WC Archive

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, one of the authors of the Institute for the Future's Future Now blog, has a well-written and thoughtful essay in this last weekend's Los Angeles Times Book Review, examining Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs and Andy Clark's Natural-Born Cyborgs. (Free registration is required to get into the LAT site.)

Pang clearly understands the importance of Rheingold's argument, seeing it as more than simply a paean to cellphones and thumb tribes. Smart Mobs describes a vision of how technology changes humans as social beings. Linking it to Clark's less-well-known exploration of how human beings co-evolve with our tools it smart. Clark sees cyborgism not involving the implantation of computer chips into our bodies, but in the ever-closer interaction between human minds and information tools. Pang draws out the contrasts between Rheingold's emphasis on groups and Clark's focus on individuals, letting us see the underlying connections.

Imagine our children carrying — or just as likely, wearing — more computing power than sits on your desk today. Imagine them living with a constant background sense of being connected to family and friends; working and playing in smart mobs; pooling experiences and knowledge with trusted humans and virtual agents; and experiencing the Internet as a deep, abiding presence, sometimes on the edge of their awareness, sometimes in the center, but always there. After a time, their abilities to organize and act collectively will recede into the backgrounds of their consciousness. At this point, smart mobs become another of Clark's technologies — another tool that quietly extends the abilities of humans, shaping our thought but rarely thought about.

I read Smart Mobs earlier this year, and it's an important book. It sounds like I now have another book to get as a companion.