It's All About The Mobile Internet. Mobile Phones, Ritual Interaction and Social Capital By Howard Rheingold, Thu Apr 21 09:00:00 GMT 2005 One scientist who observes the way people use mobile phones suspects "mobile telephone communication seems to be better at developing the social fabric than does PC-based Internet interaction.
" But, he cautions, the new fabric might be too tightly knit in some ways. Rich Ling spends hours in public places, noting in minute detail how people act when using their phones, as well as interviewing and surveying hundreds of phone users. Ling, trained as a sociologist, was conducting research for Norwegian telephone operator Telenor at the historical moment when teenage girls transformed SMS from an obscure engineer's tool into a new social medium.
Ling turned to a more recent notion of "social capital" as a tool for examining the role of mobile phones in social change. It's All About The Mobile Internet. Email, Scale-Free Networks, and the Mobile Internet By Howard Rheingold, Thu Apr 07 08:00:00 GMT 2005 Using e-mail rather than SMS as the messaging medium for mobile phones has made mobile Internet services in Japan more successful than in the West, says an industry expert -- a claim supported by recently discovered mathematical properties of networks.
"E-mail was a great enabler of mobile Internet in Japan, and there is a fundamental mathematical reason for this," claimed Ville Saarikoski, a Finn who lived in Japan when i-mode was launched and former head of mobile R&D for Sonera, in a recent e-mail interview. E-mail networks, he noted, have the unique structure of "scale-free" or "small world" networks, while the potential connectivity between nodes of SMS networks are far more highly constrained -- it takes much longer, with many more hops, to travel across networks that do not have scale-free distribution. Scale-free network theory grew out of a 1998 paper by Duncan J. It's All About The Mobile Internet.
Fused Space: Awards for Technology that Energizes Public Space By Howard Rheingold, Thu Aug 26 08:00:00 GMT 2004 Most of the changes that information and communication technologies brought to city life have emerged spontaneously; few of the biggest changes were planned or even foreseen.
People around the world today use new technologies in cities to socialize, take political action, make art, perform experiments and engage in commerce in new ways and places, and they do it far too fast for R&D when it happened within the walls of places like PARC and Bell Labs. Mobile phones have been changing with increasing speed the unspoken rituals that orchestrate the behavior of strangers in public places, text messaging has enabled urban flocking to emancipate adolescents and smart-mobbing citizens to overthrow governments, location-based services are poised to alter the way people know and discover geographies and lists of "mobile social software" are already available. It's All About The Mobile Internet. Urban Infomatics Breakout By Howard Rheingold, Tue Jan 13 11:00:00 GMT 2004 If you want to understand cities today and especially in the future, keep mobile communications in mind.
Ten years from now, understanding the way people use mobile media will be as fundamental to urban planning as understanding the buildings they inhabit and vehicles they use. I started writing about the growing importance of urban informatics in a previous article for TheFeature: Cities, Swarms, and Cellphones. More recently, I asked: Does Mobile Telephony Disrupt City Life? My collection of links about interesting new developments in the field continues to grow in both diversity and number. Forecasters sometimes talk about driving forces that can be seen inaction right now, and critical uncertainties that are not yet decided, and which will influence the kind of scenario the driving force turns into.
Anne Galloway alerted me to the controversy that emerged around William Mitchell's new book. It's All About The Mobile Internet. Does Mobile Telephony Disconnect People from City Life?
By Howard Rheingold, Mon Jan 05 11:15:00 GMT 2004 How are mobile phones changing the cultural experience of being in a city? The very experience of urbanity that is supposedly changing under the pressure of thumb-tribes is itself a sense of social place as old as civilization (the city as agora, part market, part information-exchanging machine) that was changed irrevocably by rapid mass adoption of place-altering technologies such as skyscrapers, railroads, automobiles, and wireline telephones.
Now what? Use of mobile telephony has spread through urban populations so quickly, across so many cultures and in such numbers, that it is possible to identify the early signs some the most important social questions about ubiquitous, untethered, interconnection - even if the answers remain elusive or arguable. I recently encountered two new approaches to this questions.