The personal handheld device market is poised to take the kind of jump that the desktop PC made between 1980 and 1990, from a useful toy adopted by a subculture to a disruptive technology that changes every aspect of society. The hardware upgrades that make such a jump possible are already in the product pipeline. The underlying connective infrastructure is moving toward completion.
After a pause to recover from the collapse of the telecommunications economic bubble of the 1990s, the infrastructure for global, wireless, Internet- based communication is entering the final stages of development. The pocket videophone I borrowed in Tokyo was proof that a high-speed wireless network could link wireless devices and deliver multimedia to the palm of my hand. The most important next step for the companies that would deploy this technology and profit from it has nothing to do with chips or network protocols but everything to do with business models, early adopters, communities of developers, and value chains. It’s not just about building the tools anymore. Now it’s about what people use the tools to do.
How will human behavior shift when the appliances we hold in our hands, carry in our pockets, or wear in our clothing become supercomputers that talk to each other through a wireless mega-Internet? What can we reasonably expect people to do when they get their hands on the new gadgets? Can anyone foresee which companies will drive change and detect which businesses will be transformed or rendered obsolete by it? These questions first occurred to me on that spring day in Tokyo, but I didn’t think about it again until another sight on a street halfway around the world from Shibuya Crossing caught my attention.
Sitting at an outdoor café in Helsinki a few months after I noticed the ways that people were using Japanese “i-mode” telephones, I watched five Finns meet and talk on the sidewalk. Three were in their early twenties. Two were old enough to be the younger people’s parents. One of the younger persons looked down at his mobile phone while he was talking to one of the older people. The young man smiled and then showed the screen of his telephone to his peers, who looked at each other and smiled. However, the young man holding the device didn’t show his mobile phone’s screen to the older two. The sidewalk conversation among the five people flowed smoothly, apparently unperturbed by the activities I witnessed. Whatever the younger three were doing, it was clearly part of an accepted social code I knew nothing about. A new mode of social communication, enabled by a new technology, had already diffused into the norms of Finnish society.
At that moment I recalled the odd epiphany I had experienced at Shibuya Crossing the previous spring. Faint lines began to connect the dots. My internal future-detectors switched from a mild tingle to a persistent buzz.
Twice before in the past twenty years I’ve encountered something that convinced me in an instant that my life and the lives of millions of other people would change dramatically in coming years. On both occasions, I was drawn into a personal and intellectual quest to understand these possible changes. The first experience that propelled me on one of these intellectual expeditions was the sensation of using the graphical user interface that enabled non-programmers to operate computers by pointing and clicking. My 1985 book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology presented my arguments that the PC could make possible an intellectual and creative expansion as influential as the changes triggered by the printing press.3
Within a few years of writing about them, the mind-amplifying gizmos I had futurized about had become part of my own life. My personal computer was a magic typewriter. Then I plugged my PC into my telephone, and I entered into social cyberspace. I spent more and more time online, reading and writing messages to computer bulletin boards, in chat rooms and electronic mailing lists. My 1993 book, The Virtual Community, examined the social phenomena I saw emerging from the early days of the Internet era.4 Because of these previous experiences, I was prepared to pay attention that day in March 2000, when I first watched people in Tokyo thumbing text messages on their mobile phone keypads.
We’re only seeing the first-order ripple effects of mobile-phone behavior now—the legions of the oblivious, blabbing into their hands or the air as they walk, drive, or sit in a concert and the electronic tethers that turn everywhere into the workplace and all the time into working time. What if these are just foreshocks of a future upheaval? I’ve learned enough from past technology shifts to expect the second-order effects of mobile telecommunications to bring a social tsunami. Consider a few of the early warning signs:
The “People Power II” smart mobs in Manila who overthrew the presidency of President Estrada in 2001 organized demonstrations by forwarding text messages via cell phones.5
A Web site, http://www.upoc.com, enables fans to stalk their favorite celebrities in real time through Internet-organized mobile networks and provides similar channels for journalists to organize citizen-reporters on the fly. The site makes it easy for roving phone tribes to organize communities of interest.
In Helsinki and Tokyo you can operate vending machines with your telephone and receive directions on your wireless organizer that show you how to get from where you are standing to where you want to go.6
“Lovegety” users in Japan find potential dates when their devices recognize another Lovegety in the vicinity broadcasting the appropriate pattern of attributes. Location-based matchmaking is now available on some mobile phone services.7
When I’m not using my computer, its processor searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m one of millions of people around the world who lend their computers to a cooperative effort—distributing parts of problems through the Internet, running the programs on our PCs while the machines are idle, and assembling the results via the Net. These computation collectives produce enough supercomputing power to crack codes, design medicines, or render digital films.8
Location-sensing wireless organizers, wireless networks, and community supercomputing collectives all have one thing in common: They enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before. An unanticipated convergence of technologies is suggesting new responses to civilization’s founding question, How can competing individuals learn to work cooperatively?
As indicated by their name, smart mobs are not always beneficial. Lynch mobs and mobocracies continue to engender atrocities. The same convergence of technologies that opens new vistas of cooperation also makes possible a universal surveillance economy and empowers the bloodthirsty as well as the altruistic. Like every previous leap in technological power, the new convergence of wireless computation and social communication will enable people to improve life and liberty in some ways and to degrade it in others. The same technology has the potential to be used as both a weapon of social control and a means of resistance. Even the beneficial effects will have side effects.
We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter. Although we leave digital traces of our personal lives with our credit cards and Web browsers today, tomorrow’s mobile devices will broadcast clouds of personal data to invisible monitors all around us as we move from place to place. We are living through the last years of the long era before sensors are built into the furniture. The scientific and economic underpinnings of pervasive computing have been building for decades, and the social side-effects are only beginning to erupt. The virtual, social, and physical worlds are colliding, merging, and coordinating.
Don’t mistake my estimates of the power of the coming technology with unalloyed enthusiasm for its effects. I am not calling for an uncritical embrace of the new regime, but for an informed consideration of what we’re getting ourselves into. We have an opportunity now to consider the social implications of this new technological regime as it first emerges, before every aspect of life is reordered.
Online social networks are human activities that ride on technical communications infrastructures of wires and chips. When social communication via the Internet became widespread, peop
le formed support groups and political coalitions online. The new social forms of the last decade of the twentieth century grew from the Internet’s capability for many-to-many social communication. The new social forms of the early twenty-first century will greatly enhance the power of social networks.
Since my visits to Tokyo and Helsinki, I’ve investigated the convergence of portable, pervasive, location-sensitive, intercommunicating devices with social practices that make the technologies useful to groups as well as individuals. Foremost among these social practices are the “reputation systems” that are beginning to spring up online—computer-mediated trust brokers. The power of smart mobs comes in part from the way age-old social practices surrounding trust and cooperation are being mediated by new communication and computation technologies.
In this coming world, the acts of association and assembly, core rights of free societies, might change radically when each of us will be able to know who in our vicinity is likely to buy what we have to sell, sell what we want to buy, know what we need to know, want the kind of sexual or political encounter we also want. As online events are woven into the fabric of our physical world, governments and corporations will gain even more power over our behavior and beliefs than large institutions wield today. At the same time, citizens will discover new ways to band together to resist powerful institutions. A new kind of digital divide ten years from now will separate those who know how to use new media to band together from those who don’t.
Knowing who to trust is going to become even more important. Banding together, from lynch mobs to democracies, taps the power of collective action. At the core of collective action is reputation—the histories each of us pull behind us that others routinely inspect to decide our value for everything from conversation partners to mortgage risks. Reputation systems have been fundamental to social life for a long time. In intimate societies, everyone knows everyone, and everyone’s biography is an open, if not undisputed, book. Gossip keeps us up to date on who to trust, who other people trust, who is important, and who decides who is important.
Today’s online reputation systems are computer-based technologies that make it possible to manipulate in new and powerful ways an old and essential human trait. Note the rise of Web sites like eBay (auctions), Epinions (consumer advice), Amazon (books, CDs, electronics), Slashdot (publishing and conversation) built around the contributions of millions of customers, enhanced by reputation systems that police the quality of the content and transactions exchanged through the sites.9 In each of these businesses, the consumers are also the producers of what they consume, the value of the market increases as more people use it, and the aggregate opinions of the users provide the measure of trust necessary for transactions and markets to flourish in cyberspace.
Reputation reports on eBay give prospective auction bidders a sense of the track record of the otherwise anonymous people to whom they may trustingly mail a check. Ratings of experts on Epinions make visible the experience of others in trusting each expert’s advice. Moderators on Slashdot award “karma points” that make highly knowledgeable, amusing, or useful posts in an online conversation more visible than those considered less insightful.
Wireless devices will take reputation systems into every cranny of the social world, far from the desktops to which these systems are currently anchored. As the costs of communication, coordination, and social accounting services drop, these devices make possible new ways for people to self-organize mutual aid. It is now technologically possible, for example, to create a service that would enable you to say to your handheld device: “I’m on my way to the office. Who is on my route and is looking for a ride in my direction right now—and who among them is recommended by my most trusted friends?”
Wireless communication technologies and the political regimes that regulate their use are a key component of smart mob infrastructure. One can sit in a restaurant in Stockholm or in the atrium of a business building in San Francisco and connect to unprotected or publicly available wireless networks with a laptop computer. Will ad hoc coalitions of wireless Internet enthusiasts create a grassroots network that can challenge the power of established infrastructure providers?
In Chapter 4, I’ll consider how the placeless world of wireless communications is likely to interact with the place-specific networked computer chips that are beginning to infiltrate buildings, furniture, and even clothing. Although pervasive and wearable computers have been predicted and developed for more than a decade, their enabling components are only beginning to become inexpensive enough to trigger a wave of change. After years of kludgey prototypes, wearable computers are on the threshold of becoming fashion items. The first “wearable computing communities” are emerging.
The following chapters chronicle my investigation into technology practices and social theories and my inquiry into what we need to know if we intend to influence the way technological capabilities are exercised. I discuss the likely evolution of mobile devices, the future of pervasive computing, the power of peer-to-peer resource sharing, the study of cooperation, and the science of reputation. I examine the wireless Internet business model, or lack of it, and untangle some of the geek/wonk jargon surround-xx ing regulatory battles over wireless Internet technologies. I explain why today’s regulatory battles over the electromagnetic spectrum might be the most important collision of politics and communication technology since the King of England insisted on licensing printing presses.
When I examine the potential of new technologies, I have tried to avoid the dangers of “the rhetoric of the technological sublime,” in which the miraculous properties of new tools are extolled to the exclusion of critical examination of their shadow sides.10 I seek to shine light and also to look into the shadows.
Loss of privacy is perhaps the most obvious shadow side of technological cooperation systems. In order to cooperate with more people, I need to know more about them, and that means that they will know more about me. The tools that enable cooperation also transmit to a large number of others a constellation of intimate data about each of us. In the recent past, it was said that digital information technology, such as the magnetic strips on credit cards, leaves a “trail of electronic breadcrumbs” that can be used to track individuals. In the future, the trail will become a moving cloud as individuals broadcast information about themselves to devices within ten yards, a city block, or the entire world. Although there is room for speculation about how quickly the new tools will be adopted, certainly over the next several decades inexpensive wireless devices will penetrate into every part of the social world, bringing efficiencies to the production of snooping power. The surveillance state that Orwell feared was puny in its power in comparison to the panoptic web we have woven around us. Detailed information about the minute-by-minute behaviors of entire populations will become cost-effective and increasingly accurate. Both powerfully beneficial and powerfully dangerous potentials of this new tracking capability will be literally embedded in the environment.
Cooperative effort sounds nice, and at its best, it is the foundation of the finest creations of human civilizations, but it can also be nasty if the people who cooperate share pernicious goals. Terrorists and organized criminals have been malevolently successful in their use of smart mob tactics. A technological infrastructure that increases surveillance on citizens and empowers terrorists is hardly utopian. Intrusions on individual privacy and liberty by the state and its political enemies are not the only possible negative effects of enhanced technology-assisted cooperation. In addition, profound questions about the quality and meaning of life are raised by the prospect of millions of people possessing communication devices that are “always on” at home and work. How will mobile communications affect family and societal life?
There are opportunities as well as dangers, however, and a major reason I’ve written this book is my growing belief that what we understand about the future of smart mobs, and how we talk about that future, holds the power to influence that
future—at least within a short window of opportunity. The possibilities for the use of smart mob infrastructure do not consist exclusively of dark scenarios. Indeed, cooperation is integral to the highest expressions of human civilization. In counterpoint to the dystopian possibilities I’ve noted, I introduce sociologists and economists who argue that wireless technologies could make it easier to create public goods, thus affording an unprecedented opportunity for enhancing social capital that can enrich everyone’s life.
Just as existing notions of community were challenged by the emergence of social networks in cyberspace, traditional ideas about the nature of place are being challenged as computing and communication devices begin to saturate the environment. As more people on city streets and on public transportation spend more time speaking to other people who are not physically co-present, the nature of public spaces and other aspects of social geography are changing before our eyes and ears; some of these changes will benefit the public good and others will erode it.
Before people who hold stakes in tomorrow’s technological civilization can hope to address the social challenges posed by smart mob technologies, we have to know what the issues are, what they imply, and useful ways to think about them. I conclude this book with a strategic briefing for the future, highlighting the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and dangers of mobile and pervasive technologies. I believe that our destiny is not (yet) determined by technology, that our freedom and quality of life do not (yet) have to be sacrificed to make us into more efficient components of a global wealth-generating machine.
Smart Mobs Page 2