Digital Communities Anew

Rheingold’s Smart Mobs continues a highly credentialed conversation on technology, the future, and the wide array of uses of these new gadgets.

What I walked away from this reading was both anticipation and dread. The same sentiment occurred when I had yet to embark on mobile technologies. I seemed to be the only person in Los Angeles without a cell phone back in 2001 and I was somewhat proud of this. Of coarse with an old Honda Accord and an impending drive cross country, I realized the safety features of a cell phone far outweighed my abhorrence to how those around me were using the devices. The trip aside, my trusty cell phone did bring with it lots of advantages.

The technology became imbedded into my life (although I do still abide to strict mobile etiquette) and I now don’t think twice when I call up a friend frantically trying to find her Greenwich apartment. The same idea was a large part of Rheingold’s message. There will always be the next best thing, but what is attestable to its success is the ability to become a part of our landscape naturally. Rheingold quotes Mark Weiser, former head of PARC, “They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” (p. 88).

Big Brother is always watching. A quick walk around the block and you can visually see how. Cameras mounted on buildings are no longer uncommon. They are also now visible in workplaces, schools, stores, and stop lights. Whether or not you advocate their existence, how they will be used (and enhanced) in the future will categorically force you to re-examine the trust you give to those in control of them.

I was interested in Rheingold’s vision of future educational uses of technology. He featured Jim Spohrer’s leading-edge WorldBoard where he intends to “make the entire world into a geo-spatial informational bulletin board” (p. 91). Global positioning software indeed brings data to a higher level of use.

Dave LaMorte’s blog covers the future of education with a great selection of links. He is tackling traditional teaching methods with the way information is now being accessed. “Education is changing…Teaching and learning is no longer confined to the classroom as there are more opportunities to gain enlightenment…We live in a world where students get information in many different ways, so we need to check up on them in different ways.” 

One of MIT’s blog posts written by John Borland brilliantly attests to the data on the web and how it will be laid out and organized in the future:

“(T)he socially networked, tag-rich services of Flickr, Last.fm, Del.icio.us, and the like are already imposing a grassroots order on collections of photos, music databases, and Web pages. Allowing Web users to draw their own connections, creating, sharing, and modifying their own systems of organization, provides data with structure that is usefully modeled on the way people think, advocates say…No one knows what organizational technique will ultimately prevail. But what’s increasingly clear is that different kinds of order, and a variety of ways to unearth data and reuse it in new applications, are coming to the Web. There will be no Dewey here, no one system that arranges all the world’s digital data in a single framework.

Technology will continue to revolutionize our lives in different ways. What we can only hope for is that those who govern the tools not only have honorable intentions, but create end products useful enough to become indistinguishable.