Table of Contents

  1. Introduction (0)
  2. Human Origins (1)
  3. Symbolic Record Keeping and Early Alphabets (0)
  4. The Printing Press (2)
  5. Collective Action and Science (0)
  6. Print as a Revolutionary System (1)
  7. Age of Network Technology (1)
  8. Questions From the Audience (0)

nmc The New Media Consortium
is an international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of more than 250 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. (more...)

About

At the 2007 NMC Symposium on the Evolution of Communication, Howard Rheingold delivered this keynote presentation live in Second Life. Howard surveyed the big picture/long view of the way technologies, communication media, and collective action has co-evolved. We have a video archive of this presentation:


Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action

This presentation spanned the time of speech and collective defense and collective food-gathering among primate ancestors on the African savannah; to the emergence of writing on clay tablets as empire-cities began to grow out of agricultural settlements; to the invention of the alphabet and the restriction of alphabetic knowledge to elites chosen by the emperors and popes; until the printing press enabled a rapid and broad expansion of literacy. At each of these stages, people began to do things together in the social, economic, cultural, and political realms that they were not able to do before a significant population of literates existed -- empire, science, democracy.

And now, we have questions about the role of literacies and education in the era of participatory media, from Second Life to the blogosphere to YouTube -- and the kinds of collective action we see emerging today, from Wikipedia to smart mobs to open source production. What is the connection between participatory media literacy and the public sphere that is supposed to be fundamental to democracy?

We are providing this CommentPress version of the presentation to allow audiences to engage with the ideas by being able to comment on individual paragraphs. The text was transcribed from the video above. And in addition, we have a transcript of the chat log among the participants from the live presentation.