Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

Comments by Noah Barish

March 18, 2003

Our discussion and readings of “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution” was both informative and frustrating. The author Rheingold aptly presents many social applications of wireless gadgetry, from the primitive text-messaging cell phones used to coordinate 1 million protesting Manila residents in 1986 to the mystical sounding Auranet, which broadcasts personal information in order to clarify the user’s ranking in the techno pecking order. But his analysis fell short of explaining the possible effects of these technologies on their users and society as a larger whole. To his credit, Rheingold did not claim to deliver those explanations, and then fail to deliver. Instead, he wisely concluded Chapter 7 with several thought questions, opening the door for reader speculation and investigation. One question that Rheingold did not ask but that deserves examination is whether mobile devices just aid in the coordination of conventional social interactions or actually create a higher form of social intelligence.

For example, the epigram heading Chapter 7 quotes Vincente Rafael from “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in Recent Philippine History” claiming:

Cell pones then were invested not only with the power to surpass crowded conditions and congested surroundings brought about by the state’s inability to order everyday life. They were also seen to bring a new kind of crowd about, one that was thoroughly conscious of itself as a movement headed towards a common goal.

Rafael believes that the cell phones served two purposes. First, they succeeded in passing the simple text message, “ Go 2EDSA, Wear blck” to over a million citizens, which initiated the overthrow of the Estrada regime. Cell phones enabled citizens to surmount the sheer logistical challenge of notifying and coordinating a rapid political uprising. Second, they seemed to infuse a collective purpose and self- awareness into the crowd of protesters. It is almost as if the cell phones (akin to neurons), and the messages passed between them (akin to electrochemical impulses) were seen as the rare tangible evidence of the group’s political intention and amassed social power. Raphael’s account fits nicely with Rheingold’s under-specified thesis that our whole concept of group behavior is fundamentally changed by the ubiquity of connected technology (from Handout), to the degree that crowds can attain a new sort of cell phone facilitated self consciousness.

However, Rheingold’s writing acknowledges the pragmatic counterpoint to Raphael’s romanticism. That is, that “smart mobs” are not necessarily “wise mobs”. While “Smart” refers to the high rate of information flow throughout the group, “wise” implies that the group experiences an increased social efficacy or robustness like that mention by Raphael with the protesters in Manila. Interestingly, Rheingold’s most striking insight in Chapter 7 frames this distinction between “wise” and “smart”. He sees, “a possible connection between computer-wearing social networks of thinking, communicating humans and the swarm intelligence of unthinking (but also communicating) ants, bees, fish, and birds.” (pg 176). The wise mob is the nuanced social network of people, engaged in helpful, possibly consciousness-enhancing information exchange through mobile technology. The smart mob is the unemotional, mobile technology facilitated, information-heavy network of individual actors whose actions may yield emergent organization. When we get down to it, we can only guess whether mobile technology will actually generate social wisdom, or leaving us smarting from a broken promise.