Lucky enough to follow Christian Kreutz’s tweets, I found this great article today over at Guardian, signed by Charles Leadbetter.
How can I comprise here the full spectrum of innovative ideas mentioned in the text? Maybe, just maybe if I represent them visually as a tag cloud…
Meditating on the example of the puzzle solving game on ilovebees.com, the author addresses a question:
If ingenious games designers can inspire thousands of people to collaborate to solve a puzzle, could we do something similar to tackle global warming, keep communities safe, provide support for the elderly, help disaster victims, lend and borrow money, conduct political and policy debates, teach and learn, design and make physical products?
In the end, the main concept is simple. By the powerful storm of the new communication technologies, mobs that think and act collectively are taking over areas dominated before by scholars, organizations, institutions, and corporations. There’s an evolutionary process taking place as we speak, a process that is experimenting with replacing the hierarchical top-down organizations with peer-to-peer forms of self-organized mobs. Citizens have now a worldly opportunity to organize themselves without the trappings of traditional institutions.
Nowadays we have mob politics, mob branding, mob science, mob learning and so on. Leadbetter offers wonderful examples of each mob. What I found to be interesting is the observation about processes that truly promote democracy: the broadband by which mobs communicate, get organized and act proves itself to be more efficient in bringing democratic change –- consider the example of the political opposition in Vietnam, entirely founded and organized via Internet –- than the billions of dollars spent by US on the war in Iraq.
Also, one other thing that caught my attention in the case of mob experimental science is that further and faster spread of knowledge results in an accelerations of testing ideas and theories. Those who address criticism to the minor errors met in collective amateur projects like Wikipedia forget that this social experiment is still in its incipient phase and that there’s still a lot more to come and to be perfected. In fact, perfection seems to be more easily acquirable by collective effort.
So, the future doesn’t bring a mechanical, unconscious, and abusive collective in which individuals lose their identity and freedom of opinion and action, but an organic one, comprising creative and conscious individuals. The future is not Borg. The Future is Mob.
Lucky enough to follow Christian Kreutz’s tweets, I found this great article today over at Guardian, signed by Charles Leadbetter.
How can I comprise here the full spectrum of innovative ideas mentioned in the text? Maybe, just maybe if I represent them visually as a tag cloud…Meditating on the example of the puzzle solving game on [...]
Comments
@ 23:25
I thought my son communicated through facebook to all his friends, at the knowledge of this matter,he rolled his eyes and said “Daaaaad!!..I have a cell phone”. Well, that cleared up stuff ( I think ). , they do communicate largely by the phone, texting is the word. Nowadays companies have taken to using the cell phone as the target. My son’s a part of a site called mozes.com which he’s a part of . I think they’re called “mobs”. These take care of his music and his networking. Innovative.
@ 02:18
Thanks for the comment. This is why enterprises that took advantage of the rising mobile networks and wireless broadband were visionary. Twitter is one of them. Mozes.com looks interesting indeed. People like to talk and exchange information from everywhere. From home, from work, in traffic jam.
Speaking of kids, I’ll be posting a next entry that deals with a dilemma: online social networks as potential family and real networks divider. Not such a new issue, but a still arguable one. With focus on kinds. So, if interested, feel free to drop by again.
@ 04:17
hey thanks for the feedback Marius,I’d definitely be interested in the next post. I’ll probably get my son to stop by too. Maybe we could start an interactive session.
@ 22:36
Hey Marius, I’ve been doing a lot of looking up the internet about the new mobile technology. I came across a lot of places where mobile marketing was spoken about. It’s an interesting concept. We can run votes which are live and can have a mobile question and answer sessions. I found it very interesting and fun. Some of them require a simple sign up. I am planning to run a simple one among my colleagues to find out how it works and then see the results. I’ll start from the site where I can get help from my son…yeah…Mozes. But maybe you can write an article on the mobile marketing on how companies are looking at this as an alternate source of marketing and leveraging it.
@ 01:08
Thanks for dropping by again.
I myself thought that, since the Web went mobile, it wouldn’t take long until adds also appeared on our phones. I’ll do some research on it. I see that googling “mobile marketing” returns quite a lot of results, so there’s plenty of info to go through. It’s already going big.