RIT Gannett Lecture Explores “Smart Mobs” and Collective Action, April 15

Smart mobs and virtual communities will be the topic of the next Caroline Werner Gannett Lecture Series at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Author Howard Rheingold will present “Mobile Communications, Pervasive Computing and Collective Action,” at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 15, in Webb Auditorium in the James E. Booth building on the RIT campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Rheingold was one of the first to address the phenomenon of social communication in cyberspace in his book, The Virtual Community, published in 1985. His more recent book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002), describes what happens when “communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation.”

“The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks,” he writes. “The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing—inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments.”

Rheingold’s lecture is co-sponsored by RIT’s College of Liberal Arts and the department of information technology in the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. To learn more about the author, visit www.smartmobs.com.

For more information about the Gannett lecture series, call 475-2057 or visit www.rit.edu/gannettseries.