Howard Rheingold, as he writes about himself, got into the mobile area straight from the computer realm, where, in its turn, he came from the type writer dimension.
He is the author of a number of books including 1984 Higher Creativity (written with Willis Harman), 1982 Talking Tech, 1986 The Cognitive Connections (written with Howard Levine, 1990 Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (with Stephen LaBerge)and 1988 They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and phrases.
Further on he went on exploring the areas where minds meet the technology and wrote 1984 Tools for Thought and 1991 Virtual Reality.
In 1985 Howard got involved in the WELL, a computer conferencing system. This involvement ended up in the book The Virtual Community (1993). Howard Rheingold is known as the inventor of the term “virtual community.”
In 1994 Howard was the first Executive Editor of HotWired. However, he quit right after the launch, because he wanted a jam session that just magazine. In 1996 he founded Electric Minds.
In 2002 he released the book Smart Mobs. The book is considered to be a prescient forecast of the always-on era. The weblog on the platform of the book has become one of the top blogs tracked by Technorati.
At the moment Howard Rheingold teaches Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, Digital Journalism at Stanford University, he is a non-resident Fellow of the Annenberg School for Communication. Moreover he is a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.
I was able to reach Howard and ask for an interview. He gladly agreed. As he is an extremely busy man, we decided to make the interview quite short. I chose the 4 major questions as concerns the mobile Internet industry and Howard answered them. Here you are:
1. Why did you choose mobile devices and technologies to be the major topic of your site?
My book, Smart Mobs, was about the ways in which mobile devices and the Internet are lowering the barriers to collective action — politically (Korean and Spanish elections, Orange Revolution, demonstrations in China), culturally (Wikipedia), economically (open source production), and socially (texting changing socializing patterns).
2. What are the major tendencies in the mobile industry at the moment?
The iPhone is an indicator of the future — mobile devices will not be PCs as we knew them, delivered on mobile phones as we knew them, connecting to the Web as we know it. Instead, a new hybrid medium is emerging.
3. What technology do you consider to be the most promising one? Why?
Mobile Social Software — such as Jaiku, just acquired by Google — that enables people to connect with their social networks and with local information, just in place and just in time.
4. What is your inspiration to work?
I’m not writing about somebody else’s tools - I’m writing about the tools that enable me to do my own work more effectively, expansively, imaginatively.
Thanks again to Howard for the provided answers!
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