WashPo talks to Howard Rheingold about Smart Mobs, his new book about the ways that networked communications generate purposeful, leaderless swarms of humanity:
“It’s the search for peak experience, something that’s really going to be special,” says Adam Eidinger, a District political organizer. “It happened to me just last week. There was a concert at Fort Reno — Fugazi.” His cell rang. “There’s this guy, Bernardo, who’s one of the biggest swarmer cell-phone people I know.” Came the restless call: ” ‘Where are you? There are all these people here!’ And he wasn’t just calling us. He called 25 people. Pretty soon everybody he knew was sitting on the grass, and none of them knew they were going to be there that morning.”…
Former Philippine president Joseph Estrada, accused of massive corruption, was driven out of power two years ago by smart mobs who swarmed to demonstrations, alerted by their cell phones, gathering in no time. “It’s like pizza delivery,” Alex Magno, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines, told The Post at the time. “You can get a rally in 30 minutes — delivered to you.”
(via Ben Hammersley)