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Title: Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold ISBN: 0-7382-0861-2 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.7 (20 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Very cool technology, very uninspired prose
Comment: In Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold catalogues the technologies that are converging to change the way we live: mobile communications, social networks, distributed processing and pervasive computing. He does a good job of identifying and explaining these and predicting what it will mean when they get together. This makes for an interesting read, but I'm afraid I still found the book maddening.
The worst thing is that a whole half the book is in quotes (or worse, block quotes) from other people and their dissertations or promotional materials. This makes the book lack a singular voice and is very disconcerting. Rheingold not only attributes everything to a fault, he also has the bad habit of explaining where he interviewed each person, what they ate, what funny thing the interviewee had in their office. This makes for ponderous, stalling prose that is painful to read.
He also makes the Lessig-inspired mistake of dividing the world into two camps: the government and big media are lumped on one side, and heroic no-property anarchists are placed in the other. He's right to point out that big media's vested interests are a creature of government, but he doesn't get that that really isn't capitalism. A true market is the ultimate form of the mediated cooperation he pines for.
If you are a techno-cultural geek, you have to read this book. But take it with a grain of salt, and brace yourself for plenty of minutiae.
Rating: 5
Summary: Here it Comes
Comment: By reading this review you're participating in smart mob technology. Congratulations.
I try to stay abreast of science and media technologies, but occasionally a book comes across my desk (I'm a journalist) that puts the pieces together in a way that induces epiphanies in readers - casting a shadow in their minds that sends their thoughts to the book again and again.
In "Smart Mobs" Howard Rheingold looks at the wireless ubiquitous vomitous glorious instruments that continue to invade our lives, and asks some highly relevant questions about how they'll reshape our social structures, what it will mean to always be connected, and what threats this technology poses to "individuality", human rights, health, and sanity. He reminds us in a McLuhanesque way that any time you use a tool to change the world, it also changes you.
Digital telepathy, augmented reality, computers coordinating human interaction - it's all here. It's all big.
Rating: 5
Summary: Remote Control To The World
Comment: How many of you recall that EF Hutton commercial that started off by saying, "When EF Hutton talks, people listen". The same thought can be applied to Howard Rheingold.
Rheingold is veteran technology watcher and well-publised futurist. He has identified yet another transformative technology. In 'Smart Mobs' he describes in vivid detail how large, geographically dispersed groups connected only by thin threads of communications techology, such as text messaging, e-mail, cell phones, two-way pagers, and web sites, can draw together in the blink of an eye, groups of people together for a collective cause.
From various parts of the world, Rheingold, has gathered stories about engineers and inventors of all sorts, working feverishly to create ever-smaller and more powerful devices that contribute to this new paradigm.
In this book,Rheingold points out examples of Smart Mobs such as the swarms of demonstrators who used mobile phones, Web sites, laptops and handheld computers to coordinate their protests against the World Trade Organization in November of 1999.
Rheingold shows a concern of smart mobs other than describing the weath of new communications technology that is available and coming. He is also concerned about the social, political, economic, environmental and even genetic consequences of the ever-expanding and more intrusive plethora of multidirectional communications technology.
This book is a must read.
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Title: Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi ISBN: 0452284392 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson ISBN: 0684868768 Publisher: Scribner Book Company Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts ISBN: 0393041425 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks by Mark Buchanan ISBN: 0393041530 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig ISBN: 0375726446 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 12 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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