Smart Mobs: Mobile Communication, Pervasive Computing, and Collective Action
Howard
Rheingold
howard
rheingold.com
Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University October 24, 2003
Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks.
The technologies that make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing - inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.
Street demonstrators in the 1999 anti-WTO protests used dynamically updated websites, cell-phones, and "swarming" tactics in the "battle of Seattle." A million Filipinos toppled President Estrada through public demonstrations organized through salvos of text messages.
The pieces of the puzzle are all around us now, but haven't joined together yet. The radio chips designed to replace barcodes on manufactured objects are part of it. Wireless Internet nodes in cafes, hotels, and neighborhoods are part of it. Millions of people who lend their computers to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are part of it. The way buyers and sellers rate each other on Internet auction site eBay is part of it. Research by biologists, sociologists, and economists into the nature of cooperation offer explanatory frameworks.
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 could mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world.
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 citizens 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 entrenched interests?
Howard Rheingold is the author of:
was the editor of:
- The Whole Earth Review
- The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog
- HotWired
founded:
View this talk on line at CS547 on Stanford OnLine
Titles and abstracts for all years are available by year and by speaker.
For more information about HCI at Stanford see
