Howard Rheingold

Biography

Howard Rheingold (b. 7 July 1947) is a pioneering technology writer, critic and educator who wrote about digital culture and online social interaction before most of it existed.

Rheingold graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 1968. He spent time as an editor at the Whole Earth Review before serving as editor in chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and was founding executive editor of HotWired in 1994. He was an early participant in The WELL, one of the first online communities, where he saw the power of digital networks to create meaningful human connection. He has taught at UC Berkeley's School of Information and at Stanford University, where he mentored a generation of digital thinkers while developing frameworks for understanding online collaboration.

Key Works

Tools for Thought (1985) provided one of the first accessible histories of computers and their potential for augmenting human intelligence, running from Babbage and Boole through Turing, von Neumann, Licklider, Engelbart and the Xerox PARC generation. Its organising claim — that the significant history of computing is the history of augmenting the mind rather than of automating arithmetic — was unfashionable when written and is now standard.

The Virtual Community (1993) recognised the social potential of computer networks before most others did. Rheingold defined virtual communities as "social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace." The book is grounded in his own years on the WELL and is unusual for treating birth, illness and death in an online community as its central evidence.

Smart Mobs (2002) described how mobile communications would enable new forms of collective action, predicting phenomena including flash mobs and mobile-coordinated political protest. Written before smartphones, it identified the combination of mobility, always-on connection and reputation systems as the decisive one.

Net Smart (2012) turned to literacy: attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration and network awareness as teachable skills rather than dispositions.

Approach

Rheingold's work has been enthusiastic about technology's potential to connect people while thoughtfully examining its drawbacks. This combination, with an accessible writing style, helped make complex ideas about digital culture comprehensible to general audiences. Throughout his career he has advocated using technology to enhance human connection and democratic participation rather than diminish them — a position he has held consistently enough that the shifts around him are easier to see against it.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Rheingold is the most useful primary source on the period in which the assumptions of network culture were formed, because he was both a participant and its most careful reporter. The Virtual Community in particular is a first-hand ethnography of an online community written before the vocabulary for such a thing existed, and reading it alongside Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture — which places Rheingold and the WELL inside a longer history — is the fastest available education in where digital utopianism came from.

Further Reading

• Tools for Thought (1985)
• The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993; MIT Press edition 2000)
• Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002)
• Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (2012)

Related Reading

• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
• The WELL
• Ward Cunningham
• Sherry Turkle
• Mobile technologies