In his post Mob Rules (The Law of Fives ) Charles Pesce draws an interesting picture of a network by describing how a Meraki Mini works. This was a closing keynote at the Web Directions South 2007 conference that was on in Sydney in 2007. Pesce says:

Four months ago, a small startup in Silicon Valley named Meraki (Greek for “doing it with love”) for unveiled a cute little device, a wireless router that they simply named the Mini. Inside it has a RISC CPU running a custom version of LINUX which handles all of the routing tasks. That’s where it gets interesting. You see, Meraki have pioneered a new technology known as “wireless mesh networking”. You can power up a Mini in anywhere you like, and if there’s another Mini within distance – and these devices can reach nearly half a kilometer, outdoors – it will connect to it, share routing information, and route packets from one to another – all without any need to configure anything at all. Add another, and another, and another, and all of a sudden you’ve created a very wide area WiFi network. Only one of the Minis needs to be connected to the Internet as a gateway; the others will find it and route traffic through it. The Minis are small – and they’re also cheap. For just $49 dollars US, you can order one complete with an Australian wall wart. That’s cheaper than most access points out there, and because of the mesh networking, it does a whole lot more.

And thus a self-organizing network is formed outside the control of the telcos; a network in a era when the mob rules. So the emphasis is on the how the mob uses the networks , and how networks change because of the mob.