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By Jennie Rose

An estimated 135 million people play video games, spending three billion hours a week glued to a screen. But that’s not necessarily bad news. In fact, playing video games may be part of an evolutionary leap forward, according to Howard Rheingold, educator and author of the book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.

Rather than characterizing them as hapless drones wasting time, Rheingold’s book contends that this massive population of gamers is part of a growing group of “supercollaborators,” as described by Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, who’s interviewed in the book.

Rheingold connects the dots on collaboration literacy and what he calls “Social-Digital-Know-How.” Multi-player games in particular, and virtual communities in general, are technologies that require cooperation. And when you consider the cumulative amount of technical knowledge, these gamers could be the first wave of people who possess what scientists have started calling “collective IQ.” Already, gamers who play the online game Foldit have cracked the code of the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus, which has eluded scientists for years, and could lead to a new drug.

This idea of collective intelligence and digital culture came from French media scholar Pierre Lévy, who argues that a networked culture gives rise to new structures of power, stemming from the ability of diverse groups of people to pool knowledge, collaborate through research, debate interpretations. Together, these groups refine their understanding of the world.

Wikipedia is one of the best-known byproducts of this process of refinement and social production. Though the website is still dismissed as a research tool in some education circles because it does not represent a traditionally vetted information source, danah boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a former student of Rheingold’s, counters that students must exercise their investigative skills when they use Wikipedia as a source.

“If educators would shift their thinking about Wikipedia, so much critical thinking could take place,” she says in an interview with Rheingold in the book.

The key value of Wikipedia is transparency. It’s not just for information consumers, it’s an invitation to participate and leverage new skills. To successfully “wiki” is to leverage these useful skills, like analyzing contradictions in facts, contributing to a large body of collective knowledge, and vetting sources.

School-aged children — whether they’re in or out of school — are faced with the ubiquity of networked and collaborative culture. Rheingold says that it’s hard to think of a realm of human behavior that has not been influenced, in some way, by a form of mass collaboration.

Rheingold has dedicated years to studying human potential and the species’ capacity for cooperation. The outlines of his perspective, breaking the old school “every man for himself” narrative, stem from a distinctly utopian lens. Rheingold’s findings and admonitions serve as a tonic for some of the dystopian views in the mix that predict digital communication will spell doom for humanity.

Lenny Gonzales

The onslaught of information from the wired world can be overwhelming to anyone — even the savviest online audiences. But rather than completely shut out the digital world, the smarter solution is to learn how to manage it, says author Howard Rheingold.

In his book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Rheingold outlines the potential merits of the vast digital landscape, and offers ideas on how to lasso the unwieldy aspects and use it for good.

In a recent conversation on the Forum talk program, Rheingold stresses the importance of intention when it comes to managing digital noise. Knowing that every click will likely to lead to a chunk of time spent on what follows will help people decide if that’s worthwhile. Every click counts.

“I think [there's] this matter of meta-cognition, of knowing where you’re putting your attention,” he told Michael Krasny on Forum. “You need to make decisions. ‘Am I going to click on that link? Am I going to maybe open a tab for it on my browser and look at it later? Am I going to bookmark it to look at it much later or am I going to ignore it?’ You need to make those decisions consciously and I think most of us make them unconsciously… We wouldn’t have so many cute cat videos if people didn’t click on impulse.”

Rheingold advises all of us to create a specific plan when we’re online, and to follow through.

“You have to make [decisions] in the context of what you intend to get done for the day. Write down, with good old right-brain pencil and paper, three things you want to get done [online] today, and just two or three words each, and put that in the periphery of your vision,” he said. “And when your gaze falls upon it, simply ask yourself ‘Is what I’m doing now going to get me to where I need to be by the end of the day?’ I’m not asking you to admonish yourself or to make any changes to your routine, I’m only asking you to add a little layer of awareness.”

This exercise in self-control can be honed over time with tools like meditation, Rheingold writes in a chapter called “Attention!”

“Mindfuless in all its forms and applications certainly is an end in itself, but practicing mindfulness in regard to online attention serves a specific strategic goal,” he writes. “Your goal and mine in this context is not just the control but also the management of attention.”

Rheingold is not alone in his ideas about how meditation can help focus attention when online. Researcher David Levy recently provided evidence on how learning how to meditate can train the mind to focus. (Read How Meditating Helps With Multitasking). In his study, Levy said those who learned how to meditate were able to keep on task better than those who didn’t. “They realized they didn’t have to respond to everything right away, not everything is urgent,” Levy said. “They felt more in control, less tense, less afraid.”

GUIDING KIDS ONLINE BEHAVIOR

As the digital landscape continues to shift under our feet, it’s that much more important for parents to be aware of the subtleties of having an online identity and life. Though the media portrays the Web as a “den of frivolity,” Rheingold writes that it also presents an appropriate place for young people to experiment with their identity. “What they are learning is not altogether detrimental to themselves and the society they are going to build when they come of age,” he writes.

At the same time, kids needs to be aware that their online lives will leave indefinite footprints.

“Kids need to be told before they get online that nowadays everything that you put online is going to be there forever, it’s going to be searchable, it can be connected to your name, it can be reproduced, and it can be spread around the world,” he said. “Kids have always done dumb things and they’ve always kind of said snarky things about each other and they’ve always had their best friends. They’ve never had them reproduced forever, search-ibly and reproduce-ibly and able to be broadcast everywhere. You need to know some of these things before you dip your toe in.”

And though the media is rife with stories of online bullying — with good reason, as it is a common phenomenon — the development of audio and video chats like Skype and FaceTime on Apple devices may help to ameliorate online attacks.

“There’s something about face to face that can’t be duplicated online. But a great deal of that signaling can be duplicated with audio and video,” Rheingold said. “So I think we’re getting a richer form of communication than we used to have. Here’s a research question for some sociologist: Are people going to flame each other when we have universal audio and video or is that an artifact of the text-only world?”

- Additional reporting by Amanda Stupi