This book is written in 2002. If you read the book to the end of the chapter, you will be surprised by the level and depth of the contents. Howard Rheingold(the writer of this book) extracts brilliant insights from people’s behavior and technologies.
The wirter urges some interesting phenomenon like young people in Shibuya. And he sets up his social and tech. theories what will be the next. Now sending a SMS is too common thing, but the important thing is the timing he catches the meaning of sending a SMS. He deals with many technologies such as AR(Augmented Reality), Wearable computer and so on. And these technologies are highlighted again. There is a basic concept behind those technologies and services – smart mobs.
We usually meet our friends and people for several reasons. Maintaining a relationship or making a friendship is one of main reason to meet or contact each other. Superficially, emotional factors like missing someone are not changed. But the method, furthermore the behavior is rapidly changed. Before we use computer, we usually find knowledges and information from books and lectures. Sometimes we asks what we want to know.
But we know telecommunication method and internet, so we use flock together the sites which are used for collection and share of information. We call it “Swarm Intelligence.” Wikipedia is one of the main cases. And naturally we make our social networking through websites like facebook and myspace. Surprisingly, the author has already predicted this phenomenon.
Most of all, the last chapter gives some implication what the next issue :
“How to regulate the mobile internet…free innovation and promote competition without undermining the foundation of democratic societies”
“The interdisciplinary dynamics of cooperation systems…”
“The cognitive, interpersonal, and social effects of mobile, pervasive, always-on media”
“How ubiquitous mobile internet access and information…”
I think those kewords are effective to forecast the next internet service.