While researching Lewis Thomas' essay collection entitled "Lives of a Cell", I came across the following article from July 2004 Technology Review.

Conincidence?  I think not.  Lewis Thomas laid the groundwork for much of James Lovelock's "Gaia" philososphy [1] which theorisizes mother earth as massive superorganism seeking homeostasis.

The following article should prove interesting fodder for realNEO/Tribe folks as social networks provide holarchic transfer of knowledge,  thereby enabling a knowledge economy or a spontaneous dodgeball game in the E. 5th alley...

Social Lives of a Cell Phone

New wireless services will maximize your connections to others and minimize your need to plan ahead

By Eric Bender

Want to play Dodgeball?

Heres how it works: Say you're young and single, and youre out on the town one Saturday night. You take out your mobile phone and tap in the name of the restaurant where you're hanging out. You get a list of friends, and friends of friends, within 10 blocks. You can message each other about getting together, and maybe send a photo of yourself. We're taking social software off the desktop and moving it into the environment where people actually socialize," says Dennis Crowley, co-founder of the service, which spread this spring from New York to nine other U.S. cities.

The buzz about Dodgeball gives one glimpse of the future of the mobile phone. Probably no other product in human history has evolved and been adopted worldwide so quickly. Hundreds of millions of people own a mobile phone, and many replace it every year or so. Its use has already changed how many societies communicate. It already comes with good social connection services such as group text messaging and the ability to share camera-phone snapshots directly with friends or on a mobile weblog. But its about to produce far more radical changes in how we communicate.

READ THE REST HERE [2]