I sat down with Howard Rheingold at McMenamin’s Tavern in Portland, Oregon, when he came through town at the tail end of a 14-city book tour promoting his new book Smart Mobs. I started out by asking what his purpose was in writing Smart Mobs. 

Howard Rheingold: I’m trying to take the long view in looking at a new medium for collective action, and to make sense of the early but important signs of how wireless communication devices such as mobile phones will be used to coordinate action. Right now wireless technologies are similar to the Web in its early days...the creators weren’t thinking about building this huge thing, but you’ve got millions of people adding their own content, with blogging [the practice of keeping a “Web log”, or online journal -- ed] as a real example of collective action. 

Curtis Frye: So you think that wireless communication will follow a similar developmental path to the Internet? 

HR: Sometimes when enabling technologies combine, the combination has powers beyond the powers of the component technologies. The microchip and the television screen were the enabling technologies that made the PC possible, but the PC wasn't a mainframe you could look at -- it was a computer that people who had never used computers began to apply to uses that computers had not been used for.  When PCs were connected to the telephone network with modems, the resulting technology was not just PCs connected by telephones, but the Internet, a platform for many-to-many communication that enabled people to do things neither telephones nor  computers alone made possible. When you connect mobile communication devices to a network, you won't get "the Internet (as we know it) on a phone," you'll get a new medium that will enable people to do things they couldn't do before. And when multi-megabit networks become available, the computation power of the mobile devices increases, and the number of members of those networks increases, you'll see real qualitative differences in how the networks are used. I believe collective action -- like the Web, like open source software production -- is a key to understanding the new kinds of applications that will become possible. 

CF: In Europe, Scandinavia, and Japan, you can send text messages to anyone with a wireless phone, regardless of their provider. Why can’t we do that in the US? 

HR: In part because the telco operators in the US aren’t clueful enough to build in that sort of capability, and in part because, like most companies that started out as legislated monopolies, they’re fear-driven instead of money-driven. Also, as I say in the book, it’s like asking General Motors to invent The Beatles. The reason it worked in Japan is that NTT [Nippon Telephone and Telegraph – ed] went outside the company and got a woman who was a polling expert to head up their effort. In the US the companies have clearly seen what they’re in for, but they’re trying to reframe it to their advantage. 

CF: And that reframing takes the form of battles fought on the policy and technology fronts? 

HR: Absolutely. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are trying to drive users by controlling innovation. They’re clearly more clueful about what’s happening, and they want to form a culture of consumers, not a culture of users, but they’re caught in a dilemma. It’s the same problem the government of China faces: if they allow open networks, their power declines; if they don’t allow open networks, their living, breathing research and development test bed disappears. 

CF: Do open networks necessarily mean open information exchange? File trading and so on? 

HR: Open information exchange goes way beyond file trading, and swapping copyrighted material violates enough existing laws that we don’t need to pass any more. A better example of what I’m talking about is something Marc Smith, a researcher at Microsoft, developed. Marc has a wireless-equipped Pocket PC connected with an inexpensive bar code scanner, and he has written some code that connects the information returned from the Univeral Product Code database to Google; when he scans a bar code, his system identifies the product and does a Google search on the producer. The first item he scanned was a box of prunes, which turned out to be from the Diamond Growers Cooperative. On the first results page was a listing of a legal proceeding against Diamond over allegedly inappropriate lobbying efforts trying to change California policy over the use of  methyl bromide and whether it should be listed on food labels. It’s a classic case of a closed system versus an open system: a food label is a closed system, and the Internet is an open system. 

The second item he scanned was a box of Kellogg's Cracklin Oat Bran, which produced links to articles on unlabeled milk and egg ingredients in the cereal which had affected consumers who were allergic to those ingredients.  

So, the question becomes one of whether we want the people on the scene to give us our news, or whether we want the folks with vested power interests to give us our news. Those options exist on a continuum, obviously, but it’s still a question that needs to be asked when you think about mobile communication networks. 

CF: Is there enough room in the radio spectrum for all of these devices? It seems like the government would need to keep a pretty close eye on everything to make sure nobody stepped on anybody else’s toes. 

HR: A range of new wireless technologies are challenging the old regime used for regulating spectrum - cognitive radio, ultra-wideband are only the first. There’s a thing called software-defined radio, and it’ll be built into every Intel chip in a few years. Now there’s room for millions of users, and it’s only bad for the folks who own the franchises. Of course, there are also the lessons of how Bill Gates beat IBM by by enabling many different manufacturers to license Windows, and how Apple hurt themselves by keeping their OS in ROM and not allowing other manufacturers to license the OS for non-Apple hardware. Open networks are better than closed, but  the FCC has lots of well-paid lobbyists telling them they can’t open up the airwaves without causing total chaos. The govvies don’t know everything’s in place to make it happen. It’s hard for the technical community to get their message across, because it’s hard to be both a technology geek and a policy geek. But if folks want to keep the freedom they’ve tasted, they need to act now, because the entertainment industry is coming on strong.

Return to the Technology & Society review of Smart Mobs.

Curtis D. Frye (cfrye@teleport.com) is the editor and chief reviewer of Technology and Society Book Reviews.  He is also the author of three online courses and ten books , including Privacy-Enhanced Business from Quorum Books.