Smart Mobs
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Examples later in this chapter demonstrate that smart mobs engaging in either violent or nonviolent netwar represent only a few of the many possible varieties of smart mob. Netwars do share similar technical infrastructure with other smart mobs. More importantly, however, they are both animated by a new form of social organization, the network. Networks include nodes and links, use many possible paths to distribute information from any link to any other, and are self-regulated through flat governance hierarchies and distributed power. Arquilla and Ronfeldt are among many who believe networks constitute the newest major social organizational form, after tribes, hierarchies, and markets. Although network-structured communications hold real potential for enabling democratic forms of decision-making and beneficial instances of collective action, that doesn’t mean that the transition to networked forms of social organization will be a pleasant one with uniformly benevolent outcomes. Arquilla and Ronfeldt note the potential for cooperation in examples like the nongovernmental organizations that use netwar tactics for public benefit, but they also articulated a strong caution, worth keeping in mind when contemplating the future of smart mobs:
Most people might hope for the emergence of a new form of organization to be led by “good guys” who do “the right thing” and grow stronger because of it. But history does not support this contention. The cutting edge in the early rise of a new form may be found equally among malcontents, ne’er-do-wells, and clever opportunists eager to take advantage of new ways to maneuver, exploit, and dominate. Many centuries ago, for example, the rise of hierarchical forms of organization, which displaced traditional, consultative, tribal forms, was initially attended, in parts of the world, by the appearance of ferocious chieftains bent on military conquest and of violent secret societies run according to rank—long before the hierarchical form matured through the institutionalization of states, empires, and professional administrative and bureaucratic systems. In like manner, the early spread of the market form, only a few centuries ago, was accompanied by a spawn of usurers, pirates, smugglers, and monopolists, all seeking to elude state controls over their earnings and enterprises.23
In light of the military applications of netwar tactics, it would be foolish to presume that only benign outcomes should be expected from smart mobs. But any observer who focuses exclusively on the potential for violence would miss evidence of perhaps an even more profoundly disruptive potential—for beneficial as well as malign purposes—of smart mob technologies and techniques. Could cooperation epidemics break out if smart mob media spread beyond warriors—to citizens, journalists, scientists, people looking for fun, friends, mates, customers, or trading partners?
Substitute the word “computers” for the words “smart mobs” in the previous paragraph, and you’ll recapitulate the history of computation since its birth in World War II.
Lovegety and p2p Journalism
Organized conflict is undoubtedly a site of intensive cooperation. Humans enjoy cooperating to each other’s benefit, as well, given the right conditions and payoff. Alexis de Tocqueville made an important observation in regard to early-nineteenth-century America:
The best-informed inhabitants of each district constantly use their information to discover new truths which may augment the general prosperity; and, if they have made any such discoveries, they eagerly surrender them to the mass of the people. . . . Men attend to the interests of the public, first by necessity, afterwards by choice: what was intentional becomes an instinct; and by dint of working for the good of one’s fellow-citizens, the habit and the taste for serving them is at length acquired.24
Elinor Ostrom and other students of common pool resource management (discussed in Chapter 2) have detailed the ways farmers, fishers, and foresters around the world devise ingenious social arrangements to balance cooperation and self-interest.25
Consider a few experiments on the fringes of mobile communications that might point toward a wide variety of nonviolent smart mobs in the future:
“Interpersonal awareness devices” have been evolving for several years.26 Since 1998, hundreds of thousands of Japanese have used Lovegety keychain devices, which signal when another Lovegety owner of the opposite sex and a compatible profile is within fifteen feet.27 In 2000, a similar technology for same-sex seekers, the “Gaydar” device, was marketed in North America.28 Hong Kong’s “Mobile Cupid service” (www.sunday.com) sends a text description of potential matches who are nearby at the moment.29
ImaHima (“are you free now?”) enables hundreds of thousands of Tokyo i-mode users to alert buddies who are in their vicinity at the moment.30
Upoc (“universal point of contact”) in Manhattan sponsors mobile communities of interest; any member of “manhattan celebrity watch,” “nyc terrorism alert,” “prayer of the day,” or “The Resistance,” for example, can broadcast text messages to and receive messages from all the other members.31
Phones that make it easy to send digital video directly to the Web make it possible for “peer-to-peer journalism” networks to emerge;32 Steve Mann’s students in Toronto have chronicled newsworthy events by webcasting everything their wearable cameras and microphones capture.33
Researchers in Oregon have constructed “social middleware,” which enables wearable computer users to form ad-hoc communities, using distributed reputation systems, privacy and knowledge-sharing agents, and wireless networks.34
In the fall of 2001, I visited the office of ImaHima in Tokyo’s ultra-modern Ebisu Garden Place Tower. ImaHima founder, Neeraj Jhanji, was the only person in the office on a Saturday morning. The DoCoMo skyscraper I had visited the day before was visible through the window. Neeraj, twenty-nine, a native of India, remained in Tokyo after a stint with an international consulting firm. One sunny Saturday, walking alone in one of Tokyo’s most popular and crowded districts, he wondered if any of his friends were nearby. “I looked at my phone and the answer seemed obvious,” he told me.35 Even without GPS location awareness, it would be possible to use the Internet to coordinate locations. At the time I spoke to Jhanji, ImaHima had won the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica, had been adopted as an official i-mode site, and had gained 250,000 users with a median age of twenty-five. ImaHima was planning to launch in European markets by 2002.36
Jhanji showed me how the service works. When you join, you fill out a profile and set up a buddy list similar to the kind used with Internet instant messaging; each person must give permission before someone else can know automatically where they are. You also list your favorite places. When you select the “update” link on your mobile’s ImaHima menu, everyone on your buddy list knows, for example, that you are within a few blocks of Shibuya station and are free for lunch.
The just-in-time, just-in-place matchmaking service for strangers, an intriguing aspect of ImaHima, is also where the most caution is required. With young women in Tokyo being targeted on the street by solicitors for “hostess bars,” no service could hope to attract any females without strict controls—nor would DoCoMo’s strict policies allow a service to become a lucrative official i-mode site. “You can search through the list of your friends,” Jhanji told me, “or you can ask permission to contact a stranger whose profile matches your request and who is nearby. But if you request permission to communicate and the other person denies your request, the system blocks you from communicating with that person again.”
The ambience of the Manhattan location of Upoc differs sharply from the milieu of Ebisu Garden Tower. Upoc’s building on lower Broadway is close enough to ground zero for the lingering stench to have been strong outside the building when I visited Upoc in November 2001. Upoc had used its own service as a virtual office in the days after the September attack. Upoc employee Alex LeVine sent a group SMS message to three dozen others employees immediately after he saw the second plane crash: “Do not go to work. Stand by for more directions.”37 Then he messaged nine employees already at work, telling them to evacuate. Although wire-line telephone, cellular telephone, a
nd email were all down, Upoc employees discovered that their text messaging service, based out of a server safely in New Jersey, stayed up and enabled them to regroup.
I met LeVine, Andrew Pimentel, and Upoc founder Gordon Gould in their office, a standard open-plan geek farm. It was heartening to see that at least a few rooms full of twenty-somethings in Aeron chairs still existed. Gould had been an enthusiastic participant in virtual communities. He knew the power of online social networks and noticed how today’s teens have taken to mobile phones and pagers the way his generation had taken to computer keyboards. Upoc provides instant infrastructure for a smart mob, whether it is a group of shopping buddies, fans, families, political street theater, or affinities as yet undefined. The confusing clash of standards and services that has slowed the adoption of SMS services in the United States created an opportunity to provide a platform for mobile communities among users of different services. Register for Upoc on the Web, join an existing group, or start one of your own and invite your friends and family, and suddenly you can receive and broadcast text messages to your group, no matter what mobile telephone service they use or where they are located. Link up to your roving tribe from your desktop email and vice versa. More than 100,000 users have registered for hundreds of groups.38
I registered for an Upoc account and observed from afar for two weeks before I visited New York. I joined “nyc celebrity sightings,” a mobile community of celebrity stalkers, and “nyc terror alert,” which promised immediate messages in the case of terrorist attack. I also joined the “channel” for a youth entertainer named “lil bowwow” and received offers of tickets and opportunities to download lil bowwow’s latest ringtone. After an afternoon of buzzing around California, feeling my phone buzz, and noting that Julia Roberts had been spotted in midtown Manhattan or that a fifteen-year-old lil bowwow fan in Brooklyn just got out of school, I switched to receiving my messages as email until I went to New York in person. Scanning the scores of messages exchanged every day in just a few groups made it clear that some kind of community ferment was underway.
“Communities started forming from the week we started testing the service,” Gould told me.39 Andrew Pimental, who had conducted Upoc’s marketing research, added, “There are virtual cliques, groups of friends, enemies, grudges, gangs, fights, and double agents with multiple handles who spy in groups to make sure nobody is badmouthing them or their clique.” Upoc members can set up groups in any of three ways—secret, private, or public. Anyone can join a public group. Private groups are listed in the directory, but people join by applying and can be expelled by the founder. Secret groups are not listed and are known only to their members.
I unexpectedly experienced the “nyc terror alert” in action. The next to last day of my stay in Manhattan, walking up Fifth Avenue toward a morning meeting, my pocket started buzzing. I looked at the screen of my mobile and learned that two minutes earlier, American Airlines flight 587 had crashed after takeoff from JFK. I immediately reserved a train ticket to Boston for the next day, in case the airports remained closed. It was another one of those living-in-the-future moments. I had become one of those people I had first observed at Shibuya Crossing a year and a half earlier. My pocket buzzed again. Another plane crash? No. A celebrity spotted in an upscale deli downtown.
What if smart mobs could empower entire populations to engage in peer-to-peer journalism? Imagine the impact of the Rodney King video multiplied by the people power of Napster. What if people beamed WearComp video to the Web, offering continuous views of breaking events that hitherto have been available only from Newscorp, AOL-Time-Warner, and Disney? Would it be possible to turn the table on the surveillance society and counter the media monopolies? What would be the effect on public opinion if thousands of WearComp-equipped citizens webcast all they saw and heard? Wild as it sounds, mobile squads of citizen telejournalists have already surfaced. Whether today’s experiments will even make it onto the radar of the media giants remains to be seen, but the first stirrings of p2p journalism have already been reported in Toronto and Tokyo. In 2000, WearComp researcher, innovator, and evangelist Steve Mann launched “ENGwear, an experiment in wearable news-gathering systems conducted by students and researchers at the Humanistic Intelligence Lab at the University of Toronto.”40
In the spring of 2000, Mann and a group of his students, all wearing computers equipped with “EyeTaps,” which broadcast everything they saw and heard to the Web, showed up at a demonstration in Toronto called by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). Violence broke out. Mann reported, “We, along with the journalists and various television crews, ran for cover. However, unlike the reporters, my students and I were still broadcasting, capturing almost by accident the entire event. Whatever we saw before us was captured and sent instantly in real time to the World Wide Web, without our conscious thought or effort.”41
Mann claims that the WearComp journalist-researchers who made their first appearance at the OCAP demonstration could be a model for a wider movement, which could influence as well as chronicle events:
WearComp represents a solution to this legacy of suppressed creativity and confining imagination in an age where ever-fewer sources of information seem to reach us, even as the conduits of information grow exponentially. What my students and I undertook in deciding to “cover” the OCAP protest was an experiment in media diversification. This is the process by which we merge our cyborg narratives with the demands of a growing cyberspace that we should, and one day will, be able to interact with and control. Facilitating the individual’s creation and broadcast of their own narratives and perspectives is an important part of wearable computing technology. . . .
What my students and I did—and continue to do—is something far more important than just providing “home movies” and “alternative” images for viewing on the Internet. We are also engaging in a process of cultural reclamation, where the individual is put back into the loop of information production and dispensation.42
Justin Hall, the journalist who helped me interview Shibuya youth, recently reported that Tokyo’s G3 videophones, like the one I carried around Tokyo, make it possible to send video to a Web site in real time: “With the technology in place,” wrote Hall, “it’s only a matter of time before an important amateur news video is directly distributed to the web, or to ten friends with video-mail in a news chain letter. When that happens, this new form of news distribution will become the news, and then ultimately, it will be no big deal.”43
Hall reported that some of the videophones offered digital editing capabilities and that a new service in Japan made it possible to post photos and text on the Web directly from a mobile phone. People already use weblogging software to “blog” in real-time from conferences and conventions (Chapter 5), continuously updating their Web pages through 802.11b connections.44Putting cameras and high-speed Net connections into telephones, however, moves blogging to the streets. By the time this book is published, I’m confident that street bloggers will have constructed a worldwide culture.
Mobile Ad Hoc Social Networks
Imagine my excitement, many months into my smart mob odyssey, when I came across a research report titled “When Peer-to-Peer Comes Face-to-Face: Collaborative Peer-to-Peer Computing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks,” from the “Wearable Computing Group” at the University of Oregon.45 The Oregon group, assembled by Professor Zary Segall and led by Gerd Kortuem, had designed a test bed for smart mobs around the same time I began to believe such a development was possible.
“Mobile ad hoc social network” is a longer, more technical term than “smart mob.” Both terms describe the new social form made possible by the combination of computation, communication, reputation, and location awareness. The mobile aspect is already self-evident to urbanites who see the early effects of mobile phones and SMS. Ad hoc means that the organizing among people and their devices is done informally and on the fly, the way texting youth everywhere coordinate meetings after school. Social netwo
rk means that every individual in a smart mob is a “node” in the jargon of social network analysis, with social “links” (channels of communication and social bonds) to other individuals. Nodes and links, the elements of social networks made by humans, are also the fundamental elements of communication networks constructed from optical cables and wireless devices— one reason why new communication technologies make possible profound social changes.
The Wearable Computing Group specializes in exploring the community aspects of wireless, wearable, and peer-to-peer technologies. Kortuem agreed with my assessment when I called him to talk about the research at the University of Oregon. “When I talk about community,” he told me, “I mean both the users who form social networks when they interact personally and communities of developers, like the open source community, where each member shares ideas and contributes to building something larger.”46 In Oregon, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Palo Alto, and Tokyo, small bands of researchers are beginning to walk around the same geographic neighborhoods while wearing intercommunicating computers.