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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."
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The hijackers on that flight were foiled by the very same system that communicated to the passengers the need to resist. Cuts both ways.