Comments

1 - Howard

Mon, Mar 10, 2003
@ 11:31

Here’s the letter I wrote to the editors:

To the editors –

I guess I’m pleased that “smart mob” has been verbed in a NYT Magazine headline. I do want to point out that although the anti-war movement has brought the use of online media and mobile communications to the foreground, smart mob tactics were used successfully in the Seattle anti-WTO protests in 1999, and in the “People Power II” demonstrations in the Philippines that brought down the Estrada presidency in 2000. More recently, Karl Rove, Bush’s political strategist, was reported to have coordinated the 2002 GOP electoral victories via Blackberry mobile e-mail and cell phone; young Korean activists who used text-messaging in a last-minute get-out-the-vote campaign are credited with tipping that election in favor of the eventual winner; and recent Kenyan elections were monitored and organized via mobile telephone and text messaging. An entire ecology of many-to-many media has matured over the past decade: more and more activists and grassroots movements use web pages, weblogs, email lists, mobile telephones, and text-messaging to organize collective action. I think we’re only at the beginning of the era in which entire populations use new media for political organizing, get out the vote campaigns, and (I predict) mass lobbying campaigns in which volleys of text-messages prompt constituents to call their Congressional representatives on the eve of specific votes.

Howard Rheingold (author of “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution)

2 - Tse-Sung Wu

Mon, Mar 10, 2003
@ 15:16

Good for you Howard. I thought the same when I saw that article.

Speaking of mobs, I wonder if such technology was used by Republican heavies during the FL recounts, which resulted in poll workers being intimidated away from doing their job. Apparently a video on this is making the indie documentary rounds:

http://www.unprecedented.org/

3 - Michael Weiksner

Mon, May 12, 2003
@ 12:52

With regards to democracy, “mobs” raise a concern about the deliberativeness of citizen-action. In other words, are campaigns that use new communication technologies for spin and activation good for democracy?

Shamless plug: I run a web site that links online deliberation with political action called e-thepeople.org. Although we envy the scale of a moveon.org, we are quite happy with the qualitative levels of intelligence, civility and diversity on our site. (And we do have 200,000 visitors a month too.)

4 - Howard Rheingold

Mon, May 12, 2003
@ 14:48

Deliberation is all-important, Michael, and I’m glad you are working on it. Can you briefly describe your efforts, and their effects?