Mob informant.

• Author: Propson, David
• Position: Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution - Book Review

SMART MOBS: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold Perseus, $26.00

AT LEAST ONE GOVERNMENT has fallen, in part, because of the way people used text messages," Howard Rheingold claims in his new book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. This will be surprising to those who don't even know what text messages are. A few years ago, Rheingold himself didn't. Yet today, he reports, in some countries, mobile phones are used more for sending short messages entered via the keypad--"texting"--than for making calls. All those little keystrokes can add up to much more, he claims. In January 2001 one million Filipino protesters helped force President Joseph Estrada from power, catalyzed by a text-message summoning them to Epfinaio de los Santos Avenue: "Go 2EDSA. Wear Blck"

According to Rheingold, the Manila protesters and the Palm Pilot-wielding demonstrators who disrupted the World Trade Organization's 1999 Seattle meeting were avatars of a new form of social organization: the "smart mob," an ad-hoc alliance formed fleetingly by people who may not know one another but share a common, immediate goal and can communicate instantaneously. Powerful, fast, and ubiquitous computing devices will, he argues, permit new forms of cooperation to develop. He hopes that mobile communications will create an environment where "epidemics of cooperation" can flourish, whether among rescue workers, doctors, or plain everyday pedestrians.

Rheingold, co-founder of Wired magazine's online community and former editor of the Whole Earth Review, helped create the gee-whiz messianic tone that infected most technology coverage by the time of the dot-com boom. Smart Mobs, like most of his previous books, styles itself as a report from the trenches, introducing readers to the cleverest corporate researchers and most inventive minds, unsystematically dipping into sociology and psychology, and trying to sum it all up under a single thesis. Thus it's a bit of a grab bag: Between chatting up communards in Scandinavia and self-made cyborgs in Toronto, he contemplates al Qaeda's use of cell phones, Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, and the threat of increasingly precise government and corporate surveillance. Still, a few themes can be teased out of the tangle.

He begins by asking why people cooperate at all, leading the reader through potted histories of game theory and the evolution of altruism before getting back to technology. People come to cooperate based on...