“Virtual Reality and the Virtual Community”
Summary of Key Talks
Also author of the book “Smart Mobs” and many others
http://Socialmediaclassroom.com ; howard@rheingold.com
About smart mobs:
1. Smart mobs emerge when media amplifies cooperation
2. Have both beneficial and destructive impacts
3. Are where the PC was in 1980 and the internet was in 1990
Examples of such mobs: the many Philippines protesting against the government by all coming to the same square wearing black cloths; teenagers protests organized with Facebook, SMS and youtube; SMS-organized protests against Denmark in Syria, Obama used the media very well…
New forms of economic production are already beginning to emerge:
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Toyota is famous for spending vast amounts to educate its suppliers
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IBM, HP, Sun – give away millions of dollars in open source and provide service to support open source
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Ely Lilly uses innocentive as an open network to get ideas from scientists
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eBay opened it’s platforms and many different ways to use it, more than a million people live of eBay
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Google shares their platforms as well with bloggers and for Google adds
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eBay created the rating system (actually use of the prisoner’s dilemma)
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Wikipedia
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Swarm Supercomputing Collectives “distributed.net” 30 teraflops in computing now used for cancer medicines, out of space entities, etc.
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The Tsunami blog was set up hours after the catastrophe to help people connect and get updated. After hurricane Catherina – people did the same – it was the initiative of individuals, not the government
We see platforms for participation emerge – Google, Flickr, eBay, Creative ommons, Thinkcycle, Wikipedia, Omidyar and more. Research is needed to better understand these phenomena and try to figure out where this is heading. People do act in their own self interest (not necessarily money).
Technologies of cooperation & Sharing Economics - create forums for people to act in self interest through architecture that creates value for many. They are:
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Easy to use
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Enable connections
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Open
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Group forming
Some interesting points to make:
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Every person that connects to internet can transmit a variety types of media to many people.
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Social networks amplified by communication networks are broader and faster
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Education is happening today after school hours via instant messaging, blogs, internet, etc.
Some advice: if you want to keep up with what’s going on – don’t look at the technology but keep up with literacy.
Google’s domination today is different than Microsoft’s back then. Now it’s very easy to start a web2.0 enterprise, so no great fear of Google. | 
