Smart Mobs: The next social revolution by Howard Rheingold, Perseus, $26, ISBN 0738206083
WHAT makes people willing to share information with strangers? That was the question Howard Rheingold posed in his 1994 book The Virtual Community. Much of that book was based on his experiences as a founder member of San Francisco鈥檚 electronic conferencing system the WELL, where I sometimes run across him.
Now he鈥檚 exploring intriguing new questions. What happens when computing is pervasive, enabled and supported by mobile connections? What is the sociological and cultural impact of the ad hoc formation of mobile human networks? Rheingold tackles these questions in his new book, Smart Mobs.
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Some of the technologies he looks at are new or nearly new, such as mobile phones, pervasive computing, peer-to-peer file-sharing, the Web, wearable computers and instant messaging. Others have been here a while 鈥� virtual reality and the online community.
A few of these, such as mobile phones and instant messaging, are so commonplace as to seem almost unremarkable. But pull them together and today鈥檚 teens, exchanging SMSs to agree on meetings points as they converge haphazardly and spontaneously, form ad hoc networks to solve problems or form political movements. Rheingold uses these observations as a jumping off point for looking at game theory and peer-to-peer and grid computing, and even finds something new to report about long-term cyborg Steve Mann, namely Mann鈥檚 idea that the smart rooms people talk about are a backwards step. What we want is not a smarter world around us, but smarter people.
A lot of his book is based on personal observation. He watches Japanese teens use their mobile phones to loosen the rigorous timekeeping that binds their elders, notes the same is written about teens in Norway, and sees the resentment in parts of Europe at the intrusion of private spaces into public ones.
At the MIT Media lab, Rheingold listens to physicist Neil Gershenfeld talk about merging bits and atoms, and then next door gets acquainted with Horoshi Ishii鈥檚 phicons 鈥� physical icons. On a map of MIT, you can move wooden blocks around and the computer map adjusts too. I鈥檓 not sure I want a desk covered with alphabet blocks, but it鈥檚 true that we could use new ways to interact with computers. The notion of using a pen to pick up a file from one computer and drop it onto another is appealing, although it鈥檚 nicer to sit back and let the computers do it themselves, like the peer-to-peer OpenCOLA project Rheingold also talks about.
Much of Smart Mobs is, of course, speculation. What happens when RFID (radio frequency ID) tags cost as little as a penny and can be installed in every physical object? You could look up Greenpeace product ratings from the supermarket. It would be useful to know, say, that the 8:30 bus is always late and there鈥檚 time to buy a bagel. You could pay for it with smart money, with RFID tags embedded in it so who owned it and what it was spent on could be tracked.
That may sound unlikely to happen, but Rheingold reports that the European Central Bank has proposed just such an initiative for 2005 in the interests of blocking counterfeiting. If put into place, of course, such a scheme could mean surveillance on a wider scale than previously imaginable, as Rheingold goes on to say. Although it does make you wonder: if the tag costs a penny, should the tag *be* a penny?
I鈥檓 rambling, of course. But Smart Mobs is an invitation to do that: to look with new eyes at the familiar streets populated with people yelling to unseen interlocutors, 鈥淚鈥檓 getting on the train!鈥�, and imagine what鈥檚 next.