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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
I definitely agree that there's something going on with Smart Mobs, networks, etc. Communications are advancing at an amazing rate (despite plenty of stupidities), and I'm sure they'll only get more interlinked and complex.
However I do wonder just how much we can predict. As these systems get more complex and include more factors, what can we actually say and predict about them beyond some basics and metaphors?
I recall Vernor Vinge's idea of Singularity, the creation of greater-than human intelligence. Maybe we're witnessing a hint of that as people connect to machines and each others like neurons in the brain. However, the irony is that we may not be smart enough to know if something like that is happening.
This sounds like a great book and an interesting phenomena, and I plan to buy it. But I wonder how much we can say about this phenomena.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Living in Europe it is clear that GSMs have already changed our lives and societies. It's not quite clear how, but with 70% of the population (pensioners to babies) having mobile phones and using them heavily, the dynamics of social contact have definitely changed.
I'd agree that we are on the verge of a revolution similar to that in 1992-95 with the PC and Internet. Never before have so many people had such easy access to communications. And since human society is essentially about communications, this makes for extremely interesting times.
But I think many sociologists make the mistake of thinking that technology can change us in some way. It changes the way we behave, but it just reinforces the way we are. People stick with family and friends above all, and do not just form mobs because it's possible. If anything, totally flexible mobile communications will reinforce existing social structures (like family) that are constantly under attack from modern urban life, rather than creating new social forms.
In Belgium, the SMS short-message service is extremely heavily used but mainly for saying 'honey, I'm almost home', playing trivial games, chatting with sex lines (actually robots or operators) and voting in TV contests. Smart mobs? Not really.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
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
It's just a fucking computer network! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
It's just a fucking wireless with pictures! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
It's just a fucking way to transmit voice over the telegraph! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
It's just a fucking round piece of rock! It's not gonna change society, there are no new paradigms.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
...I think i'm going to puke.
Look, i'm only going to say this once.
THE WELL WAS NEITHER UNIQUE, NOR THE FIRST TRUE "ONLINE COMMUNITY". They were no more "visionaries" than the people who frequented countless other large BBS'es that were common in the late 70's and early 80's. Its just that these people tend to be a little more vocal and persistant in their whining for some reason, somehow feeling that they deserve to be repeatedly acknowledged for their vastly overhyped, overrated, earth-shattering contribution to society. And even if they actually HAD been the golly-gee pioneers they want desparately to be acknowledged as, guess what --- there were still communities before them. So get over it. Im sure they're nice people and all, but, sorry gang....there wasn't anything unique, profound, or ground-breaking about The Well. Period.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
A quick Google give us this http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html article. He defines value as
Using his definition of "value", it is possible to defend his position. Additional nodes on a network can increase the overall connectivity value of the network.That does not necessarily make the network more valuable in an informational, social or monetary sense to any individual inside or outside of the group.
Are we talking about a new and unique form of human organization that can actually solve problems? Or will they just be a new form of easily-manipulated ideological sounding board, like Talk Radio, that ends up braking a lot of windows, besieging office buildings, and hassling people on a hit list drawn up by a clever organizer?
I've heard anecdotal evidence that the angry protests that led to the bloody "Miss World" riots in Nigeria were coordinated by cell phones and text messaging. If this is true, we may long for the day of Dumb Mobs.
Stefan
The intro speaks of MUDs, and the title of the book is "Smart Mobs". So I immediately thought, hey, this key wrote a book about creating intelligent mobiles in MUDs?
MORTAR COMBAT!
Thank you for calling the Well on their bullshit. It seems like every Well member has been gloating since 1995 that they tangibly shaped the future of society, computing, and human interaction (when in reality they were just BBS dorks like the rest of the world).
It's a big circle-jerk. The offenders in question, like most of their Man Francisco pals, would benefit from getting a good, solid ass-whupping.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
The book has a companion website, wherein Howard continues his active research into Smart Mobs and the integration of technology into daily life. Smart Mobs
I've gotten to page 53 of the book, which is dense, yet so information rich that I carry it with me everywhere, so I can try to squeeze out a few extra paragraphs on subway platforms and in elevators.
It's an excellent exploration of where mobile technology may lead.
The classic work in this field is probably Starr Roxanne Hiltz's book Online Communities, published in 1984. While it tends to focus on the user community of the EIES conferencing system, it mentions some others (although my CoSy system -- aka BIX, CIX, and a few other installations, was too new to get much attention then), and the observations are as valid now about blogs and chat rooms as they were then about the command-line, text based technology of the time.
(The following quotes are from EIES users circa 1983 -- they make just as much sense if you s/EIES/Slashdot/ for example:
"I can't think when the system is down."
"I can live without EIES, but I can't LIVE without EIES."
"I find myself staying up late at night and getting up early in the morning just to use the damn thing.")
And it occurs to me, having read The Victorian Internet, that similar sentiments were probably expressed by telegraph operators back then.
-- Alastair
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
Of course, if you actually read The Virtual Community (which has been on the Web since 1994), you will see that I did write a history of the first mailing groups on ARPAnet, the Usenet, BBSs, and all of the many virtual communities that preceded the WELL. The WELL was a good story, and you really can't get a publisher to put out a history of computer mediated communication without a good story. Certainly there are things to criticize about the book, but I would recommend critics to read the book first.
Fact is, The Well was full of writers and journalists and media-gurus-to-be.
From this POV, it was probably the first community recognized as such by the official culture establishment.
-- Let's go Viridian.
Has the author acknowledged Larry Niven??
Regards David
It is analysing the sociological impact of technology. This is very important to all nerds, because regardless if a technology is good, if a society won't embrace it, it won't happen. Also, he looks at future technology and, through that same sociological spectre, tries to see what people will be interested in. Very interesting, intriguing, and ordered-off-of-amazon.com-as-we-speak work if I may say.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
You only gave this book a 92% rating? What a hypocrite. Your review made it sound like a solid 93%.
"He also confided in me that part of the reason he started writing about this stuff was so he could justify to his wife all the time he spent online. " and you go and post that for everyone to see? remind me not to tell you any of _my_ secrets ;)
1. Given the historical behavior of mobs (generic term), I'm not so keen on upgrading them. More or less unavoidable, I guess, but anyone who's unpopular (or very popular) will have to hide much of the time - anyone who sees you can "call for backup" to anyone else who doesn't (or does) like you... and 300 people are known to do crazy things that 3 people would never try.
2. There are a lot of good things about this as well. If there are enough social impediments to people "mobbing" too much, then the good things (emergency communications, realtime local news, local problem-solving) could become a real boon for a lot of people, with the added benefit of solving simple, local problems (from traffic jams to minor flooding, etc) without 43 layers of bureaucrats. Think of realtime volunteer community work, or for that matter realtime local volunteer entertainment.
3. Some kind of "reputation system" would be cool for that kind of thing. i.e. "John Thomas," a totally unknown person says a bomb went off in the capitol, so you ignore it because the source isn't reliable. "Joe Cool," a well-known and reliable source, says there's an accident on highway 50 blocking traffic so you take the next exit.
4. So, bad, good, indifferent. Don't know how it will turn out. Will probably have one, may never turn it on.
The WELL might not be as important or unique as it once was, and it may be true that it gets more press than it deserves, and it is true that at times it may be insular and navel-gazingly self-contratulatory, but to dismissively lump it in as one more BBS is completely unfair and even deeply ignorant.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was organized and founded at the WELL. The annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conferences were started and are still ran at the WELL. Wired Magazine was partially organized on the WELL. The infamous and frauduluent cyberporn Time cover story that made passage of the CDA a foregone conclusion was systematically demolished and exposed and opposition organized at the WELL. And these are just the most salient examples.
I know that my joining Slashdot made more difference to its value then any person before me. ;-)
Am I the only person here who read "smart mobs" and expected an article on artificial intelligence as used in computer game NPC's?
Probably.
I didn't say they were wise mobs.
I thought it was a book about smart MOBileS. You know, have a conversation with the dragon before you slay it, that sorta thing.
paintball
Reeds Law is very true. All networks are proof of this. A single phone line was absolutely worthless, but as thousands and then millions of phone lines were added to the network, each individual phone line become that much more valuable. The same holds true of for fax machines, internet connections and smart mobs.
Planet P Weblog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
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.
Be careful about rants like that. They tend to reflect poorly on the poster, due to a need to resort to vulgar language, rather than being able to articulate clear arguments.
Some Debate:
Point 1: Having thought about it, I'm not all that excited about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, or the Law of Gravity. But I don't have much choice in the matter. I could rant and rage against how unjust the second law of thermodynamics is and call the whole law 'shit', but that isn't going to do any thing about the fact that energy will always flow from localized to diffused states. Reed's law is similar. I can't say that I exactly have a warm and fuzzy feeling about it, but I cannot deny its existance and truth.
Similarly, if you think about it, you will agree that the value of Slashdot increases with every new member (which is what the law states). The law does not state that a new member will make more difference to the value of the site than any prior person, as you suggest that it does. What it does state, is that a new member will provide a potential link to each other registered member of Slashdot, thereby increasing the factorial graph representation of N users by N+1.
Point 2: Clearly, if you've taken a college level calculus course, a group theory course, or a quantum theory course, you will know that logarithm is expressible in terms of multiplication, just as division is expressible in terms of multiplication, and subtraction in terms of addition. Logarithm and exponents are essentially the same thing. Now, I have thought about this topic, I have studied information theory and network theory, and have worked as a network engineer. The law is valid. The claim is not that "the bigger a network is, the greater the impact of a single new node is". You are confusing "big and great" with "numerous and potential". The more accurate claim is that the more numerous the network is, the more potential a single new node has to interact with other nodes.
Point 3: I hate to break it to you, but the fact of the matter is that not only is the law valid, it progresses at a rate faster than exponential. That is, Reed's Law is factorial, and is based on graph theory combinatorics. You appear to be trying to understand Reed's Law according to linear dynamics, which is why it doesn't make sense to you. Its a nonlinear function and requires modular mathematics, such as eigenfunctions and eigenvalues to properly calculate for a problem such as Slashdot. When you approach the problem of Slashdot with Reed's Law, eigenfunctions, and factorial combinatorics, it works out rather simply.
Case 4: This claim is similar to the prevailing 'wisdom' that a single vote doesn't matter in a large crowd. This unfortunate concept is, in large part, due to the popularity of statistics. As my old professor use to say in statistics class, 'Averages are for average people.' Moreover, every vote does count in an election, and every node does increase, factorially, in potential links to other nodes in a group. If one is able to keep track of factorially increasing links, then the whole problem can be tracked without resorting to using statistics.
SLASHDOT WAS NEITHER UNIQUE, NOR THE FIRST TRUE "ONLINE COMMUNITY". They were no more "visionaries" than the people who frequented countless other large BBS'es that were common in the late 70's and early 80's. Its just that these people tend to be a little more vocal and persistant in their whining for some reason, somehow feeling that they deserve to be repeatedly acknowledged for their vastly overhyped, overrated, earth-shattering contribution to society. And even if they actually HAD been the golly-gee pioneers they want desparately to be acknowledged as, guess what --- there were still communities before them. So get over it. Im sure they're nice people and all, but, sorry gang....there wasn't anything unique, profound, or ground-breaking about Slashdot. Period.
cpeterso
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.
Sorry, the sum of (N choose M) for all M=1..N is never greater than N^N, because it is always 2^N.
So it is "exponential", just not N^N.
Here's a cool page about Pascal's triangle.
Hi Howard,
PCPursuit was a good story.
FIDONet was a good story.
BIX was a good story.
CompuServe is a good story.
QuantumLink is better story.
Brainstorm/XNET is an even better story.
The WELL isn't a story. There were hundreds (if not thousands) of WELL-like enclaves that had come and gone years before these guys even flipped the power switch.
If you have a responsibility as an author to be honest to the story. The world doesn't need yet another person latching onto a piece of horseshit and perpetuating it as if it were fact. Wise up.
I'll use the same analogy I pointed out earlier... Who discovered America, Mr. Rheingold? By propping up The WELL as some sort of miracle happening, you're doing the literary equivalent of responding with "Well, Columbus, obviously"...
I would have more respect for you if you were to point out the equivalent of "The Americas have been continually inhabited by humans for at least the past 15,000 years. That, and archaeological evidence suggests that Norse explorers had arrived in North America and begun colonizing the reigon a full 800 years before Columbus."
See, *thats* an interesting story, Mr. Rheingold.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Fact is, The Well was full of writers and journalists and media-gurus-to-be.
So was Compuserve in 1975. A full decade before The WELL was even created.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
please correct me if you know of any other online community having more:
marriages, pregnancies, screenplays, books of fiction, business plans, political changes, etc
I'll give you two. Compuserve and FIDOnet. Here's a link to Google to get you started. Have fun.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Here's a clue, Sherlock.
GEnie had close to 100,000 users by the time The WELL came into existance. Compuserve had close to a quarter of a million, having come into existance a full 15 years before The WELL. Lay off the hash and hop aboard the Clue Train (tm), hippy. Jesus Christ...
And Californians wonder why the rest of the country laughs at them..sheesh.
Bowie J. Poag
If one more user joins Slashdot, Slashdot might get statistically a tiny bit better. And that same user might also join Kuro5hin, User Friendly, a handful of blogs, and make them all tiny bits better also?
I just don't see the sum of all those tiny bits ever adding up to N^N. And at some point I believe these communities get too big, and fragment (AOL, Compuserve, and even Slashdot might be examples.) So does the network then benefit nine times by having one community split into three parts? That might be where these "exponential benefits" factor in.
I guess what sticks in my craw is that it's hard to imagine a single AOL disk ever improving the world in any way, shape or form. But I suppose for that Joe Sixpack and his family, the world just got a whole lot better. They simply have no idea how much better it could be.
John
Fair enough. I concede the argument.
Check out Asimov's Foundation series of SciFi books.
The core of the story(s) comes down to the study of group behaviour over time, even including 'random' individuals affecting the total mass, by the character of Hari Seldon.
We may be at the computational edge of being able to this.