Smart Mobs

by Howard Rheingold

  Texting—referred to by young Finnish enthusiasts with the verb form “tekstata”—surfaced in Finland in 1995 and was discovered by teenagers in 1998.50 By 2000, Finns were exchanging more than a billion SMS messages annually.51 Eija-Liisa Kasasniemi, a Finnish folklorist, focused her dissertation research on the text message culture of Finnish teenagers. She and colleague Pirjo Rautianen started collecting data about SMS messaging in the lives of Finnish adolescents. They reported some interesting findings:

  Through SMS teens hate, gossip, mediate, and express longing, even when the writer lacks the courage for a call or in situations where other communication channels are inappropriate. The text message is the backdoor of communication.

  The SMS phenomenon has generated its own terminology, customs, and social norms . . . . Perhaps the most surprising feature in the text messaging of Finnish teenagers is the extent to which it incorporates collective behavior . . . . Text messages are circulated among friends, composed together, read together, and fitting expressions or entire messages are borrowed from others.

  Teens use the messages to test their limits and step outside the role of a child. Text messaging is a way to share relationships.52

  In 1997, Pasi Mäenpäa and Timo Kopomaa conducted research funded by Nokia and Telecom Finland (which later became Sonera). Their report included observations that resonated with Ito’s findings in Japan:

  The mobile phone creates its own user-culture, which in turn produces new urban culture and new ways of life . . .

  Spontaneous contacts, which especially the younger interviewees make “ex tempore,” tend to be these “where are you” and “whatcha doing” calls. Such chatting hardly resembles real exchange of information or even intercourse, as much as merely sharing one’s life with others in real time. It is a question of living in the same rhythm or wave with one’s closest friends, the feeling of a continuously shared life.

  The repetitive communications by phone are not merely an exchange of information; they also open another world of experience beside, or instead of, the one inhabited at the moment.53

  I met Finns in their twenties who had grown up with mobile telephony and who now design technologies that could increase social capital rather than dissipate it. They are building a “shared urban living space” that combines a physical location, a virtual community, a mobile social network, and a cooperative organization, “an anti-netcafé, where no screens flicker yet technology is present, where doing together and being together is enabled through a unique social setting.”54 It started when four young men met with an American entrepreneur who wanted to “talk to the young ‘Internet dudes’ about setting up a netcafé in Helsinki.”55

  When the Finnish Internet dudes started talking about “why netcafés suck so bad,” they started dreaming up what they came to call “Aula, an urban living room for the network society.” Part entrepreneurial enterprise, part nonprofit attempt to do good, part laboratory for studying mobile culture, Aula was being assembled while I interviewed its creators.

  I had spoken with Linturi at the elegant, slightly formal Hotel Kämp. A few blocks away from the Kämp, I met Jyri Engeström, Tuomas Toivonen, and Aleksi Aaltonen at a less elegant, less formal, more hectic and eclectic place. In May 2001, they had secured a small space in the middle of Lasipalatsi and were constructing the physical locus of their community center at one of the city’s crucial crossroads—a less spectacular but equally vital counterpart to Shibuya Crossing.

  The interior floor space consists of only a few hundred square meters and is L-shaped. Plywood was being cut as we spoke. Naked conduits covered the ceiling. Jyri Engeström, a sociology student in his early twenties, sat amidst construction materials, talking whenever the power saws fell silent. “Netcafés suck because they aren’t social places. People don’t meet there,” he proclaimed.

  The young men who turned down the netcafé idea decided to create a public space where “consumption was possible, but not obligatory, and where production and exchange were also present.”56 There would be a coffee machine and a copier/printer, but the participants would operate the machines themselves: a nonprofit Starbucks crossed with a co-op Kinko’s. They challenged themselves to design a space where virtual communities and mobile tribes could mingle in the physical world, where tech- nology could help people come together instead of pushing them apart. There would be whiteboards and wireless networks, and the key to get in the door would be an RFID “tag” (an inexpensive microchip with short-range radio broadcast capability) that would allow people to display the social network that connects them to Aula. Various sponsors were rounded up. Until the meeting space was finished and opened in September 2001, the Aula network met online and at cafés. The four people who had met in May 2000 grew to 300 a year later.

  Nokia and the recently flourishing Finnish mobile communications industry are experiencing turbulence, but mobile-enabled cultural practices continue to evolve all over Helsinki. Different forms of mobile-enabled culture are emerging in public and in the marketplace—from Arena 2000 to Helsinki Virtual Village to Aula, from adolescent subcultures to transformations in business practice. Finland might be the world’s foremost laboratory for mobile society, but it is far from the only one in the Nordic countries. Stockholm, with more mobile phones per person than any city in the world,57 has its own strong examples of mobile industry, culture, and research. Botfighters, for example.

  At a quarter to midnight on one of those late spring evenings when night falls around ten o’clock, I found myself cruising greater Stockholm with four devotees of a game that involves virtual persona, mocking text messages, location-sensing technology, junk food, and continuous banter. They call themselves “the Mob.” By their own gleeful confessions, they spend too much of their time chasing game opponents around Stockholm. They first met when three of them ganged up to track down the fourth and destroy his “bot” (a software robot that represents the player). After the virtual battle, the four exchanged good-natured insults via SMS, decided to meet face to face, and instantly became a self-styled gang.

  Joel Abrahamsson picked me up in front of my hotel after finishing his day’s work as a systems administrator for a Swedish web-hosting firm. He looked up from his mobile phone long enough to greet me. “Oh hell!” was the next thing he said. “My bot got shot.” The opponent, Abrahamsson informed me, was less than 400 meters away—perhaps one of the people we could see in the small park in front of my hotel. “Now he is demeaning me by SMS! He better hope he leaves the area before my gang gets here.” A small Volvo stopped at the curb, and I jammed in with four young men, all of whom cordially but fleetingly looked up from their phones to greet me.

  For all the talk of mobs, gangs, and bot killing, Joel and his friends are mobsters in name only, indistinguishable from other young Swedish males in the info industry.

  Earlier, I had visited the Stockholm headquarters of It’s Alive, the company that created the world’s first location-based mobile game. Sven Halling, the CEO of It’s Alive, showed me how Botfighters takes advantage of location-sensing technologies involving mobile phones. Players sign up on a Web site, create a “bot,” name it, and arm it with guns, shields, batteries, and detectors. When their mobile telephones are on, the players receive SMS messages about the geographic distance of other players. “When they get close enough to fire,” Halling explained, “players get an SMS message from our server, and if their weapons are stronger than their opponent’s shield, and their opponent doesn’t shoot first, they are credited with a kill.” The scores and competitive positions of players are instantly updated on the Web site.

  Joel, his sidekick Tjomme, and two fellows named David all work in information technology industries. Fast repartee about the game seemed to be one of the points of playing as a gang. In one respect, it is a variation on the venerable ritual of cruising in automobiles. Botfighters, however, requires laptops and mobile telephones as well as cars. While some players were in their offices or apart
ments, others, like the Mob, moved around Stockholm on foot, subway, and car. Approximately once an hour, we stopped the car for junk food and leg-stretching. At such times, a laptop would be connected to a mobile phone and players would log on to recharge bots and check game standings.

  Mobile phone users are accustomed to paying a few cents for each SMS message they send, and many send hundreds a day. It’s Alive charges mobile operators by the number of players who sign up to play the game; players pay It’s Alive a monthly fee in addition to the small fee they pay the operator for each message. The game attracts typical gamers like the Mob, males from age twelve to thirty, but it might also serve as a broader platform for social communication if pitched differently. Multiplayer games that can be played while waiting in line, sitting on the bus, and other idle moments could become a driving application for mobile, location-based services. Other location-based mobile telephone games are due to be launched soon in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia. France Telecom is running trials of location-based games modeled on treasure hunts rather than shoot-outs.58

  Stockholm, in May 2001, was buzzing with mobile culture. My hotel hosted weekend private parties, open only to those who could display the right SMS message at the door. One of the party organizers told me that this floating network of hundreds started gathering at a different locale each week after each of four founders sent SMS invitations to everyone in their address books. Svante, a young man of an anarchist persuasion, told me about a cult of fare-jumpers in Stockholm who used SMS broadcast services to warn each other when and where conductors could be found checking fare tickets. Rickard Ericsson opened a laptop on a restaurant table, plugged in his phone, and showed me LunarStorm, a virtual community he launched in January 2000, which grew to 950,000 members by spring 2001—more than 65 percent of the population of Swedish fourteen to twenty-four-year-olds. In the summer of 2001, Ericsson and colleagues added LunarMobil messaging, enabling the tens of thousands of LunarStorm members online at any time to remain in touch with each other when away from their PCs.59

  Generation Txt

  “We Are Generation Txt,” proclaims a famous SMS message that has circulated among Filipino youth; another ironic message that recirculated around Manila’s social networks said, in Filipino-English texting lingo: “Der is lyf Byond textng. Get 1.” (There is life beyond texting. Get one.)60 In a later chapter, I discuss the events of January 2001, when texting played a role in the “People Power II” revolt against President Estrada of the Philippines. Before 2001, texting had become widespread in the Philippines, with up to 50 million messages exchanged each day.61 A 2001 San Francisco Chronicle story quoted a Philippines telecommunications company source: “Some Filipino teenagers can do it blindfolded. I can’t do that—but I can text while driving.”62 Rumors, chain mail, and SMS manifestos regularly ripple through Filipino society. The Philippines might furnish early indicators of the way mobile communications could affect other countries where it is more cost-effective to jump directly to a wireless infrastructure.

  An online correspondent reported in spring 2001 on Manila’s entrenched “GenTxt”:

  Texting is used by this group to send jokes and riddles, to pass out invitations to parties, or merely to say “good morning” to friends with accompanying graphics of, say, a teddy bear. It is used much like a greeting card sent out to friends morning, noon, and night. Compilations of text messages are even available in bookstores and on the web for those who are not up to creating their own messages.

  “Sometimes, I go without lunch just so I could use my allowance to buy a pre-paid call card for my cell phone,” says Tammy Reyes, a 17-year old college student. “If I don’t receive a text when I wake up or I receive only a few messages during the day, I feel as though nobody loves me enough to remember me during the day.”63

  Although I visited Tokyo, Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, London, New York, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco, it became clear by fall 2001 that I would not be able to visit every site of texting outbreaks. I did pay attention when Xinhua News Agency reported that Thailand’s largest mobile telephone company’s GSM operation was brought down by floods of 2001 Valentine’s Day text messages.64 I took note when “373 million text messages were sent over the Orange network (U.K. and France) in January 2001.”65 I was not surprised to discover that one-fifth of the Italian population owned mobile phones,66 although I was slightly startled to learn that more than one person in eight has a mobile phone in Botswana.67

  At around the same time that I was carrying on my own informal investigation, Motorola commissioned U.K.-based writer Dr. Sadie Plant to conduct a study, “On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual life.” Plant’s research took her to Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Peshawar, Dubai, London, Birmingham, and Chicago. She reported that in some cases, people use the mobile telephone to maintain family relationships; young people who go off to work in cities can stay in touch with their rural relatives and families scattered around the world. In other cases, young people maintain relationships with friends their parents would disapprove of. Afghans in Pakistan were horrified by the ease with which young Moslem boys and girls, who would never have been allowed to be alone together, can now participate in virtual social relationships via mobile phone. Everywhere she traveled, Plant collected tales of how mobile telephones and texting were changing ways of life in unexpected ways:

  On a wooden ship moored in Dubai’s busy creek, a Somali trader dozes in the shade of a tarpaulin sheet. He wakes to the opening bars of Jingle Bells. “Hallo? Aiwa . . . la . . . aiwa . . . OK.” The deal is done. This trader, Mohammed, exports small electrical goods, including mobile phones, to East Africa. “It’s my livelihood,” he says of the mobile phone. “No mobile, no business.” It multiplies his opportunities to make contacts and do deals as he moves between cities and ports, and the short, instantaneous messages and calls to which the mobile lends itself are perfectly suited to the small and immediate transactions in which he is engaged. He now has access to intelligence about the movements of goods, ships, competitors, and markets. Information that was once way beyond his reach is now at his fingertips.

  In remote parts of several developing countries, including Swaziland, Somalia, and the Côte d’Ivoire, the mobile is being introduced in the form of payphone shops in villages which have never had land-lines. In rural Bangladesh, these shops, and the women who run them, have become new focal points in the community.68

  Why hasn’t texting taken off in the United States as a business or as a cultural appropriation? The analysts I consulted laid the blame on competing standards and clueless marketing, including a pricing model that rules out the most likely early adopters. Whereas European operators agreed on the GSM standard, which allows the customer of one company to send SMS messages to any customer of any other company, in the United States text messages can be sent only to certain kinds of telephones, and you can only send messages to people who subscribe to your operator.

  I figured David Bennahum would have a theory about the failure of American operators. I knew him as an excellent writer about technologies, but for the past year and a half, he had been a partner with a New York-based venture group that finances wireless infrastructure, technology, and media.69 I asked him why MCI or AT&T or Sprint hadn’t plugged American consumers into mobile Internet culture, and he replied without hesitation, “That would be like expecting General Motors to come up with the Beatles.”70 NTT bypassed its corporate culture by creating DoCoMo and hiring outsider Mari Matsunaga. Scandinavian and Philippine populations surprised unsuspecting telecommunications operators by embracing SMS. The European and Asian adoption of SMS was made possible in large part by pricing policies that made texting less expensive than voice calls. U.S. operators did not bypass their corporate cultures, made text messaging too expensive, failed to bridge barriers that prevented messages from traveling between different operators, and marketed text messaging services to thirt
yish executives rather than teenagers.

  Despite the corporate culture barrier Bennahum cited, he pointed out that two potentially influential American subcultures have taken to texting. Hip-hop culture, streetwise and fashion-conscious fans of rap music, favor Motorola’s two-way pagers, while young stockbrokers, suits, and geeks in the information technology industry favor the BlackBerry wireless pagers from Research In Motion.71 If the adoption barriers of incompatible technical standards and high prices for texting services disappear, might the cultural practices now incubating in these subcultures reach a tipping point and set off a mainstream fashion epidemic? Will U.S. telecommunications giants learn from DoCoMo and start doing their business in a radically different way? Or will DoCoMo break out from being a successful Japanese brand to becoming a global brand, as Honda and Sony did in previous decades? In December 2000, DoCoMo agreed to pay $9.9 billion for 16 percent of AT&T Wireless,72 and in 2001 the company set up headquarters in Dusseldorf for the “mobile invasion of Europe.”73