Mobile Virtual Communities Howard Rheingold

#06 R The mobile self

Mobile virtual communities Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold is the authority on virtual communities. His book "The Virtual Community" was the first ever to deal with the phenomenon of social communications in cyberspace when it was published in 1993, and it still is of immediate interest – MIT Press issued a new edition last year. His forthcoming book, "Smart Mobs – the next social revolution", will be published in October 2002 and focuses on the emergence of mobile communities. For receiver, Rheingold gives us an insight into how the mobilization of communication leads to the formation of new kinds of communities. www.rheingold.com/vc/book/ "The Virtual Community"

Social revolutions follow communications revolutions. I studied, described, participated in, and created some of the first virtual communities on the landlocked Internet of the 1980s and 1990s, so I knew that new social forums were certain to emerge when the many-to-many multimedia capabilities of the Web started to escape the desktop and go mobile. During the past two years, I visited communication hotspots around the world in pursuit of the social phenomenon I call "smart mobs," the subject of my forthcoming book. In Tokyo and Helsinki, Stockholm and New York City, I watched the first generation of mobile virtual communities emerge. Some of the groups and businesses I observed on my travels provide clues to the kinds of communities that might grow out of mobile communications and pervasive computing:

A group of young Finns have opened a social club in the middle of downtown Helsinki that combines physical location, virtual community, and mobile text messaging. They call it "Aula, an urban living room for the network society." Aula - http://www.aula.cc

ImaHima ("are you free now?") enables hundreds of thousands of Tokyo i-mode users to alert friends who are in their vicinity at the moment. ImaHima - http://www.imahima.com

Upoc ("universal point of contact") in Manhattan sponsors mobile communities of interest: any member of "manhattan celebrity watch", "nyc terrorism alert", "prayer of the day" or "The Resistance," for example, can exchange text messages with other members. Upoc - http://www.upoc.com

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Enthusiasts of "Botfighters," a location-based game for mobile telephone users in Sweden, cruise Stockholm in their automobiles, looking for location-based virtual encounters via SMS messages.

People love to socialize, and we especially love to invent new media for social interaction. The Internet became the fastest-growing communication medium in history long before e-commerce, dotcoms, or search engines because people used the Internet to meet in the chat rooms, message boards, newsgroups, mailing lists, buddy lists of the first "virtual communities." A network designed for researchers and programmers was appropriated by people who saw an opportunity to socialize in a new way. A close examination of the origins of today's mass media reveals that many were not designed for social purposes, but were appropriated by people seeking to satisfy the apparently insatiable human need for social communication and group formation. The inventor of the telephone thought it would broadcast concerts from Carnegie Hall, but people wanted to use it for conversation. The chat tool that made the Minitel a success in Paris two decades before the Internet emerged in America was originally used only by Minitel's technical operators, but was stolen by a technically adept user and was passed around among people who wanted to chat. Email and newsgroups were the killer application of the Internet, driving it to grow beyond the computer programmers, scientists, and academics who used it in the 1980s. In Europe and Asia, short message services (SMS), originally included as part of a mobile communications standard, was not originally seen as a source of revenue, but has grown to a share in profits of 12% and more in 2002.

A pattern has become visible: older technologies that had been confined to subcultures or elites suddenly grow to include entire populations after user- interface breakthroughs make it possible for more people to use the technologies. The Web brought an easy to use visual interface to the Internet in the 1990s, similar to the way graphic user interfaces made PCs useful to the non-geek masses in the 1980s. Mobile communication during the first decade of the 21st century will bring non-geek masses to virtual communities – people who would never use a PC, but are sophisticated texters or mobile game-players. When the Web brought Internet to the masses, online social communication platforms mutated into new forms. Now that the Net is mobilizing, expect virtual communities to evolve into new forms yet again.

Virtual communities and mobile communications each have unique characteristics. When those characteristics combine, powerful hybrids are likely to emerge, just as the merger of the PC with the telephone network led to the emergence of a wholly new medium, the Internet. Before speculating about the characteristics of mobile communities, it pays to start with the separate characteristics of virtual communities and mobile communications.

Virtual communities are:

Organized around affinities, shared interests, bringing together people who did not necessarily know each other before meeting online.

Many to many media. Unlike few to many (broadcast) or one to one (traditional telephony) media, virtual communities enable many people to communicate with many others.

Text-based, evolving into text plus graphics-based communications. Web-based media bring inline graphics, animations, video, sounds, formatted text, links into text-based conversation.

Relatively uncoupled from face to face social life in geographic communities. People communicating worldwide about shared interests very often do not live close enough to meet regularly face to face.

Mobile communications are:

Organized around known social networks – people call and send messages to people they already know. Most of the time, you communicate with people who are already in your address book.

Accessible anywhere, anytime, always on. The Internet, and all it affords, is no longer tied to the desktop computer and wired network, but has diffused to every place a mobile telephone can be carried.

Text-based evolving to text and sound and graphics-based communications. Cameras and telephones are merging.

Closely coupled to the behaviour of people in physical space, and have strong effects on how small social groups coordinate activities in local communities.

Mobile virtual communities are:

Many to many, desktop and mobile, always on – virtual communities and the resources of the Internet are instantly available to people and their software agents wherever people are located.

Used to coordinate actions of groups in geographic space – teenagers swarm in shopping centres, young adults club-hop, activists mobilize on the street. Although special circumstances can mobilize large groups, most mobile communities consist of small groups of 4-8 close friends or associates.

Game environments, social arenas, artistic media, business.tools, political weapons – like other virtual community media mobile virtual communities start with young people as means for entertainment and light social interaction, then spread to other institutions.

The future arrives in some places earlier than others. While billions of text messages are exchanged monthly in Helsinki, Manila, Stockholm, and Tokyo, American youth (with the exception of the "hiphop" and "technogeek" subcultures) have yet to catch onto texting. Finnish Futurist Risto Linturi told me that Finnish business managers must keep their mobile telephone turned on and remain available to subordinates if they want to influence their decisions – a complete reversal of the traditional hierarchy in which only bosses call subordinates, and not the other way around. Rinturi also noted that his teenage daughters and her friends use texting to coordinate like flocking birds. Anthropologist Mizuko Ito told me that the teenagers she observed have used texting to create a new kind of social space outside the borders of their parents' and teachers' ability to observe and regulate them; Ito also noted that most of the "thumb tribes" she observed kept up a steady stream of text communications among a group of 4-6 friends, an observation echoed by social scientists in Norway and Finland. Perhaps most momentously, the government of Philippine President Estrada was brought down by an extraordinary "People Power II" movement of millions of Filipinos who assembled in Manila, drawn by millions of text messages that circulated rapidly throughout Filipino society.

Ever since the alphabet made the Roman Empire possible and the printing press accelerated the Protestant Reformation, new communication media have led to new social forms. The social upheavals made possible by the Internet are still occurring. The social and economic changes triggered by mobile communications have barely begun. If we look closely at how the Internet revolution developed, we might be able to make smarter choices and end up less surprised by the wave of change that has only started to transform the ways we meet, mate, govern, earn, and learn.

This article is printed in receiver by arrangement with Howard Rheingold. (www.rheingold.com/Associates/index.html)