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.
I guess my humanities friends that always told me that culture is about to turn us into a giant meta-organism are right after all. Interesting that it took plenty of technology to get there and surprisingly little "humanities" moderation.
But then they say that a meta-organism has been what we were all along.
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
There can be a dark side to all this. Swarmers can have difficulty living in the present.
Living in the present? It sounds like these people have some problems living by themselves. We've already got attention-deficit disorder, and the article brings this up near the end -- that you get people who leave if the situation doesn't immediately grab (and hold) their attention -- but the extension of this would be people who can't (or won't) go and do things on their own, without their friends (or 'swarm').
Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story "Flash Crowd" predicted that one consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. 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 (what this does to the server may also be called slashdot effect).
So now we get to slashdot a party, bar, or other social event.
I wonder how long it will take for some marketroid to figure out a way to use the phenom as a way to promote their rather bad and awful party, bar, or social event?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Actually the flash crowd is much more effective. It seems that they actually do things other than look at web pages. For all of the calls for action that I hear here on slashdot it doesn't seem that much actually happens. Seems we have something to learn!
It's nice to see the U.S. take notice of something that's an old phenomenon over here in wireless-happy Finland (and other parts of Europe). I remember first talking about this issue with friends years and years back. Practically everyone has had a mobile phone for so many years now that a lot of people don't even notice how much it has changed things. Little kids have mobile phones. Soon my cats will probably have one ;)
For example, nobody agrees on an exact place/time to meet anymore. People just take a bus to the city center, and hook up with people while they're on the move. Likewise, people are totally used to being reachable all the time, and actually feel a bit cut off from society if their phone breaks or something. The same thing as with the Net and email, I guess. If you don't want to be available you turn your phone off or switch it to silent mode, but you want the option of being reachable to there.
Quite amusing to see the States now start to reach this level and notice it. Not intended as a putdown, just as a statement - mobile tech is one area where many parts of Europe are still way ahead, very much due to GSM. Things will probably even out in the future.
I write software for mobile messaging systems, so I have some idea of what I'm talking about, btw ;)
There are already technologies that let a phone get a general idea of its location based on what tower it's talking to (Palm.net and the VII/i705 - why oh why doesn't CDMA data have this feature? And I don't think GSM has this sort of integration, partly because both data services were designed for phones possible with an external data device, not integrated solutions like the Kyocera 6035 or the Treo)
I see in the future a variation of IM software (Why use current IM solutions when you have SMS???) in which you mark yourself as saying, "I'm available" with possibly a little bit of personal info (age 18-25 or whatever), that shows up to anyone looking to find people in their immediate area. (Maybe defined as "my tower and adjacent x towers" since I believe the GPS capabilities in E-911 are on demand and NOT user controlled.)
New to a city? Take a bus to the city center and mark yourself available to meet people. (As opposed to the mentions of such activities existing already that require you to already have the phone # of the person you're messaging.)
People would be able to create "networks" on the fly that anyone could find and join into.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?