Slashdot Mirror
Smart People in the News: Rheingold, Gosling
Roland Piquepaille writes "In "How Will "Smart Mobs" Play Out?," BusinessWeek asked questions to Howard Rheingold, who published the "Smart Mobs" book at the end of 2002. Rheingold talks about the emergence of the picturephone, especially outside the U.S. He adds that future business applications for smart mobs might start anywhere in the world, like "finding out about the spot labor market in [an] African village." For his part, James Gosling, the leading guy behind the Java programming language, is interviewed by Red Herring, in Social smarts. He talks about the social implications of the Internet by looking at the Brazilian National Medical System. Gosling also talks about the entertainment industry which deeply hates Internet, and about the open source movement, of which he is a big fan. And of course, that leads him to talk about Microsoft. This summary contains some excerpts of both interviews."
There's some smart mobsters in some African village trying to blik me out of thousands of dollars. I don't need any fancy technology other then a hotmail account to find them, either.
I had the honor of listening to James Gosling's Keynote at Borcon 2001. He gave a stimulating talk about running Java on a gas pump, which didn't actually work.
Then he took Q/A from the audience. He fielded the usual comments about how the Java API was so bloated. His reply to that was just not to use the bloated parts. He, for instance, doesn't use JDBC for anything, but he doesn't advocate removing it.
The previous day, the inventor of Pascal, who now works at Microsoft, did his entire keynote from Notepad because he was forbidden from running Visual Studio at Borcon (too much competition with Borland's IDEs).
Still, for a smart guy, he is easily provoked.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
If mobs are smarter, then why is Ahnold the frontrunner in California?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Well, I - for one - welcome our Smart Mob Overlords!
When you go to a doctor and you get a prescription, you get a database entry printed out on a piece of paper. You can walk into any clinic and they can get your records immediately
Now imagine an insurance company somehow get access to this database. Fail an eye test and 2 weeks late your car insurance increases....
But this is a good thing as long as the database is secure and can only be accessed for medical reasons.
...than Ron Jeremy. I hope to never hear of the concept again. Spot labor market in African village? Is there anyone but stupid reporters that even cares about this?
If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck it probably is a duck. "Smartmobs" looks and sounds like technogabble, and probably is. There is no sign at all that even a sophisticated urban public has any inclination to form "mobs", smart or stupid, except as part of a passing fashion.
Yes, you can get a couple hundred artists to mob a shoestore. Once, maybe twice. But try getting most people to think beyond the five minute/five day horizon of their lives? Good luck!
It's not a matter of technology. People just don't, for the most part, have the excess energy for things like instant parties.
Besides, what's the "African village" business? I wish people who wrote such comments would actually go to an African village and take a look. As a model of economical, ecological, and sociological stability and harmony, it's hard to do better. What... the... heck do you want to go adding "smart mobs" to this for?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I think it's worth considering the amount of hype surrounding anything to do with children and sexuality.
Way back when at the time 56K modems were just coming on, I installed a modem based video conferencing system for a small rural school. Everybody was so excited about the potential and the quality of the signal wasn't a big issue because it was so exciting and isn't technology great. All in all, it was not too different from what you're hearing right now in the latest frothy bubble of video conferencing hype.
But, despite all the good intentions and hopeful exuberance and pats on the back for a job well done and gosh isn't technology great type of wide-eyed speculation at the time, the system was pulled for entirely non-technical reasons.
In the process of testing the system, we hooked into the, then cutting edge, CU-See-Me network to test it out and right away it was chicks flashing tits, guys holding their dicks and all this fun stuff that might be real groovy for adult users looking for a cheap thrill, but a major problem in an elementary school setting.
Ever since then, I've seen the same old hype just continue over and over. I laughed out loud when I read an article a few months ago with the CEO of AT&T suggesting video conferencing was just about to take off and save his company along with on-line music sales. I have to speculate that there is a bit of willful ignorance going on here.
Most of the older people I know tend to be quite camera shy and then a lot of the younger people are depending on the older people to pay for their toys. I think the combo, along with the fact that almost everyone has a web cam and nobody uses them is quite suggestive of some fundamental problems with the marketing of camera enabled wireless devices.
That's not to say they're not cool and everybody should grow up and stop worrying about kids getting some cheap thrills. I agree one thousand percent. But, if everybody agreed with me, the world would be a very nice place and nobody would watch prime time TV. But obviously that's not the world we live in.
Just like digital cameras but with significantly less quality and a much less cumbersome method of sharing the photos far and wide.
Personally, I'm going back to carrier pigeon.
Mobsters in some African village? As if there are no real cities or civilizations there?
I like this the angry mob image that the suburban whitebread slashdotters think are represenative of Africans as a whole. The arrogance and racism could not be more obvious.
You people should be ashamed of yourselves. Take a cultural sensitivity class and then come back here.
According to the article he is. At least his answer to the business applications of smart mobs question, "nobody really has a clue" was probably accurately quoted. I think his answer could also be applied to the editors of that article.
I can find no reference about him ever doing work for Microsoft. I also doubt that he would - he has always been a very strong apponent of bloatware.
Is the parent post a troll, or just badly mistaken?
siener's youtube channel
Society hasn't been the same since college kids started stuffing large numbers of themselves into phone booths and Volkswagens. Smart Mobs promise to have an even greater societal impact.
gosling makes a point that i think is understated by many in the open source community - open source software is great because it is open and you can validate its contents, but the real reason MS hates it is because it is free. they are afraid to lose their cash cow (they practically mint money by selling Windows and Office software).
smd4985
In order to work out the full potential of new technologies, it is important to consider the sex uses first. I'm not joking - the sexual uses of new technologies will always outnumber, and incorporate, all other uses.
There is (apparently) an interesting new sexual practice in the UK called "dogging". This involves using the web to locate people anonymously, and then meeting up in public places (in a park for instance) to have anonymous sex. Other people go along to watch. This is I guess a type of smart mob (although "not very smart mob" might be more a appropriate name when you take sexual diseases into account).
I don't need to mention that the emergence of the picturephone will bring about whole new areas of creative uses of technology...
I agree that the internet has made it much easier to organize people, for example, the international coordination of protests against the war on Iraq was phenomenal, but has it really enhanced the effectiveness and power of grassroots groups? I think the jury is still out on this one.
I'd love to see technology used to create more genuine opportunities for participation, but as Frederick Douglas said:
Legions of bloggers writing about copyright law or the PATRIOT Act won't make a difference unless we find a way to apply real political pressure through action.foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
Is this a smart mob?
...I know this non-techy girl who is really mad at her cell provider because they don't have the infrastructure that would allow her to send video clips from her cell phone to other people's cellphones, (she can't send pictures across providers, either). Why is she so interested? Well, let's just say these moving images will be a little...dirty...
So anyway that's just one example of a desire by a single person for some sort of 'smart mob' (dumb name, imho). Maybe it's a trend, who knows.
A little off topic but on the subject of smart mobs: magician David Blaine's current 'endurance stunt' taking place in London was supposed to be the site of a "mass 'flash mob' event involving possibly hundreds" but in the end only two guys showed up.
As with the sun's light
My mom was magnificent
Unquestionable
What are you talking about?
Do you mean that in the near future - instead of texting a mob to get to the central station and moon at exactly 12 o'clock - I can SMS for a vicious gang of baseball bat wielding thugs on stolen motorcycles to beat up the fucktard who just spilled beer on my lap.
Gosling also talks [..], and about the open source movement, of which he is a big fan.
Sure, he even caused the GPL into existence.
What a fan!!!
read the emacs bit for a bit of interesting history.
http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/
I'm not sure if I completely understand the point that you're trying to make.
Just because you've been into the "CU-See-Me" network and seen people showing their willies does not mean that video conferencing or picture phones or whatever will never take off, or that the CEO of AT&T is being ignorant.
It sounds to me like you should have done a bit more thinking and testing before you did your school installation. The failure of your one project does not write off a whole new up and coming area of technology.
It means when you are too obsessed about texting messages with your cellphone or downloading the music of the top-selling artist of the week onto your wireless doodad, some teenager with a baseball bat can fucking rob you, and you will be helpless. Technology may have invented smart mobs.. but they are just a fad. The dependence on technology will lead to stupid masses.. and that's no fad.
THAT is what will drive positive social change. And since many projects that present source are themselves confused with what Open Source (not the capital letters) is, such an explanation serves as a reminder that Open Source is more than just making code available but also centers around making change available. Shutting out your community (like PostNuke and others do) and forcing forks fragments the efforts at producing a strong system. We end up with small craplets that do a lot, but do it poorly and in a very restrictive and hardcoded manner instead of the very modular and abstracted traditional UNIX system of first providing a strong and extensible framework then focusing on MANY components that each do their part well and INTEROPERATE. That last part is what is overlooked when zealots decry "but you just said we are too fragmented!"
Many people when justifying or even honestly advocating Open Source point to Apache as the example of how to do any software product right, distributed team or not, or even Open Source or not. Looking at the various "projects" out there now, you are left with the realization that sometimes a closed source (and guaranteed income) system is needed to pull the cart out of the mudhole it made. I am in favor of companies contributing in more than just the source of all their products. I personally would like to see more companies jump on the bandwagon of Open Source, but the kiddies yelling "pig-fucking capitalist" every time that any company does not open ALL of its source does not help.
How can society benefit from a group of immature retards, whom rebel for the sheer sake of rebelling? Simple, (well, not really) just distance yourself from them and try to educate. Distance Open Source from kiddie wanna-be hackers and we all prosper more. Take pride in your work and get rid of the "we don't have to do anything for you" attitude. (you indeed have no "obligation" yet your willingness to shout that out instead of seriously considering criticism makes you 1337)
Working with various companies, even behemoth Evil (tm) corporations can be a way to open up everyone not to just the computing systems benefits of Open Source but the social and economic ones as well. Companies can contribute certain sections of code (tools, compatability layers, etc) while keeping their flag ship products closed and actively working with the Open Source community. Many that do this find themselves able to make a grand ol profit even after converting the majority of their work to Open Source. Many switch more to a service based business model then. However, none of these things happen because the business folks all say, "You know, I was deeply moved by the post/blog of Johnny SnotNose where he called us all tools of the evil Corporate Hegemony."
Don't ever confuse idealism and action with stupidity and laziness!
I hate self-promoting post-wannabe wannabes.
I've had this crazy idea bouncing in my head for a while about using a mob of cellphone-holding folx to record concerts, etc.
Sure, the fidelity from any one phone sucks, but some filtering (combined with knowledge of the seat placement) would be able to eliminate much of the ambient noise, and produce multipoint surround sound. Probably the same could be done with videophones to create 3D video, if enough source were integrated.
I don't even have the math to try this, but if we can dream it, we can do it, right?
Design for Use, not Construction!
Smart mobs could easily change our perception of public and political figures! How hard is it to imagine that once camera phones get as common in the US as they are in other places of the world, that some politician just got caught in a compromising situation in a coffee house by some other patron with a camera phone who submitted it instantly to the Enquirer and got paid for it before his latte got cold?
This could have a few outcomes - public figures couldn't get reclusive enough to avoid this problem. One possibility is that with more people being caught in the act that the public will care less about such things (just because they can't handle the load of making a big deal about all of them). Another is that the people who are squeaky clean would float to the top more easily.
Rheingold. Gosling. Red Herring.
So, who's next? Razorfish? TheGlobe? The Pets.com sock puppet?
from the look-at-the-big-brain-on-brad dept.
It's BRETT, you deaf sons of bitches!
"Look at the big brain on Brett."
Sheesh!
The Humblest Mollusk on the Net
WTF? Try as I might, I can't follow his reasoning on this one. It might have been considerably harder to communicate with your operatives without modern tech, but certainly not impossible.
After all -- wasn't he the same guy who wrote that book 'Virtual Reality' back in the early 90s?
Wow -- didn't all those clowns call that one wrong.
ph
:: I guess Nazis are OK if the last name is Kennedy.
Most things seem to be OK if the last name of the offender is "Kennedy." Corruption, murder, etc. If they really are "America's Royalty" we should shoot them and dump them in the ocean off the coast of Europe.
Considering that the vast majority of people do silly things when given the oppurtunity (sorry, no stat on that one, it's just a gut feeling), when the squeaky clean ones rise to the top, who do they actually represent? The other small percentage of squeaky clean people trying to run the country?
I think that the interviewer is asking (or Rheingold in interpreting the question to mean) why he calls them "mobs" because mobs have a negative connotation. He's responding by saying that the 9/11 terrorists were a mob in the negative sense of the word and a smart mob in that that the coordination of the attack wouldn't have been possible without the datacomm infrastructure provided by cell phones and the Net.
But, frankly, I think he's just back-defining a term that sounds provacative.
My my, how the tables have turned...
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2673781a11,00. html
;-P
what do I think?
Of course it's silly, of course it's fun
but it whiffs to me of fad
if you go back 5, 10, 15, and more years pop culture is absolutely littered with "the next big thing"
really smart people, god bless their souls, are often prone to getting too excited and reading too much meaning into what is essentially meaningless and temporary inanity
hey, by all means, keep thinking big thoughts folks, but watch out for self-reinforcing over-intellectualizing hype
the economy of intellectual ideas can go into bubble burst mode just as easily as a bubble economy of internet start ups a few years back
follow flash mobs with intellectual glee my fellow news hungry nerds
but don't invest your doctoral thesis in it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Conversely, when I look at the price tag for any Microsoft product, it just makes me cringe. Look at the Microsoft Word license which is about $500 or $600 per machine. Most people made that work by basically breaking the law and installing it at home on all of their machine.
This is total crap right? The you get the whole office suite for $600 or much less in an OEM bundle, also you can get Word by itself for much less I think.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
Well, she also failed to mention that Arnold's president's grandfather on his father's side was a Nazi sympathizer whom FDR had to freeze the assets of because of the way he bought the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and it's plant at Auschwitz from Fritz Thyssen and then continued to use only slave laborers to manufacture steel that was sold exclusively to the Nazis from 1939 untill 1942 when the Justice Department caught him and kept him from spending the 1.5 million he had made until after the war, but I'm not bitching because NO ONE FUCKING CARES.
The hijackers on that flight were foiled by the very same system that communicated to the passengers the need to resist. Cuts both ways.
What interested me about Gosling's interview, was the claim that the technology exists today for everyone to vote online. I think this is disingenious, personally, to say that the only things standing in the way are societal problems: Yep, if we would just all let ourselves be given a number (unique identifier), and if we all promised to only use our own number when voting, and if none of us minded if our voting patterns were traced, graphed, and known to the world, the technology would work just nifty-like...
Two things have to happen before society will accept online voting -
-
1. we have to be able to guarantee that each citizen can vote once and only once, and that the voting citizen is who they say they are.
-
2. we have to be able to guarantee that the content of a user's vote can never be linked to the identity of the voter.
Does that technology exist now? Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but I don't think so...pixie
don't mess with those geekgrrls
Gosling is a "big fan" of open source? Maybe now he is, but don't forget the fun we all had with him concerning UnixEmacs (aka Gosmacs). He wrote a free Emacs clone, actively distributed source and solicited improvements, then sold it to a commercial company which immediately started throwing lawyers around. True, Gosling never promised to keep the source freely available, but it was a tacit assumption by the contributors which he deliberately chose not to correct. Here's one very terse account of the story.
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
NAPSTER?!?!?!?
/. ?
"Ask any IT department head and he'll tell you Napster is eating up the bandwidth"
When, dude, in 1999?
Does this dude even READ
Could you tell me the relationships between "E. Ronald Harriman," who owned 3991 of the 4000 shares of Union Banking Corporation, Governor William Avery Harriman, D-NY, and Ambassatrix Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, D-DC [Georgetown]?
Thanks!
You can find the whole damned thing on the net for free, and it takes less than an hour to download.
Because, as you know, while its illegal to share, its not illegal to take.
That's a bitch, but hey.
Outlook 2003 is nice, anyway. The rest of it is warmed over Office 1997. But at least I've got the latest.
Well I said willfully ignorant, as in deceptive to large shareholders who are mostly older individuals who don't really pay much attention to newfangled gadgetry.
But I have three web cameras sitting around that don't get used and my point was that this stuff has been hyped before. The only difference this time is that the emphasis is on freedom. Well, if you're an adult that kinda flies right by ya because you already have freedom and cameras and it's just an extension of that in a slightly more convenient form.
But what is slighyly more convenient to you or I is a world away to a twelve year old.
Although you are apparently blissfully unfamiliar with the treachery of the adolescent mind, I assure you that the lack of trust between adults and their children when it comes to sexual matters already is, has been, and will persist in being a great obstacle to the proliferation of gadgets that seem to be perfectly innocuous to you or I.
Again, I'm not opposed to these things and I think they could be fun, but the same is true of marijuana. My opinion doesn't change the big wide world. It's not logical to get so hysterical about such harmless things, but the fact is people freak over little things like kids fucking on camera.
public figures couldn't get reclusive enough to avoid this problem.
Wanna bet?
He adds that future business applications for smart mobs might start anywhere in the world, like "finding out about the spot labor market in [an] African village."
These Africans, who are trying to find a day's worth of work here, there, and anywhere they can, who desperately need that day's worth of bread, can afford a Palm or PocketPC or cell phone?
What kind of idiot says stuff like this?
This is what's wrong with tech today: stupid apps for stupid reasons. We're just fortunate that a lot of people using a lot of apps in a lot of situations find some that actually totally kick ass, because if we only had the options inventors and tech reporters gave us, we'd be in a sorry state.
Sounds like he just came up with the term "smart mobs" and then tried to figure out what it meant.
You know, the people in NYC who were doing the mobs stopped doing them. I wonder if it has anything to do with the pretentious bullshit they were immediately associated with. Obviously, these mobs in NY were a joke, a dumb but fun stunt. Suddenly, some jerk like Rheingold decides he understands the "text" and it's a semiotics class circa 1995 all over again. So he gets interviewed because the people who were clever enough to pull off these mob things are remaining anonymous.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
Here in the UK we have a 3G network where the primary selling point is real-time video calls. They are marketing pr0n on it very heavily, so I'm told.