Rheingold, Howard

1947–

Author, Online Pioneer

Writer, editor, speaker, and online community builder, Howard Rheingold is best known as the author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993), one of the first book-length attempts to treat the Internet as a social and cultural environment worthy of popular and academic attention.

Rheingold was born in 1947 in Tucson, Arizona, and was raised in Phoenix. He was a National Merit Scholar at Reed College, where he graduated in 1968. With the help of a variety of day jobs—including clerk, typist, steel worker, warehouse worker, and babysitter—he began writing in earnest in 1973. Gradually, he became a full-time writer; over the last 25 years, his work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek, and Omni.

Rheingold 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 (with Howard Levine, 1982), 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). Although Rheingold gained considerable attention with 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.

Focusing especially on the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL), a pioneering Bay Area–based online community, The Virtual Community serves, along with Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), as one of the twin pillars of the nascent field of Internet studies. In the book, Rheingold makes the 'Net—still in its early, pre-Netscape days—more familiar, and sheds light on what users do within virtual communities, from arguing over politics in one of the WELL's conference rooms to trading recipes within a cooking forum. Along the way, Rheingold explores community formation within USENET newsgroups as well as identity representation on Multiple User Domains (MUDs), and recounts a brief, simplified history of the Internet, sprinkling his anecdotal yet experienced observations with more theoretical frameworks, including theories of social contracts, reciprocity, and gift economies.

Perhaps the most important contribution of The Virtual Community is its definition of online communities, one that has been worked with (and over) by subsequent scholars of computer-mediated communication. According to Rheingold, “virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on … public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.” Herein lie two crucial Rheingoldian themes. First, building off of the ideas of ARPANET grandfather J. C. R. Licklider, virtual communities are social networks based on common and shared interests rather than on geographic proximity. Second, virtual communities represent human agency at its finest; by “taking to the wires,” everyday users of the Internet transformed a once-militaristic computer network into an online public sphere—or, to use Rheingold's words, “an electronic agora.”

One of the lasting results of Rheingold's pivotal book is a research agenda focused on the social and cultural elements of cyberspace. For example, many of the chapters in anthologies like Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety (1997) and Internet Culture (1997) build upon ideas introduced by Rheingold, and bring a more theoretically grounded framework to the terrain he travels through and the questions he asks. Further, anthologies like Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace (1996) and Race in Cyberspace (2000) use Rheingold as a starting point, yet quickly critique and problematize his findings. Indeed, while many readers enthusiastically embrace Rheingold's positive portrayal of cyberspace, most scholars find his utopian rhetoric to be deserving of critique and in need of more empirically based and theoretically grounded scholarship.

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