Smart Talk about Smart Mobs
December 1st, 2002
Howard Rheingold has been talking about his new book, Smart Mobs on The Well.
There's plenty of thought-provoking material here. (Not to mention yet another book for me to look out for once it's out in paperback.) The discussion is naturally somewhat focussed on the US when it turns to the regulatory environment, but there are some fascinating contributions from Dave Hughes about his successful efforts to persuade the Welsh Assembly of the merits of community-based wireless broadband access.
[Via Boing Boing]
December 1st, 2002 at 22:43
An idea arguably anticipated in Larry Niven's "Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club", which explored the problems caused by such collective activity. In the story, the mobs were physical, caused by people arriving en masse by matter transporter to witness, say, something interesting they'd seen on the news. But there are analogous e-phenomena, such as the public records server being crashed by the number of visitors when the 1901 census became available.
December 1st, 2002 at 23:57
Or, indeed, the Slashdot Effect.
(To nitpick for a moment, I believe the story 'Flash Crowd' – published in 1973, according to the ISFDB – was where Niven coined the term, which then popped up again in 'The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club' in 1974.)
I just hope we're not going to see some of his other stories turn out to be so prescient. If the world of 'The Jigsaw Man' comes to pass then we're all in big trouble.
(Some argue that China is already halfway to the world of 'The Jigsaw Man', but for me the scariest element of that story is the short-sighted way that the voters had demanded that politicians introduce stiffer penalties for trivial offences as soon as it became clear that it would serve to increase the supply for the organ banks.)