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.

Comments

Becoming one organism

[Neuronerd]

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.

The insects are all that is left

[milo_Gwalthny]

It has happened. We have become ants.

New Oxymoron!

[bons]

"Smart Mob"
News for Linguists. Stuff to banter.

Re:Flash Crowd

[capt.Hij]

Former Philippine president Joseph Estrada, accused of massive corruption, was driven out of power two years ago by smart mobs who swarmed to demonstrations, alerted by their cell phones, gathering in no time. "It's like pizza delivery," Alex Magno, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines, told The Post at the time. "You can get a rally in 30 minutes -- delivered to you."

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!

Re:Eye and face contact

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

people who tend to use these new PDA technologies are seriously missing out on the more traditional forms of human contact.

A priori, this is not necessarily a bad thing... Things aren't good just because they're new. They aren't good just because they're old. And sometimes, "time honored" is just another way of saying "previously the only option".

Flash Crowd != Smart Mob. FC ~= Slashdot Effect

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.)

People ARE nodes in a network. Always have been.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.