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.
but aslong as you have SMS itll be ok!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
That's it that confirms it. I am going to be a phone mercenary. Me and my swarm can get there and leave before the police arrive, and we know when they are coming and where they are. Don't like your boss? Need your wife removed? Someone steal your stapler for the last time? Message me.
"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
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.
It has happened. We have become ants.
Milo
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"
"Smart Mob"
News for Linguists. Stuff to banter.
No Zen is good zen
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
I can't get to the link. It's been flash-crowded already.
do not read this line twice.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Of all the "magic" powers, telepathy is the one I think we'll be able to simulate most accurately, and very soon. Suppose we merged cell phone technology with instant messaging buddy lists. Add a sub-vocal interface and a tiny earpiece and microphone, and you might as well be telepathic. (Albeit, for a limited number of daytime minutes!)
Shockwave Flash movies are the greatest thing to happen to non-sequitur humor since Japan.
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 ;)
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...
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
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?
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.