Howard Rheingold on cooperation, technology, and social dynamics

January 21, 2008 1:19 PM

Technology of Cooperation (.gif map), from Howard Rheingold's Cooperation Commons project. Rheingold on Amish technology practices.

More of Rheingold's writing on his homepage. An archive of (the hibernating? dead?) Cooperation Commons blog colletive. His Smart Mobs blog, apropos his book by the same name.

Two more books, in full text: The Virtual Community, Tools For Thought. An excellent bullet-point distillation, The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online. [via]

posted by cortex (6 comments total)

This is a great post. Really dense, a lot of stuff to absorb, so I can't say anything more intelligent than that for now.
posted by middleclasstool at 3:12 PM on January 21, 2008

Rheingold was active in the online community The WELL ("YOYOW - You Own Your Own Words") since the mid-80s. It was a pioneering online community cofounded by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant and later purchased by Salon Media Group in 1999^*.

Rheingold's experience at the WELL led to his writing The Virtual Community -- "Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier."

Others have written about their experience on the WELL. For example, former WELL Director Cliff Figallo wrote "Hosting Web Communities."
posted by ericb at 3:54 PM on January 21, 2008

*considers effect on community*
Yep.
[This is good.]
posted by stet at 6:29 PM on January 21, 2008

Hadn't seen that map before. I don't tend to think of Rheingold as exactly rigorous but that's a very rich & dense piece of work, definitely worth spending some time on.
posted by scalefree at 7:34 PM on January 21, 2008

Heh. More favorites than comments. Did we ever come up for a name for this?

I'm really enjoying digging into Rheingold's stuff. It's a little bizarre, I guess, that I'd never heard of him before yesterday, though in my defense I was playing Legend of Zelda and eating fruit rollups when he was doing a lot of this work.
posted by cortex at 8:04 AM on January 22, 2008

Wow. There's the age gap between me and Cortex right there!

I'm still plowing through all the links but the Amish article was really interesting. Thanks.
posted by DarlingBri at 7:03 PM on January 22, 2008