Howard Rheingold, ‘Smart Mobs: the power of the mobile many’ Network Logic. Eds. Helen McCarthy, Paul Miller and Paul Skidmore. London: Demos, 2004, pp. 191-202.
According to Howard Rheingold:
-Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don’t know each other.
-‘Killer apps’ of tomorrow’s mobile infocom industry will be social practices.
1. Netwar
-The case of ‘People power’ in 2001
-The Battle of Seattle: the first ‘netwar’, use of wireless communications + mobile social networks , demonstrators had different interests but were united.
-The term “netwars,” by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt
-Smart mobs: violent or non-violent netwar -> only a few of the many possible varieties of smart mob.
-Netwars -> share a similar technical infrastructure with other smart mobs
-New form of social organization, the network
-Networks constitute the newest major social organizational form, after tribes, hierarchies and markets.
2. Peer- to peer Journalism
- Potential for violence, malign purposes of smart mob technologies and techniques, non-violent smart-mobbing in the future, a few experiments of mobile communications are provided
- WearComp researcher, innovator and evangelist, Steve Mann launched ‘ENGwear’
3. Swarm intelligence
-PARC researchers have studied the dynamics of social systems -> a diversity of cooperation thresholds among the individuals -> tip a crowd into a sudden epidemic of cooperation
- Steven Johnson’s 2001 book Emergence ->
1) Kevin Kelly extrapolated from biological to technological networks,
2) apply to cities and Amazon.com’s recommendation system
3) In the case of the cities, the emergent intelligence resembles the ant mind, but humans posses extraordinary onboard intelligence or at least the capacity for it.
- Connections between the behavior of smart mobs and the behavior of swarm systems must be tentative.
Conclusion:
- raises three questions
- Smart mobs are not ‘thing’ -> could not be described with words, but Internet can do that, Internet -> what happened when a lot of computers started communicating
- Smart mobs -> unpredictable but at least partially describable emergent property
- more new media to invent
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Tracy, i think you have had a very fruitful presentation today. You provided many good examples to explain the notions that cover in this chapter. For example, like the WearComp researcher, that having the real time communication, can offer different definition of space and time .
ReplyDeleteHowever, i think you can involve more theories upon the "re-define of ontological challenge" in the presentation. For example, u can further explain how the notion of cyborg can challenge ontologization. Like Wesley mentioned during the tutorial, we may suggest examples to be discussed upon this idea. It would be interesting to see if Stephen William Hawking can be regarded as a cyborg and how we suport and argue this idea.
Hi Tracy, you gave us a very comprehend and detail summary of your presentation based on the readings. If anyone who has not read the readings, your summary does help very much in helping he or she in getting the brief ideas of most of the parts from the readings. It is especially it in the part of Swarm intelligence that I think you summaries this part well. Your effort in giving us the examples in illustrating the concepts from this chapter do help us a lot.
ReplyDeleteYet, as what Stella mentioned in the previous comment that your presentation can be even better if you talk about the ‘re-fine of ontological challenge’ as well. Such as you may show us how the ideas of cyborg crash with the ontology. I also agree with the suggestion given by Wesley that the case of Stephen Hawking can be discussed towards this concept. As Stephen Hawking lives with the aid of electronic devices everyday, so that he types with the movements of his facial muscles combing with his eyes. He’s now even studying of how to create a machine which can connect directly from his brain to the computer. Then, as what he mentioned ‘He writes what he thinks.’ It’d be an interesting topics to be discussed to see whether the can be regarded as a cyborg and how we make our argument towards the ontologization.
In my presentation, I have presented the idea of ‘smart mobs’ and some examples from the reading. However, it is better for me to focus more on the concept of ‘swarming’ strategies which is socially organized and rely on many small units. Moreover, I should discuss more on the relationship between smart mobs and posthumanism, also talk about the 're-define of ontological challenge. It is important for us to think about the power of populations of humans which can be united as a whole and perform its power. Wesley pointed out that one of the quotations in the reading is useful: “several of the earliest investigations have shown that the right kinds of online social networks know more than the sum of their parts: connected and communicating in the right ways, populations of humans can exhibit a kind of ‘collective intelligence’.”(Rheingold, 2004)
ReplyDeleteI think Tracy has given a comprehensive presentation of the reading; it includes some important ideas and some examples for us to understand “smart mobs”. Besides that, the online of the presentation is clear to introduce the content, it divides into three main parts: the netwar, peer-to-peer journalism and swarm intelligence. It is easy for people to follow the presentation. However, as Stella and Priscilla mentioned before, it is suggested to include more theories on the "re-define of ontological challenge", because it helps us to consider the idea of how cyborg challenge the ontology. Besides that, I think it can raise some questions for people to think about how “smart mobs” is related to the notion of post-human. For example, how we may embody the notion of post-human when people become “smart mobs” and form a group of people for some purposes.
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