2003-02-25

Smart Mobs


Immediate not very kind thoughts:
Too long. There's a lot of repeated information, especially from chapter to
chapter and often from page to page. Editing could have slimmed it down quite a
bit I think. The end-of-chapter summary lists (if that's what they were) didn't
server any useful purpose, given how much they stood out.


Kinder thoughts:

Good book. The content falls into two buckets:
- Interesting Wired-type article, tech ideas, interviews etc
- Ways of conceiving aspects of this technology [secret properties]

I don't think there's an overarching framework to place "smart mobs" in. What
there is: a lot of social theory ideas about how people work together, how to
enhance this is the new media.


Two things in particular stood out.


1
"The Era of Sentient Things" in ubicomp was pretty cool.
- Smart Motes
- computational wallpaper
- using the phone as a life remote control
- walking people as an adhoc network
	- packet switching radio dynamically
		- the more nodes, the more bandwidth: the open spectrum idea
	- recording a conversation by stiching together passerby's recordings
- makes me think of getting rid of the telegraph metaphor from computing, and
using the self-organising nature of smart motes to build something instead


2
The last chapter on the Panopticon was glorious. Especially...
- Jacque Ellul "The Technological Society" (1954)
	- talked about "technique"
	- '"the ensemble of practices by switch one uses available resources in
order to achieve certain values ends." Slavery is technique. The alphabet is
technique. Government is technique. Steam power is technique. Ellul claimes the
key characteristics of technique are rationality, artificiality, automatism of
technial choice, self-augmentation, monism, universalism, and autonomy.'
	- '"human life as a whole is not systematically ordered. But the collision
between technique and spontaneous activities that are not rationally or
systematically ordered is catastrophic for the spontaneous activities."'
	- he could have been describing hierarchies/meshworks or push/pull.
	- there's more. p198, 199.
- Lewis Mumford "The Myth of the Machine" (1967)
	- 'proposed that the most powerful and dehumanizing invention was not a
visible machine but a social machine in which humans were treated as components
in a massive hierarchical system for building pyramids and skyscrapers, empires
and civilizations. Mumford conjectured origins for what he sometimes called
"the megamachine"...'
	- that's the hierarchy of industrial society
- Joseph Weizembaum "Computer Power and Human Reason" (1976)
	- 'Weizembaum emphasized that the aspect of human nature that computers
externalize is our most machine-like aspect. He called this "the tyranny of
instrumental reasoning," building on Heidegger's view of technology as the
result of a human tendency to "enframe" the world by converting it into a
resource to be used for some end.'
	- just more and more...