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Indications of a paradigm shift


Notizen:

You might think, that the scenario which I envision sounds unrealistic or that it might be decades away. Therefore I want to present to you some evidence for the possibility of the emergence of the scenario---both technical and social.
First of all, we see that the mobile phone is changing. While the mobile itself is already a ubiquitous device, its merging with the digital camera opens new applications beyond the MMS message. The research institute InfoTrends predicts that the worldwide camera phone sales will reach almost 150 million in this year.
Then, we get fully Java-programmable handsets. This makes it possible to adapt existing phones to new applications very easily. The telecommunication network itself is also changing: from a circuit-switched architecture which is optimised for one-2-one applications to a packet-switched architecture which also supports many-2-many applications.
But of cause, the technical possibilities are not enough. The question is: do the users want such a system? I want to give you two positive indicators.
Smart mobs. The term "smart mobs" is coined by Howard Rheingold and the freeporter fits pretty good in this concept. Rheingold writes that "Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don't know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and processing capabilities." A striking example for such a smart mob were the people of Manila, the capital of the Philipines, in January of 2001. They organised huge demonstrations entirely by SMS until president Estrada was finally overthrown.
Then we have the weblog movement. Weblogs are a new form of publishing in the Word Wide Web which puts the individual authors in the centre and not a publishing organisation. As a result, there is a huge number of highly specialised and extremely topical news sources on the World Wide Web today. With the technical improvements I mentioned, weblogs will change to mobile weblogs---or moblogs---, as Rheingold calls them.