According to Wikipedia, a smart mob is "...a group that, contrary to the usual connotations of a mob, behaves intelligently or efficiently because of its exponentially increasing network links. This network enables people to connect to information and others, allowing a form of social coordination. Parallels are made to, for instance, slime moulds." and slime moulds fits well with the concept of quorum sensing.
Here's where it gets really interesting. The unified act is something that no one of the bacteria could do on their own. In fact, the unified act is something that it takes a critical mass of bacteria to do. Examples of this unified act are protection from predators and reproductive signaling, pretty good things to unify for, don't you think? And pretty similar to the things smart mobs unify for (or so it seems at times).
Biologists are actively exploring quorum sensing behavior, just as sociologists are actively exploring smart mob behavior.
This brings us to NextStage and yours truly. There is very little that doesn't interest me and I've written previously that I make a living thanks to my imagination. NextStage's Evolution TechnologyTM came from my exploring four fields -- anthropology, linguistics, mathematics and neuroscience -- that most people wouldn't normally link together. I was exploring those fields because they interest me. Did then and do now.
So I was watching this show on quorum sensing and my mind started going over what I'd read and studied about smart mobs. My imagination -- more correctly, my ability to recognize deep similarities in very disparate fields -- kicked in. NextStage comes up with crazy solutions to marketing and communications problems because of these kicks and these crazy solutions always seem to work.
So I was wondering if the mathematical and related recognition and prediction tools designed for one discipline work in the other, and then I started wondering if there was a mashup of these tools which could be applied to web based social network theory.
Stay tuned and give me a while. One thing I love to do is think...
Links for this post:
- Books worth a read:
- Cell Phone Culture
- Evolution TechnologyTM FAQs
- Nova ScienceNow
- Posts on Imagination
- Quorum Sensing
- Smart Mobs
Hi Joseph,
Although from a much different perspective, I, too, am following this sort of thing: have you heard of Yochai Benkler's "Wealth of Networks" or Tapscott's "Wikinomics"? They're social science and so might not interest you directly, but they are interesting. Also, you might want to know about the work of Timothy Harris, a professor at Brown who has done some interesting work on early modern crowds:
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Renaissance_Early_Modern_Studies/people/facultypage.php?id=10087
Audience cognition is where I started with all this, and it has been interesting to see it morph into something that adumbrates modern marketing.
Best,
Brad Berens
Posted by: Brad Berens | January 15, 2007 8:44 AM | Permalink to Comment