Social media is everywhere now, but there was a time not so long ago that it wasn’t much more than an abstract theory. In the 1980s, a few academics theorized about virtual worlds, and Howard Rheingold was among them.
Rheingold has written extensively about the capacity of technology to act as a “mind amplifier.” His latest book, Net Smart
Between launching a book and teaching students how to set up blogs, Rheingold is a very busy man. He didn’t have a lot of time for me, but what he had to say was very intriguing.
Change is in the air, and most people can tell. The economy has undergone some serious disruptions. Marketers are starting to say that companies need to start speaking with, and actually listening to, their customers in order to survive. Protest movements, from Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, are popping up without central leadership. The open source movement questions the very idea of proprietary technology.
, she talks about how the new science of complexity applies to these types of organizations.
Today you can do something that wasn’t possible for any previous generation. You can take a class from a Stanford professor without paying a dime. For the past month, I have been watching Robert Sapolsky give twenty five lectures about the biology of human behavior. As much as I’d like to ask all of you to watch them, I know that few of you will. For that reason, I couldn’t resist the urge to pass on the key insights that I learned from his class.
. He is one of the most engaging professors I have ever seen. Providing his lectures with a healthy dose of humor, he has compressed some of the most interesting information in the field into a single course. I will attempt to compress it further.
Self-help gurus would probably counter that I’m just afraid of self-improvement, but I find myself very skeptical of the entire movement. New-age mystics and self-proclaimed experts all claim to have the secret recipe for happiness. Whether arguing that reciting affirmations will realign the universe to do your bidding, or providing folksy insight that you’ve already heard from your grandparents, the majority of these books don’t have much to offer.
, didn’t get me riled up either. It wasn’t until I exchanged a few words with him that I realized we could have a very interesting conversation.