In 1953, Ralph Ellison wrote The Invisible Man a book I was required to read in college in the 1960s and one that has shaped my thinking. The invisible man in that book was a black man, one that you would pass by without seeing; you could say what you wanted within earshot of him and it did not matter, because well, it was as if he wasn't there.

Over the years, I have become aware of all sorts of invisible people in the world, those whom we are more comfortable ignoring than acknowledging; those whose problems do not concern us, because their poverty or affliction was not our doing.

Mark Horvath has been a commercial TV producer and a recording artist. He's also a great writer and story teller. Earlier in his diverse career, he was teen age pot dealer and would end up being one of those invisible people along Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. If I had passed him by in 1995, I probably would not have seen him at all--except for the large lizard on his shoulder.

Mark is now producing TV again at invisiblepeople.TV. He is also tweeting at Hardly Normal. To say his new endeavor is being done on a shoestring might exaggerate his assets. But the next time you want a dose of reality TV, try watching some f Mark's incredibly interesting, moving and occasionally inspirational episodes.

His story is below, but first one other note: Mark could really use some editing equipment. If you have some to spare contact him through me or at Hardly Normal.

1. Let's start with your background. Where were you born and raised? What did you aspire to do when you grew up?

I grew up In Binghamton, NY.  At age 14 until I was 16 I sold an average of 20 pounds of marijuana per week.  It was my first business experience. As a kid, I could not come home with a new car so the group of kids that helped me --my “employees” would spend event cent on anything fun.

I also started to play drums professionally--meaning I made money--at age 14. By the time I was 16 music gave me the same power that selling drugs did, and since people now gave me drugs to hang with the ‘band,’ and since I was no longer a minor and laws changed if I was caught selling drugs -  I stopped selling.

At 17, I formed a record and publishing company and produced my first single. Music became my life. I also learned how to do lots with a little. I did not have money to compete with major labels, but by using a little extra effort and creative thinking the stuff I produced came across with big budget excellence.

In 1990, I was playing music fulltime and got a girl pregnant. I thought I would need health insurance and started to look for ‘normal’ work. I lied on an application to a major TV syndicator. They hired me as traffic supervisor. Two weeks later they fired my boss and made me traffic manager.  Soon, I ran traffic, mass duplication, vault and fulfillment services for a major TV company. It may not have been glamorous, but if you watched TV from 1990 to 1994 I was responsible for getting it to your TV set.

2. How did you become homeless?

My homelessness resulted from a series of bad decisions and severe drug abuse over a 20-year period. I was always a very high-functioning drug addict. I didn’t lose my job because I was on drugs; I lost it because I refused to obey an order to fire a Mexican to cover a mistake made by a a senior executive.

They fired one of my team members anyway. I screamed about it and the madness sent my drug abuse into overdrive and that cost me my job. I went back to old habits and started hanging out with some very bad people.

I lost it mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

I lived on or near Hollywood Boulevard off and on for about a year. I would go into a homeless shelter and kicked out.  I was brought down to the point of no support, and no security.

It’s very hard to explain what homelessness is like. Living on the streets is hopeless and horrible.  You beat yourself up with, “how did I get here” and “how am I going to get out of here” questions.

Visiting my homeless memories are not easy for me. I remember, in 1995, sitting by what was then a tee-shirt shop next to Grumman’s Chinese Theatre. My pet
6-foot-long iguana, "D.O.G." was sitting on my shoulder. My head was buried in my hands. I was lost in thoughts of my situation.

Then, a busload of Asian tourists unloaded and a group of them surrounded me. One  asked, “can I take a picture of your Iguana?”

“Sure”, I said “for a dollar.” Everyone started handing me dollar bills. It was at that moment that I started to sell photos of D.O.G. and became “The Lizard Man Of Hollywood Boulevard.”

There's irony. Grumman's Chinese Theater became Kodak Theater. Fifteen years ago I survived by panhandling in front of it. In 2009, thanks to Jeff Pulver, I presented from the stage  at The 140 Characters Conference because of my Twitter experience.

That’s AMAZING!

3. Tell me your happiest personal story from you homeless days. Tell me your saddest.

There are memories that I now laugh at, but I don’t consider them happy. Here is a post I wrote for Change.org about my first homeless night. After walking all day to find a safe place to sleep, I finally lay down in a park only for the sprinklers to go off.

Horrible then – funny now!

4. When, how and why did you decide to not be homeless?

No one decides to be homeless.

I mean, people do dumb things that often have negative consequences. But ‘Recycling Engineer’ is never an option on career day.

I can tell you right now looking at it from both sides the system is broken. I completely understand why some people give up trying. You keep hitting wall after wall trying to make your life better and eventually it wears you down.

It’s called learned helplessness.

After everything I have been through I cannot honestly tell you why or how I made it. But I did.

What I can tell you is that I didn’t do it alone. Along that way when I was at my lowest someone was there to give a hand. We must never give up on people. Ever. I was one of the worst of the worst, yet I changed.

I'm proof that anyone can change and have a better life.

5. Having been through such an experience, you elected to then spend your life working with and for the homeless. Why?

Oh please know I didn’t pick this life. Several people have blogged about me being a hero and I cringe – I’m really not that nice - I’m not.

I just could no longer walk by people and do nothing. And that didn’t just happen overnight, either. In a way, I had heart surgery and I’ll never be the same.

I November 2007, I was working in St. Louis and earning in the six figures when I lost my job. I aggressively searched for nine months, paying my mortgage and food with my credit cards.

Executive jobs were still being cut and low end employers like McDonalds wouldn't hire me after seeing my last income.

I crashed hard. I remember applying for food stamps. Walking into the building crushed me like it did when I was homeless applying for government assistance.

I was about done when I lucked into a job back in Los Angeles. I grabbed a ghetto apartment to save money since because I had all the St. Louis debt to deal with. Three months later I was one of 50 people to get laid off. It devastated me.

I felt like I had when I had been homeless 15 years earlier, maybe worse since I'd been sober all these years.

November of 2008 I started Invisiblepeople.tv.

It wasn’t this long thought-out process, maybe because the basic concept had been in me for years. As a nonprofit television producer I was tired of spinning  homeless stories. And I had wrestled around the idea of doing a very ‘raw’ project.

Since I had nothing but a laptop, a camera and an iPhone, not even editing equipment. If I had any money, I would love to edit Invisible people.

Last winter I took a temp job supporting a homeless shelter. Along with making new friends while taping InvisiblePeople.tv my life changed.

A year ago my plan was to move back to LA for a cushy marketing job, start a new band, find a hot wife and vacation in Hawaii. Today, my financial crisis in many ways is worse, but my heart has been changed.

I sometimes dream about getting a normal job, but I know deep down I’d hate it.

In homeless services outreach you never know who you are going to meet. I was called to a park in Pasadena to assist a family. I loaded the father, mother and two babies into the van driving them to our facility.  After we arrived the father was helping me unload the baby stroller from the back of the van.

Without saying anything he pointed to a rock. I thought he was helping me clean out the back of the van so I grabbed it to throw it away. He stopped me, took the rock out of my hand and handed it to his daughter. They are homeless. They live in a park. The only toy he could give his child is a smooth rock.

My heart was wrecked and I have never been the same since.

6. Malcolm Gladwell has written that most homeless people are that way for a very short period of time and that the problems of violence, property damage and emergency room costs that disturb so many people are caused by an extremely small number of people. What is your view on that?

I love what [San Francisco mayor] Gavin Newsom said, “We don’t have a homeless problem. We have a housing problem.”

You are referring to Million Dollar Murray a likeable homeless guy who cost public services over a million dollars, before he died on the street in a drunken stupor. 

In Denver it costs $40k to keep someone on the streets and $14k to house them. To the taxpayer that’s a yearly savings of $26k per homeless individual being helped.

This is part of the growing Housing First movement, which I support.

Although controversial, it saves lives and saves money

But just providing housing is not enough.

The issue is what happens when you house  people who are still on drugs or are mentally ill. Consider this: how do you stay sober when you are crapping behind a dumpster in a McDonalds parking lot?

It’s nearly impossible to stay sober on the streets. Point blank -  unless a person has dignity they are not going to change. Give a person shelter--then work on the ‘issues’

We cannot just throw a chronic homeless person into housing and leave them alone. \ People need tangible social interaction.

My friend Alan Graham is going amazing work housing people in RVs. I am also excited to be working with Common Ground this year. Both at the forefront of ‘housing first’ model.  

7. Let's talk social media. When and how did it catch your attention? Tell me how you got started.

When I was job hunting from St. Louis, for the job that brought me back to Los Angeles. My prospective new boss tweeted, and was tweeting about the interview process, so of course, I looked, and looked, and looked!  I started my account.

Being a TV producer by trade, I started a Twitter experiment. Driving from St. Louis back to Los Angeles, I told the story and used a few tricks to engage people. People started to email me, “where you going?”

The light bulb started to glow and I saw Twitter's value as a storytelling tool. Good marketing is simply telling a good story.

When I started Invisiblepeople.tv,I used Twitter to market it for not great strategic reason. I did it because Twitter is free and that fit my budget.

I’m your typical front page USA Today recession story. I’ve lost everything. Layoff, after layoff, after layoff, house lost to foreclosure. I did not, and still do not, have an operating budget. I use what I can afford and will give me real-time storytelling ability.

8. What is one of your InvisiblePeople that moved you the most?

I walked under a bridge in Atlanta and met Angela. She’s dying under that bridge, and the best I could do is give her a sandwich. Food is not enough. We need to support people who need help with housing, jobs and health services. Sure,  maybe your support level is making a sandwich. Well then, make a bunch and take them to your local homeless shelter so they can save on their food budget for housing, jobs and health services.

if you wonder how Beth may have ended up under that bridge maybe this will help

9. How have your social media experiences helped homeless people in general and in specific.

I have an agenda. I am after your perceptions. Thing is a perception is a hard thing to measure, yet every now and then I get a glimpse. One day I was getting crazy traffic and clicked on the link that took me to America’s Next Top Model. You don’t have to be a genius to know models and homeless don’t mix. I scrolled down to find a comment left by a girl saying after visiting Invisiblepeople.tv she no longer thinks homeless are bums

Social media has been everything. I mean, I would not be typing this today if it was not for the people I met via social media that helped me. From the road trip to putting food in my fridge, social media changed my life. I am very grateful to everyone.

Now let’s get real. I was an unemployed guy who lost everything. With only a laptop and a cell phone I got the word ‘homeless’ to trend on twitter. Michael Jackson trends, iPhone trends – not HOMELESS – that’s huge! Even better,  probably the coolest thing that has ever happened in homeless cause marketing may be Ford mirroring my content

I search twitter for the word ‘homeless’. Sometimes I get people being ignorant and I educate, and sometimes I find others helping homeless people. Probably the most interesting is this story.

Those are only a few of many examples of how I changed the general public’s view on homelessness.

This last summer’s road trip I was told about 50 homeless kids that didn’t have shoes so they could not go to school. One hour later they all had new shoes.  Because I had the courage to do something different and with the help of people on social media housing and food programs have been started. That’s really amazing for a guy who has nothing but twitter to make things happen.

12. Can you tell me a single story that illustrates what social media has done for the homeless?

This may be the best single story.

                [Howard Rheingold. Photo by Oscar Espiritusanto]

Note: This is part part 2 of two parts. You can see Part 1, Where we've been here.

This title is just slightly misleading. Howard really offered no predictions of where people and technology is heading in the Conversation Age, and I didn't try to get him him to make forecasts.

While his writings have displayed more than a little prescience, he is more of a thinker than a futurist. But he did offer some interesting observations about at least one emergent technology and some useful insights into his students at Stanford and UC Berkeley and from there you might draw some conclusions yourself.

Q. You were an early champion of virtual reality, which may not have taken off as quickly as you forecast. Do you think it is still likely to evolve? How do you see it being incorporated into social media moving forward?  

You win some, you lose some. I can't really take credit for being prescient without taking blame for foreseeing events that have yet to come to pass -- may never come to pass. To be fair to myself, I did note that truly photorealistic immersive virtual worlds would not exist until sufficient affordable computation power came along, some time in the early 21st century. And people like Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford have been doing some extremely valuable social science research using today's version of virtual reality. 

There are some fundamental unsolved problems. If you can move your perceptions around a limitless virtual world, what keeps your body from slamming into the wall when you try to run toward the horizon? In regard to social media, I've spent enough time in Second Life to see exactly how seductive to a small portion of the population an immersive virtual world with photorealistic or Photoshop unrealistic avatars that can not only navigate and communicate but build and exchange landscapes, buildings, objects with behaviors can be.

But it's work to create an avatar and learn how to navigate it and where the action is. In an infinite landscape, human actitivies seem to take place far apart. So I don't see such worlds as ever becoming universal.

It's NOT the "future of the Web."

However, I do see them getting less centralized and easier to use, and people will start inventing uses for them that we don't foresee right now, and the population of enthusiasts will grow from a tiny cult following to a small cyber subculture. There are things you can do in such environments that you can't do elsewhere.

[At right--giant sunflowers from Howard's garden. Those suckers are 16 feet tall.]

Q.I’ve argued that social media is disrupting all institutions, business, government, education, health, etc. Do you agree or disagree? What is your vision for how technology will make this a better/world for everyday people 10 or 100 years hence.  

Isn't it evident from what I've written that I've been immersed in experiencing, influencing, learning about, and communicating about this disruption precisely because I think it's the single most fundamental critical uncertainty of the present age?

We have global warming, loss of species and habitat, collapse of key populations like salmon, the energy and food needs of the world population, emergent epidemics. I'd say that the main goal of the human species ought to be our own survival. The next 50 years are going to require a lot of problem-solving. The most powerful tool we have are all those people.

If only enough of them could be healthy, fed, and educated enough to help us tackle those problems. Technology and social media and new knowledge about human collective action can help.

But I don't want to be quoted as saying that the technology, the social media themselves are the linchpin. I think the way people end up using these media,  our degree of knowledge about how our literacy is connected with a struggle between power and counter-power, the degree of education of the people who pollute or nourish the infosphere, even plain old fashioned netiquette -- all matter now. I am an anti-determinist.

I believe in human agency. But there are no guarantees that democracy will win over totalitarianism, that tools will be used to feed people, that our social and political and economic institutions and our own minds will be able to cope with the pace of change that our inventions have helped us bring on ourselves.

Education and learning haven't changed, but the circumstances under which they take place are radically different.

The lecture-and-test method goes back a thousand years, to the days when books were written by hand and chained to a podium, where a professor stood up and read them. In recent years, without (I strongly suspect) any real consultation among faculty about the pedagogical consequences, wireless Internet access was installed in classrooms and lecture halls around the world. For the first time, students could look up information to determine whether the professor really knew what he or she was talking about. Students can now chat and share information among themselves during lectures and if the professor is too boring, there is always Facebook or World of Warcraft.

Many professors are in denial about this, and drone on with the same lecture they've delivered for decades. Other professors make extremely bad use of technology by reading their text-laden PowerPoint slides to their students. Others simply demand  their students keep their laptops closed for the duration of class.

Of course, since I teach social media, I can neither ignore nor prohibit laptop use, so I've taken steps to help my students become mindful of the way they deploy their attention.

One strategy is to have only the student co-teaching team keep their laptops open while they are helping me lead the class; one member of the team makes notes on the wiki, sketching in top-level headings that the other students will fill in AFTER class, another member of the team identifies words for the lexicon and adds them to the wiki (and again the class, as a whole, fills in the definitions before the next class), and a third member of the team looks up sites online and projects them (I have three screens in my classroom at Stanford).

Another strategy -- 20% of my students are allowed to have their laptops open at any time, but it's up to them to self-police. I have also made video of my students from my point of view and from theirs and have shown it to them.

More profoundly, social media have enabled students to engage in collaborative inquiry with peers, engaging in online discussions that are no longer solo performances for the teacher, but engage other students in digging down into issues that came up in class via forums, collaborating with each other and me in real time through a Twitter back channel, reflect on their learning for their own benefit and that of classmates on their blog, and learn how to learn and compose collaboratively via the wiki.

The technologies are not used to add contemporary appeal or techie flashiness but are affordances for a kind of learning based more in inquiry, collaboration, and discourse than on trying to detect what is going to be on the test and memorize it.I ask my students to read in advance my extensive description of what is expected of them and to commit themselves in writing to the kind of participation I ask. It has taken me five years, in close consultation with my students, to come up with a set of procedures that work. It's tremendously exciting to see the classroom come alive, and to engage students between class meetings via their blogs, the forums, and the wiki. Here's a presentation of one of our class sessions.

[

    [Howard Rheingold in his backyard giant sunflower patch. Photo by Shel Israel]

Howard Rheingold is a founding father of the Conversational Era. He has spent much of his past 40 years exploring the impact and promise of the convergence of technology and the human brain. He is a student of the many people, incidents and trends that have brought us to today, and as a prolific thinker, writer and speaker, he has contributed significantly to the body of knowledge and thought. 

He's not sure just how many books and articles he has authored or collaborated on, since 1970,  but Amazon offers 72 titles with his byline.  Two of these books, The Virtual Community [2000] and Smart Mobs [2003] have profoundly influenced my thinking and writing over the past half dozen years and if you happened to be into social media he is among the early pioneers who blazed the trail the rest of us have followed. He has been a friend & colleague of many of the thinkers and doers who have delivered us to today and in many cases he can say he had been there and part of the collaborating team that did that. He has also been often prophetic in seeing the seeds that began as visions and have since become reality.

Arizona-born in 1947, he graduated Reed College in Portland, Oregon, then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he became an integral part of America's most controversial Renaissance Era. He drank the original KoolAid. He also dabbled at Xerox PARC, the legendary tech experimental tech center where, among other innovations, the personal computer's graphical interface was developed. He started writing professionally in 1970 and has rarely stopped for long.

He was editor of the Whole Earth Catalog Millenium Edition, an almanac that supported the counter-culture lifestyle. Founded by thinker-enterpreneur Stuart Brand, Whole Earth Catalogs were a grassroots compendium of alternative lifestyle resources. A young hippie fruitarian of that time named Steve Jobs would later describe the Catalog as both the forerunner to the Worldwide Web and Google. 

Rheingold was an early and enthusiastic member of the San Francisco-based " Well," the first internet-based community to gain widespread notice and momentum. His speaking and writing about it, particularly in The Virtual Community introduced a great number of people to the vision of social media for the first time.

These days he continues to write and speak on issues related to the human brain and technology--his central focus throughout his adult life. He also teaches courses at both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

I have divided this interview into two parts. In this first part, Howard reflects and illuminates on what has happened so far. Most of Part 2 will discuss his thoughts on tomorrow, partly by discussing what he sees in his students.

One word of caution: this is not a quick read. It is filled with links to some of the people and events that have brought about the Conversation Age and I hope that you will follow some of these links to see and learn. Maybe it will give you some ideas on what you can contribute to tomorrow.

Q. You attended Reed College in the mid 60s, an elite liberal arts college known for free thought and lifestyle. How did that experience shape who you have become?

It's very astute to start with this question. My relationship with Reed was co-evolutionary: Reed seems to send out a kind of invisible signal that attracts a certain kind of person, and the people who are able to stick it out (very high dropout rate) tend to remain "Reedies" for life.

I was a National Merit Scholar, which meant I could have gotten into any university, but Reed was the only place I applied! I originally got wind of it because the character in Kerouac's Dharma Bums who was based on Gary Snyder who went to Reed. Snyder, more than Kerouac, was a hero of mine when I was 16 years old, so that was about all I needed to know. In retrospect, I'd say that the dominant characteristics of a person meant for Reed are:

   a.  A stubborn commitment to think for oneself
   b.  A deep and broad interest in texts and intellectual discourse
   c.  Because of the first two characteristics, we were mostly the smart weird kids in our high schools
   d.  We dropped out of the brand-name college game

Reed alumni magazine did an article on me, written by Wired [Howard was founding exec editor of Wired.com]  writer and fellow Reed alumni Gary Wolf.

The Reed  years were 1964-68 for me, so these were also tumultuous times. And I took a lot of LSD. I want to be clear on this: Many of my friends got in serious trouble or died because of drugs (and many more because of one drug: alcohol), so I'm not an advocate of indiscriminate use of recreational drugs. But LSD was an extremely important influence on my thinking.

I didn't drop acid and go to concerts. I dropped acid and stayed in my room and painted, read -- I read most of the Bible on acid -- and explored other dimensions with my fellow travelers.

In particular 1968 -- the Tet offensive, Prague Spring, China's Red Guards and Cultural Revolution; May revolt in Paris; Chicago, and assassinations of RF Kennedy and ML King; riots in American cities. We weren't participants in these events, but the world stage seemed particularly apocalyptic. I became convinced that we were living in times that would decide the future of the human experiment, and just as I went to Reed because I wanted to engage in a meaningful and deep dialogue with others about the curriculum (the sex, drugs, and rock&roll were part of it, but were always secondary to the intellectual quest), I left Reed and entered the world with a conviction that what I said and did with my education would matter not just to me but to everybody.

When I got involved with people I met from the Well, my wife, who I met at Reed  said: "This is just like Reed. A bunch of intelligent misfits have found each other and are going to town." 

Q. The common thread that seems to tie your considerable writing and thought together is the interaction of the human brain and technology.  It seems to have developed in the early 80s between your work with The Whole Earth Catalog and your involvement with  The Well. Can you walk me through how that developed?  

The brain and technology--and evolution and consciousness--were the subjects of my undergraduate thesis. One of the things that LSD taught me was that what we think we know about our minds is tiny compared to what we have to learn. I felt technology would open a new front, along with that of chemical agents (it's too bad that legitimate psychedelic research was shut down), and the approaches pointed to by Eastern mysticism, in understanding consciousness -- which seemed to me to be the essential stuff of which the universe is made.

I had what I later learned I could call a "noetic" conviction about these conjectures, and was determined to somehow add to our body of knowledge about our minds and how we could control our minds better. 

3.  You coined the term “Virtual Community” and it became the title of one of your most influential books. It’s first chapter talked about the Parenting group in The Well.  Your stories in that chapter are strikingly close to stories I found in Twitter.  Can you   compare/contrast The Well and Twitter? What has remained the same and what has changed?   

Absolutely true! In my first months on Twitter, I told fellow Well veterans Twitter felt just like the Well. While it would be a categoric error to call the Twitter population in general a community, it was clear that communities were forming there. People were getting to know each other, strangers were engaging in discussions with each other; new forms of fun were being invented; new ways to use the platform to communicate socially like the hashtag and retweet were being invented by users; people were exchanging and reciprocating knowledge; social capital was accumulating in some groups.

At the same time, Twitter was totally different. In the Well, each user might participate in different topic threads in different conferences (forums), but the discussions were centered on topics and were like places where a group of people accumulated. In each discussion, we paid attention to each other. In Twitter there is no such social symmetry. There are no topics, outside of hashtags and each person sees a different group of others.

Despite, and because of, this asymmetry, Twitter always had a social vibrancy.

Another similarity is the sense among the users that what we were co-creating with the Twitter founders would take on new forms as we went along. The Well was built on Unix, so coders and users were in dialogue, but with the Twitter's open API and the explosion of third-party applications, that co-evolving relationship seems to be in overdrive.

Twestival, 300,000 tweets/hour from Tehran, the Twitpic of the airplane that landed in the Hudson -- events that change our minds about what Twitter can be used for seem to be happening with increasing frequency

Q. For the benefit of our studio audience, just what do you mean when you say the computer is an amplifier of the human mind? 

I've learned that most people don't know much history, and those who know it seem to quickly forget it. Until a couple of mavericks who were not at all related to the existing computer industry started thinking seriously about using digital computers to augment human intellect and create new communication media, this was a crazy idea.

Computers were for scientific calculations and business data processing. But JCR Licklider [computer time-sharing], Doug Engelbart [the mouse], Bob Taylor [the internet], Alan Kay [graphical interface] thought differently. What if we could move words around on a screen by pointing at them, instead of retyping the whole page? What if we could create documents as outlines, then expand and contract them so we can zoom from big picture to detail? What if we could command computers by clicking on icons instead of typing commands? What if we could link texts, documents, and different media and move smoothly from one to another by clicking on the link?

By automating these low-level symbol manipulation tasks, would that free the brain to take in larger pictures, see relationships between micro and macro levels that couldn't be observed, try many more hypotheses than old methods afforded? All these capabilities seem obvious today, but not only were they not obvious until Engelbart's Mother of All Demos in 1968. I told the story of this creation of revolutionary innovation by a small group of outsiders in my book, Tools for Thought. I started using a modem when I first started exploring personal computer culture in the early 1980s, but didn't join the Well until after Tools for Thought was published in 1985.

I started out to make a living as a writer when I was 23, in 1970. I had a typewriter, a telephone, and a library card. Comparing the tools I had for thinking, researching, communicating, organizing back then with what I have now, it's like starting out my career with a horse and buggy and now I have my own 747.

It took me about 5 seconds to look up the passage of Engelbart's that originally fired me up, and to copy it. And I did it sitting here in my garden, via laptop and WiFi. Keeping in mind what I said previously about my interests in brain and technology and my conviction regarding this historical moment and my role and responsibility to it, it still makes sense to me as an answer to your question:

By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by "complex situations" we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers -- whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human "feel for a situation" usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids. Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man's intellect, in the sense defined above, would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits.

In 2002, you authored Smart Mobs, which has been critically acclaimed for it’s foreshadowing of social media. Among the incidents that most impressed me was how street people used mobile SMS to out maneuver police & eventually overthrow the government.  When the Iran election took place in June of this year, did you see a certain similarity? How did has technology involved to empower people. Where do you see/hope it is ultimately headed?

Let me start with the conclusion and then unpack it:  With a billion people on the Internet and 4 billion mobile phones, the ability to gain information, to process it computationally, to organize collective action with others, to publish and broadcast has been radically democratized -- but whether or not that democratized communication and coordination capability will lead to more or less democracy is not a function of the technology but of the social, political, economic activities of the people who use it.

The events in Iran should be an object lesson that access to digital media and networks guarantees that it will be impossible to keep the world from witnessing massive oppression, but does not guarantee the victory of forces of counterpower who seek liberty from oppression. Power always wakes up and mobilizes when counterpower threatens it.

The Iranian regime broadcast disinformation. They shut down Internet access. They ran cloaked proxy servers as honey pots to catch dissidents. So far, they are succeeding.

In China, the Great Firewall and tens of thousands of human cyber-police make sure that over a quarter billion Chinese netizens enjoy the power to do anything they want online as long as it doesn't challenge the authority of the party.

The victory of smart mobs is not guaranteed by the power of the tools they hold in their hands. That's just magical thinking. However, the events I described in my book were real. There were other forces at work in the Philippines -- there are always other forces at work -- but the SMS-organized People Power II demonstrations were a large part of what brought down the Estrada regime. The elections of heads of state were tipped away from the frontrunner through smart-mobbed demonstrations and get out the vote campaigns in Korea and Spain.

Where do I see it headed? My experiences have convinced me that the most important focus for public attention right now should shift to the literacies that bring power to those who possess them and leave behind those who don't know how to use their telephone as a medical instrument, educational medium, social radar, political organizing tool.

Chip fabrication plants, teenage personal computer wizards and moguls, networks of fiber optics and satellites have played and will continue to play their parts in the distribution of computing and communication power to every human on Earth.

But now that devices with such enormous untapped power are in the hands of so many, the factor that will most powerfully shape the resulting social institutions is literacy. My definition of "literacy" builds the thinking of Neil Postman: I mean the inward-looking skill that enables an individual to read and write, to decode and encode messages with a medium, and I also refer to the external community to which this skill provides entrance. As I've written recently in regard to "Crap Detection 101," the literacies I am talking about are not just about individual empowerment, but are crucial to the health of the commons.

We can't stop the Web from being overwhelmed with misinformation, disinformation, hoaxes, urban legends, spam, porn, porn-spam by controlling the sources - the Web is powerful precisely because there are no controls on what people put on it. We can only guarantee the ultimate health of the Web as a source of useful and trustworthy information by encouraging the spread of crap detection skills. That, to me, is the most important meaning of the "social" in "social media" -- that we are not just amplifying our minds and showing off for each other, we are learning and organizing, creating, innovating, building, liberating together.

To me, individualism versus collectivism is a toxically false dichotomy. Humans are humans because of our individual capabilities, the evolved genius of what we've taught each other to do with our expanded forebrains. But the "taught each other to do" part is crucial. Our individual genius would not only be useless, it wouldn't exist without our social interchanges.

[Janis Krums takes & makes his shot for the Florida Lakewood Ranchers , an amateur league team. He also took another kind of shot in January 2009, which you probably saw. photo by Angie Tyler Jula]

It's one of my favorite stories in Twittterville. In January 2009, Janis Krums, the a 23-year-old entrepreneur from Sarasota, Florida was on a ferry crossing the Hudson River when US Air Flight 1549 careened from the skies, skidding to a halt on the river about 200 yards from the ferry and immediately began to sink as passengers poured out onto the wings.

Janis whipped out his iPhone and took the photo below, which you have probably seen. He handed the phone to another passenger and then assisted in the rescue of a flight attendant who had broken both her legs and needed assistance getting off the plane.

Helping the attendant to safety, Krums got his iPhone back. It was ringing and when he picked up he was surprised to find he was talking to MSNBC and his voice was being carried live on national TV. Viewers were looking at the photo he had taken less than 30 minutes earlier.

In Twitterville, I argued that the incident changed the relationship between professional and amateur journalists; that it has begun to braid the two together on social media venues. I predicted that braided journalism is how most people will consume news in the near future.

It also has changed Janis Krums. The following is an update on what he has been up to since that unintended moment on the Hudson River. He is simultaneously starting two business in two separate categories, one of which has been a passion for years. The second, something called InboxAlarm would probably have not happened had he not happened to be crossing a river at a specific moment in time; and if my favorite social media platform not been victimized by a DDOS attack that rendered it inoperable for several days in early summer.

Please see my recent interview with him below.

Q. How has the incident changed your life?

I am associated with an event that changed the perception of citizen journalism and the evolution of news and media. The coolest part is to see that my one tweet changed the way that CNN, Fox News, and others interact with their viewers. They are actively engaged with viewers now, and seek the opinions in realtime from all the available resources.

Plus, I have a great story to tell at parties!

Q. How active were you in social media before the "Hudson River Miracle" incident? How many follower/following did you have going in to that day? How many do you have now? How much time did you spend on social media before the incident. How much now?

Before the incident I was exploring all the different services and seeing which one made sense for me. I had about 170 followers before the incident. Now I have almost 5,800. Before the incident, I was spending maybe 20 minutes a day on updates. I think right after I was spending a lot of time. Now I have learned some tricks and services (su.pr, tweetdeck, tweetie 2) that I use to monitor and use the different sites more efficiently.

Q. When I interviewed you for Twitterville, you were planning working on Elementz a nutritional enhancement drink for professional athletes. How long have you been working on it? How is it doing?

We started a year ago with the idea of what we wanted to do. At this point we have finalized 5 custom formulations and are finalizing the paperwork to produce the first two products, Vanilla and Chocolate Whey Protein. We have some very influential people on board and will be making some really cool announcements in the near future. You can check out our Facebook page for the latest news. 

7. More recently, you announced InboxAlarm.com. Can you tell me what it does and how you got the idea for it?

InboxAlarm is burglar alarm for your email inbox. You are able to create decoy emails that can be as simple as fake password information or custom emails that cater to your specific security concern. After creating an email, you send it to one of your personal emails addresses, open it once, and then forget about it. It sits in your archives until someone opens it. Once opened, you are instantly notified by a text message that there has been a breach.

We got the idea after the Twitter breach happened. In that case the hacker had days to gather information and was able to go from one employee's email account all the way up to the CEO's.

We thought that there should be a way for you to protect yourself in the case someone breaks into your inbox. There are other high profile examples; Sarah Palin getting hacked; the latest phishing attack, and countless others that don't make national news. 

8. Is InboxAlarm potentially a new business for you, or is it just a one-off from Elementz Nutrition?

InboxAlarm has the potential to be a new business for Eric and I. It is too early to tell how it will go, but the initial reaction has been very positive.

Q. How have sales gone since you announced InboxAlarm?

We have steady sales up to this point. We got some initial press from PCmag.com  and BNET, which helped the site's exposure. As well as local Sarasota coverage ) We will be focusing on a major marketing push in the coming weeks. 

Q. You have previously told me your two passions are health and social media. Can you compare and contrast starting businesses serving in the two industries? For example how are the the process and time-to-market similar or different? o

It's been very interesting to see the evolution of both Elementz Nutrition and InboxAlarm. For Elementz we had the concept few years ago, but only last year said, lets start the process and develop supplements that we can be proud to stand behind.

We were very naive in our projected timeline to get the products out into the market. We thought that it would take few months to research, develop, test, etc the formulations. That estimate was way off, it took us around a year to finalize the formulas. Right now we are finalizing everything with our manufacturer. 

However, with InboxAlarm, we had the idea in July and were able to launch the initial site during the second week of September. We had the core functionality thought out in the first day and after that just kept refining until we thought it was good enough to be released to the public. I agree with Reid Hoffman's observation: "If you're not somewhat embarrassed by your 1.0 product launch, then you've released too late."

We wanted to get it out as soon as possible and then see what the customers did and didn't like. We've improved the sign-up process and have couple of other improvements that are directly linked to the feedback from our users. 

No matter how different the market, at the end of the day it's about selling and getting the word out about your product. It doesn't matter what industry you are in, if you don't move product, you will not be around for too long. 

Jack Kennedy was president when I entered college. Like Obama today, he had a great impact on the hearts and minds of young people. In Kennedy's case, he introduced a concept of volunteerism through programs like VISTA [Volunteers in Service to America] and the Peace Corps. The attitude that we can do something to make a difference for a good cause or people in need has stayed with many of us through our lives.

When I met Jessica Evans in Vancouver last month, I was reminded of that volunteer attitude when she told me the story of Timeraiser where she has donated over 100 hours of her time in a little more than a year and how she has helped the organization expand into social media.

Timeraiser is a Canadian organization formed by the Framework Foundation. It gets corporate sponsors  finance their acquisition of selected works by local artists. Then it holds a silent auction, where mostly people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, bid their time--instead of money--to acquire a piece of art. The funding sponsors display the art in their offices for a year or so, while the volunteer works off the time pledged.

Most of the volunteer work is focused on using the professional skills of the volunteers, rather than ladling soup in food bank kitchens.

Since it started in 2004, Timeraiser has held these auctions in all major Canadian cities and has generated more than 45,000 volunteer hours for more than 250 nonprofits and has supported local artists to the tune of over $300,000.

Jessica Evans, 30 is one of those 45,000 volunteers, she is an IT professional at a Vancouver-based software company by day and has boundless energy for other activities. It was literally a rocky road she traveled that took her to both Vancouver and Timeraiser.

She tells her story in this interview:

Q. You spend much of your free time in outdoor physical activities such as bike riding and something called "bouldering." Just what is that, and when and how did you get into it? 

Bouldering is a style of rock climbing – literally climbing on large boulders without a rope. Your landing is protected by “bouldering pads”- high-density foam mats similar to those used in gymnastics.  It’s a great way to climb completely free and push your limits.

I started climbing in 2001 - yes, I think you could say I’ve traveled extensively to boulder. At the height of job dissatisfaction and restlessness when I lived in Toronto, I called myself out on my dream to live on the road and climb.  I blogged the entire experience from the inception of the idea where I used up my health benefits before giving my notice, through the emotional challenges and steep learning curve while living on the road. There’s also advice on the art of living on a few dollars a day.

It was an amazing experience and one of unexpected personal growth.  I lasted almost 6 months, living on the road camping and climbing by myself. 

I think you could say that bouldering chose me. When I was on My Big Roadtrip, I had my gear for rope climbing too but found that it was easier to boulder since you don’t need to search for a dedicated partner.  In roped climbing, you literally place your life in the hands of the other person.  I found that not knowing my climbing partner well enough to fully trust them made it tough to focus.  I ended up bouldering more and more, either by myself or trying to get in with a group that was out.  By the end of the trip I found that I was a "boulderer," and now I very rarely rope up to climb.

Sure, I traveled alone and I’ve gone on some solo bouldering trips since. There’s a bit of teamwork involved – the energy of the group really affects if you’re able to focus on the moves.  It’s so much better, and even a bit easier, if there’s a good group of people.

I crash landed in Vancouver after the road trip and when I heard about the Timeraiser in 2008, I saw it as a way to get more involved in the community of the city I had settled in and had grown to love.  Besides, I thought it sounded cool.  I like art, especially by local artists, and I had been meaning to volunteer.

It’s a mashup of silent art auction and volunteer fair – there are representatives from local nonprofit agencies, and about 25 pieces of local artwork.  The bidding opens for an hour and participants bid with a pledge of volunteer hours instead of money.  Too cool.

One of the featured agencies at the Vancouver Timeraiser was Big Sisters. Being a Big Sister was something on my life to-do list, and it was just so easy to go to the Timeraiser event and talk to a representative in person. After talking to someone face-to-face, there was a more natural commitment to follow up.

You could say that I fell in love with the concept at the Timeraiser event.  It was far cooler than I had expected.  Bidding on artwork gave me a taste of a society I may never be a part of – but the concept of Timeraiser makes it fun and easy to get involved.

After talking to the agencies at Timeraiser, I was pretty excited at all the volunteer opportunities that suited my skills. I ended up getting the winning bid on a photograph by a local artist  [Miklos LeGrady] and I fulfilled my pledge over the following year by volunteering as a Big Sister. Donating time goes so far and you can see the impact you’re having on the community.  It’s more fulfilling than, say, writing a check, though if you can afford that, go for it!

We volunteers are given a full year to complete our pledges. At this year's Timeraiser, I received my artwork. 

Last spring, Timeraiser sent out a message needing volunteers for planning the next two Timeraiser events in Vancouver. You could say I was getting hooked on volunteering and was happy to spread the word.

I applied for the position of Media & Awareness Leadership and my pitch was all social media. How can we reach our target demographic?  Well, I’m a member of the target demographic and I’m always online. I could see the need to leverage Twitter as well as Facebook fan pages. 

We’re getting to a point on the Web these days where people search Twitter to connect with a business entity, and Timeraiser needed to represent.  I also brought us onto LinkedIn and worked with Timeraiser employees to implement the Facebook fan page.
 

The entire “Tweeting for Charity” experience has been interesting. I’ve been online since the local BBS days back in the mid-90s.  Twitter is the online vehicle to reconnect with people locally and in person, or globally due to our common interests. I’m not looking to network or promote myself as a climber or a Project Manager, so getting out there to talk about something I feel so passionately about – Timeraiser – feels quite natural.

One constant I’ve experienced while engaging in social media for charity is that when I explain the concept of Timeraiser to people, if they’re interested, they’re excited like me and eager to help. It’s important to reach as many people as possible to build the network of eager excited people. 

I have to say it was powerful to watch the word spread and excitement grow along with the network. We ended up selling the event out, which was an incredible accomplishment.  A CBC reporter saw a retweet about the Vancouver Timeraiser and picked up our story the day before the event. Members of the blogging community posted up about the Timeraiser and some had tickets to give away via their sites. I think everyone worked together – Team Twitter.

Q. How has social media changed Timeraiser? What additional potential do you see?

It was very valuable to tap into the local, grassroots media in Vancouver.   Getting the word out via local bloggers is the way to go.  Civic Footprint (Timeraiser's sister nonprofit) is now working on social media strategies for other Timeraiser cities, to connect via Twitter and social media.

In the Spring, I’ll be leveraging Twitter again to connect with the local art community.  Artists selected for the Timeraiser are paid market value for their work.  In 2009, 20 of the 25 selected artists were from BC.  In 2010, I’d like to see that extend to 25/25. 

Also, it would be great if we could get a participant to blog their experience fulfilling their pledge, so we can all follow along.  I’ll see if I can put that into place.  @Timeraiser_couv is still the only account dedicated to the Timeraiser, but I hope to see the other cities follow suit.  I’m excited to see how next year unfolds, since I can incorporate what I learned this year. 

Q. I understand that you found romance on Twitter. Can you tell me just what happened and how has it worked out so far?

That’s quite the bonus, I know!  The first networking event I attended as @Timeraiser_couv was a Meetup and I was looking for others with @ Twitter IDs on their name badges. I ended up clicking with a guy there – I remember that I could read him quite well and found him intriguing.  We talked about cycling and I sent him an @ from my personal account, not Timeraiser!  When I got home, he had sent me a DM to request a coffee to “learn more about that charity stuff you do.”  We’ve been hanging out since. You could say we get along quite well.

Q. Additional comments.

I’m not climbing as much as I used to and it’s amusing because I made the move out to BC to climb full-time.  Dreams change over time, and I got to see my 2009 dream of selling out the Vancouver Timeraiser come true.Timeraiser helped me Commit to Vancouver, and now I’ll never leave.

Life on the road always meeting new people prepped me for this.