Howard Rheingold in Australia and Teledildonics

Yep Teledildonics is exactly what you think it is.

Long before Amy Jo Kim and Jenny Preece wrote their Social Networking bibles in the late ’90s, and long, long before Danah Boyd started making friends on Friendster, Howard Rheingold was writing, speaking and evangelising communities online (late ’80’s).

How can you not love a man who writes 20 pages on Teledildonics his book Virtual Reality. How can you not worship a technologist/futurist who opens a chapter with:

There was a young man named Kleene
who invented a fucking machine
Concave or convex, it fit either sex
and was exceedingly easy to clean

Ask him to recite it; you see, The Great Man is coming to Australia! w00t! October 2nd (Melbourne), details here. Oh, and don’t call him the great-great-great-grandfather of virtual communities. Jim Benson and others will yell at you if you do. This was the event I hinted at months ago. yay! But boo! I can’t go – I spend too much time blogging and not enough time generating income as it is. However, watch out for a little pink-haired pixel pixie, cyber streaking around, waggling her bottom. She’s been known to show up on Facebook and Twitter demanding attention when social networking celebs are in town.

So home I’ll be, maybe I’ll be reading Smart Mobs? I just realised that I bought it in 2005 and it’s been sitting on my bookshelf. Does anyone else do that? Buy books because they are in ‘your’ industry and then pass on reading them for ages? Even if it’s by an author you like a lot? I think I’ve been saturated over the years, with info on social networking, and I get a bit sort of ‘same old, same old’. But it’s time for me to consume this piece of traditional media. And anyway, I have to: because Mike and Dave told me to…