Swarms

Swarming Journal: June 17, 2009

By Justin Long ⋅ June 17, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Iran
The protests in Iran have become very swarmish, with a specific plausible promise (the annulment of the election) and certain shared values (nonviolence). There is some concern that if communications between the protestors are jammed, they may become isolated, and therefore blind and more likely to tend to violence. This is an interesting example of how a developing swarm can be kept accountable because of its goals and its values; but a “blind swarm” can become little better than an unruly, ungoverned mob.

Scientology
I saw an article today (Prosecutor Calls for Ban of Scientology in France), and it made me wonder: is Scientology a swarm? It would be an interesting question to investigate. Scientology is very resilient over time, but it may be more hierarchical.

On twitter, crowdsourcing, and its limits
Smartmobs.com has an article up linking to a collection of twitter reports, videos, and the like from inside Iran. It also has an important question: is this “journalism” or “reporting”? It is possible that a report may be crowdsourced from multiple individual reports by a swarm. The analysis of what such a report “means” may be something that only an expert (e.g. someone with more than 10,000 hours of experience—see Gladwell’s Outliers) can put together. This is why swarms need to have both crowdsourcing, monitoring and research going on.

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