I pointed earlier this week to this interview with Howard Rheingold, whose seminal work, The Virtual Community (1993), was the first to explore the realities and possibilities of online community. His later work, Smart Mobs (2002) followed this trend into the world of mobile gadgets and future possibilities for ubiquitous computing scattered everywhere. This interview is a very general question and answer session. The smartmobs.com blog keeps us up to date (a LOT HAS HAPPENED over the last 5 some-odd years, illuminating and in some cases further obscuring the insights and predictions in Smart Mobs.
Ever since devouring Smart Mobs (the book) in the fall of ’02, I’ve often envisioned “Smart Church Mobs” where a people who also happen to have a lot of “connected” folks (people who are often online) are also highly motivated to take “keep in touch” to the level that phrase has been taken in the 21st century, so that all those invigorating discussions can continue to unfold, and have “new links” added to them so that those good trains of thought don’t fizzle, but remain “in archive” and make themselves available to discovery by tools that find topics, tags, blogs, etc.
Anyway, I wanted to post something about how I highly recommend Howard Rheingold via his writings and articles as a premier sociologist of the Net Culture.
