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.
"Twenty years later the term passed into common use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest "
Flash Crowd == Slashdot Effect.
dmarien
It has happened. We have become ants.
Milo
this is another social "scene" I can help define by not being part of it.
yes, we have no bananas
I think that article made a more complex point
- That these technologies are strongly informing
the subcultures that really adopt them and that
at least one part of that effect is strengthening
different modalities of being social.
You could say the same about chat for instance
except these are groups of people that are out
socializing in the classical sense with special
new characteristics.
This is definately amusing :-). Centuries ago the same thing used to pass by word of mouth, and people used to flock for witch executions. And now sound has been replaced by electricity..The irony is that the meduim which is supposed to promote free thinking and freedom is also simultaniosly promoting whats it against!
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Wooh, go the americans, we can call each other or send text messages, let's all write sociology papers!
Yawn goes the rest of the developed world, another fucking sms spam.
So hungry goes the developing world, and am surrounded by landmines.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
One weak link and no automation would mean... potential for a lot of wasted energy.
Let's face it. I bet if poor old Prince William wanted his horde of money-and-power-hungry vultures off his back, all it would take is a few staff member or even a few defectors to infirltrate the network and fire off the occasional false alarm. If the level of sophistication in the group doesn't involve and automatic central server to relay these messages, then the wasted energy in communicating combined with the end result would probably see the group die off with ease....
Without guidance or leadership in such groups, any activities that can have negative consequences on those with power could likely be thwarted with ease.
Anyways, I personally live my life without a cell phone, and I love it. Of course, marriage and fatherhood mean that I don't have this need to feel my life with boring, unfullfilling noncompetitive social activity. In one level, I'm glad I don't have ammount of time to burn that these folks obviously do. On another level, a bit more time to pursue my own hobbies and goals would be nice...
He's making up terms all over the place, like this quote: "although I don't think we've ever fleshmet."
Fleshmeat? I've heard of meat-space and "rl", but I've never heard that phrase. A google search reveals it to be in the title of several pretentious sci-fi stories, and as a reference to gore.
Indeed, this whole article reeks of a hipper-than-thou attitude, whereby "cool" people have discovered a phenomenom that has been old old-hat to the Internet and science fiction crowd.
I mean, really, witness the Niven story, and Sterling has been featuring exactly this sort of thing since the early nineties.
Oh well, though geeks were some of the early adopters of cell phones, I guess we're less likely to use it for drunken phone calls and spontaneous parties. No one is going to notice until hundreds of adult children start doing it en masse.
Flash Crowd == Slashdot Effect.
Yep. The "Slashdot Effect" is the subset of Slashdot user behavior that cooresponds to a virtual flash crowd: Everybody "teleports" to the site of the news event.
But a "Smart Mob" is much different from a "Flash Crowd".
With a "Flash Crowd" hi-tek communication only enables the initial gathering. Once the mob forms they have the same characteristics as a pre-tech mob: Interpersonal communication is minimal, and the "mob organism" exhibits the collective intelligence of an ant army, far lower than that of a committee.
A "Smart Mob", on the other hand, has instant communication between separated members (and people not present). This enables large-scale organized behavior, cohesive action, regrouping, healing of "wounds", etc.
A Smart Mob has the same relation to a Flash Crowd as the "Permanent Floating Riot Club" did in the Niven short story. Though usually less hostile and sociopathic. B-)
Note that this is another example of human self-organizing behavior. Organizing people is never a problem - they do it spontaneously. Keeping them from organizing to do something undesirable, or doing something undesirable once organized, often is. (Which is why the US Constitution is primarily composed of rules limiting and channeling the government's power.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What happens when people become nodes on a network?
People ARE nodes in a network. They have been since before there was electronic communication. They have been since they were prehuman apes.
It's called "being a social animal."
It's why making friends who might engage in mutually-beneficial projects and getting such friends to introduce you to other such friends, is called "networking".
Engineering and analyzing the structure and emergent behavior of electronic communication netowrks has given us additional understanding of the behavior, even as the electronic networks themselves have aided and amplified the functioning of the social networks.
"Global village" was coined when the only ones with effective access to large-scale communication was the professional newscriers and gossips. But general access to directed communication enables a "global city" - with distinct boroughs of differing cultures and interests but without geographic limitations.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...What this would create a Partial Reinforcement effect. As any behavioral psychologist can tell you a behavior that gets reinforced partially at random intervals will happen much more often than behavior reinforced every time.
A classic example of this would be a brat crying for candy. If parents give in every now and then, this child will cry only more often and more intensily whenever (s)he wants something.
If those "lusty ladies" could not be sure that the message they got was the real one, there would be the oposite effect, a rush to that spot to be the first to confirm weather or not it is true. And those times when it is not, will only fuel the hunger for the next chance.
Havn't you heard of the inverse square law :-)
The amount of radiation from a phone say 3 foot away is way lower than one clamed to your head.
I have also noticed the atrophy of the ability to plan in my friends who have cell phones. I generally don't use one (occasionally activate a pre-paid mobile for long driving trips, should there be an emergency), and it is impossible to meet anyone anymore. They like to just say "meet me on 6th street in some bar" and then you are supposed to go to 6th, call them, find out what bar they went to on the spur of the moment, realize their habits have so atrophied they can't even tell you where they are in the bar, go to the bar and call them AGAIN, so you can locate them by the ringing phone.
It's disgusting, really. I think some of my friends have almost completely lost the ability to plan more than 30 minutes ahead. They live 30 minutes (including a shower) from school and work, and any agreement to do anything that requires more than a half an hour preparation (such as meeting at a place an hour's drive away) requires constant communication, calling them to tell "you should be on the road now" or asking them to call you as they leave, or something like that.
It's not a good part of modern society.
If I may quote a posting already listed as a troll:
"people who tend to use these new PDA technologies are seriously missing out on the more traditional forms of human contact."
I believe there is a lot of truth to this, and anyone who takes a good hard look at culture in San Francisco will see it. There are a lot of people here who know lots of people and always have a party to go to but their best friends are the ones they left behind in other towns and cities, the ones they met before social connectivity ruled their lives. Also, the connected culture, as illustrated in the article, is a culture of following, of never really going anywhere without prior review and approval - where is the discovery, adventure and education in that?
The fact that it is becoming normal to be frequently interupted by cell phone ringing and ignored by the people around you while they chat on cell phones could produce a social backlash. It has on a minor scale, but those who choose not to be totally connected by refusing PDAs and cell phones are more of an ignored anomoly right now.
It will be interesting to look back in ten or twenty years and see how much of this is just a trend for the moment (CB radio - what?) and how much sticks - tv is generally accepted as vacuous entertainment with few redeeming qualities and it's still going strong.
RTFM; please, I beg you.