number and
percent of such individuals over the "criticial mass" point. When this
level is reached in a culture...there is an escalation of creativity
resulting and civilization a great leap forward..."
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Any comments would be welcome, including people who disagree with any of
the basic premises to the outline. I'll make sure that Howard gets a copy
of whatever is posted, and, as I've indicated above, the Office Of Technological
Assessment people will receive copies too!
-- Dave taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (10/08/86)
This article is from hplabs!well!hlr (Howard Rheingold) and was received on Wed Oct 8 12:42:03 1986 Appropriately enough, this is the first time I've ventured a reply on the Usenet! Of course I am delighted that you took matters into your own hands, but I do have a couple of comments. First, the OTA wants to do their own survey of Usenet and Arpanet, so I'm not going to submit more formal survey questions as I first thought. Secondly, I've changed that outline a bit, mostly to make the opening quote less florid and more to the point. Thirdly, the material you see in quotes in the outline comes from various sources. I plan to acknowledge them directly in the document, and they have been acknowledged in the conference, but the sources of the quotes are J.C.R. Licklider and John Curtis Gowan, respectively. --howard