I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension in 1981, then plugged my computer into my telephone in 1983 and got sucked into the net. In earlier years, my interest in the powers of the human mind led to Higher Creativity (1984), written with Willis Harman, Talking Tech (1982) and The Cognitive Connection (1986) with Howard Levine, Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of Memes (1988), Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990), with Stephen LaBerge, and They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases (1988).
I ventured further into the territory where minds meet technology through the subject of computers as mind-amplifiers and wrote Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Amplifiers (1984) [New edition from MIT Press, April 2000]. Next, Virtual Reality (1991) chronicled my odyssey in the world of artificial experience, from simulated battlefields in Hawaii to robotics laboratories in Tokyo, garage inventors in Great Britain, and simulation engineers in the south of France.
In 1985, I became involved in the WELL, a “computer conferencing” system. I started writing about life in my virtual community and ended up with a book about the cultural and political implications of a new communications medium, The Virtual Community (1993 [New edition, MIT Press, 2000]). I am credited with helping popularize the term “virtual community.”
I had the privilege of serving as the editor of The Whole Earth Review and editor in chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (1994). Here’s my introduction to the Catalog, my riff on Taming Technology, and a selection of my own articles and reviews from both publications.
In 1994, I was one of the principal architects and the first Executive Editor of HotWired. I quit after launch, because I wanted something more like a jam session than a magazine. In 1996, I founded and, with the help of a crew of 15, launched Electric Minds. User generated content and social media, ten years too early.
My 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was acclaimed as a prescient a forecast of the always-on era. The TED talk I delivered about “Way New Collaboration” has been widely viewed.
I have taught "Participatory Media/Collective Action" at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, "Digital Journalism" at Stanford and "Social Media Literacies" and "Social Media Issues" at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. I was a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. I was invited to deliver the 2012 Regents’ Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley.