Fwd: Smart Mobs

From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Tue Jul 16 2002 - 12:58:06 MDT


  SMART MOBS

  Howard Rheingold

  The big battle coming over the future of smart mobs concerns media cartels
  and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast
  era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to
  create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what
  the battles over file-sharing, copy protection, regulation of the radio
  spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like
  the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread
  innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and
  locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful
  entrenched interests?

  Introduction

  In 1999 and 2000, Howard Rheingold started noticing people using mobile
  media in novel ways. In Tokyo, he accompanied flocks of teenagers as they
  converged on public places, coordinated by text messages. In Helsinki, he
  joined like-minded Finns who share the same downtown physical clubhouse,
  virtual community, and mobile-messaging media. He learned that the
  demonstrators in the 1999 anti-WTO protests used dynamically updated
  websites, cell-phones, and "swarming" tactics in the "battle of Seattle,"
  and that a million Filipino citizens toppled President Estrada in 2000
  through public demonstrations organized by salvos of text messages. Drivers
  in the UK used mobile communications to spontaneously self organize
  demonstrations against rising petrol prices. He began to see how these
  events were connected. He calls these new uses of mobile media "smart mobs."

  For nearly two years, Rheingold visited hotspots around the world where
  smart mob technologies and societies were erupting. He had some idea of how
  to look for early signs of momentous changes, having chronicled and forecast
  the PC revolution in 1985 and the Internet explosion in 1993. He is now sees
  a third wave of change underway in the first decade of the 21st century, as
  the combination of mobile communication and the Internet makes it possible
  for people to cooperate in ways never before possible.

  http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rheingold/rheingold_print.html

  SMART MOBS

  Smart mobs use mobile media and computer networks to organize collective
  actions, from swarms of techo-savvy youth in urban Asia and Scandinavia to
  citizen revolts on the streets of Seattle, Manila, and Caracas. Wireless
  community networks, webloggers, buyers and sellers on eBay are early
  indicators of smart mobs that will emerge in the coming decade.
  Communication and computing technologies capable of amplifying human
  cooperation already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by
  some to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks.
  Already, governments have fallen, subcultures have blossomed, new industries
  have been born and older industries have launched counterattacks.

  There are both dangers and opportunities posed by this emerging phenomenon.
  Smart mob devices, industries, norms, and social consequences are in their
  earliest stages of development, but they are evolving rapidly. Current
  political and social conflicts over how smart mob technologies will be
  designed and regulated pose questions about the way we will all live for
  decades to come.

  A number of new technologies make smart mobs possible and the pieces of the
  puzzle are all around us now, but haven't joined together yet. Wireless
  Internet nodes in cafes, hotels, and neighborhoods are part of it. The radio
  chips designed to replace barcodes on manufactured objects are part of it.
  Millions of people who lend their computers to the search for
  extraterrestrial intelligence are part of it. The reputation systems used on
  eBay and Slashdot, and the peer to peer capabilities demonstrated by Napster
  point to other pieces of the puzzle.

  Some mobile telephones are already equipped with location-detection devices
  and digital cameras. Some inexpensive mobile devices already read barcodes
  and send and receive messages to radio-frequency identity tags. Some furnish
  wireless, always-on Internet connections. Large numbers of people in
  industrial nations will soon have a device with them most of the time that
  will enable them to link objects, places and people to online content and
  processes. Point your device at a street sign, announce where you want to
  go, and follow the animated map beamed to the box in your palm; or point at
  a book in a store and see what the Times and your neighborhood reading group
  have to say about it. Click on a restaurant and warn your friends that the
  service has deteriorated.

  The big battle coming over the future of smart mobs concerns media cartels
  and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast
  era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to
  create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what
  the battles over file-sharing, copy protection, regulation of the radio
  spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like
  the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread
  innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and
  locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful
  entrenched interests?

  Telephone companies and cable operators, with enormous investments in old
  technologies, are moving to control who can build enterprises on the
  Internet, and the kinds of enterprises they can create. The expensive
  auctions of radio spectrum for next-generation "3G" mobile communications
  are threatened by the emergence of radically more cost effective
  technologies in the form of grassroots wireless networks.

  The entire 1920s scheme for regulating the use of the electromagnetic
  spectrum is thrown into question by the invention of "cognitive radios" and
  other wireless technologies that put power into the hands of user
  communities rather than central broadcasters.

  Five Hollywood movie studios and the four giant companies that dominate the
  global recording industry say they are trying to protect intellectual
  property, but are backing legislation and "protection devices" that will
  lock down computers and the Internet into a pay-for-play model in which only
  the largest players will be allowed to create or distribute content or
  services online, permitted to create new kinds of computers, or empowered to
  invent things like the Web.

  Although the recording industry succeeded in shutting down Napster, and the
  legal arguments were about the theft of copyrighted music, the technical
  significance of peer-to-peer resource sharing is far greater than even the
  future of the music industry. Seventy million people used Napster within the
  first months of its existence. When tens of millions of people pool their
  computing power, many things become possible.

  Seti@home uses the idle processing power of millions of PCs to search for
  life in outer space and other CPU-sharing "distributed computing" networks
  help search for new medicines, understand the immune system, crack codes,
  predict the weather. Wireless networks show that communication bandwidth can
  be pooled. Combining the data storage, computation, and communication power
  of millions of PCs makes possible entirely new kinds of science, business,
  and social enterprise, based on the emergent power of millions of
  individuals.

  Combine wearable computing, wireless communications, and peer-to-peer
  resource sharing, and all the people in a building or a crowd walking down
  the street can join into ad-hoc networks.

  As influential as the Internet has been, it has been, for the most part,
  confined to computers on desktops. Mobile communication and pervasive
  computing technologies are permeating every part of our professional and
  personal lives with Internet-enabled capabilities. Just as the
  microprocessor and the television screen combine into an entirely new
  technology with its own capabilities, the personal computer, and millions of
  computers linked through the global telecommunication network constitute an
  entirely new technology with its own capabilities, the Internet, the
  marriage of the mobile telephone and the Internet will result in far more
  than email or stock quotes in your pocket - the mobile Internet in a
  computation-pervaded environment will constitute an entirely new medium with
  its own properties.

  Will the architecture and regulation of the emerging wireless Internet be
  dictated by and empower a few large, highly centralized institutions such as
  corporations and governments, or will it favor the cooperative innovations
  of millions of citizens - the way the architecture and regulation of the
  wired Internet made the Web possible?

  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.

  Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are
  beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with
  invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. 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.

  The cost, size, and performing power of computers, video displays, and
  wireless communications are moving from the computer industry into the
  fashion industry, as wearable computers embedded in clothing become cost-
  effective. Ultimately, with peer-to-peer methodologies, reputation systems
  that mediate trust between strangers, and ad-hoc broadband networks,
  wearable devices will be desired, purchased, and used as much for their
  social capabilities as for their utility as information appliances.

  There are the dangers as well as opportunities concerning smart mobs. I used
  the word "mob" deliberately because of its dark resonances. Humans have used
  our talents for cooperation to organize atrocities. Technologies that enable
  cooperation are not inherently pathological: unlike nuclear bombs or land
  mines, smart mob technologies have the potential for being used for good as
  well as evil.

  Nevertheless, years before the September 11, 2001 attacks, commentator
  Thomas Friedman prophetically referred to "superempowered individuals" such
  as Osama Ben Laden who use modern technologies and networked organizations
  to execute acts of terrorism. RAND corporation analysts have pointed out
  that the Russian mafia and Colombian narcotics trafficking enterprises use
  "netwar" methods combining communication networks, social networks, and
  networked forms of organization.

  On the other hand, when cooperation breaks out, civilizations advance and
  the lives of citizens improve. This is the big opportunity of smart mobs.
  Language, the alphabet, cities, the printing press did not eliminate poverty
  or injustice, but they did make it possible for groups of people to create
  cooperative enterprises such as science and democracy that increased the
  health, welfare, and liberty of many.

  Just as medicine only became an effective weapon against illness when
  science furnished useful knowledge about the nature of diseases, the most
  effective use of communication and computer technologies could emerge from
  new scientific understandings of human cooperation. The most powerful
  opportunities for human progress are rooted not in electronics but in
  understandings of social practices. Sociologists, political scientists,
  evolutionary biologists, even nuclear warfare strategists have contributed
  the first clues that an interdisciplinary science of cooperation might be
  emerging.

  Mobile communications and pervasive computing have the potential for
  magnifying cooperation far more powerfully than previous technologies;
  coupled with new knowledge about the social dynamics of collective action,
  smart mob technologies could make possible improvements in the way billions
  of people live.

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