Howard Rheingold (author of The Virtual Community) has a new vlog up. The first video does a great job in setting today’s high-bandwidth, visually immersive world in the context of online community, social networking, and activism over the late 20 years. From his intro post on Smartmobs:
It all started when I started thinking about updating A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community, which I wrote twenty years ago. It didn’t take long to realize that a description of how I spend my time online these days would be conveyed more effectively via video/screencast than plain text. Once I got rolling, I realized that it would take more than one episode to show how and why I spend time reading RSS, scanning blogs, blogging, gardening wikis, posting in virtual communities, Twittering, teaching, etc. So the first month or so will feature episodes of A (re)Slice of Life Online. However, once I started including my indoor and outdoor offices in the videos, it occurred to me that I ought to explain something about the parts of my life that haven’t been so visible to my readers — the painting, gardening, sculpting that are as important to me as the publishing activities that are most visible to others.
This mixing of different aspects of life is very characteristic of how I think of social networks as well — and something I’m trying to do in this blog, as I mix in psytrance, gender, and political activism along with software engineering, security, and strategy. Rheingold does it better, of course; ah well, maybe in another 20 years I’ll be up to his level.