Smart mobs

Smart mobs are technology-enabled groups capable of organizing and acting collectively without top-down leadership, but the book distinguishes their power to coordinate from a crowd’s capacity to think wisely. Drawing on Howard Rheingold’s account of technology-assisted collective action, it argues that a group’s growing awareness of itself can come at a cost: as members become less independent, the crowd may become less wise.

Definition and Distinction

In discussing Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs, the book identifies a clear resemblance between Rheingold’s subject and its own interest in groups that cooperate and coordinate without centralized direction. In Rheingold’s title, “smart” means something closer to self-aware than wise. Smart mobs are groups able, or potentially able, to recognize themselves as a group and to act collectively in a self-directed way.

That capacity describes a form of organization, not a guarantee of sound judgment. Some crowds in the book are self-aware, too, but self-awareness is not what makes a crowd wise. The distinction separates collective agency—knowing that the group can act together—from the independent contributions that can make a group’s judgments better than any one member’s.

Technology and Collective Action

Technology matters because it can make collective organization easier, including organization that does not depend on a leader issuing instructions from above. This possibility links smart mobs to the book’s broader interest in how groups coordinate and cooperate. Their defining promise is practical: people can use technological means to organize themselves and pursue collective ends.

Rheingold’s account leaves open whether such ends will be good or bad. The organizational capacity itself does not determine the group’s purpose. Smart mobs therefore represent a form of collective power whose consequences depend on what people do with it, not a moral or intellectual guarantee built into the technology.

Self-Awareness and the Wisdom of Crowds

The book’s qualification is that a group may become less wise as it becomes more self-aware. The more members orient themselves toward the group as a group, the less independent each member may be. That loss matters because the book’s account of collective wisdom depends on people contributing judgments that are not simply copies of one another. Coordination can enable joint action, but conformity can narrow the range of information and perspectives available to the group.

This contrast also clarifies why smart mobs and wise crowds are related but not interchangeable. A smart mob’s strength lies in its ability to organize and act collectively; a wise crowd’s strength lies in aggregating judgments without erasing their independence. Collective action may benefit from shared awareness, while collective problem-solving may require members not to take their cues entirely from one another.

Scientific Collaboration as a Contrast

The book’s account of the global search for the cause of SARS offers a concrete contrast to leaderless coordination that still preserves independent work. The World Health Organization brought eleven laboratories into a collaborative effort, and researchers shared results, samples, and daily discussions; no one at the top dictated how each laboratory divided its work. The network reached its conclusion through distributed investigation rather than a single authority’s command.

The result was not credited to one discoverer. Although Cynthia Goldsmith first spotted the coronavirus, laboratories working across countries supplied the evidence that established its connection to SARS. The book describes this as a collective discovery completed in weeks. The example shows that cooperation and coordination need not extinguish the distinct contributions on which collective judgment depends.

Collective Knowledge and Trust

The comparison extends to science as a whole. Scientists publish results and make data available so that others can inspect them, challenge conclusions, and use the findings to develop further hypotheses and experiments. Even failed hypotheses contribute by showing other researchers where not to look. Knowledge, in this account, depends on contemporaries as well as predecessors: it is collective, not merely cumulative.

Yet this open process does not mean that most researchers personally reproduce every experiment. Scientists often rely on data and work they have not tested themselves, and an accepted hypothesis is generally one that the community finds credible, not one every scientist has independently verified. Scientific collaboration therefore relies on trust and fair dealing, alongside the possibility of replication and the exposure of fraud. Its authority emerges through scrutiny and acceptance across a community, rather than through a single pronouncement or a literal vote.

Against that example, smart mobs mark both the reach and the limit of technologically enabled collective action. Technology can help groups organize without central command, but organization alone does not produce wisdom. The question is whether collective awareness supports cooperation while leaving room for members to contribute independent judgment.