Closing Session:
Smart Mobs: Mobile Communication, Pervasive Computing, and Collective Action

Howard Rheingold

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks.

The technologies that make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing—inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born, and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.

Street demonstrators in the 1999 anti-WTO protests used dynamically updated websites, cell-phones, and "swarming" tactics in the "battle of Seattle." A million Filipinos toppled President Estrada through public demonstrations organized through salvos of text messages.

The pieces of the puzzle are all around us now, but haven't joined together yet. The radio chips designed to replace barcodes on manufactured objects are part of it. Wireless Internet nodes in cafes, hotels, and neighborhoods are part of it. Millions of people who lend their computers to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are part of it. The way buyers and sellers rate each other on Internet auction site eBay is part of it. Research by biologists, sociologists, and economists into the nature of cooperation offer explanatory frameworks.

The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media could mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world.

Media cartels and government agencies are seeking to re-impose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file sharing, copy protection, and regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the citizens of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of entrenched interests?

About Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold has a proven record of accurate technology and social forecasting over two decades of syndicated columns, bestselling books, and pioneering online enterprises. Now he's on to the next and biggest thing: the marriage of mobile phone, PC, and wireless Internet that is changing the way we meet, mate, entertain, govern, and conduct business.

No armchair futurist, Rheingold was founding Executive Editor of Hotwired, the first commercial webzine where the web-based discussion forum and the online banner ad were invented. In 1996, Rheingold founded Electric Minds, one of Time magazine's "ten best websites of 1996." He sold Electric Minds to Durand Communications in 1997.

• More about Howard Rheingold on his web site

Books by Howard Rheingold

• Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
  A merger of mobile communications, pervasive computing, and the Internet is triggering new forms of collective action. Governments have fallen. Industries have emerged. And novel forms of social communication and public have erupted around the globe. Published in 2002 (Buy on Amazon)
• The Virtual Community
  The first book about the social uses of cyberspace led predicted the Internet explosion. Published in 1992. (Buy on Amazon)