My review of Howard Rheingold's new book "Smart Mobs" is up on Mindjack.
Smart Mobs are the Slashdot effect applied to the meatspace zeitgeist. A squillion like-minded souls who don't know each other and will never meet pop out of the transmetropolitan brickface and break the white-noise balance of atomic viewpoints to speak with one voice, roaring a righteous YES or an adamant NO without organizers, without leaders, without manifestoes or forethought.
Enabled by close-to-hand, invisbly-ubiquitous tech — the Internet, mobile phones, two-way pagers, blogs, the Web, WiFi — they turn meme into deed. Howard walks us through the thousand facets of the Smart Mob non-movement, from Finnish wireless augmented reality gamers to the tried-and-true Japanese schoolgirl speed-tribes to earnest anti-Globalist Starbucks-smashers. We meet mystified (and sometimes delighted) (and always delightful) suits from Nokia and Japanese diversified zaibatsus and other bastions of traditional authority, who are watching their Frankenstein Monster take its first lumbering steps across the world.
