Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

Author:Howard Rheingold [HOWARD RHEINGOLD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2011-12-23T16:00:00+00:00

Starner demonstrated the power of the collective by challenging reporters to ask him questions. Tharner used his handheld keyboard and wireless Net connection to send the question to all the computer users, mobile or stationary, who subscribe to the intellectual collective known as “the help instance.” Students doing homework in their dorm room or the library, computer wearers walking across campus, can see the message and respond to it if they know the answer or have access to the appropriate reference.

Mann views the current fashionability of WearComp skeptically: “We cannot assume that all wearable technologies will be empowering. The ease with which researchers, sniffing the winds of technological change, switched from smart rooms to smart clothes (all the while maintaining what can only be described as a corporate ideology) clearly indicates the danger of blanket assumptions concerning the benefits of wearable technology. One can envision many wearable systems that, unfortunately, will take us in the other direction—away from personal freedom.”66 Mann cautions against WearComp that is sold as an individually empowering technology, but which is actually a “double agent” for some other institution or enterprise who wants to control or influence people.67 The technical question with politically important implications is, Who controls the information that comes into the WearComp and radiates out from the WearComp to sentient devices in the world?

Since Mann left to inspire new generations of wearable computer students at Toronto and Starner started incubating wearable computer research at Georgia Tech, wearable computing has grown to be a major focus at Media Lab. A group at MIT is creating MIThril, the next generation of wearable computer, named after a magical garment in Lord of the Rings: “Our goal is to not simply build a platform, but to build a community of researchers, designers, and users.”68

Perhaps more important than state-of-the-art wearable computer research platforms is the emergence of a hobbyist community similar to the subcultures that preceded and drove the PC and the Web. It didn’t take long to find out that cyberspace is full of Web sites and mailing lists devoted to wearable computers. That’s how I came to meet a cyborg in the lobby of New York’s Roosevelt Hotel. The president of Pakistan was staying at the same hotel that night, so the place was full of Secret Service agents, but Melanie McGee was sitting at a table in black leather and much more: head-mounted display over one eye, wearable computer in a shoulder holster, electrical cables wrapped in black electrical tape linking them, and battery pack on her belt. She composed email with one hand, held a drink in the other. Young men standing around the hotel lobby glanced at her and then talked into their sleeves. She’s a programmer and independent software developer when she’s not plugging components into her wearable computer. Even though only one of us wore a wearable computer as we walked around Manhattan, I found that the conversation could be augmented by easy access to Google. (Imagine conversations in the days before you could look up the answer to any question.

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