In 1963, Anthony Burgess brilliantly created a British working-class dystopia in his novel, "A Clockwork Orange." The book's title is a nod to an old Cockney phrase, "as queer as a clockwork orange," something that looks normal on the outside but with sinister inner workings—kind of like that friendly smartphone in your hand right now.
A few years ago, social networking was something our teenaged kids did for LOLs. Since then, it has been adopted, embraced and codified by the business world (who would have thought that university degree programs and full-time positions for social media managers would exist?). And now, as technology inevitably does, it is evolving—or devolving—into something with more nefarious applications.
Near the beginning of summer, I blogged about a disturbing trend that had begun cropping up in urban areas: organized robberies, looting and attacks by "flash mobs" that converged en masse at a location after being alerted via Twitter, Facebook and smartphone texting. The early reports mostly flew under the radar of media attention, and I felt somewhat paranoid for pointing out the trend. But to me it felt like the evil twin of the Twitter activity that helped spur the "Arab Spring" Middle East uprisings.
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