Rheingold, Howard

Howard Rheingold, (born July 17, 1947, Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.), American writer who was especially influential in the development of virtual communities; he wrote The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993), which was one of the first books to treat the Internet as a social and cultural environment worthy of popular and academic attention.

Rheingold attended Reed College, and after graduating in 1968, he held a variety of jobs before focusing on writing. He spent much of the 1980s exploring the intersections between human consciousness, creative activity, and new technologies. His books from this period include Talking Tech: A Conversational Guide to Science and Technology (1982; with Howard Levine), Tools for Thought: The People and Ideas Behind the Next Computer Revolution (1985), and The Cognitive Connection: Thought and Language in Man and Machine (1986; with Levine).

Although Rheingold gained considerable attention with his book Virtual Reality (1991), it was not until The Virtual Community that he became a leading commentator on cyberspace in general and the notion of online communities in particular. In that seminal work, Rheingold shed light on what users do within virtual communities, especially on The WELL, a pioneering online community that he had joined in 1985; it was there that he was credited with first coining the term virtual community. He also explored community formation within USENET newsgroups as well as identity representation on the role-playing games known as Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs). According to Rheingold, virtual communities represent human agency at its finest; everyday users of the Internet transformed a once-militaristic computer network into an online public sphere—or, in Rheingold’s words, “an electronic agora.” In The Virtual Community, he also offered a brief, simplified history of the Internet, sprinkling his anecdotal observations with more theoretical frameworks, including theories of social contracts, reciprocity, and gift economies.

In 1994 Rheingold helped create HotWired, the first commercial Webzine with a virtual community; it served as the online component of the then relatively new Wired magazine. He was HotWired’s first executive editor but left almost immediately after it launched. In 1996 he started Electric Minds, another online magazine with a virtual community. It notably hosted a discussion of the 1997 chess rematch between grandmaster Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing system. Later that year Rheingold sold Electric Minds and subsequently founded Brainstorms, a private Web-conferencing community. He later established Rheingold Associates, an online management-strategy business.

Rheingold’s other books include Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002) and Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (2012). He lectured at several schools, including Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.