Howard Rheingold's book Tools for Thought helped get me interested in the Internet and its cultural possibilities 20 years ago, even before his The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs mapped more of the near future.
Howard was in Cambridge last week and shared some of his thoughts about
the present and future of civic networking, art and journalism, over
lunch at Harvard. I took some notes, but Dave Winer actually caught the whole session on audio, 25 MB worth of MP3 file.
For those with less bandwidth available, Howard covered some of the same ground in a more formal commencement address to Stanford communication and journalism students last weekend:
I am convinced that the last time young communicators faced this
degree of excitement, peril, opportunity, uncertainty, and
responsibility was 1776...
If your calling is journalism, you enter the job market at the same
time that that the long and honorable history of American journalism is
traveling through the digestive tract of the disinfotainment industry.
But at the same time, you arrive on the scene just at the moment
something broader, faster, and perhaps more democratic than the
invention of journalism is emerging.
He followed that "digestive tract of the disinfotainment industry" reference a bit later with some notes of encouragement:
To those of you who aspire to journalism: Don't get me wrong on
this [^] there are still journalists of great courage, integrity, and
inventiveness, and they make a difference every day. But their editors
and publishers are caught in a situation not of their making.
I encourage journalism students (heck, we're all journalism students these days) to read the rest of Howard's address,
including his use of Wikipedia and South Korea's Ohmynews as examples of
technology inspiring "new kinds of art and journalism" -- and his
disheartening experience earlier this year at a conference of news
industry
technologists, along with his fondness for James Madison:
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of
acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps
both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to
be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which
knowledge gives." (Madison, 1822)
2:43:14 PM 
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