Smart Mobs: Revolutions or Bust

 
Always being connected does make us vulnerable to additional surveilance and renders us less powerful, though if we "use what we now know about cooperation to drive power/ knowledge to a higher level of democracy (190)" , we as a whole can strengthened democracy and perhap lessen the effects of surveilance or at least curb what is to come.

This is a crucial time in our history with concern to technology. The decision being made in government prompted by: cable companies, telephone companies, the movie industry and Internet inventors will effect us and our liberties for a long time to come. These corporations are moving to control who can build future technology on the Internet and what kinds of  technology they can create.  Hollywood movie studios, (through the guise of protecting intellectual property), are pushing legislation for "protection devices", that will give corporations the right to shut down any phone or computers that is said to be viewing material they deem copy written.

Americans have "voluntarily traded privacy for convenience (186)" and will soon trade their liberties for access if restrictions are imposed and we are turned from "users into passive consumers (202)". But for those who are watching the watchers, they will help decide whether smart mobs grow or dissappear.

Rheingold suggest that cooperation is an inate human trait and that us working together is almost ineveitable (212). "When certain technologies emerge", say Rheingold, "(it) can trigger human societies to reorganize at a higher level of cooperation (213)".

 
Smart mob activity, collective action, increased knowledge and social dynamics could possibly improve the way billions of people live. "Mobile communications, peer computing, location awarness, social accounting systems and pervasive computing (190)" have the potential to encourage cooperation far more than previous technologies.

Rheingold.(2002). Always-On Panopticon… or Cooperation Amplifier.Smart Mobs.