Sunday, September 22, 2002"Howard Rheingold's new book, "Smart Mobs," is coming out next November. It's a hell of a book, about the ways that technology enable groups of people to spontaneously form and coordinate in response to current events -- from SMS-enabled Filipiino demonstrations over official censorship to ubiquitous Japanese kids who photograph everything with their DoCoMo phones and post them online all the time.
Howard's site, SmartMobs.com, is a blog that talks about technology and events that show smart mobs in action." [Boing Boing Blog]
There's so much about information shifting on the front page alone of Rheingold's blog that I'm automatically adding his book to the Shifted Reading List sight unseen. I really hope Audible can get the audio rights to it. Here's an illustrative excerpt from the book summary:
"The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world."
And that, my friends, is the place from which libraries need to be available - everywhere. The book's introduction is titled How to Recognize the Future When It Lands on You, and the future is certainly hovering inches away from us.
I'll be interested to read the book and see if Rheingold discusses libraries at all, considering how we could play a huge role in the information exchanged between smart mobs. Think of librarians as a force letting authentic and accurate information loose into the wild (one form of reputation).
And in the spirit of smart communication, the book's blog has a RSS feed!
[The Shifted Librarian]
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 6:07:29 PM -
"Our hope and aspiration is that by setting an example, other universities will also put their valued materials on the internet and thereby make a truly profound and fundamental impact on learning and education worldwide," said MIT's Professor Dick Yue.The people behind this say there is no "revenue objective," hoping "it will put the net back on track towards its original goal of sharing information and knowledge around the world, rather than selling CDs and t-shirts." How refreshing... [jenett.radio]
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:22:18 PM -
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:21:19 PM -
The Boston Globe's "Ideas" section has an excellent article by Elaine Scarry, who teaches at Harvard, on why a distributed defense makes sense. Here's the way the headline writer put it:
FAILSAFE
On Sept. 11, passengers armed only with cell phones and courage succeeded where a multibillion-dollar military failed. Does their achievement mean that 50 years of American defense policy is all wrong?
After a careful and persuasive analysis of what worked (bottom-up action coordinated via cellphones and loved ones) and what didn't (centralized defense via scrambling jet fighters) on Sept. 11 after the first planes hit, Scarry enlarges the idea to nuclear policy, concluding that the world will not give up these "monarchic weapons" (because they are to be used without any consent by the citizenry) until the U.S. does.
The Ideas section of the Sunday Globe is only two weeks old, an expansion of the intellectual content of the journal after it constracted its book section a few months ago. Scarry's article is exactly the sort of piece that will make this section work: provocative without extremism, broadening in scope as it moves along rather than narrowing to details, and very nicely written.
Note: The Globe locks up its content after a few days because it would rather make a few bucks than be a continuing presence in the world's global conversation.
In poking around the Web about Scarry, I immediately found an interview with her (by David Bowman) at Salon about the relationship of beauty and justice. What a remarkable thinker. [JOHO the Blog]
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:41:30 PM -
- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:22:56 PM -
