Slashdot Mirror
Smart Mobs, Swarms, and Flash Crowds
PizzaFace writes "Personal communication devices always allowed people to communicate easily and to coordinate their plans at the spur of the moment. As PCDs became widespread, they allowed their owners to converge rapidly in large groups, for purposes social or political. Now something else is happening. Ubiquitous PCDs give each owner multiple simultaneous opportunities for communication or convergence. People surf their PCD network from one conversation to another, and physically surf the most promising of the gatherings to which the network invites them. Their web of social contacts is as broad as the globe and as shallow as a cell phone's keystroke. What happens when people become nodes on a network? Joel Garreau reports provocatively in the Washington Post. His sample is skewed by Washington's summer influx of interns, who come from around the country to work for little or no pay in part because they're chasing 'peak experiences,' and who have lots of disposable time and energy, no local roots or tethers, and an unusually large network of like-wired acquaintances." I think the conventional (and most descriptive) term for this behavior is flash crowd.
You don't say.
Maybe mobiles aren't as coomon in the USA as in the UK, but here roughly 75% of the population have one, and if you're between 15 and 25 quite a few people look at you strangely if you don't (around Cambridge anyhow). They've become expected.
For example, I was meeting my mates in London for my birthday 2 weeks ago; we were all coming in from different areas of the south of England. The day before we arranged a place and time - Victoria at 11:00. Come the next morning, everyone arrives in London, different arrival points, different times - out comes the mobiles> All 8 of us found each other within 20 mins of arriving, despite the 'group' having moved several times between the first and last person - some of whom didn't hear about the meet til that morning.
Trying to do the same on such short notice without mobiles just wouldn't be possible. Mobiles have removed the need to plan - you can just do it all on the fly.
as cell phones increasingly become something that a teenager gets with her driver's license (...)
I knew the US are lagging behind Europe in terms of cell phone usage, but I didnt think it was that much. In Germany, being 14 and not having at least a crappy Nokia 3210 means your parents are technophobic hippies, and that youre socially death.
Just a repackaging of what Rheingold himself wrote 2 weeks ago, Smart Mobs, with a few amusing if poorly documented anecdotes thrown in. The original is more interesting.