Smart Mobs

by Howard Rheingold

  Mizuko Ito, who has moved between Japan and the United States most of her life, believes unique cultural characteristics of American society contribute to the lack of a mobile texting culture:

  Even urban Americans have immense amounts of private space that can accommodate their full social identities as well as their social networks. Things that many middle class urban Americans have that most middle class urban Japanese don’t have include homes large enough to entertain friends and colleagues, private bedrooms for children, kitchens with storage space and appliances, more than one car, extra parking space at home, free parking for cars when out, cheap gas, toll free expressways, PC with Internet access (and space to put a PC in the home), more than one phone line with competitive phone rates (this just recently changed in Japan).

  All these items work for the use of private and against the use of street and public spaces. Americans move between private nucleated homes, private transport, and often private offices and cubicles as well, with quick forays in the car to shop occasionally (not daily grocery shopping as in Japan), and use of public space and restaurants has the sense of an optional excursion rather than a necessity. In Japan most people have to meet people outside the home. In Tokyo, I find myself occupying more quasi-public spaces conducive to texting because car usage is prohibitively expensive, my home is small, and it takes a long time on foot and public transportation to get anywhere. The technology of the phone is part of this ecology of other technologies of place and identity-shaping, and the overall ecology of these technologies is so different in the U.S., working against the adoption of mobile texting in the Japanese mode.74

  Other forces, psychological and cultural, undoubtedly are at work in the United States. The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, influenced American attitudes about the devices Americans call “cell phones.” First came dramatic reports that people trapped in burning buildings and hijacked airplanes had used their personal telephones to call their families.75 Then came reports that two-way text pagers, which made use of a packet-switched data network, remained useful as a lifeline when most voice calls became impossible in Lower Manhattan.76 (Packet-switching had been invented originally as a means of communicating during a nuclear war.77) As more Americans start using mobile phones and two-way messaging for safety in the United States, research from Scandinavia suggests that they will quickly adopt the devices for social communication.78

  Although it isn’t clear yet which company will become the IBM, Microsoft, or AOL of the wireless Internet, or whether American users will grow a mainstream texting culture, it’s clear that mobile telephony, texting, and mobile Internet services are already affecting social relationships.

  Identity Networks, Placeless Spaces, and Other Social Collisions

  The mobile Internet may be the first major new communication medium where the social impacts have been systematically observed from its earliest stages.79 I urge caution when generalizing about the broader meaning of early findings about mobile communications. The methodology of the observations that provide data must be scrutinized. Social, economic, and psychological contexts of the observed cultures must be considered when framing theories about social impacts. Despite these cautions, I am convinced that some of the first social scientists to look at the mobile communication subcultures have uncovered useful clues. What follows is a brief review of the most relevant social scientific observation of mobile telephone use on

  the level of the individual personality, where cognitive and identity-related issues emerge;

  the level of the immediate social network and neighborhood, where place and community-related issues emerge;

  the level of the society, where emergent effects of individual usage may influence the zeitgeist, values, and/or power structure of an entire polity, culture, or civilization.

  It is worth noting that adolescents, those aged fourteen to twenty, are often the early adopters of mobile communications and are among the first whose identities, families, and communities begin to change. The most obvious explanation for the key role of youth in the diffusion of mobile telephones and texting is that adolescents have adopted a medium that allows them to communicate with peers, outside the surveillance of parents and teachers, at the precise time in their lives when they are separating from their families and asserting their identities as members of a peer group. Another explanation is that young people are comfortable with technologies that didn’t exist when their parents were growing up.

  Social theorist Erving Goffman wrote about the way people improvise public performances as a way of composing an identity in the presenter’s own mind as well as the minds of others.80 In regard to what Goffman called “the presentation of self,” the ways people communicate and the groups they use as audiences for their communicative performances are part of the social machinery they use to construct identities. The groups that individuals belong to define who they think they are. This presentation of self points outward to the group and inward toward the identity of the presenter at the same time, through the same communication acts. Goff-man fits well with mobile media because SMS messages, and the choice of who to send it to and how to respond, are used by young people today as the raw material for identity and group-shaping activities.

  Researchers studying Norwegian adolescents’ use of mobile telephones found that “in Goffmanian terms, the indirect nature of text messages allows one to arrange ‘face’.”81 The same researchers noted that chain SMS messages, jokes (often of a sexual nature), and expression of interest in potential boyfriends or girlfriends all have an “expressive” element that constitutes a “confirmation of a relationship. It is a type of social interaction wherein the sender and receiver share a common, though asynchronous experience. When one sends a message it refreshes the contact between the two.”82 Norwegian ethnologist Truls Erik Johnsen claims, “The content is not that important. The message has a meaning in itself; it is a way of showing the recipient you’re thinking of him (or her).”83

  In the next chapter, I’ll look more closely at social networks. Note that many youth use social networks as status markers like fashionable clothing or popular music. “Which group do you belong to?” has always been important to adolescents. Researchers Alex S. Taylor and Richard Harper observed 120 participants between ages eleven and eighteen in the United Kingdom and reported that a primary advantage of the phone was the way it enabled young people to demonstrate their membership and status in social networks:

  Both the physical appearance of the phone and the manner in which the phone was used held symbolic value that also supported the demonstration of social networks. . . .

  Through the act of using their phones, young people appear to consolidate their peer relationships, differentiate themselves from family or household relations, and contribute to a growing sense of both independence (from family) and collectivity (amongst peers). In short, the collaborative forms of interaction with the device appear to both functionally and symbolically cement the durability of social relationships in local communities.84

  One of the most obvious early impacts on the level of the immediate social network is the role of texting in youthful mating rituals. Because they can take their time to compose their message, and because they don’t have to face rejection in person, young men in Scandinavia and elsewhere have found it easier to ask for dates. A young man sends the object of his attention a blank message, or a bland one such as “that was a nice party.” The recipient can choose to ignore the initiation or to respond and thereby signal interest. Younger adolescents have been observed to carry on entire dating relationships exclusively through SMS exchanges.85

  Text messages and telephones are used as social objects in themselves. Swedish researchers Alexandra Weilenmann and Catrine Larsson noted, as I did, that Scandinavian teenagers often flash the messages on their screens at each other, or even pass the telephone around: “Teenagers thus share the communication they take part in with their co-present friend
s. Not only the communication but also the phone itself is often shared.”86

  Marko Ahtisaari, one of the young architects of Helsinki’s Aula, reiterated the role of the physical device itself in socializing: “The very act of learning to use new mobile social services is social. We learn by being shown, not by reading manuals. The icons and ringing tones used to physically personalize phones are meant to be displayed. The fact that I have Madonna’s not-yet-released single as my ringing tone says something about me.”87

  In Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany, “over half of those surveyed had some form of negative reaction to mobile phone use in public.”88 Sadie Plant quoted Goffman by way of explaining the discomfort associated with overhearing mobile telephone conversations: “A conversation has a life on its own behalf. It is a little social system with its own boundary-maintaining tendencies; it is a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains.”89 Plant notes, “To overhear a conversation is to listen in to one of these worlds. To overhear just one of its sides is to be neither fully admitted nor completely excluded from its world.”90

  Other observers of this phenomenon have referred to Goffman’s theories about the different “faces” we present to different audiences:

  We believe that talking on a mobile phone in a public place is in part a matter of a conflict of social spaces in which people assume different faces. Mobile phone use often necessitates the interleaving of multiple activities and of multiple public faces. When mobile phone users are on the phone, they are simultaneously in two spaces: the space they physically occupy, and the virtual space of the conversation (the conversational space). When a phone call comes in (or perhaps more pretentiously, when a call is placed out), the user decides, consciously or otherwise, what face takes precedence: the face that is consonant with one’s physical environment, or that of the conversational space. The greater the conflict between the behavioral requirements of the two spaces, the more conscious, explicit, and difficult this decision might be.

  One’s assumption of multiple faces, it would seem, is what is largely at issue for those who find public mobile telephone use disturbing or even offensive. First, choosing to be behaviorally present in a different space from one’s physical location may be perceived as inconsiderate by those in the space. Second, a mobile phone user might have to violate (or at least perturb) the social norms of the physical space in order to honor the norms in the conversational space. Finally, perhaps what is most apparent to the public is that the face one presents on the phone is in contrast to the face assumed just before the phone call. This changing act brings to the fore that faces are publicly assumed, which then gives rise to the feeling that the new face and perhaps even the old face are false.91

  Mizuko Ito pointed out to me that Goffman’s theories of the link between identity construction and public performance are useful frames for looking at the people in public places engaged in conversations with people who aren’t there: “The way mobile phones locate people in social groups is connected to the way the mobile phone operates in public space. To me these are interconnected points related to how people occupy technologically enhanced social space. The power of the mobile phone to allow people to be connected continuously with their virtual social group is what isolates them from co-present others in the public space, in other words, exclusion as the other side of the coin from affiliation.”92

  In Chapter 8, I’ll take up the implications of the “always-on” nature of the mobile Internet, the effects of being continuously available to others, and the way all our formerly idle moments aboard public transit or while walking down the street are now filled with activity. If mobile telephony and texting alone were the only agents of change, the world’s cultures would be facing a major shift in norms, relationships, and social power. Today’s mobile devices, however, are only part of a larger smart mob infrastructure. “Peer-to-peer” methodologies like the one that made Napster possible are converging on mobile Internet devices, providing opportunities for massive device-to-device collective actions. The emergence of pervasive computation in smart rooms, wearable computers, and digital cities from laboratories into product lines are only beginning to transform today’s telephones into the “remote controls for your life” envisioned by Hirschhorn, Linturi, and Natsuno.

  The forms of collective behavior enabled or changed by smart mob technology go far beyond the etiquette of where and how to conduct mobile phone calls. The most radical changes are those possible at the level of entire societies. In order to make sense of the technologies I was seeing in media labs and the behaviors I was seeing on the streets, I looked for observers who focused not on small groups, but on the collective actions of entire societies. Fortunately, the years I had spent trying to make sense of virtual communities had led me to thinkers such as Marc A. Smith, now at Microsoft Research. After the streets of Helsinki and Tokyo, and the media labs of Cambridge and California, I headed for Redmond to try to see a bigger picture.

  2

  Technologies of Cooperation

  Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. ’Tis profitable for us both, that I shou’d labour with you to-day, and that you shou’d aid me tomorrow. I have no kindness for you, and know you have as little for me. I will not, therefore, take any pains on your account; and should I labour with you upon my own account, in expectation of a return, I know I shou’d be disappointed, and that I shou’d in vain depend upon your gratitude. Here then I leave you to labour alone:You treat me in the same manner. The seasons change; and both of us lose our harvests for want of mutual confidence and security.

  —David Hume, ATreatise of Human Nature, 1739

  The Alchemy of Coopetition

  Redmond, Washington, is headquarters of the world’s most successful company, mother lode for the world’s richest man, and home base of an army of carnivorously competitive software geeks. Despite this intense concentration of mojo, the Microsoft campus is also an unremarkable suburban office park with sidewalks, stands of fir, and lawns separating clusters of three-story buildings. Unlike Sanno Park Tower, the Microsoft campus displays few signifiers of power—aside from the wireless Internet antennae dangling discreetly from light poles. I wasn’t sniffing for clues about the industry, although Microsoft might become the dominant player in the wireless Internet industry. I wasn’t seeking a peek at future technologies, although the secret gizmos of tomorrow can be found within these buildings. I was searching for hints about the social forces at work in smart mobs.

  What scientific knowledge can make sense of swarming teenagers in Finland and texting revolutionaries in Manila? Anthropologist Mizuko Ito and her Scandinavian counterparts helped me to understand group behaviors emerging from use of the mobile telephone. I needed to know more about what these activities could mean for entire societies, so I paid a pilgrimage to my guru in matters cybersociological.

  In the ten years I’ve known him, Marc A. Smith had morphed from UCLA graduate student into Microsoft’s research sociologist. In 1992, while I was trying to make sense of virtual communities, I heard about this fellow who had turned Usenet, the Internet’s worldwide ecology of virtual communities, into an immense sociology laboratory. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch regarding social studies of cyberspaces. At Microsoft, Smith has refined the instrument he started building as a grad student— software that maps the social networks woven from a million electronic messages exchanged in 48,000 different conversation groups every day.1 My question in 1992 was, What do people gain from virtual communities that keeps them sharing information with people they might never meet face to face?

  Smith’s answer was “social network capital, knowledge capital, and communion”— people can put a little of what they know and how they feel into the online network and draw out larger amounts of knowledge and opportunities for sociability than they put in.2

  A decade later, I found myself trying to understand what happens when virtual communities migrate from deskto
p computers to mobile telephones. I wanted to visualize future social forms that could grow out of today’s roving bands of mobile texters. How might the intergenerational power shifts illuminated by anthropologists affect power structures and social contracts? Will groups of people find it possible to draw out more than they put into mobile social networks? I was fortunate to be able to turn to someone who had studied both sociology and social cyberspaces. I arrived in Redmond on a rare clear winter day. We left our rain gear inside and engaged in a peripatetic interview. The Cascades sparkled visibly on the horizon. I explained the enabling technologies for smart mobs while we walked.

  Smith escorted me into his company cafeteria for coffee—a company cafeteria with its own Starbucks. “The effects of mobile and pervasive technology will reach further into our lives than the Internet has,” Smith said in a melodramatic voice, sweeping one arm through the air while reaching into his back pocket with the other hand. Instead of paying cash for our coffees, he placed his wallet on a small pad next to the cash register, triggering a “beep.” A chip on a plastic card in his wallet opens doors for Smith and pays for necessities of life within the Microsoft domain. We found a booth. I looked around with the knowledge that we were surrounded by some of the most intelligent and well-caffeinated people in the world.

  Smith fell silent, sipped, and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Does the new medium change the way people cooperate?” Smith stated his question again, rolling his gaze back down to eye contact. “That’s the big question, and it’s not a simple one. Sociologists have developed an entire vocabulary for arguing the technicalities of cooperation. To cast the impacts of mobile and pervasive media in terms sociologists know about, I’d ask how these tools might influence collective action and public goods.” Marc is good at italicizing the spoken word. Another pause. Another sip.