Tue, Nov 18, 2003
Howard Rheingold on Smart Mobs
#
(The last in my series of
retroactive
summaries.) HowardRheingold
spoke at Stanford on October 24, 2003. His talk, entitled,
"Smart Mobs: Mobile Communication, Pervasive Computing, and Collective
Action," centered around several themes raised in his most recent
book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social
Revolution. (AZ)
Rheingold suggests that there is a threshold for collective action,
and current technology is causing us to approach and, in some cases,
surpass that threshold. He cited many, many interesting examples,
among them: (B0)
- The most recent presidential election in South Korea, where a web site that sent thousands of e-mails and SMS messages in the days preceding helped determine the outcome. (B1)
- The Howard Dean campaign. (B2)
- The observation that the personal computer became a tool for the masses in the United States when the price came down to one month's salary of the average lower middle class family ($2,000-3,000). Rheingold then stated that wireless handhelds will reach that threshold on a worldwide basis (approximately $70) within the next three to six years. (B3)
Rheingold described a project that a friend from Microsoft Research
developed. The friend took an IPAQ with wireless networking and a
camera, and developed a bar code reader that would query the UPC
database and then do a Google search on the product. Rheingold
scanned a box of prunes in his friend's kitchen, which resulted in
articles on Sun-Diamond Corporation that raised questions about its
environmental practices. What would be the impact of a tool like this
if it were available on a wide scale? Such a scenario is not only
possible, it is probable within the next few years. (B4)
/talks |
Posted at 10:10pm
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