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Meeting Howard Rheingold (2)
This has been quite an experience. Flying over 2000 kilometres up north, just for meeting other bloggers in Umea, Sweden. Some last minute shopping at Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam) to prepare for expected coldness turned out to be very useful. I probably wouldn't have survived the wind on our first night up there without my newly bought winter hat. The weather turned out to be OK though, which resulted in a pleasant surprise: seeing the northern light (see the photograph in my photoblog). Anyway, now it's time to reflect a bit on the past few days.
The seminar of Howard Rheingold was the main reason for Stephanie Hendrick to invite us over to HumLab, Umea University. I think most people know who he is, but if you don't check out his personal website. I must say the seminar was not that interesting to me. As a blogger most of the things he told last thursday were already known to me, something in common with the other bloggers around I guess. One term Rheingold uses is very interesting: collective action. New communication technologies make it possible for people to connect to each other and communicate which can lead to group forming. An example he gave was the use of SMS in the Philippines to gather people in black clothes at a certain place to demonstrate. The thing we must keep in mind that these collective actions will not all be democratic and peaceful. Smartmobs can be riots as well!
During the seminar Rheingold talked about reputation building through peer-to-peer web pages, e.g. e-bay with its reputation building of sellers. A question that popped into my mind whether this peer-to-peer reputation building will improve overall quality of live. Linking this development to Habermas' ideal speech situation, acting truthfully is one of the most important things in human communication. If sellers on e-bay act untruthfully (by selling crap for large amount of money) that will show up on their record. In that respect it might be a good way to filter 'bad' people out of the system. But I can imagine that it could also be used to give bad reviews on competitors without actually buying stuff. I must honestly say I haven't bought anything through sites like e-bay so I have no eperience what actually happens on those sites. Living in a city with all stores in walking distance it's faster and easier for me to buy things in the traditional stores (OK, not cheaper, but at least I've never had any problems returning products with deficiencies).
The workshop the next morning with Howard Rheingold was supposed to be more interactive, but somehow there was only little interaction and already over before I even realized it (but maybe that's because it was interesting). A few interesting things that came about:
- Rheingold showed us how he starts his working day by skimming through blogs and other information resources. The title of blogpost is the most important factor in the decision of reading the post or not. This is a thing I never realized before, though I'm skimming through my RSS-feeds exactly in that manner. I didn't give titles that much thought up until now, but I certainly will in the future.
- Human beings are social beings that will communicate with others in order to socialize. New communication technologies support the need for socializing, but they will transform existing social networks
- Most technology is developed in terms of the developer and not in terms of the end user. During the introduction Howard mentioned that most blogging software is developed by users, e.g. to be able to publish easily on the internet. A huge research area lies within the user perspective of technology in my view. Too often they've been neglected.
All in all it was interesting to meet Howard Rheingold. I really need to read his books!
