# The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier *By Howard Rheingold. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1993. Second edition, with a new concluding chapter, MIT Press, 2000.* > I did not read the whole book. The author posted the 1993 text of the introduction, ten chapters and bibliography free on his own site. I downloaded all of it, but I read only parts. I read the opening and the closing of the introduction (about the first third of it), chapters 1 and 2 in excerpt (the opening, a middle passage and the ending of each, plus a targeted read of the chapter 1 passages about Blair Newman and the hardware fundraiser), and only the opening and closing paragraphs of chapters 3 to 10, plus a scan of the names each chapter uses most. Everything in section 5 is therefore a skeleton built from those parts, the table of contents and secondary sources. I did not read the 2000 edition's new concluding chapter at all, and I could not tell what else differs from the 1993 text. Related dossiers in this vault: [[Book Summaries/Hafner, Katie/The WELL - Katie Hafner|The WELL]] (Hafner's 2001 history of the community Rheingold writes about; that dossier links here), [[Book Summaries/Turner, Fred/From Counterculture to Cyberculture - Fred Turner|From Counterculture to Cyberculture]] (Turner's chapter 5 is "Virtuality and Community on the WELL"), and Rheingold's other books: [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/Tools for Thought - Howard Rheingold|Tools for Thought]], [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/Smart Mobs - Howard Rheingold|Smart Mobs]], [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/Net Smart - Howard Rheingold|Net Smart]] and [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/Mind Amplifier - Howard Rheingold|Mind Amplifier]]. There is also a topic note on the community itself, with a timeline and article summaries: [[Book Summaries/Topics/The WELL]]. ## 1. Book facts | | | |---|---| | Title | *The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier*. The 1994 Secker & Warburg (UK) edition carries a different subtitle, *Finding Connection in a Computerized World*, in the Internet Archive record | | Author | Howard Rheingold (sole author) | | First edition | Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1993; ISBN 0201608707 / 9780201608700 (Internet Archive and Open Library records; Wikipedia and a 2004 review print it as 0-201-60870-7) | | Other editions | HarperPerennial paperback, 1994 (ISBN 0060976411 in Open Library; the author's contents page names "HarperPerennial Paperback"); Secker & Warburg, 1994 (0436412144); MIT Press 2nd edition, 2000, paperback 0262681218 / 9780262681216, eBook 9780262291415 (Open Library; Wikipedia lists the eBook ISBN) | | Length | Varies by record, so treat it as unsettled: Open Library gives 325 pages for the Addison-Wesley record, 335 for HarperPerennial and 360 (also 447 and 480 on other records) for MIT Press. Internet Archive scans have 346 to 486 page images | | Language | English | | Subject | Online communities in the early 1990s (the WELL, Usenet, BBSs, MUDs, IRC, Minitel, Japanese and British systems), their promise and risks for democracy and for personal life | | Audiobook | I found none. Audible's search page does not render results for my box, so this is unconfirmed | | Where it came up | Marshall asked for it on 2026-11-03; the Hafner dossier already links to this note | ## 2. Book resources **Free (legal).** - **Author-posted text (1993 edition).** Howard Rheingold put the introduction, chapters 1 to 10 and the bibliography on his own sites without charge. Table of contents: [people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook](https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/) (the older copy, on the WELL) and [rheingold.com/vc/book](https://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/) (the newer copy, "©1998 howard rheingold"). Direct pages: [introduction](https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbookintro.html), [chapter 1](https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbook1.html), [chapter 2](https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbook2.html), then `vcbook3.html` to `vcbook10.html` and [`vcbookbiblio.html`](https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbookbiblio.html) in the same folder. His note on the older contents page asks readers who like it to buy the paperback. This is the author's own posting, not an unauthorized copy. It is the 1993 text, not the 2000 second edition, whose new concluding chapter is not on those pages (the contents lists only the introduction, ten chapters and a bibliography). - **Internet Archive (controlled lending).** Scans of several editions: [Addison-Wesley 1993](https://archive.org/details/virtualcommunity00rhei), [MIT Press 2000](https://archive.org/details/virtualcommunity0000rhei_e4a7), plus HarperPerennial and Secker & Warburg scans (identifiers `virtualcommunity00rhei_0`, `virtualcommunity0000rhei_h5r0` and `virtualcommunity0000rhei`). Their metadata shows "printdisabled", and the 1993, 1994 and UK scans also show "inlibrary", which means borrowing with a free Internet Archive account, not open download. The metadata shows access-restricted for all five. I did not log in, so I have not confirmed any copy can be borrowed today. - **Open Library.** [Addison-Wesley record](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1412025M) and [MIT Press paperback record](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL9458696M); the work page lists 11 editions and marks the work "borrowable". - **Libby/OverDrive and Hoopla.** [OverDrive search](https://www.overdrive.com/search?q=rheingold%20virtual%20community) and [Hoopla search](https://www.hoopladigital.com/search?q=rheingold%20virtual%20community) load, but their results are not readable from my box. I cannot say what any library holds. Search your own library in Libby. - **Project Gutenberg.** Not applicable (a 1993 copyrighted book). **Paid.** - **Amazon.** [MIT Press paperback, ISBN 0262681218](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262681218) and [Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0201608707](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201608707) both load, but I could not parse a price, a stock status or a Kindle edition from either. I did not confirm Kindle availability. An eBook edition exists (ISBN 9780262291415 in Open Library), so a Kindle or other eBook edition is plausible, but I have not seen it. - **Audible:** none found. **Cover:** [Open Library cover image](https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/135346-L.jpg). ## 3. Author biography Howard Rheingold (born July 7, 1947, Phoenix, Arizona; Reed College; per [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Rheingold)) is an American writer, critic and teacher on the cultural and social effects of communication media. He joined the WELL in the summer of 1985 (his own introduction says "since the summer of 1985", and an average of two hours a day, seven days a week) and, per chapter 2, asked the WELL's first staffer about hosting a conference about the mind. At the time of the book he was an editor of *Whole Earth Review*, according to the Fresh Air 1993 segment description. Earlier books in this vault: *Tools for Thought* (1985), and the later *Smart Mobs* (2002), *Net Smart* (2012) and *Mind Amplifier* (2012). Wired's 2002 review calls him the author of *Virtual Reality* "and other works in the early 1990s that prophesied the rise of electronic communities". His sites: [rheingold.com/howard](https://www.rheingold.com/howard) and [smartmobs.com](https://www.smartmobs.com). ## 4. Author interviews and talks - **NPR *Fresh Air* with Terry Gross, October 21, 1993, "The New Networked Frontier."** [Segment page](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/new-networked-frontier). The description says Rheingold "argues that although computer mediated communication has made it possible for people to have access to almost anything, it is dangerous as well", and that individuals must keep using the net to express their views or lose the ability to. I read the description only, not the audio or a transcript. - **Scott London, "Life on the Electronic Frontier: An Interview with Howard Rheingold."** [Interview](https://scott.london/interviews/rheingold.html). My box gets an error (406) when it fetches this page directly, so I only saw a search-result excerpt. It covers how he joined the WELL, how it turned from words on a screen into face-to-face parties, and his view that community is made by people, not by the computer. The date was not shown in what I saw. - **PBS *Frontline* interview, fall 1995.** [Transcript on his site](https://people.well.com/user/hlr/texts/mindtomind/frontline.html). I saw only the opening excerpt, in which he defines a virtual community as "just like any other kind of community" whose members have "some common cause" and "some reason to care about each other". - **Community Signal podcast with Patrick O'Keefe (2016).** [Episode page](https://www.communitysignal.com/the-howard-rheingold-episode/). I saw only the intro and part of the transcript. The host says the book took five years, "from 1987 to 1992", to find a publisher; I did not check that independently. ## 5. Summary **What the book is.** A first-person tour of "virtual communities" at the point where they were becoming visible to the public. Rheingold starts from his daily life on the WELL, in the Bay Area, then widens the circle to Usenet, bulletin-board systems, MUDs, Internet Relay Chat, and to systems in Japan, France and Britain. The last chapters ask whether any of it can help democracy, and what the sceptics fear. Wikipedia describes the book the same way and adds that Rheingold "points out the potential benefits for personal psychological well-being, as well as for society at large, of belonging to a virtual community". **The author's own definitions (introduction).** "Virtual communities are 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." He uses "CMC" for computer-mediated communication, calls the Net the loosely connected computer networks that link people into public discussions, and offers an image of cyberspace as a "social petri dish". He says he writes to inform a wider public about the importance of cyberspace "to political liberties" and the ways virtual communities will change "our experience of the real world", while keeping "my eyes open for the pitfalls of mixing technology and human relationships". He warns that "big power and big money will find a way to control access" unless informed citizens act first. He says the tour starts at the WELL because some knowledge of a small virtual community gives "tools for comparison" later, and "the fundamentals of human nature, however, always scale up". **Chapter outline.** Titles come from the author's own posted contents page and chapter headings. I give no page numbers: the posted text has none, and I found no published contents page for any print edition. Eight chapters (3 to 10) are summarized from their openings, closings and name scans, so treat the points as pointers, not a faithful digest. - **Introduction.** (Read about the first third and the end.) His WELL life since 1985, a seven-year-old daughter who knows that her father congregates with "invisible friends", the 1985 community of a few hundred growing to eight thousand by 1993, and a list of what he does online in a day (a parenting conference, MicroMUSE, TWICS in Tokyo, CIX in London, CalvaCom in Paris, Usenet, IRC). The thesis: ordinary people can join two decentralized technologies, the personal computer and the telephone network, "for a few hundred dollars". - **Chapter 1: The Heart of the WELL.** (Read the opening, a middle passage and the ending.) Opens in the summer of 1986: his two-year-old daughter has a tick, he logs onto the WELL's Parenting conference, and a physician member answers within minutes, before the pediatrician calls back. Then a WELL-wide picnic, the episode, around 1988, in which hard-core users prepaid bills to fund a new computer after the system outgrew its first one, which he calls a first "barn raising", and the story of Blair Newman, a prolific member who got on many people's nerves, who deleted everything he had ever written on the WELL and, a couple of weeks later, killed himself. The WELL held a real funeral and online grieving. Rheingold uses it to draw lessons: "Words on a screen can hurt people", and online talk "has the reach and permanence of a publication". The chapter ends with John Perry Barlow's line that "you aren't a real community until you have a funeral". - **Chapter 2: Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place.** (Read the opening, a middle passage and the ending.) Joining in 1985 after reading about Stewart Brand's new service, his first $100 bill, hosting a conference about the mind in exchange for a bill rebate, the WELL's Sausalito origins and its Whole Earth roots and the Deadheads who show up in the text, and a portrait of a WELL staff member nicknamed "Tex", whom he met in person and who left in 1992 for another online service. Ends by arguing that all the Net has is folklore, such as netiquette, that two dozen social scientists working for several years could give the debates "a basis of validated observation". - **Chapter 3: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net.** (Read the opening and closing only.) Opens with Douglas Engelbart's 1950 idea that computers could help people handle symbols and think better. The name scan shows ARPA and the ARPANET, J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Usenet, Unix, NREN and NSFNET, and Washington politics. The closing says the Net has three streams: the ARPANET mainstream, grassroots bulletin-board systems, and group-conversation systems culminating in Usenet. - **Chapter 4: Grassroots Groupminds.** (Opening and closing only.) Opens with the "groupmind" feeling of tapping "multibrained" collective expertise on the WELL, an irony that we need networks to recover cooperation. The name scan shows Usenet, Fidonet and BBSs, EIES and Murray Turoff, and Engelbart's NLS. The ending lists the range of subcultures on BBSs. - **Chapter 5: Multi-User Dungeons and Alternate Identities.** (Opening and closing only.) Opens inside a MUD fantasy world; says MUDs began on a computer at an English university in 1980 and counts more than 170 multi-user games on the Internet by July 1992. The scan shows LambdaMOO, MicroMUSE, MediaMOO, Pavel Curtis, Amy Bruckman and Bartle. The closing raises questions about obsessive use and what universities owe or may do. - **Chapter 6: Real-time Tribes.** (Opening and closing only.) Internet Relay Chat as an experiment in the "minimum elements of communication necessary" for a community: stable nicknames, quick wit and a shared imagined context. The scan and closing show the Habitat graphical world (Lucasfilm Games, Fujitsu), avatars, and a discussion of Japanese communication ideas such as *kansei*. - **Chapter 7: Japan and the Net.** (Opening and closing only.) Begins with Izumi Aizu, who "transported me bodily to Japan" through an email invitation to a conference about a "Hypernetwork Society". The scan shows TWICS in Tokyo, COARA in Oita, Joichi Ito and Governor Hiramatsu. The close quotes Ito on a Japanese version of online media that could become a "transmission of Japanese culture to the West". - **Chapter 8: Telematique and Messageries Roses: A Tale of Two Virtual Communities.** (Opening and closing only. The contents page spells it "Messageries Rose".) Per its title it tells of two French virtual communities, and it also brings in Britain's CIX; the name scan shows Minitel, France Telecom, CalvaCom and TWICS. The opening says big institutions often think of CMC as a kind of database, a way of broadcasting information on screens, and that citizens use it differently. The ending describes a schism in a group on CIX, with private email posted publicly and the factions talking again months later. - **Chapter 9: Electronic Frontiers and Online Activists.** (Opening and closing only, plus targeted look at a few names.) Opens with a quote from the activist Dave Hughes: "Tom Paine would have published Common Sense on a computer bulletin board". Covers Hughes's grassroots politics, his Big Sky Telegraph project in rural Montana schoolhouses, and the raids on BBS users (Operation Sun Devil, the Steve Jackson Games raid), followed by a section on the birth of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It also mentions Santa Monica and Cleveland as places where citizens use CMC politically. The ending says "electronic democracy is far from inevitable". - **Chapter 10: Disinformocracy.** (Opening and closing only.) Hears from the sceptics. Its example is Prodigy, a commercial service funded by fees and on-screen advertising, and the name scan shows Baudrillard, Debord, Habermas, Foucault, the panopticon and McLuhan. The ending calls the late 1990s a "narrow window of historical opportunity" and asks for neither a sales-pitch spell nor rejection but a look at how technology can build "stronger, more humane communities". - **Bibliography.** Posted separately; I read its first entries only. - **2000 second edition: a new concluding chapter.** Per Wikipedia; I have not seen its title or contents. **How it connects to the other dossiers.** Hafner's *The WELL* tells the day-to-day history of the community from a reporter's distance (the Tom Mandel story and the later business sale); Rheingold's book is the insider's version from 1993. Turner's *From Counterculture to Cyberculture* argues that Brand's network of Whole Earth, the WELL and *Wired* turned a counterculture into digital utopianism; Turner's chapter 5 is on the WELL. Rheingold appears in both. His later *Smart Mobs*, *Net Smart* and *Mind Amplifier* carry the same community-and-technology line forward. **Reception (as reported by others).** - **Ian Goodwin, *Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture* (2004).** [Open-access review](https://www.westminsterpapers.org/article/id/8/) (pages 103 to 109) of the 1993 and 2000 editions. I read only its abstract, which calls *The Virtual Community* "seminal", says "no figure has loomed as large, or as controversially" over the study of virtual community as Rheingold, and calls it "required reading for anyone interested in online sociability". I did not read the review itself. - **Martin Rich, *Journal of Information Technology* 9(3), 1994, p. 247**, and **William Sims Bainbridge, *Science* 265(5175), 1994, p. 1114.** Both are listed as reviews in Wikipedia's article; I could not open either. - **Scott London's interview** (above) calls it a bestseller. That is his claim, which I have not checked. - **Goodreads:** 3.82 average from 185 ratings, 16 editions (search page, Nov 3, 2026). ## 6. Fact-check Overall verdict: **mixed**. Publication facts and the chapter list are checked against the author's posted pages and catalog records. The chapter summaries rest on partial reading. | Claim | Verdict | Evidence | |---|---|---| | Addison-Wesley 1993; ISBN 0201608707 | Supported | Internet Archive and Open Library records; the 2004 review's heading prints 0-201-60870-7 | | MIT Press second edition in 2000 with a new concluding chapter | Supported (secondary) | Wikipedia; Internet Archive and Open Library show the 2000 MIT Press record. I did not see the new chapter | | Number of pages | Unsettled | Open Library gives 325, 335, 360, 447 and 480 for different records; Internet Archive page-image counts differ | | The text is posted free by the author | Supported | Both contents pages open and carry his notice and link to every chapter; all pages loaded | | The posted text is the 1993 edition and omits the 2000 chapter | Supported (inference) | The older contents page prints "copyright 1993" and lists an introduction, ten chapters and a bibliography only; no later chapter is listed | | Rheingold joined the WELL in summer 1985 | Supported | His introduction; chapter 2 says he read about the new service "in the spring of 1985" and signed up | | The WELL grew from "a few hundred" in 1985 to eight thousand by 1993 | Supported (his figure) | Introduction | | The WELL's first computer was outgrown and members prepaid bills to buy a new one (1988) | Supported (his account) | Chapter 1: "seven hundred users in 1985" and "three thousand users we had in 1988" | | Who "Tex" is | Not checked | Chapter 2 gives only the nickname; I did not map it to a real name, so I do not state one | | Blair Newman deleted his posts and later died by suicide, and a funeral followed | Supported (his account) | Chapter 1. He also notes a different "urban folklore" version printed in some magazines, which he disputes | | Other chapter contents (3 to 10) | Partly checked | Only openings, closings and name counts read; each point is marked as such | | Reviews by Rich and Bainbridge | Listed, not read | Wikipedia references; the pages are not open to me | | The book was a "bestseller" | Not verified | Only Scott London's introduction says so | | The Fresh Air segment date of October 21, 1993 | Supported | Fresh Air Archive page | | Kindle and Audible availability | Not confirmed | Amazon and Audible pages did not yield usable results | | Whether Internet Archive lending is open today | Not confirmed | I did not log in | ## 7. Citations and references - The book (author-posted): [Table of contents (WELL copy)](https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/); [Table of contents (rheingold.com copy)](https://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/); [Introduction](https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbookintro.html); chapters 1 to 10 at `https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbook<N>.html`; [Bibliography](https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbookbiblio.html). - Catalogs and listings: [Internet Archive 1993](https://archive.org/details/virtualcommunity00rhei); [Internet Archive 2000](https://archive.org/details/virtualcommunity0000rhei_e4a7); [Open Library 1993](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1412025M); [Open Library 2000 paperback](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL9458696M); [Amazon, MIT Press](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262681218); [Amazon, Addison-Wesley](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201608707); [OverDrive search](https://www.overdrive.com/search?q=rheingold%20virtual%20community); [Hoopla search](https://www.hoopladigital.com/search?q=rheingold%20virtual%20community); [Goodreads search](https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=rheingold+the+virtual+community). MIT Press's own page (mitpress.mit.edu) returned an access error, so I did not use it. - Reviews: [Goodwin 2004, abstract only](https://www.westminsterpapers.org/article/id/8/); Rich (1994) at doi.org/10.1177/026839629400900309 and Bainbridge (*Science*, 19 Aug 1994), both from Wikipedia's reference list and not opened. - Interviews: [Fresh Air, Oct 21, 1993](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/new-networked-frontier); [Scott London interview](https://scott.london/interviews/rheingold.html) (search excerpt only); [PBS Frontline interview, 1995](https://people.well.com/user/hlr/texts/mindtomind/frontline.html) (excerpt only); [Community Signal episode](https://www.communitysignal.com/the-howard-rheingold-episode/) (partial). - Background: [Wikipedia, The Virtual Community](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtual_Community); [Wikipedia, Howard Rheingold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Rheingold); [Wired, 2002 review of *Smart Mobs*](https://www.wired.com/2002/10/mobile-junkies-reshaping-society/), for the "prophesied the rise of electronic communities" line. - Related dossiers: [[Book Summaries/Hafner, Katie/The WELL - Katie Hafner|The WELL]]; [[Book Summaries/Turner, Fred/From Counterculture to Cyberculture - Fred Turner|From Counterculture to Cyberculture]]; [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/Tools for Thought - Howard Rheingold|Tools for Thought]]; [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/Smart Mobs - Howard Rheingold|Smart Mobs]]; [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/Net Smart - Howard Rheingold|Net Smart]]; [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/Mind Amplifier - Howard Rheingold|Mind Amplifier]]; [[Book Summaries/Topics/The WELL]] (topic note).