Mob Shift
I write this from a neighborhood coffee shop, connected to the web on a free community network. A square patch in Seattle’s rather threadbare wireless quilt. I must admit this past September I felt like Tennessee William’s character Blanche DuBois as I attempted to connect to the internet in Paris. With limited access to the internet from the apartment I became acutely aware of the wireless networks in the neighborhood, and the different times in the day when they would become active. The only way I could retrieve my mail and manage my blog was by “relying on the kindness of strangers”. In other words, I would poach a connection from their unsecured home network. As I uploaded a 50 megabyte video file I would occasionally imagine some frustrated guy in his living room saying to his wife, “Je ne comprends pas pourquoi l'Internet est si lent” (“I do not understand why the network is so slow” or something like that.)
I love being connected to the web from anywhere. Unlike texting and the rather crude graphic interface of most contemporary mobile computing solutions, with a wireless computer I have the whole internet at my fingertips. It is rich, robust and revolutionary. All other forms of mobile computing leave me wanting more. We can be certain that will change, but for now I will stick with what works for me.
Howard Rheingold begins “Smart Mobs” with a passing reference to Hachiko, a dog who for nearly 10 years kept returning to the same spot near Tokyo’s Shibuya station, waiting for his long dead master. Rheingold’s reference was incidental to the point of the book, but I cannot tell you how often I feel like Hachiko, returning to technology that many would argue may be losing its usefulness. And like that dog, all too often I fail to recognize that something in the technological cosmos has changed.
Rheingold quotes Mizuko Ito as contrasting America’s ample opportunities for personal privacy with that of a Japanese teenager. Where here in the States we are free to find private space at home, in the car or at work to connect with our network in a discrete and personal fashion, a teen growing up in Japan lives In a highly structured environment bookended by school and family. Texting on their keitai as they move from home to school and back, their phones act as a private channel of communication. Here in the States the existing channels are not as closely monitored, if only as a function of geography. Perhaps I find the cryptic glyphs of text messaging arcane because the channels that exist for me are controlled by me, not by my parents or public transportation or coworkers. I can keep my network as public or private as I like. The buzz that comes with knowing a secret code, the tribal insider’s rush of being part of “the group” eludes me. Perhaps that is because I don’t need the symbolic independence from existing norms.
Social coordination involves e-mail and the telephone for me. I can’t coordinate with text messages if no one is playing along. Really, my group of aging baby boomers has yet to embrace mobile communication on anything but their cell phones. My friends and family are the poster children for late adopters. Consequently, that means only a miniscule percentage of my community is text enabled.
I like to think I am a more effective journalist and producer because I am not a member of any group (aside from the middle-aged white guys, which I came to by birth, not choice.) I like to imagine that I am an observer of all groups. As a journalist you spend a disproportionate amount of time and effort living life in the third person. As much as this sounds like a rationalization, perhaps I don’t like the ritual of text messaging because I don’t have any first-person groups to text with. I have not been invited to the party. Even though this comes out with an overtone of sour grapes, I am happy with that. I like the view of observer rather than participant. I like the physical network I have here in the coffee shop, and the virtual network I have on the web. Mobile technology promises a brave new world of social connections, I think I will just sit back and watch it shake itself out.
