virtual tribes

The NPR blog has a story on the recent immigration protests, with links to the LA Times. What I think is cool about this news story is the way it shows some of the unexpected effects of newer communication technology. A lot of the changes we talk about with computers and networks is just more / better / faster, but there are some fundamental shifts starting to emerge. One of those shifts is a much greater ability for people to organize themselves over distances. You can see it most clearly in Europe and Japan with their widespread use of text messaging on cell phones, but it exists in the U.S. as well with social networking sites like myspace.com and e-mail discussion lists. (Once you combine an e-mail discussion list with a Blackberry or Treo, you have effectively pretty much the same thing as text messaging on cell phones.) This is a trend to watch -- it may produce some big ripples in the future.