Howard Rheingold (born 1947) is an American critic, writer, and teacher, known for his specialties on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities. He pioneered the practice of community-building as a type of media literacy with  the WELL, a "computer conferencing" system that became a virtual community. His book, The Virtual Community(1993/2000) helped a generation of educators understand the affordances of digital media. He taught courses at Stanford University including A Literacy of Cooperation and VirtualCommunity/Social Media. He also taught a course called  Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information. In 2008, he was a winner in MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning competition and used the award to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom. He has a YouTube channel that covers a range of subjects and maintains Rheingold University where he first began teaching about the nature of attention in a digital world.