Howard Rheingold onCollective Action, Social Networks and Smart Mobs

 

 

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A future of smart mobs and self-organized media is plausible as long as the owners of tomorrow’s communications devices remain free to use the emerging media in any way they choose. However, a war over control of innovation might change all that, and the attack is already gathering force.

You can see this multifront war in the following trends: The recording industry’s attacks on file-sharing; the motion picture industry’s sponsorship of digital rights management; the collusion of politicians, computer software monopolies and hardware manufacturers to burn "trusted computing" into future media; the moves by telephone and cable companies to fragment the Internet commons by refusing to carry traffic that competes with their own content offerings; the international adoption of versions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; the pressure from incumbent radio spectrum license holders to regulate future wireless communications technologies with laws formulated for radio of the 1920s.

If those trends go unchecked, in a few years we will no longer be "users," free to reshape the technology as we choose, but "consumers," whose only liberty will be the freedom to decide which brand to buy. You’ll have to get a license or permission from your boss if you want to make the Net or your PC do something it hasn’t done before.

Fortunately, the war isn’t over—and what we know, say and do now counts. Hundreds of millions of people have tasted the freedom, power and opportunity that personal computing and the Internet have made possible. Once they understand what’s at stake, they can use the very media that is the spoil of the battle to self-organize collective action. Politicians won’t try to get away with quite as much if enough people know about it, innovators will be motivated to make yesterday’s centralized media obsolete as quickly as possible, and entire populations will reshape our media environment the way we did when we built the Web by posting webpages and listing our favorite links.

The time to know, speak and act is now. The technology is in your hands. Use it well if you want to keep it that way. © 2008 CXO Media Inc.