mart Mobs." The odd phrase might bring to mind rowdies partying after the Harvard-Yale football game. But, in fact, it has been coined by the author Howard Rheingold to describe groups of people equipped with high-tech communications devices that allow them to act in concert — whether they know each other or not.
This phenomenon is showing up among teens in tech meccas like Tokyo, where wireless text messages have caught on in a big way. American hip-hop fans, using two-way pagers, spontaneously appear for parties. And in Finland, members of a local cooperative mix the virtual and the physical by communicating via pagers and cellphones to meet at their club.
It's not all fun and games. Smart mobs in Manila contributed to the overthrow of President Joseph Estrada in 2001 by organizing demonstrations via forwarded cellphone text messages. Protesters at the World Trade Organization gathering in Seattle in 1999 were able to check into a sprawling electronic network to see which way the tear gas was blowing. Or they could use the network to determine their preferred level of involvement: nonviolent demonstrations, civil disobedience or mass arrests. The Sept. 11 terrorists used such devices to plan and coordinate their attack, and the victims used them to convey information — and, in the case of United Airlines flight 93, learned of the other attacks and took action that may have prevented even more devastation.
To Mr. Rheingold, this all looks like a something very big — which is why he calls the book on the subject that is planned for release this fall "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution" (Perseus Publishing).
Mr. Rheingold can recognize a revolution. He published "The Virtual Community" in 1993, long before corporate America realized that the killer app of the Internet would be the connections that the Net allows between people. He sees a similar shift with smart mobs and what he calls swarming.
"It took me eight years to find something that seemed that significant to me," Mr. Rheingold said. He has run around the world for the last two years watching young people in Tokyo and Scandinavia form "thumb tribes," and he has observed the ways that instant communications reshaped citizen revolts on the streets of Seattle, Manila and Caracas.
His feelings about all this are decidedly mixed. A world in which everyone is available online at any time can become a world without privacy, he warns, and the notion of smart mobs implies both potential for new benefits and menace. "I think it's important to signal that this technology has advantages and disadvantages, dangers as well as opportunities," he said.
Swarming behavior in itself is not new, nor does it require high technology. During my college days in the late 1970's, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, hundreds of people could spontaneously appear at my house for a party — with the benefit of no technology more advanced than the waves of attractive force emanating from kegs of free beer.
But Mr. Rheingold argues that the convergence of wireless communications technologies and widely distributed networks allow swarming on a scale that has never existed before. He envisions shifts along the lines of those that began to occur when people first settled into villages and formed nation-states. "We are on the verge of a major series of social changes that are closely tied into emerging technologies," he said.
This blossoming of smart mobs will probably happen despite the interests of business, Mr. Rheingold said, not because of any plan. He points to other technologies, like Napster, that have emerged into broad acceptance to the horror of larger business interests, and said that smart mobs could be setting the stage for the next big fight of the new economy — over control of personal information and of the technologies that connect people.
Other certified smart guys who gaze toward the future say Mr. Rheingold is on to something, but perhaps not as much as he thinks. "What he's talking about is real," said John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox PARC. "The thing that surprises me is that he is casting this as so new." The ideas behind what the folks at PARC called "ubiquitous computing" have been around for a while — and Mr. Rheingold describes the early PARC work extensively.
But to Mr. Brown, the most interesting social changes are not taking place with handheld and wearable devices so much as with the vast communities that are growing up around complex online games like EverQuest and Lineage, and which flourish because of high-speed Internet connections.
Jyri Engestrom, however, would not agree. He is a founder of Aula, a three-year-old cooperative in Finland that provides a physical meeting place to augment the virtual community. The city already had Internet cafes when the group started, he said. "What was missing was not a new Internet cafe," he said, "but a community, or network" where artists, business people and geeks could meet, talk, share ideas and have fun. Mr. Engestrom said the group planned to expand to other places as well, including a local cafe. Aula now has nearly 500 members, he said, with radio frequency ID tags that let them into the Aula meeting space and let others know they are there. "We're using digital technology in our case to enhance community-building in the wild, in the physical world," he said.
The revolution is on hold in this country, at least until text messaging catches on to a greater extent than the well-heeled Blackberry users and scattered communities that use two-way pagers. With the telecommunications industry in the dumps, that could take a while.
But if the change comes, yet another digital divide could emerge between the old and the young. Me, I can't type with my thumbs, and have no interest in learning. Even Mr. Rheingold said that he had the equipment but lacked the desire — and a network of friends — to send text messages to.
"We may not be interested," he said, "but today's 17-year-olds are."
