di Howard Rheingold |
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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.
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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 are beginning to 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. At least one key global business question is part of it - why is the Japanese company DoCoMo profiting from enhanced wireless Internet services while US and European mobile telephony operators struggle to avoid failure? 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. 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: How to Recognize The Future When It Lands On You (vedi sintesi) Mobile communication devices, peer to peer methods, and a computation-pervaded
environment are making it possible for groups of people to organize
collective actions on a scale never before possible -- smart mobs,
for better and for worse. Connecting mobile devices to the Internet is more than getting stock quotes on your phone. The practice of sending short instant text messages triggered youth revolutions in Tokyo and Helsinki, and a political revolution in Manila.
Chapter Two: Technologies of Cooperation (vedi sintesi) Mobile and pervasive technologies of cooperation make new kinds of collective action possible.
Chapter Three: Computation Nations and Swarm Supercomputers (vedi sintesi) As the computing power in desktop machines has multiplied, and the Internet has connected hundreds of millions of machines at increasingly higher speeds, people have started linking their computers into collective enterprises.
Chapter Four: The Era of Sentient Things (vedi sintesi) Radio-equipped microchips permeating the environment, computers built into clothing, information beacons embedded in cities, are erasing the barrier between bits and atoms. Information is becoming embedded in things, and associated with places -- presenting grave dangers and unprecedented opportunity.
Chapter Five: The Evolution of Reputation (vedi sintesi) Reputation marks the spot where technology and cooperation converge.
Chapter Six: Wireless Quilts (vedi sintesi) Ad hoc, self-organized networks of grassroots users of inexpensive, high speed, wireless Internet communications, now challengeexisting technologies, regulatory regimes, and industries.
Chapter Seven: Smart Mobs and the Power of the Mobile Many (vedi sintesi) Smart mobs emerge when social networks use mobile communication devices, pervasive computation, peer to peer and reputation management methodologies to coordinate collective action - political, social, economic.
Chapter Eight: Always-On Panopticon...or Cooperation Amplifier (vedi sintesi) The same technologies that can amplify cooperation also have the potential to intensify surveillance; what we know and do can minimize dangers and maximize opportunities.
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