Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold
Posted on April 12th, 2005
Let's start off with a definition:
Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don't know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones... When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote-control devices for the physical world.
You can see this starting to happen in the United States with the popularity of camera phones. But in more wirelessly-advanced parts of the world like Japan or Finland where text messaging is more deeply ingrained in digital culture, you can see it even better. With Smart Mobs Rheingold is mapping out the implications of wireless connectivity. It's the infamous Next Big Thing, full of potential to change our ideas of privacy and even the way we communicate with one another.
Rheingold points out that it's not the technology itself that will cause an evolutionary step, but the uses that emerge from it. If your cellphone can communicate with my cellphone as well as the cellphones of everyone else in the immediate vicinity, it'll be a lot easier for ad-hoc social groups to form based on some common characteristic or goal. We have that ability now, but in a slower form. Buyers and sellers on Ebay have to actively seek one another out. Social networks among groups of friends are only just beginning to get mapped out by Friendster and similar services.
Reading Smart Mobs, you start to get a sense of how limited our computer interactions are right now. To put it another way, what has your computer done for you lately? It's pretty good at fetching information when you ask for it, and superb at playing file cabinet to your growing collection of digital stuff, but there's relatively little discovery going on beyond what you self initiate. Rheingold also talks about wearable computers-- why are the keyboard and mouse the only ways that the computer is aware of me?
Having read about all the potential of the wireless web, though, I'm still not in any rush to jump into it. At some point it will probably be impossible to avoid cellphone ownership, similar to how it's impossible for many people to avoid computer ownership. But I think that day is still far away.
Update: the book has a website! www.smartmobs.com. As well as an online bibliography. Useful!