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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."
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.
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 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.
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.
a much less cumbersome method of sharing the photos far and wide
Thats the whole point of the damn things. Its easy and convenient so you so it thus providing an additional revenue stream to the telcoms in situations where normally your phone would be sitting idle in your pocket.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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?
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.
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.