READING: The Argument

Reading Matt Bai's book, The Argument, I couldn't help but think of how many times political campaigns or advocacy movements struggle under the collective weight of the egos of those 'in charge'.

Reading about the behind the scenes back and forth and power struggles in Bai's book, you get a visceral sense for the painful dialectic between vision and execution that haunts human activities across the board.

While the circulated powerpoint laid out a compelling and coherent vision of what needed to happen and rallied economic and social capital, the constellation of people that embarked on executing (e.g. managing) that vision fell short.

Their egos and personal interests quickly mired them in the type of political game which they arguably were trying to transcend.

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Reading this book, I couldn't help but think of a Shirky quote in the last reading from the IDPI.

Instead of unlimited growth, membership, and freedom, many of the communities that have one well have bounded size or strong limits to growth, non-trivial barriers to joining or becoming a member in good standing, and enforceable community norms that constrain individual freedoms. Forums that lack any mechanism for ejecting or controlling hostile users, especially those convened around contentious topics, have often broken down under the weight of users hostile to the conversation. Thoughtful regulations can actually help, not hinder the growth of your community.

In online communities, regulations can be imposed externally through platform architecture.

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I think there is a lesson to be learned from online communities that reach a point of self-sustainability: they are hard-coded w/ the logic of self restraint.

The behavior that leads to tragedy-of-the-commons type of outcomes is avoided by making sure individual egos are kept in check through technical architecture.

I think we are still trying to figure out how to soft-code self restraint when it comes to off-line systems to avoid tragedy of the commons (shared bike programs still don't work).

But as we move into a period of effective cybernetic human organizing - like the Obama Campaign - I think we will be able to intelligently apply technical systems to impose limitations on the activities in ways to promote the public good...and potentially give the dems a better chance at executing their vision.

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I did really enjoy Bai's thorough job explaining the rise of internet-based political activists and how they transformed the party. In terms of speaking to the potential for the internet to change politics, I thought this book was very interesting.

Unconferences, Twitter, and @SocJustCampDC

After campaigning for Obama in rural Iowa just before the 2008 election, I came back to DC and heard about a conference called Rootscamp 2008.

I forget where I heard about it.

My first unconference, Rootscamp was amazing. I found myself in an extremely talented people cloud: Chris Hughes of Facebook, Marshall Ganz out of Harvard, and Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum, and were all in the orbit.

Since Rootscamp, I've been averaging roughly an unconference a month: EDemocacyCamp, Participation Camp, Gov 2.0 Camp, Social Change Camp, Crisis Camp, Accessibility Camp, Congress Camp.

(I've been thinking about what a unconference rehab program might look light).

Along with a number of friends, including Greg Bloom of Bread for the City, I am now helping plan Social Justice Camp: "A participant-driven conference in Washington, DC convened for the creative pursuit of social justice through technology and collaboration."

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So far, I have used Twitter to help publicize and pull people into the fold and it seems to be having some traction.

I wanted to post about how easy Twitter makes it to penetrate existing communities and simultaneously build rapport with people while pushing message.

I think the main thing twitter allows you to do is let people know that you're listening to them...and that you are interested in their interests.

It's been really useful mining twitter feeds to examine folks social graphs, interests, and geographies.

@SocJustCampDC is currently up to 125 followers on Twitter.

Public Media Camp

Since going to Rootscamp in 2008 just after Obama won the presidential election, I have been addicted to unconferences.

Since Rootscamp I have averaged practically an unconference a month for the last 10 months and I am extremely excited to work for an organization that is planning an unconference next month - Public Media Camp.

I was fortunate enough to get to here Andy Carvin talk about Public Media camp this past week at DC Media Makers.

Andy Carvin - NPR's senior social media strategist - gave a short presentation on Public Media Camp, a quickly approaching unconference based at American University (October 17-18th).

Along with PBS’ social media guy Jonathan Coffman and Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs (who helped run DC’s Apps for Democracy), Carvin hopes to fundamentally redefine the relationship between the public and public media organizations.

Andy suggested that folks at public media organizations are great at asking for financial support but not extremely good at harnessing human support (e.g. time, technical expertise, excitement).

Public Media Camp is an unconference designed to harness these other resources (e.g. social capital).

According to Carvin, well over 200 folks have registered and some are coming in from as far away as Alaska.

If anyone is interested in watching Andy Carvin's talk, Alex Howard, a local tech journalist and amazing guy, archived his livestream video here.

READINGS: IPDI, Rosenblatt

Reading @JulieG's report "Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User Generated Content," (link to pdf) some of the concepts I found interesting were:

-The importance of leveraging offline networks to reinforce online networks (Repubs and Churches, Obama & Farmers Markets)
-The need to let go of control of message so online communities and tell stories in their own voice
-The ostensible paradox individual restraints and of network growth (Shirky quote)

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In @drdigipol's blog post and embedded essay on how the Aryan Resistance could use the net to push their message, I couldn't help but think of Shirky's explanation of how lowered transaction costs have given created new groups of people who were not groups before.

Diasporic groups of people, who previously could not find each other, now have the tools to amplify their message, rally an online community, and create a sense of normalcy inside their collective social space (e.g. the Pro Ana girls who leveraged YM's web site to share tips about being anorexic).

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Both readings speak to the new opportunities digital communication tools represent and the shift from broadcast to conversation media.

The dark matter I see emerging in the social media landscape is the cultural piece. The tools are demanding new things from organizations, political candidates, and possibly even hate groups.

I recently saw a tweet that said any enterprise change is 20% technological and 80% cultural.

I think it's possible that while larger organizations have more resources, they are not as nimble as smaller networks of people.

The Goliaths of the day are now on the same playing field of many Davids, who are now wired.

(I think the above image of the liliputians restraining Gulliver seems pretty illustrative of media landscape being ushered in by the internet and social media...)

READING: Here Comes Everybody

Shirky's Here Comes Everbody is a sophisticated glimpse into the social and economic changes taking place as the internet helps drive us from an industrial paradigm into a digital, information economy.

Referencing numerous anecdotes and an impressive range of social science concepts, Shirky explores the subtleties of how evolving electronic communication tools have facilitated radically new group behavior.

Shirky maps out how the internet challenges the logic of conventional institutions.

As much the internet has dropped transaction costs, it has reshaped the marketplace that made institutions as we know them necessary.

Now that the landscape of transaction costs has been fundamentally altered, the stability of institutions is very much problematized.

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Charting changes from mass amateurization to the ability of ephemeral groups of people to spontaneously create campaigns with political significance to collaborative production of software and other products, the internet is giving groups of people new ways to create.

It is shifting some of the longstanding social bargains behind modern society.

On very emblematic example from Shirky's book is the industrial (railroad era) relic that is the top-down org chart. As much as the org chart represents a command and control management paradigm, the internet allows for a new paradigm...a new org chart for the 21st century.

If Shirky is right, the 21st century version of an org chart will be a work in progress for a while to come.

The logic of group management during the industrial era - and the institutional infrastructure it gave birth to - has been derailed.

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Shirky's book actually catalyzed my decision to go back to school for communications.

Throughout Shirky's book, McLuhan’s words resonate deeply, ‘we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.’

As much as railroads and industrial machines shaped organizational logic, I believe the internet has potential to reshape that same logic and drive new kinds of human endeavor.

In my statement of purpose, I tried to explain why I think it's so important to study communication:

Considering our evolutionary track record, mankind’s ability to develop increasingly complex technologies – iron smelting and agricultural methods, written language, moveable type, industrial machinery – has consistently set the stage for the punctuated development of increasingly complex human culture. I believe digital communication technologies are an important enunciation of this larger historical arc and will accelerate the ongoing evolution of man, his tools, and his social order.

In short, Shirky's Here Comes Everybody pulls back the curtain on a cultural shift that is ushering in a new era of human collaboration and participation.

READING: Mobilizing Generation 2.0 (steal this strategy)

(via)

Ben Rigby's Mobilizing Generation 2.0 is a comprehensive how-to written for a new kind of organization and a new kind of a citizen.

The book covers pushing messages and narratives online, organizing and convening publics in virtual space, and wielding an integrated set of communication tools in the name of social change.

As I read the book, it registered like a 21st century version of Abbie Hoffman's Steal this Book for geeks (minus the illegality & political radicalism): a practical handbook focused on changing society and democratizing discourse.

Hoffman, an activist and organizer of sorts, understood the limitations of the media landscape of his generation:

To talk of true freedom of the press, we must talk of the availability of the channels of communication that are designed to reach the entire population, or at least that segment of the population that might participate in such a dialogue. Freedom of the press belongs to those that own the distribution system. Perhaps that has always been the case, but in a mass society where nearly everyone is instantaneously plugged into a variety of national communications systems, wide-spread dissemination of the information is the crux of the matter.

Mobilizing Generation 2.0 effectively maps a communications landscape that Hoffman didn't live to see.

We now have 'channels of communication' with the potential of reaching the entire population...

Rigby charts the shifting ground between a paradigm of broadcast and control and the emerging paradigm of conversation and engagement.

He also speaks to some of the old psychologies still at work and the difficulties of dealing with busy people and organizations with tight budgets.

So while the tools have changed and we're living in a dramatically different world, it is still unwritten how exactly the tools will change us and how they will change society.

Reading Rigby's book however, it makes you realize the extent a small group of people can really make a difference if they're organized, strategic, and understand both the logic of tools and what motivates people to participate.

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Notable quotes:

"Blogging purists will say that operating a successful blog necessitates shifting the very structure of your organization - making it more open" (Rigby, p. 43)

"Sustainable advantage in Web 2.0 is not about maintaining control; it's about delivering value to a community over time" (Rigby, p. 45).

"To be effective in this environment, you have to behave more like an organizer and less like a marketer" (Rigby, p. 83).

The demographics of social networks (specifically Myspace)

While the above video may be one of the most articulate demographic mappings of the social networks that I've ever seen (even though it's a bit dated), there is some very good academic research being conducted on social networks.

danah boyd (@zephoria) is well know for her work researching social media and the activities of youth online; at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York this past summer, she gave this talk which created a ton of buzz.

"The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online" discussed how online networks are subject to the same logic of homophily as offline networks and communities (homophily = tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others).

boyd touched on the social divisions that occurred as Myspace experienced a major exodus of its wealthier, more educated white users who left for the land of Facebook:

What happened was modern day "white flight." Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those who deserted MySpace did so by "choice" but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.

Researchers out of Harvard recently looked at a dataset of 100,000 Myspace users and mirror Boyd's "white flight" findings; they reported that Myspace users...

...populate smaller cities and communities in the south and central parts of the country. Piskorski rattles off some MySpace hotspots: "Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida."

They aren't in Dallas but they are in Fort Worth. Not in Miami but in Tampa. They're in California, but in cities like Fresno. In other words, not anywhere near the media hubs (except Atlanta) and far away from those elite opinion-makers in coastal urban areas.

Exploring the web site, I'm realizing how important it is to understand that Myspace is a non-random collection of voters and constituents who may have fundamentally different political sensibilities - as well as aesthetic sensibilities - as the people who spend their time in Facebook (or any other social network for that matter).

It seems like it would be useful keeping this in mind for organizational interests attempting to brand and execute their respective campaigns online.

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The other thing that came to mind was @planetmoney's recent podcast MySpace Was Born Of Total Ignorance, which is pretty awesome.

They talk about how creators of Myspace - who came out of the Hollywood/internet porn scene - wanted to create a nightclub atmosphere online.

Hearing about the thinking and experiences of the sites founders, the podcast helps make sense of why Myspace would attract different kinds of folks than the Ivy-League-generated Facebook.

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Related stuff:

-Short interview w/ Global Voices' Ethan Zuckerman (@EthanZ) on homophily
-Stealing Myspace (Book by author interviewed on mentioned Planet Money podcast)