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Howard Rheingold at the Ars Electronica in 2004

Howard Rheingold (born July 7, 1947) is a critic and writer; his specialties are on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a term he is credited with inventing).

Rheingold was born to Geraldine and Nathan Rheingold in Phoenix, Arizona. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, from 1964 to 1968. His senior thesis was entitled "What Life Can Compare with This? Sitting Alone at the Window, I Watch the Flowers Bloom, the Leaves Fall, the Seasons Come and Go."

A lifelong fascination with mind altering and its methods led Rheingold to the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Xerox PARC. There he worked on and wrote about the earliest personal computers. This led to his writing Tools for Thought in 1985, a history of the people behind the personal computer. Around that time he first logged on to The WELL - an influential early online community. He explored the experience in his seminal book, The Virtual Community.

In 1991, Rheingold wrote Virtual Reality: Exploring the Brave New Technologies of Artificial Experience and Interactive Worlds from Cyberspace to Teledildonics.

After a stint editing the Whole Earth Review, Rheingold served as editor in chief of the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog. Shortly thereafter, he was hired on as founding executive editor of HotWired, one of the first commercial content web sites published in 1994 by Wired magazine. Rheingold left HotWired and soon founded Electric Minds in 1996 to chronicle and promote the growth of community online. Electric Minds, like so many other San Francisco-based Internet startups, quickly depleted its venture-capital funds and stands as one of the most spectacular Internet flame-outs of its era. Despite accolades, the site was sold and scaled back in 1997.

In 2002, Rheingold published Smart Mobs, exploring the potential for technology to augment collective intelligence. Shortly thereafter, in conjunction with the Institute for the Future, Rheingold launched an effort to develop a broad-based literacy of cooperation.

Rheingold lives in Mill Valley, California, with his wife Judy and daughter Mamie.

• Talking Tech: A conversational Guide to Science and Technology with Howard Levine (1982)
• Higher Creativity with Willis Harman (1984)
• Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (free in HTML form) (1985)
• Out of the Inner Circle with Bill Landreth (1985)
• They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases (1988)
• The Cognitive Connection: Thought and Language in Man and Machine with Howard Levine (1987)
• Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind (1988)
• Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming with Stephen LaBerge (1990)
• Virtual Reality (1991)
• The Virtual Community (free in HTML form) (1993)
• Millennium Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas for the Twenty-First Century (1995)
• The Heart of the WELL (1998)
• Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2003)

• Howard Rheingold's Web site
• Smart Mobs weblog/book site
• Reed College Alumni Magazine Profile
• A 48MB Quicktime movie of Howard Rheingold and Andrea Saveri outlining the Cooperation Project, licensed under Creative Commons, hosted by the Internet Archive
• Blau Exchange Interview, Jan 2007