The previous post about Brainstorms leads me to post a little reciting of what I was raving about back in October 2002: Howard Rheingold’s book that had just come out , Smart Mobs (which has a BLOG by that name which continues to keep us updated with continuing findings, studies, articles (many of them by Howard, since it is, after all, HIS blog)

I was (and still am) enthralled with the inmplications and the “brainstorms” (no pun intended) that such a study gave me about how the Church needs to be “Smart” in this wireless rush and growth. Smart Mobs was a kind of update to The Virtual Community, whiich came out in 1992 , just prior to the public “discovery of the Web” and the entry of Mosaic and Netscape into the Net Community which spawned millions of lines of text— and a few graphics—- to go up on Web pages that people could type in an address and find or find by “browsing” or “surfing” the Net. The Virtual Community described the new twist that was occurring in the world of relationships, and told the story of several “online encounters” of the “personal relationship kind”.

Ten years later, Smart Mobs takes notice of how that “connectivity revolution” has moved off of the “Wired Net” and onto the wireless one (which is eventually connected to the WIRED one via Wireless routers, found in homes, businesses, coffeeshops, a nd “in the air” at various locations, seeping out into the public where people “warchalk” by using sensors to pick up wireless networks, or see the “markings” (thus the term “chalk”) on the side of buildings as a kind of “marker” to alert people that a network seeps out beyond these walls.

Smart Mobs travels around the world to Japan and elsewhere to study “smart-texting” and “wireless connectivity usage” in various groups, and explores how all of this is shifting certain social “normalcies” once again. As people increasingly “log on” at various remote places, the ways in which people interact is shifting (and not even always for the better– although Howard is often encouraging and obviously intrigued and a user of wireless gadgets, he is also an excellent writer and sociogical researcher, and often sounds warnings about some negative consequences, such as how it is increasingly noticable that people sitting next to you are “somewhere else”, because they are “connected” elsewhere (or people in neighboring cars are not watching what they’re doing , and holding a cell phone to their ear to the detriment of appropriate road-driving attention).