Product Description

Smart Mobs takes us on a journey around the world for a preview of the next techno-cultural shift. The coming wave, says Rheingold, is the result of super-efficient mobile communications-cellular phones, wireless-paging, and Internet-access devices-that will allow us to connect with anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Rheingold offers a penetrating perspective on the new convergence of pop culture, cutting-edge technology, and social activism. He also reminds us that the real impact of mobile communications will come not from the technology itself but from how people use it, resist it, and adapt to it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #188877 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-15
• Released on: 2003-10-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780738208619
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
The title of this book is a mild pun. People are using smart "mobs" (rhymes with "robes") to become smart "mobs" (rhymes with "robs"), meaning, sophisticated mobile Internet access is allowing people who don't know each other to act in concert. In this timely if at times overenthusiastic survey of wireless communication devices, Rheingold (The Virtual Community) conveys how cell phones, pagers and PDAs are shaping modern culture. He interviewed dozens of people around the world who work and play with these technologies to see how this revolution is manifesting, and his findings are stirring. The concept has caught on among young Japanese, where cliques of teenagers hang out together all day, despite being in different places, by sending and receiving hundreds of iconic text transmissions on their iMode telephones. And demonstrators in Seattle and Manila relied on wireless telephones to coordinate their actions and evade barricades. In major cities, Rheingold says, techno-hipsters can congregate in "WiFi" areas that interact with their wireless devices to let them participate in a virtual social scene. In one amusing example, he tells of upscale prostitutes who can enter their services and prices into their mobile phones, allowing customers to discreetly determine if anyone nearby is selling what they want to buy (a Japanese company, Lovegety, has already adapted this idea to dating). This study of the potential of mobile, always on, fast Internet access nicely serves as a travelogue to the future, showing the possibilities and dangers of communications innovation.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Mobile, wireless, Net-connected devices are now being hawked by the computer and telecom industries, prompting technology author Rheingold to take stock of the incipient revolution. Glimpsing the future in vignettes of wireless users in Helsinki and Tokyo, Rheingold primarily explores the sociology that might characterize a world of "ad-hocracy," in which people cluster temporarily around information of mutual interest. Rheingold describes how consumerism might change when pedestrians, as their mobiles detect stores and restaurants, patch into electronic gossip about an establishment. The location-detection feature of these devices will inevitably breach privacy, which informs Rheingold's somewhat skeptical stance toward this brave new world, and contrasts with the enthusiasm of certain computer scientists he interviews, such as Microsoft's promoter of a wireless urban space pervasively connected to the Internet. The cyber-savvy and socially aware will be interested and undoubtedly concerned by Rheingold's informed report. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A vivid mural of the...new frontier of the mobile Web." -- Fast Company

"A wide-ranging and fascinating survey of...emerging technologies." -- Harvard Business Review

"Lively and illuminating." -- Boston Globe

"[Rheingold's] notion of smart mobs is a provocative distillation, a sort of unified field theory of current tech thinking." -- BusinessWeek

Customer Reviews

Describes the Techno-Powered Popular Revolution

At the very end of the book, the author quotes James Madison as carved into the marble of the Library of Congress: "...a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." And there it is--Howard Rheingold has documented the next level of the Internet, in which kids typing 60 words a minute with one thumb, "swarms" of people converging on a geospatial node guided only by their cell phones; virtual "CIAs" coming together overnight to put together massive (and accurate) analysis with which to take down a corporate or government position that is fradulent--this is the future and it is bright.

As I go back through the book picking out highlights, a few of the following serve to capture the deep rich story being told by this book--breakthroughs coming from associations of amateurs rather than industry leaders; computer-mediated trust brokers--collective action driven by reputation; detailed minute-by-minute information about behaviors of entire populations (or any segment thereof); texting as kid privacy from adult hearing; the end of the telephone number as relevant information; the marriage of geospatial and lifestyle/preference information to guide on the street behavior; the perennial problem of "free riders" and how groups can constrain them; distributed processing versus centralized corporate lawyering; locations with virtual information; shirt labels with their transportation as well as cleaning history (and videos of the sex partners?)--this is just mind-boggling.

Finally, the author deserves major credit for putting all this techno-marvel stuff into a deep sociological and cultural context. He carefully considers the major issues of privacy, control, social responsibility, and group behavior. He ends on very positive notes, but also notes that time is running out--we have to understand where all this is going, and begin to change how we invest and how we design everything from our clothing to our cities to our governments.

This is an affirming book--the people that pay taxes can still look forward to the day when they might take back control of their government and redirect benefits away from special interests and back toward the commonwealth. Smart mobs, indeed.

Smart mobs, really smart book
"Smart mobs" sounds like an oxymoron: after all, what's more impulsive or uncontrolled than a mob? It's typical of Howard Rheingold to throw down such a brightly-colored rhetorical gauntlet, and then to describe how smart mobs are emerging in places as diverse as Tokyo, anti-globalization protests, and virtual communities. Forget images of mobs storming the Bastille, or rioters: smart mobs are a new kind of social organization, made possible by real-time, connective technologies-- cell phones, SMS, pagers, and the Web. If old-fashioned mobs were just giant assemblies of individuals, communications technologies give them nervous systems, the ability to coordinate their actions, to work together, and respond to changes and challenges. Smart mobs are not automatically good or evil. The crowds that brought down Phillipine president Joseph Estrada responded to calls put out via SMS. Anti-globalization protesters have been avidly embraced network technologies. So has Al Qaeda.

Some readers will doubtless find familiar ideas in "Smart Mobs:" for whatever odd reason, 2002 has been The Year of Books About Self-Organizing Social Networks, thanks to writers as different at Steven Johnson ("Emergence") and Mark Taylor ("The Moment of Complexity"). But Rheingold is scrupulous and generous about acknowleding his influences; besides, the real value of his book lies in his own fieldwork, and his reflections on what the smart mob phenomenon will mean for business, politics, and social life. Even if your copy of Wolfram is dog-eared and the spine is weak from re-reading (and let's face it, whose isn't), it's still worth following Rheingold through Shibuya, Helsinki, and the Web...

Design for Community Mini Review
Howard Rheingold has impeccable timing. In the mid 80s, aware that personal computers were changing the way we think, he wrote Tools for Thought. In the early 90s, he explored how emerging digital networks were changing social groups in The Virtual Community. Twice now he's put words to important social/digital trends, years before they reach critical mass.

So when Rheingold writes a book, it's a good idea to pay attention. His new book, Smart Mobs, takes a hard look at what happens when networked virtual communication goes mobile. And it's a mind-bending read.

Consider for a moment that, for a good many years, personal computers sat in offices and living rooms totally disconnected from each other. It seems quaint now, but I remember that time. And if you can remember the sea change that happened in the world when all those computers (and the people behind them) got connected to the internet, you can get some inkling of the change Rheingold predicts is on its way when that same networked computational power goes mobile.

We're in for another whirlwind of change in technology, and with it, a change in the way communities come together and express themselves. The book is a captivating exploration of what these new technologies are (think internet-enabled, location-aware mobile phones and PDAs) and how they're already shaping communities around the world.

Howard's writing is engaging and deep, and the book is an evenhanded exploration of the new technology, both good and bad. If you want a glimpse of the virtual communities of the future, pick up his book and follow the ongoing conversation at smartmobs.com.

(Reprinted from designforcommunity.com with permission.)