By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 15, 2002
Prince William can't keep the women away. At the University of St. Andrews, where he's a student, he'll try to sneak out for a quiet drink, informing no one of his plan. But suddenly, out of nowhere, a mob of 100 crazed young women will appear, clamoring for his attention. No matter how secretly William tries to move around, a gang always masses within minutes. How do they do it?
With ''texting'' and some clever use of mobile phones. When one girl spots the prince, she taps out a text message on her cellphone and alerts her gaggle of teenage friends. They all do the same. ''It just has a snowball effect,'' one observer told a Scottish newspaper. ''Informing 100 girls of his movements takes just seconds.'' Presto: an instant swarm.
Or, more accurately, a ''smart mob'' -- the newest form of social organization. A smart mob is a self-organizing group of people who operate like a swarm of bees or a flock of pigeons. Scientists have long studied the intelligent ''emergent behavior'' of hive-style animals. But texting on cellphones is now allowing humans to behave in the same way -- forming into a group that is controlled by no single person, yet which moves as if it has a mind of its own. Since mobile text-messages can be instantly forwarded like e-mail pass-arounds, the mobs frequently involve masses of people who have never even met. ''They enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before,'' writes the technology thinker Howard Rheingold in his book ''Smart Mobs,'' published this fall.
The political effects can be astonishing. In the Philippines last year, smart mobs helped topple President Joseph Estrada. Barely an hour after fresh news of corruption arose, a text message forwarded from citizen to citizen (''Go 2EDSA, Wear blck'') summoned thousands of black-clad protesters to a public plaza. In America, antiglobalization advocates now use text messages to avoid the police at demonstrations; groups split up and re-form like amoebas.
This process isn't always so benign; mobs can be about lynching as often as democracy. Last month's Miss World eruption in Nigeria was triggered partly by texting: angry Muslims used their phones to pass on news of an article praising the pageant. Within days, more than 200 people had been killed.