Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Took delivery of two eagerly awaited books this week: Prey by Michael Crichton and Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold. Flicking through the first few pages of each I noticed a word that had not been at the forefront of my vocabulary: "flocking". And what's more, it's a concept central to each book. Crichton's novel is about evil clouds of nanocomponents that are fond of "flocking":

"Flocking was not hard wired. There was nothing in the bird brain that said, 'When thus-and-such happens, start flocking.' On the contrary, flocking simply emerged within the group as a result of much simpler, low-level rules. Rules like, 'Stay close to the birds nearest you, but don't bump them.' From those rules, the entire group flocked in smooth co-ordination.

Because flocking arose from low-level rules, it was called emergent behaviour. The technical definition of emergent behaviour was behaviour that occurred in a group but was not programmed into any member of the group. Emergent behaviour could occur in any population, including a computer population. Or a robot population. Or a nanoswarm."

I'm a Crichton fan and the book, so far, is proving a great read. By the way, it will appear in German on Monday with the title Beute.

Unlike Michael Crichton, Howard Rheingold doesn't do thrillers, but what both writers have in common is their interest in the impact of technology on society. Rheingold was ahead of the pack in the 80's in anticipating the power of the PC and he also foresaw the Internet revolution of the 90's. Now, in Smart Mobs, he's predicting the next techno-cultural shift. And what might that be? Well, at the heart of it all are the wireless devices — mobile phones, PDAs, pagers — that are making instant communication ubiquitous. Edgey technology converges with pop culture and creates a new kind of social connectivity. And flocking? On the first page of Rheingold's book, we meet the author standing outside the Shibuya subway station in Tokyo. Hundreds of people mill around. "Cliques and flocks assemble and diffuse". Standing at the Shibuya Crossing and watching people using their keitai (mobile phones) for talking, texting and surfing, (this is DoCoMo i-mode country, after all), he observes:

"The crosswalk works on the scramble system. Every time the lights turn green, 1,500 people cross from eight directions at once, performing a complex, collective, ad hoc choreography that accomplishes the opposite of flocking; people co-operate with immediate neighbours in order to go in different directions. In addition to negotiating a split-second co-ordination with moving strangers, many in the crowd carry on simultaneous conversations with people located elsewhere."

Yes, flocking. Looks like we've got a meme here.