Power of Technology

Howard Rheingold writes about smart mobs, or groups of people that use technology as a device in order to organize an operation to take place. Rheingold gives us many examples of instances where cell phones were used to organize citizens of a country to overthrow their government. For example, on January 20, 2001, President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of state to lose power to a smart mob. This overthrowing was done by citizens through text messaging.

After reading this article, I began to analyze how much society uses technology to communicate and how powerful it really is. It is amazing that we can use different forms of technology in order to overturn a government. The recent example of this is in Egypt. President Hosni Mubarak was forced from office due to the citizen’s revolution. How could a President be overthrown by citizens? It was all done by gathering people through social-networks online. Technology has created ways that a large number of people can communicate and at any moment they wish. These advancements help keep people up to date with what is going on. Text messaging helps people find out where people are located at all times.

Once I thought about how astounding it is that technology can have such a huge impact on people, I started to think about the other aspects of social mobs. There has also been social mobs that come together to interact with society in other ways than riots. For example, as I was reading this article, I began to think about the idea of flash mobs. Flash mobs are a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual or pointless act for a certain period of time. After that time is up, the people then move off to wherever they were originally going and act like nothing just happened. The purpose of this mob is for entertainment. The way that flash mobs are created is through different types of media, such as texting, emails, social networks, etc. If we did not have all of these technology tools, people would not have the easy communication techniques to get the word out to people in a fast amount of time. These mobs would have a more difficult time being so powerful.