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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