Howard Rheingold stopped by Indiana University today, as part of the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics lecture series. Rheingold is an important author in the exploration of communities, a journey that began over two decades ago with Tools for Thought and more recently Smart Mobs. In between was a book about his experiences in a virtual community (a term he is credited with creating) called “The WELL.”
Howard’s one-hour talk at the IMU covered many of the examples of smart mobs from his book, with some more recent examples thrown in. Smart mobs are ways of doing things cooperatively due to new connections, usually achieved through advances in technology. Existing infrastructure and tools combine to create new media that could not be predicted by looking at the component parts. “Smart mobs can do good, but also can do evil,” warned Rheingold. Among the anecdotal examples:
- Distributed Computation — The SETI @ Home project is probably the most well known, but other efforts have also sought online volunteers to lend computing power to a big project during downtime.
- Humanitarian Coordination — Disasters, such as the Tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, have benefited from use of media like blogs and wikis to help resources find their way to the affected areas. The IRC community provided news coverage of Katrina by dumping radio transmission transcripts onto a central wiki. The effort was short-lived but effective, eventually breaking down due to the politics of site control, contributor burnout and better reporting by mainstream media.
- Commerce — The fact that eBay exists is testimony to the impact user feedback can have. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game theory experiment about cooperation, predicting self-preservation would win out even at the cost to the individual and society. By adding a reputation system into the open sale of items, eBay has bypassed that dilemma with collective information to increase trust of the sender and receiver of goods.
- News Channels — When government-backed news sources failed to satisfy their hunger for knowledge, Koreans created Oh My News, a wiki-like user-driven content site boasting some 50,000 citizen reporters. Authors are paid based on reader responses that push stories to the top of the site. The Sunlight Foundation is an organization that highlights the hidden public records which are deliberately made obscure, such as earmarks added to Congressional bills.
On the media horizon comes NewsTrust.net, a site where news is rated by users using a sophisticated survey. The site is in beta but hopes to educate as well as inform by training readers to be critical thinkers. A familiar name popped up on the front page when I went to that site: Aldon Hynes, who worked on the Lamont campaign this past year (). His testimonial for NewsTrust is:
I started using NewsTrust early on, in an effort to find those news stories that were better than average. I’ve found many great stories this way. As I’ve gotten more involved, I’ve started reviewing and submitting stories myself. It has caused me to stop, think and learn more about what makes for better journalism. With this, I’ve come to better appreciate some news sources that I’ve not always favored, as I’ve come to see some of their better journalism.
Rheingold also provided a historical perspective of collective action, beginning with it being a key reason smallish, slowish primates were able to evolve out of the trees to win out over faster and more savage creatures. The coordinated hunt that could bring down large mammoths also brought about the concept of economics, where surplus meat could become a kind of wealth. The printing press may not have created Protestants and Democracy, but the technology lessened the reliance on central elite institutions to provide information to the masses. Science no longer relied on a once-in-generation thinker to contemplate all of the answers; knowledge could aggregate through publication and allow any reader to build upon the work of another.
Responding to a question, Rheingold said there is no real research done on the smart mob examples. He’d like to see a formal survey of the above phenomena, as well as disclosure about the dangers of mob effects. Other areas of relevant research might include design principles for smart mob systems (work being done here at IU by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom) and who owns user-generated content (an issue growing more common for places like YouTube and Second Life).
The question I didn’t ask him (I was late and already missed one bus home) was about his definition of community had changed or might conceivably be changed by the continued evolution of cooperation. He called Martin Luther’s Protestant movement the first virtual community, but that obviously didn’t involve the Internet. Might new technology affect component concepts like duration, critical mass, discussions, and human feeling? If so, might communities of yesterday lose their status as such?
