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Interview with Howard Rheingold

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Of course the most important change that the internet

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brought has been a democratisation 
of the ability to create

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and distribute not only your opinions, 
but all sorts of media.

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It used to be that if you had a radio station 
or TV station or printing press

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you could broadcast your views 
to a very large number of people

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at quite a bit of expenseive 
and a fairly small percentage of the population was able do that.

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The internet made it possible for 
everyone who had a personal computer 

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that was connected to the network 
to in effect have a printing press,

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and a broadcasting station and 
a place of assembly a place where community

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 could take place, a market place. 

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That's a very radical change in the way
 the printing press was a radical change.

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For thousands of years, 
scribal culture really hand-picked the people who were

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 given this code to transmit knowledge
 across time and space.

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In the wake of the printing press,
 milions of people became literate 

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instead of thousands and 
constitutions, democracies, science

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as collective knowledge gathering, 
the protestant reformation Ð very large scale social changes 

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Ð were enabled by a literate population.

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So now we're seeing the beginning 
of vast expansion of literacy, 

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not only in the ability to send words on a page, 
but TV and audio 

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and software and music and movies 
from any spot to any other spot. 

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Structurally, 
that change is a very dramatic change 

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and socially it means that 
we now have another population

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that has a degree of literacy that will enable them 
to organise forms of collective action

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that they weren't able to organise before.

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Just as you couldn't govern yourself, 

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you couldn't overthrow the monarchy 
and create a constitution

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without a literate population. 
You couldn't create science as a collective enterprise, 

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you had to wait for Newton or 
a Gallileo or an Aristotle to come along,

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you couldn't enlist entire populations of people in that. 

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So I think the largest social question 
is what forms of collective action - 

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and that could be political, 
rise of democracy and nation states,

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it could be economic, the emergence of market capitalism 
in the wake of Gutenberg, 

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literacy Ð it's cultural: 
public education afforded by cheap printing.

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Those are the kinds of changes that 
we ought to look at in the largest sense,

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in regard to what the internet
 provides as a communication medium. 

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Well we're benefiting from two technological bonanzas 

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the microchip, Moore's law, 
making devices much more powerful and less expensive 

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every year, that means that a five year old's video game

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has all the power that all the computers 
in the world had not too long ago. 

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That's a tremendous advantage in terms of putting the ability

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 to produce and distribute culture 
in the hands of many many people.

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It used to be that you had to spend 
hundreds of thousands of dollars on a video camera, 

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You had to spend hundreds of dollars per hour to edit it,

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now all those capabilities are broadly available.

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But it's not only I think the distribution of news, 
media and cultural material

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we're seeing with open source software production, 
the rise of peer production software

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we're seeing with Wikipedia, 
the collective creation of knowledge or aggregation

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of knowledge, what Yochai Benkler calls 
«commons based« peer production,

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may well be a third method of economic production 
along with the market and the firm,

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we're really in the earliest days of that, 
so I think the wide spread availability 

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of devices that enable people to compute 
and to capture and distribute media 

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we're only judging that on the basis 
of what we know from the past,

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we really need to look forward to what 
entire populations of people are going to be able to

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argue, are they going to be able to do scientific research?

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Together we're now seeing with distributed computations, 
that people lend their computing 

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power to big scientific efforts 
to understand how proteins fold,

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or the immune system works 
or the weather systems propagate.

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Entirely new economic systems 
we have a very crude price system,

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that allocates value according to what populations 
are willing to pay for commodities,

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what if we were able to find out what 
individuals were willing to pay for commodities?

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We're seeing subsistance farmers, 
who are able to get one bit of information on their mobile phones

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should I walk 3 hours in this direction with my crop 
or 3 hours in that direction?

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Or should I go to this port with my fish or that port with my fish?

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That makes the difference between 
feeding their children and not feeding their children.

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So I think we need to think broadly 
in terms of the kind of economic, political

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and cultural power that can be wielded by populations.

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formally that are only wielded by small numbers of people.

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Centralised systems of communication 
that are expensive to operate 

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naturally support a centralised 
and hierachical power structure.

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Those who can afford 
or those who have the weapons 

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to control a newspaper printing facility 
or a tv broadcasting system

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have the power to inform and persuade;

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that has proved to be a much more effective power 

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in many political instances than traditional weaponry.

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When not just those who can afford 
to persuade and inform and perhaps misinform

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have the ability to spread information 
we have a very different decentralised power regime

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and certainly we are seeing a struggle 
between the incumbent powers that be 

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and people who suddently have cultural 
and political power they didn't have before. 

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I think if you belive in democracy 
having more people involved in decisions

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about their govenance is a good thing,
 then in the long run this is a good thing.

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But i think that democracy has its problems -
 the mob is as dangerous as the tyrant 

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and i would not put too much trust 
in the utopian decentralisation of power

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 without an accompanying kind of
 education about the use of that power. 

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The world in which our bodies exist 
does not cease to be important,

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simply because we have this world of the mind.

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A dictator or a criminal can come 
to your house and take you away,

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or kill you. I think it's important to understand 
that physical power is not going away,

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The rise of soft power means 
that physical power is not the only way

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to sway populations, 
but I think we're going to see the co-existance

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of hierarchies and networks 
of centralised power and decentralised power

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of hard power and soft power, 
the ability of powerful and well financed players

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to manipulate a distributed system should not be over looked.