Pioneers: Howard Rheingold
Summary
TLDRこのエピソードは、インターネットの歴史とその影響について霍华德・レインゴールドとの対話を通じて探求する。レインゴールドは、インターネットがまだ存在する前からの経験から、コンピュータを強化器として見なす視点を持つ。彼は、オンラインコミュニティの発生や、分散型ネットワークの社会的結果、そして技術的な進歩がもたらす社会的変革について洞察し、熱く語る。対話は、技術の発展と共に進化する文化的価値や、教育における新しいツールの重要性についても触れる。
Takeaways
- インターネットの基礎は耐障害性にあります。核攻撃に対して強韧であるために分散型パケットスイッチングインフラストラクチャが採用されました。
- パケットスイッチングはRANDコポレーションの人々によって発明されましたが、ARPANETが採用した理由は、電話交換ネットワークの信頼性にあります。
- コンピュータはネットワークを通じて他コンピュータと通信するルータとして機能し、これが今でも重要な部分です。
- コンピュータがパケットを受け取った際の動作は、通信がネットワークをスムーズに移動できるようにしています。
- ARPANETの創設は、大学間でのコンピュータ研究を接続することを目的としており、プログラマー同士がネットワークでコミュニケーションを取り始めました。
- インターネットの技術的な建築は、社会的な変化をもたらすことができ、新しいコミュニケーションネットワークを創造しました。
- インターネットが広まるにつれ、人々の間でのコミュニケーションの仕方や文化的形が大きく変わりました。
- インターネットは中央集権的なシステムとは異なり、誰もが情報を共有し、知識を拡大することができる構造を持っています。
- インターネットの文化は、人々の協力と共有の精神に基づいており、オープンソースやWikipediaのようなプロジェクトが成功を収めています。
- 技術の発展はソフトウェアの柔軟性と人間の社会的な要素の組み合わせによるものであり、オンラインコミュニティの形成や進化に影響を与えています。
- 教育においてもインターネットを活用することで、より自由な学習の形態が可能となり、学習者同士が情報を共有し、協働して学ぶことができる環境が整いつつあります。
Q & A
ハワード・ラインゴールドが初めてインターネットに接続したのはいつですか?
-1983年です。
「仮想コミュニティ」という言葉を造ったのは誰ですか?
-「仮想コミュニティ」という言葉を造ったのはハワード・ラインゴールドです。
ARPANETの設計の一つの目的は何でしたか?
-ARPANETの設計の一つの目的は核攻撃に対する耐久性を持たせることでした。
パケット交換技術はどこで発明されましたか?
-パケット交換技術はRAND Corporationで発明されました。
ARPANETがパケット交換技術を採用した主な理由は何でしたか?
-ARPANETがパケット交換技術を採用した主な理由は、複数のコンピュータセンター間でプログラムを実行できるようにするためでした。
インターネット上の「端から端への原則」の重要な社会的影響は何ですか?
-インターネット上の「端から端への原則」は、特定の利害関係なしに革新を可能にし、異なる場所にいる人々が共通の関心事で繋がることを可能にしました。
初期のインターネットコミュニティでのコミュニケーションの主な形式は何でしたか?
-初期のインターネットコミュニティでのコミュニケーションの主な形式は、電子メールやフォーラムを通じたテキストベースのやり取りでした。
ワールドワイドウェブが発明されたことでインターネット文化はどのように変化しましたか?
-ワールドワイドウェブの発明により、インターネットはマルチメディアコンテンツの共有が可能になり、より視覚的で対話的な体験が提供されるようになりました。
オープンソース文化が公共財の創出に与えた影響は何ですか?
-オープンソース文化は、金銭的な報酬や直接的な関連性がない個人でも公共財を共同で創出できることを証明し、技術や情報の自由な共有を促進しました。
初期のインターネット開発者たちは、どのような意図でインターネットを創造しましたか?
-初期のインターネット開発者たちは、科学研究や教育の進展を目的として、情報の共有とコミュニケーションを促進するためにインターネットを創造しました。
Outlines
🌐 インターネットの発展と仮想コミュニティの誕生
この段落では、ホワード・リーンゴルドが1983年にインターネットに接続し、コンピュータを増幅器として認識した最初の非プログラマーの一人であったこと、また「仮想コミュニティ」という言葉を考案した経験について語ています。彼は、オンライン上のコミュニケーションと協調に関する深い洞察を持っており、その歴史的背景とその意味を詳細に説明しています。
💡 インターネットの分散化とその社会的影響
この段落では、ARPANETの設計の1つの目標が核攻撃に対する弾力性を確保することであり、それがなぜインターネットが今日のような分散型のパケットスイッチング基盤を持つのかについて説明されています。また、分散型デザインの社会的影響についても議論されており、その背後にある歴史的事実や技術的な詳細が含まれています。
🌟 インターネットの創造と革新の精神
この段落では、インターネットがどのように創造され、どのように発展してきたかについて語されています。技術者の間でのコミュニケーションがどのようにその発展に寄与したか、また個人がネットワーク上で革新を起こす際に必要な許可やインフラの変更が不要であったことを強調しています。この段落は、インターネットの精神や、その背後にあった人々の仕事と努力について理解するための重要な情報を提供しています。
🤖 コンピュータの進化と人間の知能の拡張
この段落では、コンピュータが人間の知能を拡張するツールとして認識され始めた過程について説明されています。特に、ドуг・エンゲルバートとJ.C.R. リッカーの視点が強調されており、彼らがコンピュータビジョンを形づけた方法と、そのビジョンが現在も影響を与えていることについて語られています。この段落は、コンピュータ技術の発展と、それが人間の生活や仕事に与える影響について深く掘り下げています。
🌈 インターネット文化の進化と多様性
この段落では、インターネット文化の進化とその多様性について語されています。特に、技術の発展がどのように文化に影響を与えたか、またその文化が健康的な発展と不健康な発展の両方を示す例を挙げています。この段落は、インターネットがもたらした文化的な変化と、その変化が人々の生活に与える影響について理解するための重要な情報を提供しています。
🚀 ソフトウェアの柔軟性と革新の加速
この段落では、ソフトウェアの柔軟性とその革新の加速について語されています。ソフトウェアの変更が容易であること、そしてその変更がどのように技術の進歩を加速させているかについて説明されています。また、ソフトウェアの柔軟性がどのように新しいコミュニケーション方式や文化的な形の創生を促進しているかについても触れられています。この段落は、ソフトウェア技術の発展とその社会的影響について深く掘り下げています。
🤝 オンラインコミュニティと協力の原理
この段落では、オンラインコミュニティと協力の原理について語されています。特に、知識資本、社会資本、共感、そして共通体と共通体の原理がどのように機能するかについて説明されています。この段落は、インターネットが提供するコミュニケーションの可能性と、それによって生み出される社会的な価値について理解するための重要な情報を提供しています。
📚 自学とオンラインでの知識共有
この段落では、オンライン環境での自学と知識共有の重要性について語されています。特に、オンライン上での教育資源の活用方法や、自主学習の組織方法について詳細に説明されています。この段落は、現代の教育システムにおける革新的なアプローチと、オンライン環境が教育に与える影響について理解するための重要な情報を提供しています。
👨👩👧👦 家族関係の変貌とデジタルネイティブ
この段落では、コンピュータとインターネットが家族関係に与えた影響と、デジタルネイティブに関する議論について語されています。家族間のコミュニケーションの容易さや、若者と年長者の間での知識の共有、そして新しい技術への柔軟なアプローチについても触れられています。この段落は、デジタル技術が家族生活にどのように影響を与え、そして世代間の相互作用についての理解を深めるための重要な情報を提供しています。
Mindmap
Keywords
💡internet
💡packet switching
💡virtual community
💡social consequences
💡collective action
💡end-to-end principle
💡innovation
💡online culture
💡permissionless innovation
💡tragedy of the commons
Highlights
Howard Rheingold, one of the earliest pioneers on the internet, discusses the social consequences of the internet's decentralized design.
Rheingold explains the origins of packet switching and its adoption by ARPANET, highlighting the misunderstandings around its invention.
The importance of the end-to-end principle in allowing nodes on the network to communicate freely, fostering innovation and cultural exchange.
Rheingold's perspective on the internet as a tool for collective action and coordination, emphasizing the role of online communities in social change.
The discussion on how the internet has evolved from a text-based medium to a multimedia platform, influenced by technological advancements and user behavior.
Rheingold's insights on the democratizing nature of the web, where individuals could create and share content without the need for permission or centralized control.
The impact of the internet on education and learning, with Rheingold's project 'Perigogy' showcasing collaborative online learning without traditional teachers.
Rheingold's thoughts on the role of social media and online platforms in shaping internet culture and the challenges they pose to the original ideals of an open web.
The importance of 'view source' in the early web, enabling users to learn from and build upon each other's work, fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation.
Rheingold's reflections on the evolution of online culture and its amplification of certain human behaviors, both positive and negative.
The discussion on the role of the technical architecture of the internet in enabling social changes and the potential for new forms of communication and cultural expression.
Rheingold's personal experiences with the internet, from his early days at Xerox PARC to his observations on the changing dynamics of human relationships in the digital age.
The significance of the 'rough consensus and running code' philosophy in the development of the internet and the trust it required among its pioneers.
Rheingold's views on the potential of the internet as a mind-amplifying technology and the need for literacy in using these tools effectively.
The exploration of how different individuals use computers and the internet, challenging the notion of digital natives and the value of intergenerational learning.
Rheingold's advice for those intimidated by new technology, emphasizing the importance of play, exploration, and learning from mistakes.
Transcripts
[Music]
hello i'm devin and you're listening to
the ninth episode of tools and craft a
series of conversations with the
designers engineers writers and
inventors who are shaping computing as
we know it
today i'm talking with howard reingold
howard first plugged into the internet
in 1983 before the world wide web even
existed
he was one of the first non-programmers
to see computers as mine amplifiers
rather than just computing or word
processing machines and he coined the
word virtual community through his
experience as a member of the well one
of the first online communities and he's
thought in depth about collective action
and coordination online
he's been on the web for so long there's
a lot of other things that he has done
on on computers and but that's just a
quick taste and i'm sure y'all will get
a better sense that as we dive in
so howard thank you so much for taking
the time to chat i've been really
looking forward to this me too
so one goal of the arpanet design was to
be resilient to nuclear attack which is
why the internet today has a
decentralized packet switching
infrastructure enabling it to avoid a
single point of failure what were the
social consequences of this
decentralized design
i could be wrong about this but my
understanding from my conversations with
bob taylor was that packet switching
had been invented by some people at rand
corporation
in order to create a decentralized way
of communicating during a nuclear attack
that was not the reason
that arpanet adopted it arpanet adopted
it because i guess it was a t or bell
telephone the the
switched
network
that existed at that time was the
telephone network and if you remember
old movies of switchboard operators
making connections
a switch network literally
creates a circuit between the the
listener and and the speaker and
what i was told by bob taylor was that
the switch network people the telephone
people
didn't
didn't believe that that packet
switching uh would work
for this they adopted packet switching
the network was really enabled by the
understanding that they could create a
computer on the network that would speak
to other
computers on other networks i guess we
call that a router
these days so i'll have to tell you i'm
not much of a
technical
expert but actually when i first started
out writing i talked myself into a job
at xerox park doing some some writing
there they gave me assignment of helping
some of their scientists publish who
were good scientists but were
procrastinators on on publishing and one
of the first jobs i i had was two people
wanted jim white and yogan dalal and i
think yoga dela later became a
a venture capitalist and they had a
paper on
the the way
that the packet encapsulated the
structure of the network
and
helping them write that i i spoke to
them and we made recordings and i did
transcripts and we talked about the
transcripts i it was like
being given a a paper in greek and a
greek and a latin dictionary and
speaking either of those languages but
what stuck with me was the the the way
that the structure of the packet enabled
communications to move through this
network very fluidly in that when a
computer received a packet the the first
it would unwrap it and the first thing
it would read would would be about where
that pack was headed and if it wasn't
headed for that computer it would throw
it in that general direction of that
computer
etc
etc so packet switching is really an
essential
part of the
the arpanet but
as i was told the reason for creating
the arpanet was that arpa was sponsoring
computer research at a number of
different places at university of
california
at the university of utah at mit
and the and they met in person a couple
of times a year the the computer science
researchers and they began wanting to
run the the programs on on one computer
center
from another computer center and so
that's
how they started it was really to
connect to these disparate projects
technically
what happened along with that was that
along with the technical connection the
programmers started using the network to
communicate with each other and i think
that the real genius of of jcr lick
lighter and bob taylor who were running
the the project was that instead of
saying you guys shouldn't be talking
about science fiction one of the first
lists was about
sf lovers about science fiction um you
should be talking about your work
they understood that they were creating
a new kind of communication network and
in fact they wrote a paper that i
recommend called the computer as a
communication device and in fact lick
lighter called it the intergalactic
network and they and they
mused about what would happen when
most of humanity is online
we'll definitely have to include a link
to that in in the transcript i'm sure a
lot of people will want to read it
there's a quote that i think you you
quoted in something that you wrote from
john gilmer where he said the net
interprets censorship as damage and
routes around it which i thought was
like a very evocative way to describe
the the architecture of the net how has
that played out in practice and like
what sorts of interactions have people
had as a result that maybe wouldn't have
been possible in like a bell telephone
centralized system
gilmore disavows being the person to
have invented that and it's unclear who
actually invented that phrase and i
think it's pretty clear now
that it turned out to be wrong i mean
you've got the great firewall
in china but the end-to-end principle
that any node on the network can
communicate with any other node on the
network really led to a lot of the
innovation that that led to the web and
the online culture we see today
i thought of it when i first started in
in terms of the social
dimension which is that you could
communicate with someone who shared a
particular interest
whether you knew that person before or
or even whether they were on the same
side of the the planet
as you and and that is enormously
important today
if the example i often use is if you
have a disease that one in a million
people have there are 2 000 others and
you can connect with them
we're also discovering that if that
rising tide lifts all boats it lifts the
the pirate ships as well as the hospital
ships so um you can have medical support
groups and you can have nazis
who are able to connect with each other
in ways that they weren't able to
connect with each other before and i
think that's one of the most important
aspects of of the end-to-end principle
the other one being that
you
you don't have to ask permission and you
don't have to rewire the network in
order to innovate as long as whatever
you're doing on your node you can take
your computer and and plug it into the
network and
disseminate
the world wide web for example if it's
if it speaks the protocols of the
internet if that moves the packets
around technically the way they're
supposed to then no you don't have to
get permission to do it the you know the
the google guys didn't have to ask
permission to create a new search engine
from their their dorm room and and tim
berners-lee didn't have to rewire the
the web in order to disseminate html
so i think that
those are the
to me the the two most important aspects
of
you know just the the technicality of
what they call the end and
uh principle which i think illustrates a
way that a technical architecture can
result in
enormous social changes absolutely when
i first went to college i was planning
to study mechanical engineering but as
soon as i took my first programming
class i realized oh man this is the real
stuff because i realized that i didn't
need permission to do anything i could
just put up a website and it would just
start working and maybe no one wanted to
go to it and that was my problem but i
didn't need any permission to make it
happen and so i quickly changed my major
because of that that feeling of like man
it's just it's just me and my computer
and then suddenly i've like potentially
done something that tons of people can
use or not in most the cases of most
projects these days in terms of the
the giant monopolies a lot of people
have forgotten or never never learned
that the web as we know it was really
created by people like you and i who
just put up our websites and linked to
our friends websites and put up pictures
of our our pets it was not
a corporation in fact if you said i plan
to make money on the internet before
before netscape people would would laugh
at you and it certainly it wasn't the
government the government enabled the
technology and supported the creation of
the technology enabled the transition of
the national science foundation network
to the internet but it wasn't really the
government didn't create the web what
are the pockets of communities that
still view the internet in those ways
like where do you see that spark of
people still viewing the web as
something that can be co-created as
opposed to something that facebook has
to make a web page for you well i think
that's one of the big issues of the day
is when you're talking about the tragedy
of the commons or the commons there's
the enclosure of the commons the literal
common land that that the peasants were
able to graze on in england was
was fenced in and if you you tried to
use it you were you were shot or hanged
and that's called enclosure and
i feel that facebook is trying to
enclose
the internet it's trying to make people
believe that it is
the internet but we've got
all kinds of conversations
going on in all kinds of places you know
just reddit itself is is a ecology uh
full of uh communities of people who who
share a particular interest so you know
it's like the the big companies uh kind
of own the loaf but there's lots of lots
of raisins inside it and a lot of little
communities inside it you know i
mentioned medical support communities i
wrote about that back in 1987 it was a
uh to us
in the well
when we formed a support community for a
parent whose son had developed leukemia
now of course that's not surprising i
mean who has not googled their symptoms
and people who have diseases or
are caregivers for diseases they know
how to contact
support groups online and you know the
same thing goes for engineers
we probably wouldn't have the internet
as we know it today
if the companies then in silicon valley
had realized that their engineers were
using the network to talk with engineers
at other companies and
and solve problems together to share
lore and knowledge so i think sharing
lore is
another thing that that people do
without even
thinking about it i i think there are a
lot of these
threads that connect people either you
know through their their
personal lives like medical support
groups or through their professional
lives with sharing sharing lore you know
long before linkedin that was how you
found out about where jobs were i think
that
when the web first started everybody who
was putting up a website understood that
we were creating it nowadays you know
people who
were born
into an age where the where facebook
dominated don't i don't think all
understand that that they have that
capability that that anybody can can
innovate and create something new they
can create a new tumblr or they can
create a new reddit as as as people have
done and of course things are spring
things spring up new ways of
communicating spring up and people
invent
new art forms new cultural forms around
them tik tok
didn't exist a few years ago i can
remember when video online was extremely
slow and
only nerds used it so i have a lot of
faith that it's sort of like water will
always find its own level if there's a
new way to communicate
people will find it and invent new forms
that
quite often in fact almost always the
people who invented the technical means
of communicating did not have in mind i
have this ongoing group chat with some
of my friends on facebook messenger
and something we we talk about on and
off is how
it feels very impersonal like in
facebook messenger
imessage whatsapp all of these they all
look more or less the same for for every
group
and that has its uses because you know
it makes it means that you have a
standardized interface and like everyone
knows how to use it but in the on the
other hand it doesn't really feel like
it's your place it feels like you're
living you're like living and
communicating in this like institutional
setting as opposed to this shared space
that you like create together like a
studio you might have with your friends
and so something we we daydream about is
often like making our own mess messaging
chat just for ourselves not to like sell
or something but just for ourselves for
our own uses
uh to make it almost more like a
scrapbook and this is this is something
i'm always tempted to to go off and
build but it actually is hard to build a
chat app that is good and useful so i've
held myself back up until now but i
think the more i think about it the more
i'm gonna have to do it one day i think
i wrote a short essay on patreon in
response to this idea of facebook and
closure
you know if you want to start a forum
or you want to start a
chat group or you want to start a
mailing list the tools are there you can
create your own communities people
can make
their their own substitutes for facebook
for their their small group i just i
don't want that to be lost i i i don't
want that skill of just taking what's
available online and rolling your own
when slack came along a lot of
old-timers said
wait this looks like a irc it's irc with
you know a little bit of a fanciness in
the in the interface and i think
certainly there
it's proven to be value in in taking the
technical skeleton of things that have
existed for a long time and make them
make them
look a little a little friendlier yeah
so on that note actually how did the
internet culture change when the world
wide web was invented in 1989 well um
you have to remember that the internet
was
almost entirely text
there were people exchanging images
most of them pornographic on newsnet and
that had to do with transmitting
long
passages of gibberish that you had to
decode
so
the idea that you would have
pictures
or video or
or sound
was was
kind of it was it was so distant as to
be invisible to most people i think
people who understood where moore's law
was taking technology
knew that eventually the internet would
be a
would be multimedia in fact allen k in
1977
in scientific american in an article
called microelectronics in the personal
computer
talked about the internet being a
meta medium the the ability to link of
course hypertext has been an idea for
quite a while since ted nelson and
doug engelbart but when you put the
multimedia together with the hypertext
you get a basis for all all sorts of
things
the idea that people would use the web a
to make money really uh exploded after
the internet after the net netscape ipo
i was involved with starting hot wires
which was wired magazine's
online venue and and and we put ads i
think
in just a uh a short period of time i
don't know whether it's hours or days
more video was uploaded to youtube than
in all the history of broadcast
televisions
and you know we knew that that
we would be able to manipulate images
but nobody really dreamed of a photoshop
when we saw mac paint so i think that
the
the technology
enabled
accelerated evolution people saw oh we
can we can put a picture up what what
can we do with pictures oh you can
upload videos what what can we do with
video and of course we've seen that's
that's gone in so many different
directions and and none of them not all
of them healthy ones so
again
sometimes uh
people ask has the web become is it good
or bad and i think well are humans good
or bad you know
at the point where you've got a
significant portion of the human race
online and not just uh you know
technical experts and and
scientists and academics you're gonna
get the full
spectrum of human behavior and some of
that is not not so pretty and
you know previously
you could hide a lot of that not so
pretty stuff it wasn't visible to
everybody but again every every node can
talk to every other node if if you want
to
seek out the the ugly stuff or if the
youtube algorithm believes it will cause
you to be more engaged you can swiftly
get get involved with some some very
nasty stuff online so you asked about
culture you can't really leave that out
i think you know the uh inventiveness i
i understand that that pornography has
driven new technologies for a long time
that not long
after the
uh printing press became widespread
there was uh pornography about the the
the uh french french royalty and again
the video recorder was was driven by
people who didn't want to go to the
store to buy porn so i you know i think
humans are
a mixture all all humans are a mixture
and so so is our culture and so is the
online culture i think the online
culture does amplify
some things and things like for example
the youtube algorithm
does drive people towards the unhealthy
content
what you said about evolution of culture
online and evolution of technological
advancement online has
got me thinking one of the reasons why
the evolution has sped up in
certain dimensions is because software
is so malleable you can kind of like
poke at it and fiddle with it and if it
breaks it's actually fine because you
just like rerun it or you press undo
versus i don't know if you want to
innovate on building a house or
something if you mess up like someone
might die
and so i feel like it makes software
and software tools much more playful
because you can just kind of poke at it
until it does a thing that was
interesting as opposed to
having to worry about the consequences
now certainly there are consequences and
you wouldn't want like the software that
i don't know accepts credit card
payments to to be fiddled with in that
way but photoshop you can just kind of
like apply some filter over something or
some algorithm and be like oh wow that
made a really interesting like visual
effect on this piece of art or oh man
that didn't look good at all i'm gonna
undo it
you know there's a french word for that
they call it bricolage a bricoleur
is someone who just throws a lump of
clay onto the table and messes with it
until a form emerges
in my experience
when you're trying to create something
there are usually two different
approaches to it and some sometimes
quite often you have people embody both
different approaches there are people
who want a blueprint and a timeline and
milestones and objective measures of
every step and there are people who just
want to mess with this part of the code
and see what happens and i think the the
most interesting
uh developments are when those those two
mindsets
uh collide and they have to find a way
that they they can they can work
together and either side can do things
that the other side can't and if they
have to agree on something then they
need to find something that that fits
both both ways of doing things but but
certainly we wouldn't have the web today
if it wasn't for
view source
i remember
not not being a coder at all that i
could find a web page that did something
i really liked and i could view source
and i could copy that source and i could
find all the places where it mentioned
that specific website and just changed
the mention to my stuff and bang i had
something there and i think that that's
one of the reasons that the web
has spawned so many different cultures
is that ability to build on what other
people have done even if you're not
entirely knowledgeable about what it is
they did
yeah definitely i mean i remember some
of my first experiences programming were
wordpress sites and i had no idea what
was going on with any of it but i did
know that like if i saw the word red and
i wanted to replace it with the word
purple suddenly my page would be purple
and that was cool
and you know from there you start
pulling the thread and you start
realizing like oh this the place where
it says on click maybe that has
something to do with clicking
and you kind of like you pull the thread
until it all unravels in a good way well
you know the great thing about wordpress
is that there's a
very large community and
if you've got a problem or you have an
innovation that you wanted to
incorporate
the skill of finding who knows what is
really important and um and in terms of
programming the site where if you've got
a programming question you put it up and
oh stack overflow yeah stack overflow
how did how did programmers work before
stack overflow i mean think about that
it's the
this again
that ability to connect with the person
even though you don't know who that
person was in this case it's who is the
person who's encountered this particular
programming issue oh my god you put put
it up not only do people answer your
questions
in most cases they've already answered
the question
and i think that
that ability to
lean on a
community of of people who are not only
knowledgeable but willing willing to
share i think they're willing to share
part was really built in not to the
technical infrastructure but cul culture
that developed out of the early internet
in the early web this is something i
find even my i surprise myself with
where like i contribute to this open
source
tool called log seek and i sometimes
just like sit in their discord and when
i say sometimes i mean like a few days a
week i'll just sit in their discord
channel
answering questions about it and i don't
know why i do that it's just fun but i
would not expect that i would
spend my time that way if that makes
sense from an outside view but i kind of
get pulled in and i feel very happy when
i get to explain things people
that is a key question when i was
writing my book the virtual community in
1991 1992 i found it very hard to find
academic experts who could answer my
my questions i did find a graduate
student at ucla by the name of mark
smith and i asked mark
why
do people spend time
giving information to other people they
don't know
and he said knowledge capital
social capital
and communion and i think that he was
right and in fact when i i taught social
media
issues and social media literacies uh to
college students i had a a week that was
devoted to social capital online and you
know most of these formal terms i
discovered after trying to find out what
people said about what what i knew
what was happening and i became
excited about life online when when i
discovered that if i freely gave out
uh information to people who are looking
for it i would get ten times as much
back when i asked for it and and that's
essentially
uh social capital it's people
accomplishing things together outside
the formal frameworks of
contracts or laws and and it's essential
to to human life you know with with
farmers if you break your leg and it's
harvest season and then if you have good
relationships with your neighbors they
will take in the harvest and you know
the classic is that the amish
barn racing so i think that that's
another essential
part of online culture and
reciprocity is part of it is i
discovered called
diffuse or indirect reciprocity so
you have a question
i give you the answer even though i
don't know you and you may never
reciprocate to me directly but we both
belong to the same community in which we
know that others are going to answer my
question even if they don't know me so
in fact that's a deep principle of how
human cooperation
has come to evolve so i i think that
there are both
there's both a technical architecture
and
some some principles of the way humans
operate that have combined to create
things like that again i learned all
these things because i was interested in
why
why does it work this way there was a
sociologist by the name of manker olsen
who wrote a book called the logic of
collective action
and that was considered the last word on
the subject and in which he he pretty
much
declared
that that public goods things that no
one in particular is responsible for
like well i don't know keeping the
sidewalk clean are not going to be
created by groups of people who are not
financially compensated or related to
each other or are very large at all and
of course open source came along the
wikipedia came along and the web came
along and those are all
whatever the opposite of an existence
proof is it proves that the the logic of
collective action needs to be revised
that people will
create public goods
together
there's a book by stephen weber called
the the success of open source in which
he he actually dealt with some some
surveys of open source uh contributors
and the reasons i may not get this
exactly right the the number one reason
was learning how to program
a number two reason was monetizing their
ability to program and number three
reason was contributing to a public good
and the fourth reason was sticking it to
microsoft so it turns out that when
you're dealing with public goods online
having a couple of characteristics makes
it more successful and one of them is a
number of different motivations for
doing it
and another one that works very well for
open source programming and wikipedia is
self-election i may be obsessed with a
particular kind of south american ant so
that's when i'm going to decide to write
about on on wikipedia or i think
interestingly i am a programmer and
there's a new printer and nobody has a
driver for it so i've got to create that
driver i might as well contribute that
driver to the to the public so that
other programmers who need to connect to
that printer can use it but also i'm
signaling that i'm a cooperator and when
i need help someone will help me
all of this is may is enabled by the
technical architecture but it's really
driven by the the
human social factors yeah i think
the the self-election is a big part of
why people are motivated and
it is i think a very powerful positive
force i think it all has some gaps
though too which is like some projects
are just more charismatic than others so
you know i'm i imagine that the
wikipedia page for kittens has probably
been updated more often than like snails
i don't know i haven't actually checked
if that's true but i i would i would
hazard a guess and there's probably some
much more obscure animal that i've never
even heard of that very few people pay
attention to that like has very little
information written about it or
similarly with open source software i
think
a lot of software tools get a lot more
attention and work
on them when they are at sort of the top
of the stack the ui layer the the part
that actually
interacts with humans where the p people
actually see it as opposed to the
transitive dependencies that that
software might rely on so i think that
is one of the like
one of the limitations of that but it
doesn't make self-election bad it just
means that we need
other types of reasons to work on
something that fill in those gaps
who are those people in the early days
of the internet and then of the world
wide web well you know the in the
creation of the internet a lot of it was
done through email they had
they called it rfcs
requests for comment and so people would
you know as you know programmers have
strong ideas they would argue about
things technically but there was a
fellow who kind of ran the mailing list
who died a few years ago by the name of
john postel and everybody trusted him to
not be in a particular faction faction
so i think the philosophy behind the
people who created the
internet was rough consensus and running
code and so
rough
consensus is important because anyone
who's participated in
consensus based activities that are that
are strict consensus finds that they go
on and on and on and there's always
somebody who's going to stop it
oscar wilde said of socialism it
requires too many evenings
consensus requires too much meta
conversation so having someone that
everybody trusted was was really
important i think to that it's really
useful in a group uh in advance of
having to approach big decisions is to
sort of make the meta decision of who
will just make a call when it comes to
it it's an incredibly valuable thing
that you can do because otherwise if you
don't do that and you all respect each
other and want want everyone to agree
then you end up in this situation where
you don't do anything at all you know i
think it's important to go back to your
original question to to understand that
it was really the extraordinary
leadership of jcr lickliner and robert
taylor who were at arpa when all of this
business started
taylor was i think in his 20s and had
been a nasa administrator and jcr lick
was was older and he had done some war
work at mit and so when arfa was created
they had this little office called the
information processing techniques office
it was really a a tiny thing but he
understood where interactive computing
was going and he hired taylor and they
did things like fund doug engelbart and
they funded
ivan sutherland who invented computer
graphics who later succeeded them at
arpa and they funded alan kaye
there came a time when the u.s congress
said
this arpa
that's supposed to be for the defense
department this is during the vietnam
war now if you're not working on things
that the military can use right away we
don't want you to do it so a lot of
people quit
and bob taylor was hired by the xerox
company to invent the information
architecture of the future and they gave
him a hundred million dollars and ten
years with no interference and he went
and hired all of those arpa engineers
who were all you know pretty young
graduate students from the university of
utah and university of california and
all over the place and brought them to
palo alto and put them in the same
building and the architecture of the
building was organized in these pods
where if you had to get from one place
to another you had to go through a place
where people were having conversations
and they had bean bag chairs all over
the place and white boards all over the
place these were people who had been
used to working
with the old
technologies of of you know getting on
the airplane or getting on the train and
getting together and working with
blackboards now they had this this
integrated
facility i think that that it would not
have happened if it had not been the for
the extraordinary trust that that people
had in bob taylor from that and these
were all very strong personalities if
you've ever talked to or read anything
by allen k you know that that he was a
very strongly opinionated person and
there were a lot of others there as well
and they of course built on the the work
of doug engelbart and they and they were
the ones that led me to doug engelbart
if you're interested in this part of the
history bob taylor
and john markov did a video at the
university of texas at austin a few
years ago that's completely fascinating
you know taylor's a a texan and he has
this kind of down-home way of talking
about things and he's got lots of great
stories uh about where the the bodies
are buried so and that's that's where i
came into the the picture was that i
had been professional writer trying to
make a living as a writer for
some years and
i was tired of typewriters you know you
you type out a page and then you mark it
up and then you have to retype it it's a
pain and i heard a rumor that you could
use computers and screens and move words
around without having to retype them
i went to apple which at that time
was in two buildings i talked to jeff
raskin who later was kind of the
initiator of the macintosh project he
said no you can't really do word
processing on
on on apple twos because the hardware
only supports uppercase because
the founders believe that that people
are
almost exclusively going to use these
computers for playing games and writing
code in in basic
so that's when i came across alan k's
1977 article
and
i thought
xerox park must be the coolest place to
work if you're interested in the the
future of this technology and i i talked
my way into into a job there and and
part of that job was interviewing
people when i interviewed
bob taylor he turned me on to doug
engelbart and when i met doug engelbart
that's when i really understood that
this was
not just a far better typewriter this
was a mind amplifier or as he called it
augmenting human intellect and that
the future
of
mind amplifiers was going to to
explode as the technology did as alan
kaye said back then everybody knows
where the silicon is going so if you can
if you can put a pixel on a screen
in not too many years you're going to
put a million pixels on the screen
you're going to enable them to move
around so what does that
have to do with how we think and and
communicate and and then i i still
believe is the
the most important aspect of the of the
technology you know engelbart had a a
hard time getting people to to listen to
him it took him 10 years he got he had
this vision actually in the 1950s of
people using screens and computers to
to collaborate but the computer
uc berkeley said and there were about
four or five computers on the west coast
then uc berkeley said well you can study
computer science here but don't talk
about these mind amplifiers is it's
crazy and he went to hewlett-packard and
they said that they were never going to
get into digital technology and so
finally he understood that people did
not
understand that computers which were
used exclusively for scientific
computations and business data
processing were
as alan turing said many years ago a
universal machine said you could get
them to do
lots of
other things so he wrote that paper on
augmenting human intellect which i
taught to every class that i taught and
which i still recommend to people and
particularly engineers who are trying to
build things today because they call it
the unfinished revolution although the
paper was published in 1962 everything
that he foresaw
has not really come to pass yet what are
the gaps
well he had this framework he called
hlamt humans using language artifact
artifacts methodology and training and
in the years after that engelbart often
pointed out that the artifacts the
computers and the networks
evolved to something
literally millions and billions of times
more powerful but how much progress has
been made in the
language methodology and and training
part of that now and i think that that
applies to the future of thinking tools
i think it's going to have
less to do with the technology and more
to do with how people learn and how
people learn to to use it and how they
learn to extend their minds and i'm sure
you have the same thing i do which is i
offload an awful lot of my memory to
google and it's it's
outboard brain i use it a 100 times a
day sometimes
i can't remember something exactly but i
know a couple of characteristics of it
and i search on them and i find it
the the book goes into a lot of detail
about the three aspects one is the body
and some fascinating scientific research
about for example stock brokers don't
even know that stock brokers who can
hear their heart beat you know some
people can hear their heartbeat some
people
can't that people who are more tuned in
to their bodily sensations make more
successful decisions
even though they don't know that that's
the aspect of it so the the body has
part of it gestures are a big part of
thinking for example so body is part of
it the environment is part of it and
then again the technological
extensions that like the computer and
the network so i think we're only really
beginning to learn
the literacy
of
mind amplification that the tools are
all there i mean i think one thing that
i've only come to really appreciate in
the last few years
is
how physical thinking is uh or or should
be
in the sense that
i think one of the things that attracted
me to software to computers to the
internet was how abstract and like in my
head it felt that was really really cool
because i could have a whole little
world in my head but i've come to
realize that actually a lot of the
intuitions that you have for how
something works are physical intuitions
and also having a space that is sort of
an extension of your mind or almost a
not a visualization but um i'll give an
example i i have a friend who has his
own personal uh gaming arcade so he has
like a separate apartment that he rents
out and he has like ddr machines pinball
machines that kind of thing in there and
this space you go in and you just feel
like you're inside of roger's brain it's
awesome
and it's something where as soon as i
saw it i was like oh man i can see how
this place helps him think it helps him
think the types of thoughts he wants to
have it's also a very fun place to be
and so
something i've been worrying about is i
think that a lot of the
tools that we have are very contained
within uh little little rectangles and
they're very powerful but i think
there's probably limitations there i
don't know a lot of a lot of the
greatest scientific discoveries have
happened because of
scientists who sort of felt things in
their body you know i've heard stories
of uh feynman like who was a scientist
at los alamos like rolling around on the
ground like grappling with problems and
like feeling it in his arms and stuff
like that which you know i don't think i
understand physics enough to understand
exactly what he was going through but it
helps him solve problems and helps him
wrap his mind around it so like how do
you approach
teaching these skills to your own
daughter pretty recently
if you're talking about the history of
education
you've got youtube you've got wikipedia
you've got search you've got uh
forums and and chat you've got open
educational resources
why can't a group of people get together
and learn something together
even though they don't have a teacher or
an educational institution what's really
missing is
is knowing how to do that how do you how
do you you want to learn a subject how
do you find out what are the best
sources on that subject how do you
arrange those sources into a syllabus
and what media are you going to use how
are you going to assess your learning
how are you going to divide the the work
of being the being the teacher for the
day so i started a project called
perigogy p-e-e-r-a-g-o-g-y
and it's interesting because i was
invited to give a lecture about about
learning at berkeley at the end of my
lecture i called for creating a handbook
for
learning online without without a
teacher and part of this invited lecture
was i was supposed to meet with the
faculty and graduate students
in a face-to-face seminar for uh several
times after the lecture and i did but i
brought my laptop and i opened it up to
a video conferencing system uh circa
2011.
after a couple of months all of the
people of the
faculty and the graduate students i met
with face-to-face have dropped out of
the project
but educators from
mexico and brazil the uk germany japan
had come in online and had uh created a
community and it's still going i think
the periodic handbook is in its fourth
or fifth edition you can go to
piragaggi.org and and get connected to
it for free
there's a an ongoing community that
anybody can join so i think part of the
what people need to learn is not just
how to to find information online
but how to use these amazing resources
to learn together online and of course
schools are quite resistant
to this when i was at stanford i was i
was
concerned about the fact why why are
there so few of the faculty using
forums and
and wikis and i i went to someone who
was in charge of a center for
innovations and learning
and he said well that the answer to that
is easy this is a knowledge factory and
people are hired here because of their
publications their contributions to
their field and if you're supposed to
teach a class and you never show up
that could be a problem but there's no
positive
incentives for innovating in in
teaching
in in that system and i found
when i was actively
involved in digital media and learning
that the real innovators were not at the
knowledge factories
they were at
some small liberal arts school
university of mary washington i think a
lot of people may have never heard of
that but that's that's where i found
some great innovations in open learning
and i i in fact over a period of years
uh interviewed
more than a hundred innovators in
digital media and learning and i'm
afraid that that what happens in most
fields has to happen in education is
that the the old people have to retire
and the young people have to take over
but an awful lot of them are flying
under the radar now and using
you know not just the face-to-face
elements that go back to you know
ancient samaria but the the media that
students live in when they're not in
school as well
how did computers and the internet
change your relationship with your
family
oh well that's actually when i started
writing about it was uh
uh i think the opening line of my book
the virtual community is uh
my daughter's saying mommy daddy is
laughing at his computer again i had
been writing for quite a while before i
got a computer and a modem and it was
just a miraculous to me to discover that
there were all these interesting people
saying interesting things and i could
uh talk with them and in fact it was
kind of writing as a performing art
instead of waiting for the thing to be
published and printed and maybe someday
somebody would say something to you
about it it was moving that into real
time and i was spending hours a day on
it and so finally my wife became
concerned about that so i started
i started writing articles about it i
wrote uh virtual communities for the
whole earth review in 1987. so okay
that's legit so i really
i don't think of myself so much as a
pioneer as a early participant observer
not only was this fascinating to me as a
writer but the tools were something that
a writer's dream it's like i started out
with a horse and buggy and now i have my
own spaceship it's you know amazing to
think what's you know of course i use
search uh 100 times a day but they've
got things like divan think and the
brain and all kinds of other kind of
knowledge management
tools and thinking tools and
online concept mapping
i think the large end of the funnel for
a writer has gotten so big that you can
gather so much more information that
this causes some problems at the small
end of the funnel how am i going to
integrate all of this and you know tools
that take all of the little snippets
that you've you've gathered and
show you ways that they could be
organized or which ones might relate to
each other are our tremendous help i
think that there's you know there's
still a long way to go in that you know
you still
have to take
everything that you have discovered and
arrange it in serial order if you're if
you're writing a book
uh or you're writing you know an article
uh
it's it's still got to come out in that
that serial order i know this is a
little off topic but i remember when we
were first starting hotwired we were
very
aware that we were creating a new medium
and that
you know whatever we did people would
would follow and i remember a meeting
that was strictly about we need to have
a feature in which people write essays
in which they include links
stop for a second that sounds so weird
doesn't it i mean don't we all naturally
in
include links when when we're writing
these days it's part of the the literacy
of writing back in those days
it was something that you really
had to to think about so anyway back to
family it really helped when i was
traveling when i did a lot of speaking
and traveling to be
in touch with with back home i mean
being in touch
was a lot harder back in the old days
you know there was a time when if you
were in a different country and you
wanted to make a call to the u.s you had
to have
the people in your hotel set it up and
call you when it was
was ready to go
of course able to communicate with my
daughter when she was in college and
when she was away and you know we still
communicate every day
how many families have the the the
family um whatsapp uh chat uh going on
or even you know some some people have a
uh like a walkie-talkie app so you can
have people all over the world i
remember in the early days talking to a
waitress in sweden about this and and
she said well i have a one one sibling
in australia and another one in in in
thailand and if it wasn't for email it
would be very expensive for us to to
stay in touch so there's a negative side
of that which is when you went to
college you used to kind of
go you were on your own
and maybe you would call mom and dad or
write mom and dad but nowadays like uh
back before uh online maps uh my
daughter would call and ask
i'm i'm trying to go to so and so a
dress how do i get there and so
you know that so many so many things
have changed in human
relations including that of the family
and i think you know in some ways being
able to be in touch all the time is a
great innovation in some ways
it's harder for young people to to
form their their own personalities and
detach leave home
don't really leave home so much anymore
one thing i think
i don't fully appreciate and i won't but
every time i've learned about it i've
been more impressed is how
differently different people use
computers uh when i whenever i sit and
watch a friend using a computer or my
parents or anybody they always use it
quite differently than me uh sometimes
it's like small things like the text
size on their phone is different than
mine and i forget that like you can even
change that um or you know sometimes
deeper things like how did a friend set
up their
text editor or their terminal things
like that
i i think it's really fun to see the
rise of tools like twitch for like
video streaming and those sorts of
things where we can get a little bit
more visibility into how other people
use these tools because i think
everything i know about computers really
has either been from poking around
myself or by incorporating things that
i've other like sort of folk practices
that i've seen other people use um so i
think it's
it's also about just like seeing other
people use computers in ways that you
didn't think of or
and also being able to transfer your
knowledge to them directly and it's very
much like a peer-to-peer type of
learning environment well again um
when i was at
hotwired i was 49 and
my intern was 19
and
i just surrendered the computer to him
and let him configure it and let me show
me how to use it and i i think it's
really
i'm not a believer in the digital native
i don't believe that just because you're
young you know everything other
especially the social and political and
ethical implications but i believe that
a young that young people have a lot
more time and that they have this kind
of peer network to learn whatever is the
new way to
to communicate and i think we need to we
need to older folks need to listen to
the younger folks more i think there's a
general myth of fluency both for digital
tools as well as language around youth
where
i think a lot of people think like oh
because i didn't learn a language when i
was young i'll never be able to pick it
up and it might be true that it might be
hard to pick up certain sounds when
you're speaking or in the case of
digital tools you might not have certain
intuitions but i think that the
experience that you bring to the table
can give you different types of
expertise in that space so to like
stretch the the language analogy i've
been learning spanish and i'm like
almost fluent but
every once in a while i will
invent a word without realizing that i
invented a word and my boyfriend who's
argentinian will often go
hey that's not a real word but i like it
you know and he's like i know exactly
what you mean but also that's not a real
word i think similarly with digital
tools like sure
maybe if you didn't grow up with it you
might not have quite as much
certain types of the fluency but in
other ways you're going to understand
the system better and you might have
like a better mental model of like
actually what's going on technically as
opposed to just sort of leaning in so i
think
it might be true like it's not that you
come to the table necessarily with the
same skills but you come with different
different strengths
well and also i think nobody
of any age is able to encompass the kind
of cultural cornucopia of innovations
that are happening i when i started
teaching college students in 2005 i was
pretty sure that i knew more than they
did about life online by 2012
none of us
knew
everything there was about um social
media and so we started a kind of show
and tell where every week a couple of
students would show us what they were
doing online that was really interesting
and most of the class learned something
from that you know whether it was you
know
tumblr or
or youtube
or reddit
people were
really into something and really
understood it and other people may have
known it existed but didn't know much
about it and i think that we're never
going to be able to encompass it i think
we just need a culture of
not being ashamed of learning from each
other
there is a certain part of internet
culture i think where it's very
self-reflective and i i don't mean to be
offensive but like naval gazing around
people who sort of say like i'm an
internet person and i i know more about
internet culture than other people do
and that that's always sort of gotten on
my nerves because i think it's like
you know a certain part of internet
culture and it just happens to be the
part that
like is self-reflective about the fact
that it's on the internet but you know
we're actually all on the internet and
we all we all know different things
about it and i think that there's a
certain moral superiority that some
people come with which i don't
personally think is warranted
well i i think socially if we were just
able to accept a a new behavior of
saying wait what can you can you teach
me what what what that's about i have no
idea and
the other person saying oh sure it works
like this i think we'd
be a lot better off i don't think you
can learn all these things in school i
mean you don't learn about cultural uh
habits
in school many people who didn't grow up
with computers or the web are a little
intimidated by this technolo these
technologies i see this amongst some of
my friends and some of my family members
as well
by conscious it seems like you pick up
new tools and ways of interacting with
them with a lot of enthusiasm you know
actually when we were entering this uh
zen caster recording i think you
figured out the audio before i did
what advice would you have to people who
are a little intimidated by the
prospects of diving into new technology
you know there's
an enormous value in just playing with
things and i think that if we
we valued
fooling around with a new tool and just
seeing what what it might do rather than
you know i don't know being embarrassed
by not knowing how to work it we would
all benefit
from that again i think this is just
it's social and and cultural i think
that if we had a culture of learning
from each other if the if this
periodicity business got
embedded in everything and people
weren't i think what stops you from from
messing with something or asking
something
how it works is it's because you're
afraid of the unknown and you're going
to make a mistake and you're going to be
embarrassed in front of people are you
going to break something i think that
that if we if we did away with that and
just enabled people to to play as they
learn and i think this applies to
everything from k-12 to universities to
you know learning how to operate a
computer we we would advance our
learning a lot better well that's a
perfect place to stop thank you for
taking part of your day to talk with me
this has been a super fun conversation
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