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Smart Mobs
The central thesis of Smart Mobs is that wireless communication technologies offer a new way for folks to combine their knowledge and energy. As Howard says in the book's introduction:
"If the transition period we are entering in the first decade of the twenty-first century resembles the advent of PCs and the Internet, the new technology regime will turn out to be an entirely new medium, not simply a means of receiving stock quotes or email on the train or surfing the Web while walking down the street. Mobile Internet, when it really arrives, will not be just a way to do old things while moving. It will be a way to do things that couldn't be done before." (p. xiv)
I've done my share of pie in the sky predicting based on what other people have written, so I appreciate it when a writer takes the time to find out what's happening on the ground with regard to the new technologies they're writing about. As it turns out, Howard spent quite a bit of time in Europe, Scandinavia, Japan, and Redmond (with Microsoft's resident online sociologist) finding out how people behave in countries with more advanced wireless communication grids and standards that let people send text messages to any wireless-equipped device (not just to users on the same network as in the US). Those stories, and the personalities driving them, are all chronicled in Smart Mobs.
As engaging as Howard is as a writer, I couldn't give his work such a high rating if I didn't feel his book was something a literate but not necessarily technically sophisticated reader could pick up and, having read it, understand the forces at work. Fortunately, it's all there. I'd imagine that most all of the folks who buy Smart Mobs will know about Moore's Law, which states that the number of computing elements that could be fit in a given space would double every eighteen months. There are other forces at work, though, and Howard lists the three other "laws" that apply to wireless networking in a social context:
- Sarnoff's Law, which states that the value of a broadcast network is proportionate to the number of viewers.
- Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a network where each node can reach every other node grows with the square of the number of nodes.
- Reed's Law, which states that, for a network where members of the network can form groups within the network, the value of that network will grow exponentially. That is, the value of the network is equal to the number of nodes raised to the power of the number of nodes, instead of just the square of the number of nodes.
Web logs ("blogs"), eBay, and other online communities are examples of how users have made the Internet a network that conforms to Reed's Law.
So what's not to like about a new wireless Internet where the users are free to roam and create their own groups, spread their information, and share resources? From the point of view of the communication operators (a.k.a. the phone companies), they see little good coming out of creating a medium where they give up their powerful position as information gatekeepers. And, of course, there are vested financial interests on the part of the companies that have leased the rights to different parts of the radio frequency spectrum, even though there are technologies that can avoid interference and make sure all devices can "play nice."
On the political side, wireless technologies have had tremendous impacts, speeding the downfall of a government in the Philippines and being used to coordinate action during the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle. I wouldn't be too surprised if there are plans in place to black out on civilian wireless networks on an emergency basis in case of similar activity in the U.S..
We're taking the first baby steps toward a new wireless network, but there's a lot to be determined, both technologically and in terms of the freedoms we'll enjoy in using the network. Smart Mobs is a wonderful introduction to the issues at hand, and Howard Rheingold makes a powerful argument for an open network we can use to our best advantage.
Curtis D. Frye is the editor and chief reviewer of Technology and Society Book Reviews. He is also the author of three online courses and ten books , including Privacy-Enhanced Business from Quorum Books. You can purchase Smart Mobs from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
If the sum of knowledge is available in a smart mob, then this knowledge is also available to any hostile individual that taps into the mob network. The information's quality is only as good as its most trustworthy member.
This is shit. Utter shit. Not just the web log link, but the law - think about it. Imagine 1 person joining Slashdot. According to this law, he will make more difference to the value of the site than any person before him. This also applies to nodes in a network, clearly.
Anyone who isn't an idiot can see that rather than exponential, it is more accurately logarithmic, or at the very most sigmoidal. Anyone who disagrees with me, think about it. The claim is that the bigger a network is, the greater the impact of a single new node is. That's what an exponential function means.
Dumb. Dumb, wrong and idiotic.
How is "value of network" defined in all those laws? Surely can't be monetary or even necessarily related to productivity. Perhaps cultural, but how do you compute an "exponential growth in a cultural value"?
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
I happen to be reading this book right now and I find much of the information it presents very interesting. Some of the more interesting and exciting topics include wearable computing, and always on Inet connections, and what the meshing of those two ideas could mean. Check out this link here for info on one such program, the MIThril wearable computing project. Some very cool stuff coming out of MIT.
The reason Santa is so jolly is that he knows where all the bad girls live.
If the book is as shallow as the review I am not gonna buy it.
This review was just a string of the usual cyberspeak when it comes to wifi and online communities. Where is the beef?!
orangeguru
Does being part of a group make you smarter? Possibly, though I would postulate that instead it make you more of an instrument of the group, therefore less likely to exercise free will. It is the exercise of free will in a thoughtful manner that makes individuals smart.
The home of the 3D Socialization and Interaction Engine
Wireless communication is currently changing our lives but I think it would be presumptuous to say that it's already done so. Someone pointed out in another comment that emergency plans are probably already in place to shut down wireless networks in the US in case of insurrection or armed revolting, but I think that our lives will only be changed when those plans are actively used to stop a revolt, riot, or protest. Then our lives will have been changed, but only in the same way that Nazi Germany was changed when Hitler came to power.
A little over two years ago, the near-total penetration of mobile phones allowed a mob consisting of a small number of truckers and farmers to bring the UK almost to a standstill - they were able to coordinate blockades of oil refineries and depots all over the country, and organise go-slow convoys on the major motorways. If each group of protestors had needed to have access to a landline phone to communicate, things would have been far more difficult.
I gather rival football hooligans have actually been known to contact each other by mobile before the match to arrange fights. Mad.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
We should bear in mind whenever we are tempted to think that the next big thing - be it the telegraph, the telephone, intercontinental air travel, the internet, or whatever paradigm-buster de jure the media machine jams into our attention - will make us smarter/more compassionate/more productive/etc. that we are basically still cavemen. We may have wireless wearable computers, but we will as a whole use them the same way we used wooden clubs - to get women, food, and power.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The value to the Internet is the "cloud". That is, all those machines out there forming the Net. The age old diagramming technique is to draw a cloud in the middle of the diagram, hanging users and servers off the sides of the cloud.
802.11 nodes do not give you access to the cloud. The cloud is built from landlines, and this isn't likely to change due to the level of investment put into the wires for the landlines that is where the bulk of the cloud changes.
To get from an 802.11 node to the cloud, you've got to interface to the landlines. Therefore, a gatekeeper is required somewhere along the way.
It's hard to imagine enough 802.11 deployment in the hands of individuals to create enough of an infrastructure to be interesting. That is, you'd have to build enough 802.11 to equal some interesting proportion of the bulk of the cloud (The Internet) at large.
- David
Has the author acknowledged Larry Niven??
Regards David
If the sum of knowledge is available in a smart mob, then this knowledge is also available to any hostile individual that taps into the mob network. The information's quality is only as good as its most trustworthy member.
This is precisely correct, and you should read the book to find out more. Open reputation mechanisms in such networks (Slashdot being a prime example) help to ensure the trustworthiness of the network and its individual nodes. One must accept as given that hostile forces are looking in and, in true Internet fashion, adapt or route around the intrusion.
As Rheingold states, there is a continuous competition or arms race between the development of privacy mechanisms in these technologies and technologies to counter that privacy. It is very similar to the war between those who want information to be free and those who want to charge money for it.
I'm almost finished Smart Mobs find it a most excellent compendium of the effect that communications technologies are having on our culture. I recommend it to all.
You've hit directly on the critical flaw in all of these "Laws" - the "value" of a network is primarily a function of how the network is used, not its architecture.
The value function f(n) of a network, where n is the number of nodes, is determined by the application(s) built on that network. f(n) is certainly linear for most one-to-many broadcast networks; but to say it is exponential (or polynomial or sigmoidal or logarithmic) based only on the architecture is presumptuous.
Whether a given network architecture is end-to-end or broadcast, allows subgroups, etc., merely puts constraints on what kinds of applications can run over that network; but the value is determined by the applications, not the architecture.
Some non-architectural factors also contribute to the value function; consider two networks with identical architecture, one with ping times of 1 millisecond and the other with ping times of 1 month.
Nonetheless, the argument about the value of subgroups is important. (As an aside, the number of distinct unordered subgroups of a network with N nodes is not N^N, it is the sum of (N choose M) for all M=1..N, which turns out to be more than N^N for N>4, I think... just add up all the numbers on the N+1th row of Pascal's triangle.) But not all possible subgroups are interesting, and the real-world constraint on their "value" is again based on the application.
If one considers subgroups based on some kind of social relationships, I would suggest that the real-world multiplier of value here is the average number of subgroups that participants are comfortable with, and the number that the application can usefully manage. For example, some MMORPGs have various different chat channels for different kinds of social structures; but any given player is going to have a hard time differentiating chat from more than 2-4 channels/organizations, with the primary constraint there being usability of the chat UI. Once it becomes too confusing to figure out which chat goes with which organization, it all blurs together and the value is reduced to near the value of having one global channel.