Thursday, after a pleasant early morning flight from Stockholm to Umea where Stephanie Hendrick met us at the airport, we enjoyed an afternoon seminar with Howard Rheingold. The seminar was organized by the Humanities Lab (HumLab) of Umea University. The HumLab provided a great space, a cross between a high tech laboratory and welcoming living room, it lured everyone into pleasant and interesting conversation immediately.
What led to writing Smart Mobs
Howard Rheingold told us his stories of the observations that triggered him into writing Smart Mobs. (also see Jill Walkers excellent notes from two days before when Rheingold presented in Bergen) Several of his observations were:

in the Phillipines within hours after the government seemed to censor tv transmission about impeachment hearings of the president, thousands of people showed up on a central square in black clothes. Not by central organization but by sms-ing eachother.
The interesting thing to Howard Rheingold was that everywhere he went he saw these new phenomena and heard it describe in the same words. Metaphors like birds flocking to seemingly random places, to suddenly move on again.
He then realised that mobile phones were growing into multifunctional and multimedia devices, text, speech, and internet and camera turned it into hybrid devices. This enabled what his colleague described as Collective Action.
How devices enabling collective action will change the world
When the PC came to our homes, we did not use them the way we used the same calculating power in mainframes. We invented new uses. An effect that is well known from philosophy of technology. We can expect the same from mobile devices, which will make available huge calculating power away from the desktop. A critical barrier is price. The average monthly income world wide is $60-$70, when prices drop below that a tipping point is reached. Already these devices are creating change. Fishermen getting text messages while at sea where to get the best price for your catch. That literally helps feed your kids. Mobile devices foster emergent patterns, by providing until recently only centrally available capacities to distributed masses. This enables collective action. (Interestingly one of Humlabs people, Jim, told the story how the Swedish police went after the people who were trying to coordinate the informationflow during the anti globalist riots in Goteborg. There were no leaders to prosecute, so they went after the information agents.)
When the devices are widely distributed so will the uses. People will create applications fitting their needs. Tim Berners Lee did not need permission to create the Web, he just wrote something that was useful to him, and as it turned out to a lot of others.
When thinking about how this stuff will have influence, also think about projects already using distributed calculating power, like SETI or the Folding Project (http://folding.stanford.edu). Add location awareness (geotagging, RFID) to the mix, with millions and millions of RFID chips being spread around the world. Barcodes are an advance warning, of what can happen with these chips permeating the environment, certainly if combined with e.g. Google searches.
Rheingold rightly warns about that none of this technology is intrinsically good. It can be used both for good and for bad. He points out that the violent riots surrounding the Miss World pageant in Nigeria were also the result of SMS-based communication.
Q&A session
In the Q&A session several interesting things came up.
Asked if centralization wouldn’t be a threat to the changes he described earlier, Rheingold observed that the development of technology is moving away from centralization, and active devices are increasingly becoming their own infrastructure. (think for instance of the Apple wireless cards that can both serve as a Wifi-card and as an Acces point) Of course centralized vested interests will battle this (something we are already seeing in the music and movie industries I think. By the way, Rheingold also passionately spread the message that current intellectual property laws are killing of innovation)
What will be the information containers of tommorrow? Where to store all our information is indeed an interesting question. There are basically three containers involved, the cloud of internet, storage devices and our heads. How much cognitive overhead can you deal with to keep track of all those info-containers. Will we cope? Howard Rheingold seemed uncertain, or as he said he may be too old, but I think we will adapt. Information overload does not exist.
Collective action also in the past changed things rapidly. Collective hunting drove bigger mammals into extinction quickly, agriculture made possible cities and empires, which in turn required administration. Writing exploded because of it, being followed by the printing press etc. It is a continuous process of acceleration. He wonders if we will keep up. I think we will, or at least the younger generations will. Institutions change slowly, only when the old people die Continuing this thought by the way would confirm my own intuition that the current ageing of the workforce, and the imminent retirement of large parts of the workforce in Europe can be an enormous catalyst for change and innovation.
Howard Rheingold sees huge potential for virtual ways of dealing with information, as opposed to more tangible stuff like books etc. He uses the word co-evolution. It reminds me of Dennet’s book about evolution where he explains culture as a realm accelerating our evolution because we can change and adapt without having to change our physical lay-out. The virtual world is a place within culture where even more acceleration is possible.
He points to India and China where two billion people are on the brink of adding their creativity to that mix.
All in all a very worthwile afternoon, even though much of what Rheingold talked about wasn’t new, at least not to my ears. He did add different perspectives though, and hearing your own observations and suspicions put into words by others helps to reflect on them better. During the small scale reception afterwards, to which we were luckily invited by Patrick, head of HumLab we had plenty time to talk to the people of HumLab and Howard Rheingold in person, continuing on the themes of his earlier presentation. Howard Rheingold seemed interested in the concept of our Blogwalks, as it too is a collective action from distributed agents.
Next entries will go into the workshop with Howard Rheingold on Friday morning and the Blogwalk meeting on Friday afternoon.
[Update: The videostream of the Seminar (RealPlayer needed)]