Net Smart [Kindle Edition]

Howard Rheingold (Author), Anthony Weeks (Author, Illustrator)

Book Description

A media guru shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The social media landscape changes quicker than you can say 'future shock.' As soon as you think you've mastered one network, another pops up, demanding its share of time and attention. Thank goodness, then, for Howard Rheingold. He has identified the skills -- simultaneously old-fashioned and cutting-edge -- that not only will help you thrive in this tumultuous world, but also help you shape social media into a force for good. Net Smart is a lifeboat for people who want to participate in new technologies without drowning in the flood."--Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind

"A desperately needed and wonderfully written guide to being literate in today's digital, always-on world. This book is not just descriptive. It articulates a comprehensive set of social norms, practices and protocols that help us unleash the collective power of networked intelligence. And, yes, using the web mindfully can indeed make us smarter, as this book will illustrate. A must read for anyone wanting to thrive in today's increasingly connected world."--John Seely Brown, Former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corp and Director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center; co-author of A New Culture of Learning

"Once again, Howard Rheingold has found a way of journeying into the future and coming back with gold. The questions he tackles here could not be more pertinent. Whether you're thrilled at the amazing potential for online collaboration, or just stressed by your email in-box, his insights on how to achieve a new form of digital literacy deserve wide adoption."--Chris Anderson, Curator of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)

"Education today is woefully inadequate. It's about teaching people information and skills as if we're alone and disconnected, stocking knowledge and tools in our brains. Today, it is important to learn how to find information and how to collaborate. Written in the traditionally smart and fun-to-read Rheingoldian style, Net Smart is the guide on how to think, learn, survive and thrive in the post-internet era. An essential guide and a must-read!"--Joichi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab

"That Rheingold has written a smart and enjoyable guide is unsurprising....Rheingold does us an important service by offering a number of insights into, and strategies for, the 'net smarts' we need to function more efficiently in our increasingly online world."--James Hendler, Science

"Here, I'd point to the work of my friend Howard Rheingold and his new book Net Smart, which is an excellent guide for how to be a digitally fluent user of all the technologies we have available to us now. It's an excellent book and I think the FCC should include it in their plan for training the digital educators going into schools!"--Christopher Mims, Technology Review

"If you are going to purchase one book about using social media, this is the one to read. It's for people who want to go deeper and get practical know how, improved productivity, and integrate physical and virtual lives."--Beth Kantor

About the Author

Howard Rheingold, an influential writer and thinker on social media, is the author of Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (both published by the MIT Press), and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

Product Details

• File Size: 2676 KB
• Print Length: 333 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0262017458
• Publisher: The MIT Press (February 24, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B007D5UP9G
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #60,410 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #3 in Books > Computers & Technology > Home Computing & How-to > Social Media How-to
  • #41 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Media Studies
  • #52 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Technology > General & Reference

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Net Smart - What we all need to be March 21, 2012

By Tom Parsons

Format:Kindle Edition

In Net Smart, Howard Rheingold details how the digital world is reshaping our minds, our culture, and itself, faster than any but the very young and the very dedicated can keep up with.

However, as he shows with examples from his college teaching, the very young lack the perspective to do much more than ride the wave they are part of, even though they provide its power. They cannot clearly evaluate its history, present impact, or possible futures. But he showed me how this no-longer-young person can play a worthwhile part in all that, improve my own mind, and have more fun at the same time.

I thought I was fairly net-savvy from decades of playing and working with computers and being online. But I was surprised by how much I learned from Rheingold, who has been seriously involved at the frontiers of the net and its communities for all the years that I have just dabbled as a user (which should maybe have an "l" in front of it).

Net Smart rearranged a lot of what I sort-of-knew into a more coherent picture that also included a great deal that I didn't know. It is a book that will show you how to interact with the net more productively, and also how to use both your online and offline time in positive-sum games that benefit others as well as yourself.

Despite the electronic title, there is a significant amount of just plain self-help here that I found very worthwhile in its own right. As Rheingold says, "Learning the latest knowledge about the brain's capacity to rewire itself - known as "neuroplasticity" - can increase your power to actually direct your brain's self-rewiring function rather than just being affected by it".

Net Smart will help if you have children and want to participate in their world and help shape it (or them!) for the better. Just yesterday, I was led to a 2007 Larry Lessig TED talk about modern media by a link that my daughter posted on Facebook, and the Lessig page linked to a 2005 TED talk by Rheingold himself, which leads right back to Net Smart and why we all need to be just that.

This book is a treasure.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Necessary tools for the 21st century March 14, 2012

By J. M. Raimondo

Format:Kindle Edition

It's a pleasure to follow Howard Rheingold on this provocative journey into how best to make sense of the near-now through developing some new and distinct basic competencies. In a way the book is Howard's travelogue through his own cognitive atlas as he sagely builds a set of models for how to now only survive, but thrive in the face of ever-accelerating demands on attention and in the sheer volume of information encountered daily.
As Rheingold skillfully builds his case for acquiring a new set of tools with which to deal with information, he also introduces us to a plethora of experts across a broad swath of disciplines: IT, engineering, learning, cognitive science, and neuroscience to flesh out the concepts he's inventing to help himself make better sense of the world. At the same time, the book provides detailed step-by-step examples of how to implement the dashboard, Radars, agents, and sensors that Howard has arrayed to bring coherence and amenity to his own info-space.
At the book's heart is a key notion of Infotention-a neologism Rheingold coined, and which really sits at the middle of a radical proposition. Developing the cognitive capacity to effectively adopt a "mind-machine combination of brainpowered attention skills and computer-powered information filters" is a deceptively simple proposition with deep implications. Very little in most people's education provides them with the ability to effectively develop the mindset of focus and awareness that Infotention calls for.
Rheingold also brings a deep understanding of the underpinnings of the social platforms that have exploded on to the scene. The book explores deeply and from a variety of perspectives, how much we have learned about ourselves as social beings in the past quarter century, and how that knowledge can be used in association with social networks to develop a new and more self-aware society. At the same time the book acknowledges the concerns that arise when network platforms turn into surveillance tools. Rheingold makes the case for a balanced and aware approach, illustrating with his own humane approach to developing limits and guidelines for behaving in the social sphere.
Finally, the book provides a mind map for understanding how learning online is emerging as its own distinct discipline. Rheingold expounds holographically about how learning is being transformed by social affordances, by new understanding derived from neuroscience, and through the effort of brave teachers who are hacking education from within and without. With subtlety but also with a sense of urgency, Rheingold explores the ways in which the inherited understanding of and approaches to learning stand to be up-ended through the intervention of online means.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Mindfulness Online May 8, 2012

By roy christopher

Format:Hardcover

Media literacy involves grappling with the ways a new medium not only changes but also reinforces our uses and understandings of the current ones. For example, the onset of digital media extended the reach of literacy by reinforcing the use of writing and print media. No one medium or technology stands alone. They must be considered in concert. Moreover, to be literate in the all-at-once world of digital media is to understand its systemic nature, the inherent interrelationship and interconnectedness of all technology and media. As Walter Ong put it, "Today, it appears, we live in a culture or in cultures very much drawn to openness and in particular to open-system models for conceptual representations. This openness can be connected with our new kind of orality, the secondary orality of our electronic age..." "Secondary orality" reminds one of the original names of certain technologies (e.g., "horseless carriage," "cordless phone," "wireless" technology, etc.), as if the real name for the thing is yet to come along.

These changes deserve an updated and much more nuanced consideration given how far they've proliferated since Ong's time. 'Net Smart: How to Thrive Online' collects Howard Rheingold`s thoughts about using, learning, and teaching via networks from the decades since Ong and McLuhan theorized technology's epochal shift. Rheingold's account is as personal as it is pragmatic. He was at Xerox PARC when Bob Taylor, Douglas Englebart, and Alan Kay were inventing the medium (see his 1985 book, 'Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology'), and he was an integral part of the community of visionaries who helped create the networked world in which we live (he coined the term "virtual community" in 1987). In 'Net Smart', his decades of firsthand experience are distilled into five, easy-to-grasp literacies: attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection (critical consumption), and network smarts -- all playfully illustrated by Anthony Weeks. Since 1985, Rheingold has been calling our networked, digital technologies "mind amplifiers," and it is through that lens that he shows us how to learn, live, and thrive together.

This book is not only thoughtful, it are mindful. The deep passion of the author for his subject is evident in the words on every page. A bit ahead of their time, Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan gave us a vocabulary to talk about our new media. With 'Net Smart', Howard Rheingold has given us more than words: He's given us useful practices.

More About the Author

Howard Rheingold is the author of:

Tools for Thought
The Virtual Community
Smart Mobs
Net Smart
Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind
Mind Amplifier

Was:

editor of Whole Earth Review

editor of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog

founding executive editor of Hotwired

founder of Electric Minds

Has taught:

Participatory Media and Collective Action (UC Berkeley, SIMS, Fall
2005, 2006, 2007 )

Virtual Community/Social Media (Stanford, Fall 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010; UC Berkeley,
Spring 2008, 2009)
Toward a Literacy of Cooperation (Stanford, Winter, 2005)

Digital Journalism (Stanford University Winter, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 )