Smart Mobs takes us on a journey around the world for a preview of the next techno-cultural shift. The coming wave, says Rheingold, is the result of super-efficient mobile communications-cellular phones, wireless-paging, and Internet-access devices-that will allow us to connect with anyone, anytime, anywhere. Rheingold offers a penetrating perspective on the new convergence of pop culture, cutting-edge technology, and social activism. He also reminds us that the real impact of mobile communications will come not from the technology itself but from how people use it, resist it, and adapt to it.

Smart Mobs takes us on a journey around the world for a preview of the next techno-cultural shift. The coming wave, says Rheingold, is the result of super-efficient mobile communications-cellular phones, wireless-paging, and Internet-access devices-that will allow us to connect with anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Rheingold offers a penetrating perspective on the new convergence of pop culture, cutting-edge technology, and social activism. He also reminds us that the real impact of mobile communications will come not from the technology itself but from how people use it, resist it, and adapt to it.

Turgid
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.

incohesive writing
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.

A whirlwind tour through the world next year.
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.

Smart Mobs. Smarter Marketers.
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.

Remote Control To The World
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.

Keen on Smart Mobs
As one who needed a basic primer on various areas of technology--past, present, and future--and their implications for the human being, I found "Smart Mobs" to be both helpful and conversational. Rheingold’s journalistic style kept the topics easy to understand, interesting to read, and fairly light hearted in spite of some rather daunting conclusions that one could draw from his research. As well, those who want to delve further into the various topics discussed will find his endnotes quite helpful--annotated are works from a number of key figures who a) are making, or have made, breakthroughs in technology, or b) provided insightful critiques on those breakthroughs. I found that engaging in "Smart Mobs" opened the door to further research and understanding of this seemingly complex and very progressive area of study.

Smart Mobs, Smart Social Transformation
Smart Mobs are dynamic groups of people who can act together cooperatively even if they are complete strangers. Their communication is facilitated by a new wave of wireless, mobile, portable computing devices. Howard Rheingold provokes us to foresee a future where people spontaneously interact and exchange ideas in a manner that will transform how we work, play, trade, govern, and create.

Rheingold cogently explores examples of what he refers to as a "social tsunami". Special attention is given to mobile telephones which are transforming how youth exercise their social power. Teenage "thumb tribes" have developed new ways of communicating using SMS text messaging in Tokyo and Helsinki. Spontaneous groups coordinated by SMS messages had a more serious impact in the Philippines in January of 2001 when groups of protestors responding to SMS messages managed to play a primary role in overthrowing then President Joseph Estrada.

Much attention is also given to networked PC’s and how supercomputers, open source software and the mobile internet are facilitating social networking. Rheingold adroitly explains how these tools can be both weapons of social control and resistance.

Perhaps the most provocative ideas revolve around the fact that we now have access to information about each other as never before. He explores privacy and trust issues and appears particularly concerned with surveillance web-sites, software and the electronic "bread crumb" trails that we are unaware we are leaving.

Overall, Rheingold expertly weaves his experiences, interviews with experts and solid research to elucidate his interest in how human behavior will change as a result of the latest technological advances. He convincingly argues that our changing notion of community needs to be used in a beneficial manner to create a more humane and sustainable world.

This book is a must read for academics, corporate types and anyone interested in how technology can promote grassroots social change.

smart mobs and trends
This is a very thought-provoking book and the evidence is all around us, from teens IM’ing each other to the current craze of "random mobs" where people use their cell phones to gather at some destination and do something silly, as was recently happening in New York City and elsewhere. These trends are more avidly followed in Europe and Asia than here, but, honestly, what if Rheingold’s barking up the wrong tree and all this texting proves to be just as silly a fad as others in the past?

Bringing down governments is one thing, telling the gang where to meet for pizza is another. I really can’t think of any good reason to use my SMS capability other than to probably annoy someone. 4 stars for a neat idea, but, really who cares other than activists or teens?