Teenagers in Japan and elsewhere use it precisely because you can communicate silently. Your parents or your teachers can't hear you.
reason: That's a more decentralized process than you have with, for example, Karl Rove getting out the vote.
Rheingold: Well, he's coordinating. You have a mixture of hierarchical and decentralized decision making. You've got a widespread group of folks besides the guy giving orders.
We're also seeing other forms of social activity. Hundreds of thousands of young people in Brazil have a group called Blah! that they use to flirt with. You get a screen name, which protects your real identity. You get a profile, which describes who you are. And you can search for profiles and send them messages. They can reply to you through their handle or through their real identity, or they can block communications from you. It's almost entirely about flirting, and it's mostly young people, and it's popular -- 400,000 people joined it in the first three months it was in operation. They have face-to-face parties with people standing around texting each other, looking around to see if the people who are texting are the ones they're talking to.
So you've got flirting, you've got gaming, you've got riots, you've got elections, you've got political demonstrations. And these are just the first signs of collective action online. I'm not making a big claim about something that exists today. I'm pointing out some early indicators of what may be happening in a future in which millions of people have devices on them that are not just telephones but also computers connected to networks.
reason: In the book you compare smart-mob behavior to the swarm systems observed in ants and other insects.
Rheingold: You need to make an important distinction, in that swarm systems that have been studied in biology and in complex systems consist of relatively unintelligent actors. With humans, of course, we have intelligent actors.
With ants, you have very sophisticated decision making about where to locate the nest and where are the nearest, best sources of food and what are the routes. These are done not by individuals who make decisions with neurosystems but by the emergent decisions of a whole lot of individual actors.
You've seen recently -- Steven Johnson wrote very nicely about it in his book Emergence -- that this kind of behavior goes on in cities. Neighborhoods form not because people make conscious decisions about it but because of the emergent behavior of a lot of people who go to the same place for a certain kind of activity. The stock market, again, is another good example. The price of a stock is not decided by any one person but is an artifact of the aggregate transactions of large numbers of people.
I cite some interesting research with "toy markets" that shows that groups of people can make decisions in an emergent manner better than the individuals in the group. The Hollywood Stock Market is an example. People exchange symbolic money, buying and selling stock on what the box office receipts of Hollywood films that are soon to be released will be. And then the films are released; those stocks that have good box office go up and those that don't go down, so there are winners and losers. It turns out that those markets -- those aggregate decisions of everyone who's making an investment -- can actually predict what will be box office winners better than the individuals in those groups.
reason: The book is about not just smart mobs, but what happens when smart mobs collide with smart environments -- what happens when mobility meets pervasiveness.
Rheingold: I think there are two aspects to smart environments. One is information embedded in places and things. The other is location awareness, so that devices we carry around know where we are. When you combine those two, you get a lot of possibilities.
You can associate information with places by putting, in those places, a device that broadcasts information to nearby devices. More practically, you could do it by simply using a server, so if your device knows where you are and it communicates with a server, you can ask about information that's stored about that place. So, for example, you might want to combine these two and point your device down the street and ask, "Is there a good Chinese restaurant in this direction?" Not just "What does Zagat say about it?" but "What do my friends say about it?"
Or, "I'm new in town. How do I get from where I am in relation to Fifth and Main? And what's the crime rate at Fifth and Main at this time of day?" Or, "I'm about to enter this restaurant. What do the people who've eaten here in the last hour say about the service here?" So there's a lot of information that can be associated with places. There's also questions about who has the right to write that information, as well as to access it.
Then there's the idea that individual objects will have some kind of ambient intelligence -- that they'll have sensors in them that have information storage and communication capacity, and little radio circuits. We're now seeing the replacement of bar codes, beginning with the radio frequency ID tag. Gillette has just said it's going to buy a half billion of these. These are little microchips that are inexpensive, getting down to pennies or less than a penny, that you can put on an object. The chips will have information about that object, just as a bar code does, except you can write to this information and read from it using radio devices instead of relying on line of sight.
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