Credited with coining phrases such as ‘virtual community' and later ‘smart mobs', Howard Rheingold has been an avid actor and commentator on Internet evolution since its inception. He was one of the first to get his hands on a Xerox computer in 1979. Where man meets machine, Rheingold has been at the forefront to muse and amuse about communication technology's impact on human relations and society.

In a keynote speech kicking off this year's Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum, Howard Rheingold led more than 850 participants on a historical journey reviewing communication methods and their impact on collective action - from the age of hunters and gatherers and the evolution of language through to the dawn of coded language and the path of pervasive literacy. Now we are on the cusp of a new era which Rheingold likens to the status of disease diagnosis before the advent of modern medicine. "Four hundred years ago disease was thought to be caused by sin, heresy, foreigners or witchcraft," he said. In terms of present-day communications technology, "we are where medicine was before the development of germ theory."

Rheingold was one of the first to get his hands on a Xerox computer, launching into the brave new world of digital communications in 1973. In that age of IT infancy no one could have foreseen the profound threshold we are witnessing today, "the merging of the computer, Internet and phone to create a new medium," says Rheingold. In recent years "we have jumped from communication systems linking a few to many whereas now we have high-speed, many-to-many networks." Such tools are being used to integrate conventional, top-down practices of organization with emerging grassroots methods to empower groups to successfully and mostly peacefully secure human rights, influence politics and elections and even topple governments.

Each "new form of wealth creates a new form of collective activity," says Rheingold, who after publishing Smart Mobs in 2002 is now enabling the pooling of knowledge to facilitate multi-disciplinary cooperation and progressive action by linking previous insular areas of expertise, such as physics, political science, computer science, biology and sociology at platforms such as www.cooperationcommons.com. 

At this intersection of technology and collective action, Rheingold might hesitate to predict the future, but the visionary's vision of the future rests in Africa, Asia and India, places that were "left out of the innovation" previously. Having leapfrogged to wireless technology there, he thinks they harbor the greatest and most surprising wellspring of development in the next couple of decades.