Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold is a journalist and online communities pioneer (The Virtual Community) whose work explores the emancipatory potential for technology to augment human consciousness and social groups. With his roots in the American 1960s counterculture, Rheingold skilfully blends journalistic accounts of information technology development within an optimistic framework of personal transformation and civilisational renewal. Rheingold popularised the work of early computer scientists like Douglas Engelbart and J. C. R. Licklider in his book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (2000, MIT Press). His recent book Smart Mobs (2002, Basic Books) explores how emerging technologies like mobiles, social networking and WiFi are augmenting self-organising systems of cooperation between dispersed social actor movements. In 2004-2005 Rheingold convened the subject ‘Toward a Literacy of Cooperation’ at Stanford University, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future.

Papers:

Technologies of Cooperation http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/Technology_of_cooperation.pdf

Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business http://cooperation.smartmobs.com/cs/files/IFTF_New_Literacy_of_Cooperation1.pdf

The Cooperation Project: Objectives, Accomplishments and Proposals http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/CooperationProject_3_30_05.pdf

Toward a Literacy of Cooperation http://shl.stanford.edu/hum202_syllabus.html

URL: http://www.smartmobs.com/

http://www.rheingold.com/index.html

Email: hlr@well.com

More Information

• Howard Rheingold on Wikipedia