One important aspect of emerging smartmob technologies is the access to different ways to collect and view data and information on a myriad of different human activity. In particular, information (and/or knowledge) visualization technology makes the flow of of different human “energies” and activities (financial, political, informational, etc) easier to visualize, while the nature of networks makes the information easier to share. The nature of computer modeling and data visualization on computers allows for unique and novel ways of viewing and understanding impacts and relationships on global, “local”, and individual scales. Mobile Social Ad hoc Networks (smartmobs) can use these data visualizations as a way to understand their relationship to the larger “systems” on all of these scales in ways that were previously clouded or unseen.

Brian Holmes’ “Flowmaps, The Imaginaries of Global Integration” explores how these data and info- visualizations are emerging within information ecologies, and he asks quite a few important questions:

what made it possible, at the scale of the individual or the intimate territory, to grasp this new representation, to transform it into embodied movements, to transmit it to others and even to contribute to it?….How do people sense the emergence of a new diagram of power? How do they come to recognize it, to inhabit it? What happens when a specific diagram, integrating millions or even billions of individuals in a functional pattern, finally becomes visible and speakable as a map, as a representation? And what changes when the map appears, not as an inexorable law of surface, but as a malleable structure, open to the development of a strategy? What kinds of counter-maps then arise, what kinds of artistic expressions, what kinds of social and technological experiments? How are they practiced, upon what territories, and by whom?