Christian Science Monitor January 09, 2003
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0109/p14s02-stct.html

Cellphones change how people hang out - and protest By Tom Regan | Staff
writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Howard Rheingold's first "aha" moment was early in 2000, in Tokyo.

On his visit, he noticed that everyone had a mobile phone, but most people
were looking at the phone, not talking into it. As they walked along, they
used their thumbs to type in text messages, says Mr. Rheingold, a
technology trend spotter and cultural observer with several books to his
credit.

The second moment came several months later, in Helsinki, when Rheingold
observed three Finnish teens meet two adults. As they talked, one teenager
looked at his phone, smiled, and showed it to his friends, who also smiled.
But they didn't show it to the adults. Everyone kept talking as if it was
nothing unusual.

"That's when I realized that some norm I didn't know about had permeated
society," he says.

From those two experiences, Rheingold came up with the theory of "smart
mobs" - the ability of groups to gather at a moment's notice, made possible
by the proliferation of mobile communications. The phrase is also the title
of his new book.

"Smart mobs" is an interesting choice of words because the term is both
positive and threatening, as Rheingold wanted it to be. The man who foresaw
the PC revolution in his 1985 book, "Tools for Thought," and then how the
Internet could be used to create new kinds of communities in the 1993 book,
"Virtual Communities," says this new form of communication will produce
both good and bad consequences.

On the positive side, millions of Filipinos used cellular phones and text
messaging starting in October 2000 to protest against the government of
President Joseph Estrada, a collective protest that led to his downfall in
February 2001. On the other hand, terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, or hate
groups in countries such as Germany, have learned to use mobile
communications to organize and also to avoid surveillance.

This potential for mobile organization will only grow as high-speed
bandwidth becomes more available.

An obstacle to this development, he says, is if big business, having missed
the boat on owning the first wave of the Internet, tries to take over new
forms of "collective action."

Rheingold says that would be a mistake.

The Internet is proof that entrepreneurs and capitalists can benefit from a
scheme in which the common resource does not become the exclusive property
of a company. For example, Rheingold says, the Internet didn't take off
until the US government stepped in to rescind AT&T's rule against attaching
devices to telephones.

Rheingold believes devices like mobile phones are catalysts for change. But
if the ability of people to innovate "at the edges" is compromised by
battles over who owns the technology, the future could be vastly different.

Yet even with the digital world spawning new forms of social and cultural
interaction, Rheingold is not a rosy optimist. "Organized crime,
terrorists, and people who want to sell you things," he says, are going to
use the same medium you do to wreak destruction and intrude on your privacy."

With the Internet, he sees the scenario arising in which people misuse a
common resource in their own interest and in so doing destroy the resource.

It doesn't have to happen, he says. The key elements to managing a
collective technology include: "contracts, not laws; local control; and an
architecture where people can spy on each other. In other words self-policing."

For better or worse, mobile communication is not going away. Even in the
US, cities like Denver, Los Angeles, and Atlanta would "shut down if
wireless was absent. These cities have already arranged their 'metabolism'
around wireless," he says.

Rheingold is critical of utopian projections for technology, because he
believes there is potential for a lot of misery. "Hence the name 'smart
mobs,'" he says. "I wanted a little resonance of the 'lynch mob' in there.
Because if we're not careful and if we don't pay attention to how these
technologies develop, there may well be one."


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html