Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution Transforming Cultures and Communities in the Age of Instant Access

Newspaper Research Journal, Fall 2003 by Stepno, Bob

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution Transforming Cultures and Communities in the Age of Instant Access, by Howard Rheingold, Perseus Publishing, 2002

While I was writing this review, my neighborhood had its first "flashmob"-dozens of strangers packing the greeting card aisle at the Harvard Co-op, saying they were looking for a card for "my friend Bill from New York." A few took pictures of the crowd and uploaded them to Web sites. They all seemed to be smiling. The point? None - except to demonstrate that people are bored, and that the technology is here: The network of e-mail lists, bulletin boards, cell phone text messages and Web pages that spread the word of where to go and what to do on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

Smart Mobs is about the more serious things people can do when they wed (for better or for worse) technologies of communication, cooperation and coordination - photo phones, pagers, weblogs, wearable computers, wireless networks and what ever comes next in a world of mobile always-on media. Put them together and you also get "moblogs," mobile live reports in words and pictures, posted to Web sites by participants in events, which could include real "news" events.

For such a digital guy, Rheingold knows how to put dead trees to good use in a timely fashion. he wrote the first book I read about the dawn of the Internet (Tools for Thought: The History and future of Mind-Expanding Technology, 1985), then plugged a modem into his PC and started getting parenting tips from online neighbors, which inspired his 1993 book, The Virtual Community, just as the World Wide Web started to cause a population explosion in everyone's virtual neighborhood.

He got the jump on "smart mobs" in Asia and Scandinavia, where mobile young users of cell phones, pagers and text-messaging were creating their own communication culture, ahead of their Americana counterparts. Smart Mobs discusses phenomena as diverse as digitally-augmented social protests in Manila and Seattle and a Japanese matchmaking service that alerts subscribers to possible dates in the vicinity of their mobile phones. (Position-indicators in phones, like the "digital traces" left behind your credit card transactions, have a dark side that Rheingold also recognizes: "We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.")

Along with "flashmob" and "moblog" demonstrations, this year brought online community-organizing to the political scene, with Howard Dean's campaign using "meetup.com" calendars and open-source weblog software to bring groups of people, and their checkbooks, together. New heavily-marketed camera-phones are another wave - already making news headlines such as: "Camera Phone Helps Foil Alleged Abduction Attempt."

While most of these Smart Mob technologies (and you can pronounce that like the "mob" in "mobile") begin as person-to-person or peer-to-peer ("P2P" for the compulsive abbreviators), they are also about gateways from one-to-one to one-to-many and many-to-many. Weblogs are simply time-stamped Web pages using software that makes it easy to add new items and links to other sites, but the linkage can become a "blogroll" spreading into a web of affinity groups, social circles and - potentially - social movements.

Along the way, "peer-to-peer journalism/E is easy to envision, and more than a year ago, Rheingold was already predicting "the power of the Rodney King video multiplied by the power of Napster." Newspapers have caught onto the weblog phenomenon, both as a form or ersatz newspaper opinion column or "this-just-in" time-stamped account of a developing story. The "Really Simple Syndication" RSS protocol developed by the Web community has been adopted by major media companies, allowing keepers of personal diaries like "scripting.com" to republish summaries and links to stories in The New York Times.

What next? Will online, print and broadcast newsrooms creatively adopt these technologies as reporting tools? Will they (or savvy politicians) manage to co-opt grassroots community building with some kind of cyber Astroturf? How does a reader know what to believe?

There are new ways to establish "reputation" online-for the volunteer reporters and commentators on http: / / slashdot.com, for someone selling classic comic books on e-Bay, or a lone pamphleteer with a weblog at "http:// bobslog.blogspot.com." Rheingold discusses at length the evolving social and technical tools that permit people to trust strangers in both commercial and information transactions, but he is also careful to point out the opportunities for mischief.

Beyond the talk about "reputation management" by cross-linked weblogs, where do professional newspapers come in? Rheingold is pretty clear about that: Journalists can use the same tools to check facts, get community feedback, collect news tips, and put breaking news onto a Web site with a click of a photophone (or design a site to receive 100 clicks from motorists stranded in a traffic jam).