Author: sam

Our understanding of space is in flux. The creeping spread of hybrid spaces challenges our relationships with and in space. The evolution of public space over the coming years will question our mediation of reality. Our ‘view of the world’ will continue to be moulded and reshaped by experience but these experiences will be extended into new cybrid realms.

[Please refer to my Bibliography for the sources of quotes.]

Propagated not only by buildings and fixed objects but also by the everyday technologies we carry; cybrid spaces are innately social. They will facilitate an extension of our senses and new means of interaction. This will enable unprecedented levels of cooperation and has the possibility of profoundly changing the way we socially navigate space.

Smart mobs embody such an evolution of our social navigation. As smart mobs we could be in a constant state of collaboration sharing resources and discerning more about our peers and our surroundings than ever before. Unlike the wired Internet, the mobile cybrid information spaces of the coming years will not require expensive equipment, making it open to the majority. Nor will it require significant social adjustment as mobile phone ownership is already widespread and will act as a precursor to the adoption of new technologies.

In coining the ideas of smart mobs and cybrid spaces Rheingold and Anders have given us a lexicon with which we can understand a unique point in our social development. Cybrids, cybrid spaces and smart mobs will not be forms imposed from above; they will not be created by any one company or government; they will emerge from a critical mass of technologies and social practices coming together to radically change how we relate to our environments and each other.

Posted by Sam at April 23, 2004 11:57 AM

Already the pace at which we live due to the technological saturation of our daily lives has led to the widening of our social circles. We stay in contact with many more people than ever before and submit to living in a constant potential of being interrupted by carrying communications devices at all times, everywhere we go.

[Please refer to my Bibliography for the sources of quotes.]

These connections are no longer local either. With the rise of cheap travel we are much more likely to keep in contact with those people we meet across the world. Whereas before we would have to write letters and make expensive international phone calls we now send email and text messages and speak in real-time using instant messaging software, which is now enabled with video and sound . Such persistent connections are not as close as those nurtured face-to-face and so although people often view the world in terms of groups, they function in networks.

Some of these connections may also be temporary. United by common goals people form transitory special interest groups. When augmented by modern communications technologies these groups can take on an epic scale. Recently, rallies against the Iraq War were organised with great effect using the Internet. Cellspace has also proved invaluable in organising large groups of people. On January the 20th 2001 President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to an army of demonstrators armed solely with mobile phones. Tens of thousands of Manila residents, mobilised and coordinated by waves of text messages, converged on Epifano de los Santas Avenue, known as Edsa, within an hour of the first text message volleys reading “Go 2 EDSA, wear blck”. Over the next four days over a million Filipinos joined the demonstration. Estrada was rapidly ousted from power.

This new fast-paced mobile ad hoc communications phenomenon is described in depth by Howard Rheingold (2002). Rheingold, like Anders, has coined a useful term to denote the emerging behaviours of technologically enabled groups: the ‘smart mob’.

It is the combination of increasingly rapid personal communication, cell and cybrid spaces and reputation that is and will continue the evolution of this new social form. This combination is only now beginning to knit and reveal its form making the coming decade a crucial period in which we can decide how we want such social and technological systems to benefit us.

The mobile phone and the proliferation of cellspace offer the first insight into the possibilities smart mobbing will afford. As seen in the Philippines in 2001, at the World Trade Organisation demonstrations in Seattle, in 2000, and most recently in the protests in Madrid after the rail bombings (2004), living in cellspace allows the rapid coordination of large groups through the massive distributed sending of text messages. As in Manila and Madrid, within minutes tens of thousands of people can be on the streets, within days it can be millions.

Such massive cooperation has always been possible but there has simply never before been a means of communication that was as fast, cheap and widespread as the mobile phone. Rheingold notes that researchers at Xerox PARC studying the dynamics of social systems observed that a diversity of cooperation thresholds among a crowd can tip it into a sudden epidemic of cooperation. A minority of extremists might act first and, if conditions are right, their actions can trigger others who needed to see somebody else make the first move, at which point a cascade of others may take their cue. (2002: 174)

Of course sudden epidemics of cooperation are not always as positive as demonstrations against totalitarian regimes or the perpetration of seemingly unjust wars. The lynch mobs of the former Yugoslavia and the involvement of a large part of the population of Rwanda in the perpetration of atrocities are testament to this.

This ‘threshold’ model of cooperative behaviour helps explain the link between ‘intelligent’ cooperative behaviour and the emergent flocking and swarming behaviours of ‘unintelligent’ animals. Thresholds are individual reactions to the dynamics of groups. The key statistic is the proportion of other people who have to act before an individual decides to join them (Granovitter in Rheingold, 2002: 175).

It is worth noting that the cooperative behaviour exhibited en mass in Manila and elsewhere involved a fairly high level of initial motivation followed by a proactive use of mobile phones, fully exploiting cellspace. Part of the reason the smart mobs of Manila, Seattle and Madrid were able to function was that the technology had ceased being a novelty and had permeated their lives to the extent that extending oneself into cellspace was second nature.

As mentioned throughout this chapter a variety of technologies now allow devices to intercommunicate and form ad hoc networks. It is this facility of new technologies that will aid social cooperation on a broader everyday level. When interacting with co-present others in everyday spaces people are not united in clear common goals. This is where smart mob technologies promise extraordinary change. Already used to carrying mobile phones, it is likely we will readily accept their successors, often dubbed ‘smart phones’, that will provide a persistent mediation of our surroundings. Location-based technologies will provide us with information about our immediate surroundings and mobile ad hoc peer-to-peer technologies will provide us with information about the people we come in to contact with. Coupled with this we shall never be without the facility to communicate with the rest of the planet using voice communications or the mobile Internet.

There are a variety of services worldwide that are beginning to offer users the ability to explore new ways of interacting with their environments and other people within their vicinity. Commercial applications such as Dodgeball, ImaHima, Lovegety Mogi, and Node Explore already facilitate smart mob behaviours. They allow users to ascertain information about their location, beyond what is available to them simply in actuality, and allow them to make links with people they would otherwise never be aware of, managing trust and reputation issues along the way.

With many political issues, such as privacy, international monopolies and freedom of speech, the nature of smart mobs remains uncertain, as Rheingold says: ‘Technologies of cooperation or the ultimate disinfotainment apparatus? The next several years are a crucial and unusually malleable interregnum.’ (2002: 215) What we know about the new technologies, how we use them and how we let them be used on society is sure to have implications on how we live and particularly on our social navigation of public space.

Posted by Sam at April 23, 2004 11:55 AM

Reputation is an important factor in our social navigation. When deciding where we consume goods from and which information sources we trust we are faced with trial and error situations. If we have a trusted friend, who can provide advice on where to buy particular goods or services or which newspaper or website to read, we can forego some of our social games and act according to another’s experience.

[Please refer to my Bibliography for the sources of quotes.]

Reputation systems already drive the most successful virtual knowledge transactions. E-Bay, the electronic auctions website, acts as a third-party to users who can sell goods to the highest bidder. Users are encouraged to rate sellers according to the quality of goods and the service they receive. Many participate in rating, overcoming the collective action dilemma, recognising that by contributing a small amount to the system they can receive the benefits of the sum of the contributions: an accurate means of assessing the trustworthiness of sellers.

Purely virtual systems can, and generally must, be egalitarian in offering everyone a chance to rate each other. The most successful example of such a system is the SlashDot, a website about ‘News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters’ (2004), forums. Using a random seed, any user can become a moderator for a short time, awarding high or low ratings to posts. Thus a constantly evolving peer-review drives the reputation system. Such systems are important as users; in fact all users of the Internet have little idea of each other’s identity. The recent explosion of ‘social software’ websites, such as friendster.com, thetribe.net and Google’s Orkut, present a different model. Simply by creating an account and inviting friends to ‘link’ with you a network of social contacts can form. A form of social capital is placed on who knows whom; the connotation is that because you know ‘a’ and ‘a’ knows ‘b’, ‘b’ must be trustworthy. Social software sites generally provide links across three degrees of separation, a ‘friend of a friend of a friend’. What people separated by three degrees have in common and whether they feel the other trustworthy or not is questionable at best. In actual spaces it is very different. Whilst we may consider information from second degree or third degree links, we generally trust the opinions of a select few, the reputation system is much more local. Those people are friends and family we know directly, i.e. separated from us by one degree.

Forming links with others through cybrid face-to-face interactions, as suggested in 2.2, may bring up issues of trust to which there seems two possible reputation-based solutions. A ‘local’ system based purely on the opinions of first-degree links would provide reputation information users know they can trust. Alternatively, following the virtual model feedback could be made available by anyone. This could be organised according to the context and the trustworthiness of the person who gave the feedback. It is also possible for such a system to be distributed across the mobile ad hoc networks that could make up cybrid social space. Schneider et al. describes such a solution as a ‘decentralised reputation framework that uses opportunistic physical encounters to propagate trust data’ (2000: 3). Such data would be continuously shared and updated with the added benefits of an extreme difficulty in feedback being biased and individuals only ever having a general awareness of their reputation.

Such systems provide interesting questions for the future of our social navigation. Reputation could, for example, prove an effective form of distributed policing. Those deemed untrustworthy by communities could find themselves barred from public events such as football matches, concerts and nightclubs. The chances for reform in such cases might therefore be very difficult. Once someone is ‘black marked’ they might find themselves rapidly excommunicated. New systems of class could emerge as, under the guise of positive discrimination, well-behaved students are favoured by universities, and only graduates deemed to have the right sort of reputation are employed by ‘reputable’ firms. Depending on the success of the implementation of distributed reputation systems it could be possible for the introduction of a new technological edge to public relations of ‘reputation management’.

We cannot be certain of the strategies that will emerge in a cybrid society until it is broadly realised there are many hints from existing social theory. Existing Internet-based social systems can already be described in terms of behaviours predicted by theories of ‘game’ and reputation. When coupled with widespread cybrid spaces there can be no doubt that exciting new social phenomena will occur.

Posted by Sam at April 19, 2004 05:37 PM

The debate over whether cooperation is an exclusively human trait, whether cooperation is a biological strategy employed to ensure genetic reproduction and whether noble concepts of altruism simply cloak an innate but subtle selfishness is too wide for the scope of this work. However the tension between self-interest and cooperation is crucial in understanding how we socially interact.

[Please refer to my Bibliography for the sources of quotes.]

In conversation with Howard Rheingold, Marc A. Smith, research sociologist at Microsoft, suggests ‘If you follow the strands of cooperation, public goods, presentation of self, and reputation you might find they all tie together. “¦Biologists, economists, even nuclear warfare strategists became interested in social games.’ (2002: 31) The ‘public goods’ that Smith highlights are resources ‘”¦from which all may benefit, regardless of whether they helped create [them]’ (31). It is the balancing of public goods against our own self-interest that provides the collective action dilemma. Those people who ignore the balance and choose to benefit from a public good without contributing, or risk depletion through over consumption, are ‘free riders’ or ‘free loaders’. If we all free ride then the public good is not created or is over consumed, in which case we all suffer, as Smith notes: ‘What’s good for you can be bad for us’ (31). The result of an entire population of free riders is the ultimate consumption of public goods, a situation labelled ‘the tragedy of the commons’ by Garret Hardin (1968).

Other people’s performances and weighing up collective action dilemmas combine in a heady mix of ‘bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do’ (Bronowski, 1973, cited in Rheingold, 2002: 41). It is the constant enactment of these tactical games that makes us good ‘mind readers’ (Johnson, 2001) and is described by Game Theory, devised by John von Neumann a contemporary of Einstein at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and the Manhattan Project.

There were four elements of von Neumann games devised by researchers at the RAND Corporation, in the 1950s: Chicken, Deadlock, Prisoner’s Dilemma and Stag Hunt. These games, told as stories but equally represented by complex mathematical formulae, were used, and have been developed, in fields as diverse as economics, predicting markets, and nuclear warfare simulation.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma game has been integrated into a multitude of research practices since its initial definition and is the most relevant to social navigation. The game can be described thus: Two men have been charged with a joint violation of the law and they are held separately and are unable to communicate. Each ‘prisoner’ is told that the prisoner who testifies will be released and their partner will be sentenced to three years. If both prisoners testify the will both receive a two-year sentence. If neither testifies they will both receive a one-year sentence. Part of the theory of the game is that each player is only interested in his own welfare. Therefore the two prisoners are faced with a choice of cooperation or defection. (Rheingold, 2002: 42) There is then a mathematical relationship between the payoffs for the players. The temptation payoff (T) for defecting is greater than the reward payoff (R) for mutual cooperation; which is greater than the punishment payoff (P) for mutual defection; all of which are greater than the ‘sucker’s’ (S) payoff for cooperating when the other player defects. Equated thus T>R>P>S, the relationship is usually presented in a table, see Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1 (Rheingold, 2002: 43) The outcomes of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Each outcome results in a sentence given, in years, in the form A,B.

The application of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to how we make our decisions on when to cooperate and when to be selfish demonstrates how we weigh up collective action dilemmas. Prisoner’s Dilemmas are rarely played once; iterative versions of the game are crucial to learning who is trustworthy.

When considering new collaborative systems, such as those made possible by cybrid spaces, the Prisoner’s Dilemma becomes crucial in defining the terms of interaction to promote the emergence of cooperation. Systems in which cooperation is not fostered become weak and can easily be compromised. The majority of users of peer-to-peer file sharing networks, such as Kazaa and Gnutella, free ride, leeching free music from a small minority. This has meant that covert ‘saboteur’ accounts set up by record companies have been extremely successful in propagating ‘dummy’ files, making it very difficult to be certain of the quality of what is being downloaded. Greater payoffs for cooperation or design systems that take advantage of selfish behaviour will be an important consideration in designing applications for the augmentation of face-to-face encounters.

Collaboration is not only about cooperation, when considering larger numbers of participants it is also about coordination. Coordination problems in large social groups do not involve Prisoner’s Dilemmas they involve collective monitoring and sanctioning. Chewe (2001) claims that public rituals are not just about top-down communication but also about many-to-many communication. Everyone in a group then knows who else is contributing, free riding and even policing to solve the coordination problems.

Such coordination problems are mirrored in nature as demonstrated by Steven Johnson’s ‘Emergence’ (2001). Complex behaviours such as insect swarms and bird flocks are simply the result of many individual decisions based on simple common rules, such as avoiding collision and travelling in roughly the same direction. Similar behaviour is exhibited in human crowds such as football supporters in a large stadium chanting the same words or stamping their feet in time.

In societies where there will be increasing numbers of opportunities to cooperate with others through personal communication technologies forming ad hoc cybrid links we will be making judgements on who to trust constantly. Of course once we have decided whom we trust we share that information with those we know. Networks of reputation form as a result of our judgements, making reputation an important part of a cybrid society.

Posted by Sam at April 19, 2004 05:36 PM

We all have a natural desire to establish personal spaces. We buy homes, we have offices and we sit certain distances apart from other passengers on public transport. In an increasingly crowded and mobile society we spend most of our waking lives in the personal spaces we construct for ourselves in transit, whether walking down the street, sitting on a train or driving a car. When spending such large amounts of time in transitory personal spaces it is inevitable that cracks appear in the public façade with which we present ourselves.

[Please refer to my Bibliography for the sources of quotes.]

Erving Goffman describes this facade as a ‘performance’ to those around us in public spaces. We present a ‘front stage’, which is the performance we put on for the outside world. We hide elements of our true selves ‘back stage’. Goffman noted that however polished the ‘front stage’ performance there is an uncontrolled leakage of elements of our true selves, from ‘back stage’ (1984: 109-114). The information that does get through is called ‘stigma’ by Goffman and is the attributes that mark out an individual’s emotional and social status. It is our ability to pick up these clues that make us the successful ‘mind readers’ Johnson (2001) suggests.

The shrinking of our personal spaces to those we create in transit, and the majority of time we now spend in these transitory spaces, has resulted in an increase in the stigma we give-off inadvertently. This has been accentuated by the arrival of mobile personal communications devices, as highlighted by many people’s dislike of public mobile phone users (Ibid. 5). The stigma that are picked up by co-present others may not relate to interactions in the actual environment. As people can be continuously connected to their virtual social groups many alienate themselves from others in public spaces.

The space in which our social interactions occur is a very local one. Goffman (1984) labelled this the ‘Interaction Order’. Modern mobile communications devices are increasingly equipped with Bluetooth and other short-range radio frequency devices that create a sphere of connectivity within the immediate vicinity of the user. Rheingold equates this wireless 12ft information bubble around wearable computer users as a physical model of Goffman’s interaction order (2002: 171). Paul Rankin of Philips Research Laboratories describes these cybrid bubbles as ‘aura’.

Devices we carry are increasingly linking up to share our information, for example mobile phones can share address books with PDAs and laptops. The need for devices to connect to each other within our aura has led to the development of ‘personal area’ networking. Personal Area Networks (PANs) are low power, low range wireless networks that provide connectivity among devices within the aura space (Kortuem et al. 2001: 1). Thus our personal spaces become cybrid, and with that comes the augmentation of the information we give-off. PANs will augment our local interactions by allowing us to share information with any passer-by. When aura overlap, devices will be able to share information about users allowing matching algorithms to run for a variety of contexts, such as personal interests and common acquaintances. The ability of our PANs ‘to establish communication links among devices during a face-to-face encounter can be used to facilitate, augment or even promote face-to-face interaction’ (Kortuem et al. 2001: 3). Such ‘impromptu collaboration’ (Kortuem et al. 2001: 3), using only the devices we normally carry, allows the sharing of resources such as music and contacts and promotes conversation and cooperation with others with similar interests we would not otherwise meet.

Such an invisible bubble that stretches before us as we go about our lives could remove much of the guesswork around gathering basic information about others and leave us to engage in the higher order interpretation and reasoning at which we are so good. Of course all of this relies on all parties being similarly trustworthy. It is calculating whom we can trust and then sharing that information in the form of reputation that is an important building block on which mobile peer-to-peer networks shall be based.

Posted by Sam at April 19, 2004 05:24 PM