Smart Mobs

by Howard Rheingold

  Will the Internet remain a decentralized, self-organized commons as the fixed network infrastructure upgrades to wireless connection technologies? Lawrence Lessig, distinguished professor at Harvard and Stanford law schools, is alarmed at technical and legal movements now underway that might change the characteristics that enabled the Internet to thrive. Intrigued by Lessig’s book, The Future of Ideas, I talked with him directly in his office at Stanford’s law school.68 Lessig was dressed casually in black jeans and a blue cardigan sweater. I noticed five different coffee containers on his desk. I asked him whether it was proper to think of the Internet as the kind of common pool resource that Hardin and Ostrom had written about.

  Definitely! The resource that was held in commons was the right to innovate. That resource was held in commons because the architecture of the Internet prevented the owner of the network from vetoing innovations in content or applications that they didn’t like. The end-to-end principle meant that the network itself had no power to discriminate. That meant anybody could take advantage of the commons created by connecting all these computers together to develop new ideas and applications that everybody could have access to. And that’s what happened. The value of the Internet came from no single institution or company, but from the collective innovations of millions of contributors.

  I asked Lessig why he is worried about the future.

  The innovation commons is being corrupted by changes that are being made at the architecture level. These changes are accomplished by allowing future versions of Internet software protocols to abandon the end-to-end principle, enabling the network owners to decide which applications will be permitted to run over the network and which applications won’t. Coaxial cable owners that offer high-speed Internet access already prevent their users from running servers or hosting Web pages and are preventing content that competes with the cable owner’s own content from running on their parts of the Internet. The AT&TMediaOne merger created a huge cable infrastructure that AT&T controlled. AOL-Time-Warner created a huge cable infrastructure that AOL controlled, and now they’re trying to put them both together into a single cable infrastructure for a large part of the Internet. As cable providers consolidate ownership, they are increasingly asserting their right to decide how people can use the network.

  Four months after Lessig and I talked, the Federal Communications Commission launched a campaign to expand deployment of high-speed Internet access by reclassifying the cable modem business as an “information service” that would not require open access with the rest of the Internet to connect with their lines.69 At the same time, the cable television industry pressed the FCC to prevent local governments from requesting that a portion of bandwidth be set aside for public, educational, and governmental uses.70 In March, 2002, the FCC ruled in favor of the cable industry, dropping the requirement that cable operators allow competitors to use their networks and removing the power of local governments to request public resources in exchange for monopoly access to the local community.71

  Lessig and I talked about technical and legal changes that might affect the wireless Internet of the future; that discussion continues in Chapter 6, “Wireless Quilts.” He did have this to say in regard to the enabling technologies for smart mobs:

  New ways to think about connecting information services and people on the network now seem to be possible with wireless technologies, but what has to be preserved is the right to innovate about how these different ways of connecting to the Net can be used. The right to connect all sorts of devices to the network to do things that were never imagined by the people who built the network will assure a broad range of innovation around the mobile Internet. Are we going to move toward a controlled wireless world, where the equivalent of telephone companies or cable companies get to decide what we do on our wireless devices? It will be innovative relative to what wireless devices were five years ago, but still it will be innovative only as far as the controlling companies believe benefits them. Or will we adopt an architecture for wireless where nobody gets to decide for everyone what the technology can and cannot be used for? Once we construct an innovation commons there, I think we could see the next great revolution of innovation in wireless Internet technology.

  Who Knows Who Knows Who? Social Networks as Driving Forces

  A few years ago, Marc Smith introduced me to his colleague Barry Well-man, a master of a discipline Smith knew would interest me—social network analysis. I learned that people were studying social networks decades before computer networks or mobile telephones were invented and that Wellman claimed that “computer networks are social networks.”72 His research and hypotheses about the connections between online and face-to-face social networks mapped perfectly onto many questions that had cropped up when I was investigating social cyberspaces. When Wellman visited California, he and I walked in an oak forest and chatted about the ways physical places and cyberspaces influence one another. Wellman has a quiet manner and a dry sense of humor, and he doesn’t shrink from making bold claims. Wellman’s claims came back to me when I looked for the social underpinnings of smart mobs.

  Every time someone interacts with another person, there is the potential to exchange information about people they both know. The structure of everyone’s links to everyone else is a network that acts as a channel through which news, job tips, possible romantic partners, and contagious diseases travel. Social networks can be measured, and interconnections can be charted, from relationships between interlocking boards of directors of major corporations to terrorist networks. One of Wellman’s claims is that “we find community in networks, not groups.”73 He explained that “a group is a special type of network: densely-knit (most people are directly connected), tightly-bounded (most ties stay within the densely-knit cluster), and multistranded (most ties contain many role relationships),” and he challenged conventional thinking about how people cluster socially:

  Although people often view the world in terms of groups, they function in networks. In networked societies, boundaries are permeable, interactions are with diverse others, connections switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies can be flatter and recursive. The change from groups to networks can be seen at many levels. Trading and political blocs have lost their monolithic character in the world system. Organizations form complex networks of alliance and exchange rather than cartels, and workers report to multiple peers and superiors. . . . Communities are far-flung, loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit, and fragmentary. Most people operate in multiple, thinly-connected, partial communities as they deal with networks of kin, neighbours, friends, workmates and organizational ties. Rather than fitting into the same group as those around them, each person has his/her own “personal community.”74

  Does “personal community” remind anyone of those teenagers in Scandinavia and Pakistan, Tokyo and Manila, maintaining a stream of text messages with small groups of five to eight close friends as they go about their lives? I think Wellman’s mapping of traditional social network analysis onto social cyberspaces can be applied to mobile cyberspaces, as well:

  Complex social networks have always existed, but recent technological developments in communication have afforded their emergence as a dominant form of social organization. When computer-mediated communication networks link people, institutions and knowledge, they are computer-supported social networks. The technological development of computer networks and the societal flourishing of social networks are now in a positive feedback loop. Just as the flexibility of less-bounded, spatially dispersed social networks creates demand for the world wide web and collaborative communication, the breathless development of computer networks nourishes societal transitions from little boxes to social networks. I define “community” as networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity. I do not limit my thinking about community to neighbourhoods and villages. This is good advice for any epoch and especially pertinent for the twenty-first century
.75

  Wellman foresees that “the person—not the place, household or workgroup— will become even more of an autonomous communication node” and points out that “people usually obtain support, companionship, information and a sense of belonging from those who do not live within the same neighborhood or even within the same metropolitan area. People maintain these community ties through phoning, writing, driving, railroading, transiting and flying. . . . The person has become the portal.”76 The In- ternet facilitates the creation and management of multiple, personal social networks.

  What connects the technical properties of computer networks and the communication properties of social networks? When I started posing this question in my own social network, all the most interesting links led to Reed’s Law, a mathematical formulation discovered by David P. Reed. When I educated myself about Reed, I knew I had to meet him. He had been one of the authors of the Internet’s end-to-end principle; Reed had been the senior scientist of Lotus Corporation, and in affiliation with MIT’s Media Lab, he has become one of the instigators of the “open spectrum” movement, a radical rethinking of the way wireless communications are regulated. When I visited Media Lab in the fall of 2001, Reed and I met at the lab and continued our conversation over lunch, where he recalled how he first discovered his law.

  Reed’s Law relating social networks and computer networks is the most recent in a series of fundamental discoveries about the driving forces of computers and networks. In the social sciences, prediction is necessarily fuzzy. In the economics of computer-mediated social networks, however, four key mathematical laws of growth have been derived by four astute inquirers: Sarnoff’s Law, Moore’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law, and Reed’s Law. Each law is about how value is affected by technological leverage.

  Sarnoff’s Law emerged from the advent of radio and television networks in the early twentieth century, in which a central source broadcasts from a small number of transmitting stations to a large number of receivers. Broadcast pioneer David Sarnoff pointed out the obvious: The value of broadcast networks is proportionate to the number of viewers.77

  The often-cited Moore’s Law is the reason electronic miniaturization has driven the hyper-evolution of electronics, computers, and networks. In 1965, Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel and one of the inventors of the microprocessor, noted that the number of elements that could be packed into the same amount of space on a microchip had doubled every year. Moore forecast that the number of elements would double every eighteen months in the future.78 Anything that doubles and redoubles grows large very quickly, from 2,250 elements in Intel’s first microprocessor of 1971 to 42 million elements in the Pentium 4 processor thirty years later.79 Computers and electronic components have driven industrial growth for decades because they are among the rare technologies that grow more powerful and less expensive simultaneously. Without the efficiencies described by Moore’s Law, the PC, the Internet, and mobile telephones would have been impossibly large, unintelligent, and expensive.

  What happens when you link devices based on Moore’s Law? When ARPA wizards gathered at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early 1970s to create the first personal computers, one of the engineering aces, Bob Metcalfe, led the team that invented the Ethernet, a high-speed network that interconnected PCs in the same building.80 Metcalfe left PARC, founded 3Com, Inc., cashed out, and came up with Metcalfe’s Law, which describes the growth of value in networks. The math is simple and is based on a fundamental mathematical property of networks: The number of potential connections between nodes grows more quickly than the number of nodes. The total value of a network where each node can reach every other node grows with the square of the number of nodes. If you have two nodes, each with a value of one unit, the value of joining them is four units. Four interconnected nodes, each still worth one unit, is worth sixteen units when networked, and one hundred nodes is worth one hundred times one hundred, or ten thousand. When value increases exponentially more quickly than the number of nodes, the mathematical consequence translates into economic leverage: Connecting two networks creates far more value than the sum of their values as independent networks.81

  David Reed has a graying beard and a wicked twinkle in his eye. He’s not the type of fellow to pound the table to make a point. He’s more the kind of fellow who genially proves he is right with equations on a whiteboard. As we sipped lobster bisque in Kendall Square, I asked him what led him to Reed’s Law.

  “I had the first ‘eureka’ when I thought about why eBay was so successful.” 82

  eBay, which has turned out to be the only hugely profitable e-commerce business, doesn’t sell any merchandise; it provides a market for customers to buy and sell from each other.

  eBay won because it facilitated the formation of social groups around specific interests. Social groups form around people who want to buy or sell teapots or antique radios. At that time, I had been reading Fukuyama about social capital.83 Fukuyama argues in his book Trust that there is a strong correlation between the prosperity of national economies and social capital, which he defines as the ease with which people in a particular culture can form new associations. I realized that the millions of humans who used the millions of computers added another important property—the ability of the people in the network to form groups. I remembered that when it became possible to send and reply to entire groups in email, it became possible to create ad hoc discussions. Since then, all sorts of chat rooms, message boards, listservs, buddy lists, auction markets, have added new ways for people to form groups online. Human communication adds a dimension to the computer network. I started thinking in terms of group-forming networks (GFNs). I saw that the value of a GFN grows even faster—much, much faster—than the networks where Metcalfe’s Law holds true. Reed’s Law shows that the value of the network grows proportionately not to the square of the users, but exponentially.84

  That means you raise two to the power of the number of nodes instead of squaring the number of nodes. The value of two nodes is four under Met-calfe’s Law and Reed’s Law, but the value of ten nodes is one hundred (ten to the second power) under Metcalfe’s Law and 1,024 (two to the tenth power) under Reed’s Law—and the differential rates of growth climb the hockey stick curve from there. This explains how social networks, enabled by email and other social communications, drove the growth of the network beyond communities of engineers to include every kind of interest group. Reed’s Law is the link between computer networks and social networks.

  Reed, using his law to analyze the value of different kinds of networks, believes he has discovered an important cultural and economic shift. When a network is aimed at broadcasting something of value to individuals, like a television network, the value of services is linear. When the network enables transactions between the individual nodes, the value is squared. When the same network includes ways for the individuals to form groups, the value is exponential:

  What’s important is that the dominant value in a typical network tends to shift from one category to another as the scale of the network increases. Whether the growth is by incremental customer additions or by transparent interconnection, scale growth tends to support new categories of “killer apps,” and thus new competitive games.

  We can see this scale-driven value shift in the history of the Internet. The earliest usage of the Internet was dominated by its role as a terminal network, allowing many terminals to selectively access a small number of costly time-sharing hosts. As the Internet grew, much more of the usage and value of the Internet became focused on pairwise exchanges of email messages, files, etc., following Metcalfe’s Law. And as the Internet started to take off in the early ’90s, traffic started to be dominated by newsgroups, user-created mailing lists, special interest web sites, etc., following the exponential GFN law. Though the previously dominant functions did not lose value or decline as the scale of the Internet grew, the value and usage of services that scaled by newly dominant scaling laws grew faster. Thus many kinds o
f transactions and collaboration that had been conducted outside the Internet became absorbed into the growth of the Internet’s functions, and these become the new competitive playing field.

  What’s important in a network changes as the network scale shifts. In a network dominated by linear connectivity value growth, “content is king.” That is, in such networks, there is a small number of sources (publishers or makers) of content that every user selects from. The sources compete for users based on the value of their content (published stories, published images, standardized consumer goods). Where Metcalfe’s Law dominates, transactions become central. The stuff that is traded in transactions (be it email or voice mail, money, securities, contracted services, or whatnot) is king. And where the GFN law dominates, the central role is filled by jointly constructed value (such as specialized newsgroups, joint responses to RFPs, gossip, etc.).85

  Reed believes that there is a direct connection between the kind of social capital that Fukuyama discusses and the way people use the Internet as a group-forming network. This connection is the reason why esoteric technical and legal arguments about the end-to-end principle and wireless regulation might have a large effect on everybody in the world. If the innovation commons is open to many in the future, as it has been in the past, a “cornucopia of the commons” could make it possible for many to benefit. Or those who have concentrated capital in existing infrastructures and corporations might manage to enclose the commons and reserve that power of innovation by technically excluding future innovators. The first battle has already been fought over Napster. The established interests won, triggering an effort by innovators to invent knowledge commons that can’t be enclosed.