🚀 go-pugleaf

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