[LM_NET] blog: when mobile podcasting leads to mobcasting

[Andy Carvin <acarvin@EDC.ORG>]

Hi everyone,

I've just posted a blog that might be of interest. It's about
"mobcasting" -- the idea of combining mobile phone-enable podcasting
with smart mob-like group action. Here's a snippet from the blog:

"What do I mean by mobcasting? Well, it's really a double entrendre, if
you will: a play on both mobile podcasting and Smart Mobs, Howard
Rheingold's notion of viral-like social coordination enabled by
information and communications technologies. Smart mobs got a lot of
hype last year in the mainstream media, usually in the form of
surrealistic group performance art initiated over the Internet. But
smart mobs are much more powerful than just a group of college kids
showing up in an art gallery at 12:15pm, standing on one foot and
yelling "Tevye, get off the roof!" before dispersing without further
comment. Like the case of SMS use during the anti-Estrada demonstrations
in the Philippines, smart mobs can be any form of group social action
enabled by ICTs.

"A quick example: imagine a large protest at a political convention.
During the protest, police overstep their authority and begin abusing
protesters, sometimes brutally. A few journalists are covering the
event, but not live. For the protestors and civil rights activists
caught in the melee, the police abuses clearly need to be documented and
publicized as quickly as possible. Rather than waiting for the handful
of journalists to file a story on it, activists at the protest capture
the event on their video phones -- dozens of phones from dozens of
angles. Thanks to the local 3G (or community wi-fi) network, the
activists immediately podcast the footage on their blogs. The footage
gets aggregated on a civil rights website thanks to the RSS feeds
produced by the podcasters' blogs. (Or perhaps they all podcast their
footage directly to a centralized website, a la OneWorld TV but with an
RSS twist.) This leads to coverage by bloggers throughout the
blogosphere, which leads to coverage by the mainstream media, which
leads to demands of accountability by the general public. That's
mobcasting."

To read more, please visit here:

http://www.andycarvin.com

permalink:
http://www.andycarvin.com/000712.html

Would love to hear your thoughts on the concept.

thanks,
ac

--
-----------------------------------
Andy Carvin
Program Director
EDC Center for Media & Community
acarvin @ edc . org
http://www.digitaldivide.net
http://www.tsunami-info.org
Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com
-----------------------------------

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