Thursday, March 23, 2006

What I am reading now



Got this book just before the tournament, but as you may have noticed, been watching the tournaments and red sox preseason last week. Did get a chance to start reading this though and am impressed. Short, sweet and too the point, with some very good observations. Just started chapter 6.

In the book the prof, talks about the flash crowd and other ways that people have been connecting with each other and it occurs to me that one of his premises about wealth allowing people to spend time on non essential tasks has led to practical purposes when applied to public assemblage. Over the last couple of years we have seen the cedar revolution, the orange revolution and the rose revolution, where one of the main ways that these protestors / freedom fighters communicated was through text messages.

So the question is, and I think the answer is no, if flash crowds hadn't shown how effective text messaging was in creating spontaneous crowds would these revolutions been as successful as they turned out to be?

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