Howard Rheingold

Hi! I'm excited about Patreon because it gives me an opportunity and new incentives to engage, converse, co-learn, and co-create with my online public, which I started doing in 1985. I intend to provide a continuous stream of content -- something almost every day. Some of the stream will consist of curated links about topics that I've been looking into: mind amplifiers, digital media and learning, personal knowledge management, cooperation theory and practice, attention and metacognition, networks, technology criticism, and more. I contextualize these links by telling you why they are worthy of your attention and what they mean in a broader context. Some of the stream will consist of my artistic creations -- paintings, wooden objects, electronically animated objects that emit light and sound. Some of my content will expose my creative process through videos, time-lapses of my art-making, and my ruminations on where it all comes from and where it's going. All patrons will be able to interact with me via comments in my activity stream; patrons at the $10/month level and above will have exclusive access to an online forum where we can talk about my creations -- and anything my patron community wants to talk about If you aren't already familiar with my work, here is a synopsis: I've written books about consciousness (Higher Creativity - 1984 and Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming - 1988), history of mind-amplifying technology (Tools for Thought - 1985 ), Virtual Reality (1991!), the birth of social media (The Virtual Community - 1993!), the social revolutions growing from the hybrid of mobile telephones, digital media, and the Internet (Smart Mobs - 2002!) and social media literacy (Net Smart -- 2012). TED published my e-book about the psycho-social-technological facets of augmenting human intellect (Mind Amplifier -- 2012) Note that two of my books, Tools for Thought and The Virtual Community, have been online for free since 1995. I gave a TED talk in 2005 about the need for an interdisciplinary understanding of cooperation -- viewed more than a million times. Since that talk, I worked with Institute for the Future to provide resources for cooperation studies and have taught (six times) an online course on cooperation. I also created and facilitated online courses on mind amplifiers and thinking-knowledge tools. I taught (face to face) courses on digital journalism, social media literacies, and social media issues at Berkeley and Stanford for ten years. I instigated a community-created handbook for peer learning, published nearly 100 video interviews and blog posts about digital media and learning innovators, and helped organized a MOOC for connected educators. I've curated links publicly about my topics, and published interviews with curation experts. I've shared my paintings online since 1995. More recently, I've been making magical objects of paint and light, using wood, acrylics, and arduino-controlled LEDs. I was an extraterrestrial anthropologist on the streets of San Francisco in 1977, an investigative video documentary project I hope to continue in 2018. I've spent 30 years giving away my writing, facilitating online conversations, and sharing pointers to useful knowledge; now that I'm retired from teaching and writing books, a little income can help me create more ambitious works and further my learning of the crafts of woodworking and electronics. Thank you for supporting my ongoing journey!