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Summary: Turgid
Comment: Rheingold is very bright and full of profound insight. He is abysmal at communicating those ideas. This book is so heavily referenced that reading it is a torment and a slog.
He is certainly right. Wireless, wearable computers will create a world very different than the one we have known. Privacy is disappearing. Anyone-to-anyone communication is already changing our world view and according to the research he cites ad nauseum, young folks growing up in this Webbed world are changing fastest of all.
Rheingold would have immensely profited from the expertise of a thoughtful editor.
Customer Rating:
Summary: incohesive writing
Comment: This book suffers from incohesive writing and lacks a clear framework that covers the theme of smart mobs. The sequence of chapters does not provide a progressive build-up of a framework of any sort. Even more, the sequence inside each chapter does not carry the reader towards any defined theme. On one section the author describes teenagers in Finland sending text messages, then he jumps to his meeting with a company executive, then jumps to describing the mobile phone standards in Europe, etc.
The only common thread among sections in chapters and among the chapters is the smart mobs theme, obviously, but the author does not break down clearly this central theme into its parts. This makes for a very confusing and bothersome reading.
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Summary: A whirlwind tour through the world next year.
Comment: Howard Rheingold has excellent credentials to write this book through his long involvement at Wired magazine. He blends an effervescent interest in smart new gadgetry (point your phone-cam at some foreign signwriting and have it translated into your own language) with a thirsty desire to understand what it means to our society. To hunt down the story he structures the narrative in a breathtaking first-person style that takes us from Shibuya Station in Tokyo to the wireless capital of the world, Helsinki, and then back across the Atlantic to Bell Laboratories - and beyond.
Clearly our society has been undergoing massive underlying change since the advent of the internet and mobile phones - but few writers have really grappled with the wider implications. If, as McLuhan said, the Medium is the Message then wireless technology provides a medium that totally re-engineers the way people can interact with their physical and social environment.
Rheingold calls on dramatic examples of how individuals, wireless and mobile, can outwit the top down forces of the establishment - for example in the World Trade protests at Seattle, and political protests in the Philippines. He uses these as a metaphor for how the top-down 20th Century style organisations, political, industrial or media are increasingly out of step in the mobile age. Rheingold looks to young urban people - urban tribes if you like - as a bellwether to tomorrow's society.
I loved this book. The writing is sharp, the insights deep and Rheingold's ability to take us into the labs of tomorrow a real treat. I strongly recommend it.
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Summary: Smart Mobs. Smarter Marketers.
Comment: The cool thing about "Smart Mobs" is that it's really happening. People are behaving in "linked" ways that transcend the obvious demographic definitions of groups we typically think of as "behaving in unison." As technology and the infrastructure arriving with it enable increasingly extemporaneous networks between people, marketers are similarly challenged to reach outside of traditional mass channels. Howard Rheingold brings us a really nice set of actual examples--combined with his own unique insights--that provide the basis for next-generation communications strategies as what had been cohesive groups fragment into a foam of indivduals united (only) by this moments current interest and the task at hand. For marketers, it's a great read...and a big clue. Anyway, I liked it.
Customer Rating:
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.
