Howard Rheingold’s book, Smart Mobs, discusses the evolution of the Internet as stationary to the Internet on the go. The first five chapters of the book reveal the infinite possibilities that arise with a mobile Web. Users can control, look-up, and purchase an endless amount from their wireless technology devices.
All over the world technology has been evolving at an extremely fast pace. Rheingold mentions Japan and Finland, in particular, two countries that have been home to several significant advancements in the mobile Internet arena. Rheingold describes Tokyo, Japan as a place where the youth rely on their cellular phones for virtually everything. Texting, especially, is extremely popular in Japan, where teens can keep in contact with their friends from wherever they are, whenever they want. Some even hold dating relationships through text messages.
What are they consequences of such cell phone-reliant behavior? According to graduate student Tomoko Kawamura, “Kids have become loose about time and place” because they have cell phone (p. 5). People are so connected that they have virtually no worries about punctuality anymore. That is quite a strong effect of mobiles, and it is one that is worrisome in itself. Have we started to disregard the values that we used to hold as priorities?
NTT DoCoMo, a subsidiary of Japan’s telephone operator NTT, leads the wireless cellular industry in Japan. Across the globe in Finland, Helsinki, as of 2002, led the world in the number of Net connections and cell phone users. To be honest, I would not have predicted that to be true. I was always under the impression that Tokyo, Japan was far more connected that any other city in the world. From Sweden come a variety of virtual communities, such as LunarStorm. Ultimately, people between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four are those dominating Web communities. The Swedes are also the creators of many innovative technological devices used around the world.
Rheingold makes statement after statement that the world is advancing to quickly technologically. He’s correct to the point that his own book comes with an expiration date: 2002, the year it was published. The author states, for example, that text messaging with cell phone can only be transmitted to the holders of cell phones who subscribe to the same operator as the sender is not longer the case. While texting has grown increasingly popular in the U.S., it still does not compare to the popularity in Europe and Asia. This probably has a lot to do with the cost of texting—which was created cheap to begin with in other nations.
Rheingold discusses in detail game theory, which explains the popularity and uses of the mobile Web. Those who belong to mobile virtual mobs are smart to employ the “tit for tat” strategy, which allows for equal gain of each player. This type of game strategy is applied to software as well. Shawn Fanning, for example, created Napster to allow users to share music files through a large network. Those songs that one downloads to one’s personal computer become available to others, working as a give and take relationship.
Not only is technology now portable, but it is wearable. Rheingold describes the way in which people are developing completely customized computer that collect data based on where a person is and what he or she wants to do. Steve Mann, University of Toronto professor who has wanted to be a cybernetic organism (cyborg) since a young age, defends human intelligence for the purpose of learning about our surroundings. He argues that each person should be able to control his or her own environment, which is what wearing a computer entails. Analyst Gartner Consulting “predicts that 40 percent of adults and 75 percent of teenagers will use wearable computing devices by 2010” (p. 112). Considering that is only two years away, I’m not sure the mobile Web is advancing that quickly. The introduction of Apple’s iphone in the U.S. has caused a leap in that direction, but the cost of such devices still do not seem to be attracting as many users as possible. Though as more and more advanced devices begin circulating, prices will go down, and more people will begin to join the trend. Only time will tell what the future of technology holds.
