HOWARD RHEINGOLD....

Howard Rheingold (was born in phoenix arizona on July 7, 1947) is a critic, writer, and teacher; his specialities are on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, from 1964 to 1968. In 1998, he created his next virtual community, Brainstorms, a private successful webconferencing community for knowledgeable, intellectual, civil, and future-thinking adults from all over the world. As of 2011, Brainstorms was in its thirteenth year.
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.
In 2008, Rheingold became the first research fellow at the Institute for the Future, with which he had long been affiliated.Rheingold is a visiting lecturer in Stanford University's Department of Communication where he teaches two courses, "Digital Journalism" and "Virtual Communities and Social Media". He is a lecturer in U.C. Berkeley's School of Information where he teaches "Virtual Communities and Social Media" and where he previously taught "Participatory Media/Collective Action".

SOME OF HIS WORKS:

The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier ( (1993)
where he stated:
"When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and evocative, like, well, 'The Virtual Community,' even though a more accurate title might be: 'People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community.'"  

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (1985)

Out of the Inner Circle, with Bill Landreth (1985)

The Cognitive Connection: Thought and Language in Man and Machine, with Howard Levine (1987)  

Virtual Reality (1991)