Digiwonder?

Howard Rheingold's shoes have hand-painted comets and rockets and stars on them. The bright purples, reds, yellows, blues, and greens of his palette suggest his wonder and amazement at the digital world and his enduring fascination with how we shape it and are shaped by it.

I just finished reading the first couple chapters of his book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. In it, he travels the world- Tokyo, Finland, Redmond, Washington– an intrepid traveler interviewing the brightest minds behind the digital world. It's almost as if his physical world travels unfold like a sweeping Internet search. He hops from node to node,criss-crossing continents and oceans, painting his own web mirroring the one he studies.

What are smart mobs? Today, they are text messaging Tokyo teenagers or a Finnish gamer being alerted that an enemy gamer is in the physical area– he can shoot his bot. (I picture a big 70s-ish car tearing through a grimy back alley as our protagonist stares intently at his wireless handheld. Yes! The enemy botfighter he seeks is in range. He signals his driver to stop. The car screeches to a halt. But instead of a real bullet shoot out, he slams his thumb on his send button. A hit! Enemy down. More cyber points. They pull away slowly. Time for a slice of pizza.)

As today's technologies continue to collide and morph into new applications, it won't only be pubescent "thumb tribes" and geeky techies who are meeting, hating, falling in love, and living over their mobile hand-helds. It will be all of us. Rheingold predicts that our wireless handhelds will soon become remote controls for our lives.

Rheingold draws the analogies, Internet is to wireless life what the telegraph was to the telephone. Just as we don't compare the two technologies, he predicts we won't compare the static Internet to the mobile one.

But not so fast. Enter culture, economics, Net Neutrality. The rollout and adoption of wireless life to a certain extent hinges on people's easy access to it, their culture, how much it costs.

Way, way back in the early days of computers, programmers kept code sheets in drawers for each other to borrow and improve (seeds of today's open source model). They figured out ways to network their computers together and send each other messages to compare notes (seeds of the Internet). And they did this in a decentralized environment, with the idea that helping each other out would grow the bank of collective knowledge and technological progress faster. That is untilenterprizing guys like Bill Gates challenged this model, asserting that software was private property and not a public resource. Now it's both.

Rheingold poses the natural next question:

Will the Internet remain a decentralized, self-organized commons as the fixed network infrastructure upgrades to wireless connection technologies? Lawrence Lessig, distinguished professor at Harvard and Stanford law schools, is alarmed at technical and legal movement snow underway that might change the characteristics that enabled the Internet to thrive (page 54).

There's that old saying, the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. After spending an afternoon travelling with Rheingold, the cliche fits. My questions:

It seems to me that if the big wireless networks decided to cooperate, allowing customers to interact regardless of their carrier and even create new and better applications for the network, then people would more quickly experiement and ultimately adopt these technologies. And that would be good for all the providers. I write this, however with a very cursory understanding of the economic issues behind this. Is the fact that US carriers don't operate on one standard like GSM already going to make this impossible– or at least improbable?

As the world goes mobile, what will be the triumphs of our new way of connecting? What will be the scandals? Who will have better lives? Who will be left behind? How will government respond? What laws do we now need for this new, fast approaching world?

While I know I won't get definite answers to all of these unknowns, like Rheingold, I'll keep studying.

–Suz