Partyers or Protesters--Cells Gather Them Fast

At the University of St. Andrews, royal hottie Prince William can’t even go out for drinks with friends without being tracked electronically by a pack of networked women.

“A quite sophisticated text messaging network has sprung up,” an “insider” told the Scottish Daily Record. “If William is spotted anywhere in the town then messages are sent out” on his admirers’ cell phones. “It starts off quite small. The first messages are then forwarded to more girls and so on. It just has a snowball effect. Informing 100 girls of his movements takes just seconds.” At one bar, the prince had to be moved to a safe location when more than 100 “lusty ladies,” so alerted, suddenly mobbed the place.

Chalk up another life changed by “swarming,” which is transforming social, work, military and even political lives worldwide. It is the unintended consequence of people, cell phones in hand, learning they can coordinate instantly and leaderlessly.

“It’s the search for peak experience, something that’s really going to be special,” says Adam Eidinger, a Washington political organizer. It’s the precise opposite of a 1962-style “American Graffiti” world. Then you had to go to a place--the strip, the drive-in--to find out what was going on. Now you find out what’s going on by cell phone, and go to the place where it’s happening.

Once-isolated individuals are discovering a new way to organize order out of chaos, without guidance. Swarming reverses the idea that geography, in an Internet age, has become irrelevant. The whole point is to bring people together in one location for face-to-face contact. Swarming is also leading to such wondrous social developments as “time-softening,” “cell dancing,” and “smart mobs.”

Howard Rheingold is an apostle of swarming.

Rheingold has for a generation examined society’s unintended and imaginative uses of new technology. He helped pioneer virtual communities--a phrase he invented--before most people had even heard of e-mail or seen a cell phone.

As the Internet and mobile communications merge, Rheingold sees a profound societal shift. “They amplify human talents for cooperation,” he says.

This is by no means all fun and games. The gear was used by “some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks,” says Rheingold, whose forthcoming book is called “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.”

Smart mobs are a serious realignment in which leaders may determine an overall goal, but the actual execution is created on the fly by participants at the lowest possible level, Rheingold notes. They respond to changing situations without requesting or needing permission. The key to the power of mobiles--including such hybrids as two-way pagers, Blackberry e-mailers, personal digital assistants merged with phones, wireless laptops, and phones merged with two-way radios--is that they liberate people from their desktop phones and computers.

Former Philippine President Joseph Estrada, accused of massive corruption, was driven out of power two years ago by smart mobs who swarmed to demonstrations, alerted by their cell phones. “It’s like pizza delivery,” Alex Magno, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines, told the Washington Post then. “You can get a rally in 30 minutes--delivered to you.”

The U.S. military has been one of the earliest institutions to both fear and see the possibilities in swarming. John Arquilla co-authored “Swarming and the Future of Conflict” two years ago for the think tank Rand Corp. and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He sees swarming--”a deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions”--as spearheading a revolution in military affairs.

But social swarms are easily the most common and intriguing for most people. On a Saturday night in Washington, the members of one swarm--single, in their 20s and 30s--are briefly landing at Gazuza, a club where, at this instant, the action is.

Anna Boyarsky and Corinne Fralick, both 21, both interns, casually mention that their group house has no land lines anymore. Why bother? To be young is to be cognitively welded to a mobile.

The swarmers laugh at themselves and the role swarming plays in their lives. “Cell dancing” comes up, the choreographed behavior in which two people who are vaguely in the same area but can’t find each other get on the phone.

“It’s a locator service,” says Boyarsky. “My younger brother was in town. We were going to meet up for lunch. ‘I’m at M and something,’ he said.” She had him walk down the street, calling out landmarks until they spotted each other. More seriously, everyone acknowledges that being constantly in touch with the swarm is changing their sense of time, place, obligations and presence.

Remember arranging to meet at a specific time at a specific location? Forget it. People now vaguely agree to meet after work, then work out the details on the fly. A time-softened meeting starts with a call that says, “I’m 15 minutes away.”

“If you didn’t have the cell phone, you’d make more of an effort to be on time,” says Kaine Kornegay, 21, an intern in the Senate. “It’s more socially acceptable to be late,” he says, “because you’ve given notice that you would be.”

There can be a dark side. Swarmers run the risk of never really connecting with the person physically in front of them. They’re always wondering if there isn’t somebody better to talk to at the next place. How’s the party? Should we move on? Is there any food? Are the girls prettier where you are?

Swarmers do indeed end up with “a more abrupt attention span,” says Boyarsky. “But you have to have a grip on reality to feel it. Unless you know what is real--what is a real friendship and relationship--neither can have an effect on you. If you know what is real, then you know that the cell phone is not a real relationship. It’s a connection, but not a person. It allows you to connect to other people, but it’s not them, and not you.

“It’s a sign of commitment, when you turn off the phone,” Boyarsky says. “When somebody turns off their cell phone for you, it’s true love.”