Sunday, July 23, 2006

Rheinghold, "Smart Mobs"

Rheinghold, Howard. "Smart Mobs: The Power of the Mobile Many." Vitanza 89-120.

"Smart mobs are an unpredictable but at least partially describable emergent property that I see surfacing as more people use mobile telephones, more chips communicate with each other, more computers know where they are located, more technology becomes wearable, more people start using these new media to invent new forms of sex, commerce, entertainment, communion, and, as always, conflict" (115).

An virtual enthusiast, Rheingold covers a range of issues related to wireless, handheld and portable devices (wearable computing) while considering the potentials of digitally enabled collectivity. His examples are primarily political and popular press (news items). He recounts the power struggle of Philippine President Joseph Estrada and the impact of "smart mobs" in toppling the regime. Because cellular phones are so inexpensive, the citizen (peer-to-peer) journalism they enable is potentially a major force in social and political change. Rheinghold the technical infrastructure as "a social instrument" (93).

"Examples later in this chapter demonstrate that smart mobs engaging in either violent or nonviolent netwar represent only a few of the many possible varieties of smart mob.[...] Networks include nodes and links, use many possible paths to distribute information from any link to any other, and are self-regulated through flat governance hierarchies and distributed power" (96). Rheingold goes on to clarify--is this a given yet?--that networks and networking technologies are neither inherently good nor inherently bad (97).

Rheingold's discussion of "personal awareness devices" is very interesting--related to "reputation systems" (98) and GPS. Basically, the locative devices enable real-time social positioning notifications. ^I still find it fascinating that such devices might be used to observe patterns at an academic conference, such as the CCCC.

"What if smart mobs could empower entire populations to engage in peer-to-peer journalism?" (101).

"'Mobile ad hoc social network' is a longer, more technical term than 'smart mob.' Both terms describe the new social form made possible by the combination of computation, communication, reputation, and location awareness. The mobile aspect is already self-evident to urbanites who see the early effects of mobile phones and SMS" (103).

"The research is as much behavioral as it is computational, beginning with simple experiments matching properties of mobile computing with the needs of social networks" (104).

"Trust means a distributed reputation system" (106).

"The coordinated movements of schools and flocks is a dynamically shifting aggregation of individual decisions" (110).

"Oscillation is one of the standard and simplest emergent phenomena" (111). ^ Connect this with Lanham in Economics of Attention?

Terms: Goffman's "interaction order" (105), "epidemics of cooperation" (108), "synchronization of brain processes" (111),

Related sources:

Ball, Philip. Critical Mass. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959.

Granovetter, Mark. "Threshold Models of Collective Behavior, " American Journal of Sociology. 83.6 (1978): 1420-1443.

Huberman, Bernardo. "The Social Mind." Origins of the Human Brain. Jean-Pierre Changeuz and Jean Chavaillon, eds. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995: 250.

Posted by Derek Mueller at July 23, 2006 4:10 PM to Writing Technologies