Commentary on Smart Mobs (Rheingold)

The power of the mobilee many is inspiring, shocking and frightening. Rheingold does a very good job in this chapter of conveying the sheer impact that mobile networking can have on society. If I am a revolutionary in the Philippines, or a protestor at the WTO meeting in 1999, I am very excited of the possibilities for mobileization that mobile technologies provide. But if I am a policeman or a legislator in the Philippines or at the WTO meeting, I am very disappointed that such technologies can be used to bring me down.
There are two issues that jump out at me when considering the Smart Mobs excerpt and discussion in our class. The first issue is the destructive nature of mobileization, and the other is the constructive nature of it. I wish we had spent more time discussing the issues behind the technology in the destructive case, and spent more time discussing systems such as WALID mentioned in the reading in the constructive case.
To be honest, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the power of mobileization, which can be greatly aided by mobile technologies, is lynchings. I know it’s unfair to put a highly orchestrated and thought out event such as the 1999 WTO protests on the same level with lynchings, but in a way, they are both a chip off the old block. The whole point of having a legal and political infrastructure is to have a just way to sort out differences of opinion, to have a filter through which strong opinions that can harm other people can be restrained and brought down to a reasonable level, and to have a mutually agreed upon framework with which to address problems. We don’t have governments such as the United States’ in place out of random power-trips of robber-barons, we have them in place out of necessity, out of intelligent responses to anarchy that truly leave the helpless completely helpless. With its many faults, the United States is still a far better place to live than other countries without any form of legal accountability. The United States today is a far better place to live than it was in the old days where things were decided by duals, and it is far better place to live than a rural town in Guatemala where one little slip can result in you getting lynched by 300 indigenous people who are convinced you are the devil. The point is, the very institutions that the Philippine revolution and the WTO protestors were fighting against are the very same institutions that were originally intended to protect people from the masses, from ad hoc robber-baron-esque no-protection-for-the-underdog infrastructures that were in place before the democratic government was in place and before the WTO was formed. If the mobile many has the power to destroy or take down the filters that were set up to protect the world from the mobile many, than the filters are useless. If the semi-intelligent dialogue between parties in the government or WTO is completely replaced with unintelligent yells and screams of the masses, then we are no better off than we were before. The solution, in my mind, is incorporating the perspective of the mobile many into the existing infrastructure to allow for level-headed action. This is obviously easier said than done, and WTO protestors would argue that their protest is necessary in order to have their voice heard. But I fear that if mobile technologies aid mobilization, they will tend to aid the lynching type of mobilization, and not the intelligent cooperative type of mobilization.
So, how can mobilization be constructive? This leads to my second issue. It seems that systems such as WALID, and other systems like CraigsList and eBay that aren’t mentioned in the chapter, are very effective avenues of cooperative mobilization. If mobile technologies can allow two strangers to end up carpooling to the same place together, or allow a group of friends to easily negotiate errand runs based on current locations, or allow two complete strangers to have a market exchange more effectively, then this mobilization, in my opinion, is a constructive mobilization. The ability to connect someone who wants something, with someone else who can give that something conveniently, is invaluable, and in my opinion, the key asset of networks. If the mobile many are going to have power, it should have constructive interactions with entities they normally wouldn’t have interacted with had it not been for mobile technologies. This is a use of mobile technologies that I think should get more focus and attention. One may argue that the Philippine revolution and WTO protests are examples of such constructive cooperation, and in a sense, regardless of one’s political stance, they are. But I would rather see mobile technologies influencing the decision making process of government and international business leaders from the inside, rather than a massive lynching effort from the outside. I believe that this is one of mobile technologies greatest assets, it’s ability transcend physical and socio-economic barriers, to increase dialogue and exposure to heterogeneity in the real world, and thus increasing intelligent cooperative behavior.
That is the true power of the mobile many.