But then it feels to me like there was a long stretch where the innovations that were happening were more evolutionary, and you highlighted that Time magazine. And then, shifting to the people that you profile in the book like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay and all these people making these radical transformations. You know, batch processing and this idea that computers were these large mainframes that you connected to through things like time sharing. Jorge: I came across that edition of the book, and one of the things that stood out to me was that there was a lot of really revolutionary innovation happening in the 1960s and seventies, particularly if one thinks of where computers were before then. Jorge: I came across the book - in what I think is the second edition - which came out around the year 2000 if I’m not mistaken. It is much more gratifying than the money which would’ve been spent by now. So I’m very gratified to hear from people like you - which I do all the time - that the book actually influenced the way people thought about using computers. And it was published in 1985, and the book, for reasons I won’t get into that have nothing to do with me, sank like a stone. And I thought, “this is a story that ought to be told.” And so I started writing it in, I think, 1983. There was a whole series of people standing on the shoulders of the work of others that led to the personal computer as we know it today. But where was Doug Engelbart? Where was Xerox PARC, for that matter? Where was John von Neumann? Alan Turing? Boole? Babbage? And I read the article, and it was… there was a lot about the young Steve Jobs and the young Bill Gates. And there were a lot of geniuses there, doing fantastic things that a lot of people didn’t know about.Īnd around 1982, I think it was, Time Magazine had on its cover the person of the year was the personal computer. But more specifically, in the early 1980s, I talked my way into a job writing at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which was really where the graphical user interface was developed and where Steve Jobs got the idea for the Macintosh. So, I’ve always been interested in the connection between mind and electronic tool. And I thought that electronics was a much finer tool than chemicals for altering consciousness and also a good tool for exploring consciousness. So I was interested in the fact that they had hooked up the brainwaves of Zen meditators and saw that not only did they emit a lot of the alpha frequency, but that you could teach people - or people could teach themselves - to emit more of the alpha frequency. In fact, I wrote an autobiography for a show of my artwork at the Institute For The Future, and in that, I went back to my senior thesis at Reed College in 1968, which is about the use of neural feedback in consciousness. Howard: Well, I’ve always been interested in it. And I wanted to start by thanking you for your contributions to that zeitgeist, to the way that we understand ourselves, and also by asking you: how did you get interested in the use of technology as a way of augmenting our cognitive abilities? Technology for augmenting cognitive abilities
First, it taught me that there was a history to this stuff, and it also expanded the frontiers of what I understood I was doing in designing for the web. It really reframed the work that I was doing in two ways. And I remember the connection with HotWired and the Whole Earth Catalog.īut it was really the book Tools For Thought that made a big impression on me. And at that time, I was living in Panama and trying to connect with this global zeitgeist of people who were into this stuff. To give you a little bit of background, I got into web design and making websites in the mid-1990s. Jorge: It is such an incredible honor and privilege for me to be hosting you in the show. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Show notes include Amazon affiliate links.
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Net Smart: How to Thrive Online by Howard Rheingold.The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier by Howard Rheingold.Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold.
In this conversation, we discuss computers as extensions for our minds, Douglas Engelbart’s unfinished revolution, basic literacies for interacting in information environments, and the resurgence of Tools for Thought. His work has explored and defined key aspects of digital culture, including the use of computers as tools for mind augmentation, virtual communities, and social media literacy. Howard Rheingold is an eminent author, maker, and educator.