This I Believe: informed citizenship and informed citizenry

Here's an inalienable right for you: the right to informed citizenship.

Citizenship, the informed kind, has two distinct angles to it. The first is the personal: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to the information that allows us to act in a civic and socially responsible way, and Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The second is the social: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to live in a society populated by informed citizens. We have a right to live among an informed citizenry, and any policy, law, or practice that restricts this right exists in opposition to a free and functional democracy.

In America, we embrace the right to informed citizenship; or, more accurately, we shout our support of informed citizenship up to the very rafters. Then we give Big Business a million incendiary devices to burn down that house.

There are explosives, like the recent SCOTUS decision knocking down campaign finance laws and giving corporate lobbyists unfettered access to our legislative and executive branches (and, by extension, the judicial branch as well).

Then there's the kindling, the petrol, the oxygen that keeps the fire blazing. Among the most powerful of these is the news paywall, which sequesters off information to which citizens have an absolute right. In theory, paywalls are no different from their precursors, subscription fees and newsstand prices. But two things have changed--our model of citizenship, and our access to circulated information--since those pre-internet days.

For example: In 1990-1991, during the first Gulf War, news was circulated fairly evenly across multiple platforms. An American who didn't want to pay for a newspaper could still gather information through television and radio. She could walk into a library and read the news for free. Certainly this wasn't a utopian ideal of a free press on every street corner, but the news that enabled a citizen to act was available through multiple outlets.

Today, the speed and reach of internet news sources make them by far the dominant news circulation platform. Indeed, the speed and reach of internet news are part of why a new model of citizenship is emerging. If there was ever a time when it was possible to measure civic engagement by looking at voter turnout on Election Day, that time is long past. Today's civically engaged citizen is the one who is aware of Facebook's abominable approach to privacy and has made decisions about how (or whether) to use Facebook as a result of this knowledge. Today's informed citizen may not know how many electoral votes are needed for a candidate to win the presidency, but she knows how to find that information when necessary. She votes on Election Day, sure, but she also votes with her feet and her eyeballs and her fingertips, constantly making informed decisions about how to parcel out her energy and time, when to dance along with corporate and political influences and when to resist, when to leave the dance floor entirely.

Paywalls make it harder for an informed citizen to stay informed, which in turn restricts my right to live among an informed citizenry. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the news that sticks is the news that spreads--via blogs, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and news aggregating sites like Boingboing. News that's stuck behind a paywall is news that can't spread and is therefore news that dies.

And that's not all: I believe that news paywalls are likely to have long-term effects on citizenship, as well, since I agree with James Seddon's point in his recent Wired article that young people who grow up without unfettered access to local news are likely to grow up without a sense of social and civic connection to their communities.

I recognize that the current business model for print journalism isn't working. I recognize that newspapers need to do something if they want to try to save their jobs. But in America, the eight-year reign of Baby Bush notwithstanding, we don't let business interests trump fundamental human rights.

I'm rooting for newspapers, I really am. I hope they survive this challenge. But news paywalls are in direct opposition to our fundamental right to informed citizenship, and my message to the print media folks is this: Find another way.

on Cory Doctorow on how to say stupid things about social media

"There are plenty of things to worry about when it comes to social media," says writer Cory Doctorow in his fantastic Guardian piece, "How to say stupid things about social media." Social media environments, he continues,

are Skinner boxes designed to condition us to undervalue our privacy and to disclose personal information. They have opaque governance structures. They are walled gardens that violate the innovative spirit of the internet. But to deride them for being social, experimental and personal is to sound like a total fool.

Yet plenty of perfectly smart people who should know better say exactly the foolish kinds of things Doctorow rightly decries in his post. Mainly, lately, the stupid things have been leveled at Twitter: It's trivial. It's banal. It's too voyeuristic, or it's a weak imitation of real relationships, or--and this is the one that really gets me--I try to use it in smart, deliberate, consequential ways, even though lots of my followers don't.

Partially, people who take stances like the above fail to see that the majority of the communication on sites like Twitter falls into the category of what Doctorow calls "social grooming." He writes:

The meaning of the messages isn't "u look h4wt dude" or "wat up wiv you dawg?" That's merely the form. The meaning is: "I am thinking of you, I care about you, I hope you are well."

Doctorow compares the "banality" of conversations on Twitter and Facebook to the conversations we have with coworkers. We ask a coworker if she had a good weekend, he writes, not because we care about how her weekend went but because we care about developing bonds with the people around us.

Yes, though that's only part of the answer. In choosing to communicate via Twitter, I'm not only saying "I am thinking of you, I care about you, I hope you are well," but I am also publicly announcing: "I am thinking of him, I care about her, I hope he is well." These announcements are interspersed with my Twitter interactions with
people who are not close friends or even necessarily acquaintances--people I care about only in the most abstract sense. I follow just under 350 people, after all, and am followed by around the same number--a far higher number than I am equipped to develop deep relationships with. And lots of people follow and are followed by far greater numbers than I.

The creaming together of the personal and the professional, the public and the private, means that 'trivial' social interactions in online social networks, however much they seem to replicate those that pepper our physical interactions, actually represent a new social animal whose form we have yet to fully sketch. We're all kind of blindly feeling our way around the elephant here. We who embrace social media technologies can scoff at the person who says an elephant is like a water spout after feeling only its trunk, or the person who has felt a little more and argues it's like a moving pillar topped off by a shithole, but we would do well to remember that in this parable, everyone who tries to describe the elephant, no matter how much of it he has touched, can only describe it by comparing it to objects he has previously encountered. Twitter is similar to a lot of things, but in the end it's its own elephant, identical to nothing else we've seen before.

This is why, as Doctorow points out, people rely on personal experience and therefore read Twitter and similar networks as trivial and banal instead of deeply socially meaningful. But it's also why we need to take care to treat the social meaning as different from that which emerges through other types of (digital or physical) social interactions.

time to smack down the Wall Street Journal

(Don't worry; I snuck around the pay wall.)

As my sister Laura put it when she sent me this article on why the Wall Street Journal is five years behind the times why email is no longer the communication tool of choice, "It's trying so hard to be 'with it' and in the flow of the times... But it seems stuffy and like a 40-year-old's take on new media."

The piece is called "Why Email No Longer Rules… And what that means for the way we communicate," and it reiterates points that were interesting to tech folks a handful of years ago. (Here's a 2007 piece on the decline of email from Gawker; here's a 2007 piece on the same topic from Slate ; here's a 2006 blogpost on the issue ; and so on.)

Among the "insights" of the WSJ article are that email seems painfully slow to us now:

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

There is, reporter Jessica E. Vascellaro explains, a new phenomenon wherein we receive a constant stream of information, both personal and professional. There is a downside, as she points out:

That can make it harder to determine the importance of various messages. When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages—from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening's plans—being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.

Additionally, the speed of communication presents problems:

While making communication more frequent, they can also make it less personal and intimate. Communicating is becoming so easy that the recipient knows how little time and thought was required of the sender. Yes, your half-dozen closest friends can read your vacation updates. But so can your 500 other "friends." And if you know all these people are reading your updates, you might say a lot less than you would otherwise.

Good lord! she exclaims. We're surrounded by this constant stream of information! How will we manage it?

It makes sense that we would compare new forms of communication--Twitter, Facebook, text messages--to older forms of written communication like email and, going back more than ten years (!), letters, memos, and personal notes. If we compare newer communication technologies to those previous modes of written communication, then Vascellaro's points ring true.

But here's where Laura got it right: Thinking of Twitter as a faster, shorter, and less consequential version of email is an old-school paradigm that ignores that other than the fact that it works primarily with printed text, Twitter (and, more broadly, microblogging in general) is not like email at all. Anyone who approaches these new platforms with an attempt to figure out what's 'important' and what's 'trivial,' what needs to be acted on and what can be ignored, is missing out entirely on the spirit of these spaces.

In fact, Twitter, Facebook, and similar participatory platforms support a convergence of multiple types of communication. Twitter, just as one example, supports a type of identity work that was not previously seen in other communication environments. Through the careful combination of tweets about personal information, 'trivial' details, and and professional interests, people are painstakingly (sometimes, especially at first, accidentally) crafting and presenting a coherent if fluid and flexible identity, which then informs the identities they present in other spaces, online and off.

What makes Twitter new is the particular combination of people and affordances. Facebook and similar social networks require people to send out friend requests that must then be accepted; it means people can control, fairly strictly, the size of their community. Twitter requires no such permission. Because I can follow almost anyone I want to, and because almost anyone who wants to can follow me, we're seeing a fascinating intermixture of near and distant connections between people. I follow my best friend, who follows me; I also follow my idol Clay Shirky, who doesn't follow me (yet); and I follow colleagues who fall all along the friendship continuum. Some of them follow me and some of them don't (yet).

Vascellaro largely focuses on the professional implications of new communication tools, and agrees that one nice feature of these tools is that information is often available instantaneously--if you need to know whether a colleague has left work yet, you might check her Facebook status. The downside, she explains, is that

a dump of personal data can also turn off the people you are trying to communicate with. If I really just want to know what time the meeting is, I may not care that you have updated your status message to point people to photos of your kids.

In fact, if you're using Facebook and Twitter just to find out the kinds of information you used to get through email and phone conversations, then the volume of information may feel overwhelming and prohibitive. But if you're only focusing on how to use these tools to do the work that email used to do, then you're kind of missing the point: Social media communication tools provide new avenues for doing deep identity work in communities that mix professional and personal relationships.

To be clear, Twitter is not email on steroids. Facebook is not like coffee circles for 500 people at a time. And blogs are not diaries with 100 or 1000 readers. Twitter is Twitter. Facebook is Facebook. And trying to parse these spaces by comparing them to previous one-to-many types of communications (like email) limits one's ability to see the full range of the affordances of these platforms.

I don't mean to hammer too hard on Vascellaro, who has written numerous interesting tech-related articles for the WSJ. But a quick look at her homepage reveals her biases (this, by the way, is another interesting aspect of an increasingly participatory culture: a public figure's digital footprint becomes a matter of public interest). Her site points to her Facebook page, the details of which are locked to the public; the ability to lock down a Facebook page, in my experience, is a feature largely leveraged by people who struggle with the notion of mixing the personal and the professional. But increasingly, the ability to engage with this mixture--even by getting it wrong sometimes--is more valued and valuable than the ability to carefully separate the two.

A look at Vascellaro's Twitter feed is even more telling. Her first several hundred tweets mimicked the style of Facebook status updates:




Eventually, she switched to a broadcast approach, mainly tweeting about interesting articles or linking to her own writing at the WSJ. These forms of participation are, just to be clear, perfectly legitimate. But other people do it better, and I imagine they get more out of the Twitter experience.

"Better" in this case, means "with deeper engagement in the collective meaning-making process supported by the affordances of Twitter."

[insert contemplative pause]

Truly, I've been sitting here considering whether an examination of Vascellaro's social networking practices are germain to a critique of her article. She links to her Facebook page (locked to outsiders) and her Twitter feed on her home page, and I believe that there is much to be learned about a technology reporter's biases through an examination of her use of those technologies. But I wonder how I would feel if someone picked apart my use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. At the very least, I might be engaging in an ad hominem attack. But then I think, if a school reporter critiques public schools, we should try to find out where she sends her kids. If a tech reporter smacks down Apple products, we should find out what kind of products she uses at work and at home.

Am I being a crudwad for examining Vascellaro's digital footprint? Is it relevant to the issues she identifies in her piece? I would love for people to weigh in on this. In fact, I think I'll try to get Vascellaro herself to weigh in.

...and yet I don't use Facebook much lately

This blog has been an unofficial Don't Say Facebook is Over zone. I'm not quite willing to let go of that stance, especially since statistics suggest that Facebook activity continues to increase worldwide.

But you guys, I really don't use Facebook that much anymore. And I'm not alone: Lots of my friends have drifted away too. Most of us prefer Twitter now, which means that one of the more interesting features of Facebook--the friend newsfeed--is clogged up by lame quiz results and remediated tweets that I've already read. All of the interesting stuff is going on over at twitter now, and Facebook is starting to feel like the social networking version of a print newspaper: I already got all the important news elsewhere, and the rest of what's there feels like filler.

More significantly, gaining a new Twitter follower feels like a bigger win to me than adding a Facebook friend does.

Now, I don't want to open myself up to accusations of Virginia Heffernanism. I'm not going to argue that my experience is symptomatic of any larger social networking trends. As far as I can tell, Facebook is far from an "online ghost town." In fact--and this seems important--as Facebook increasingly becomes the domain of an older and generally less social networking-savvy demographic, it's shifting to accommodate its new users' needs and interests. Though it has certainly tried, Facebook just can't keep up with the dynamic, socially complex Twitterspace; and the more it embraces this fact, the more it attempts to fortify the features it can uniquely offer, the more likely its continued success becomes.

what is learning (in new media)?

Alert blogtrollers may have seen multiple posts recently with titles identical to the one accompanying this post--that's because we've been asked by learning scientist and new media researcher Kylie Peppler to address this very concern. The question--what is learning in new media?--is too broad for anyone to address within the context of a single blogpost, but if we all set to work, we might get that turkey stripped down to its bones by the end of the night.

My chunk of the turkey is time.

When I joined Twitter, I lurked for months and months without tweeting a thing. When I finally did join the community as a good, earnest citizen, I started out slowly and picked up speed as I learned to negotiate the community's norms and embrace the valued practices of the space. Now, a year and a half later, I can communicate fairly clearly the spoken and tacit norms of the Twitterspace.

I did the same thing with Facebook, Wikipedia, and blogging--looking around for months before joining the community. By doing so, by taking the time to consider the space I was entering, I was able to reflect on others' practices before offering up my own. I read thousands of blogs before starting my own. I worked with friends to learn how to edit Wikipedia. And I was coerced by another friend to join Facebook; the rest was up to me.

I recently spent some time working with Scratch, a simple visual programming language designed for young learners. As the site explains,

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

I've designed exactly two projects in Scratch; the first was about a year ago, when a colleague spent the morning helping me work up a little thing I call Jimmy Eats World.


To play this project, click the green flag in the upper right.

I'm annoyed with myself that I didn't make the flying hippo actually disappear at the end of the project, and if I wanted to I could open up the program and make it so. Or I could turn the main sprite, the walking cat, into a hammerhead shark announcing my blog's url.

I could do that if I wanted to, because I am a highly resourceful independent learner who has the passion and the time to devote to projects like this. I find them personally and epistemologically meaningful--I feel enriched, and I feel that the time I devote to these kinds of projects makes me a better, more useful and proficient blogger and educational researcher.

Time, the friend of the highly resourceful learner, is the enemy of teaching. Time: There's never enough and even if there were, it couldn't be spent on tinkering. There's content to cover, and not just in the name of high stakes tests. A teacher's job--one made ever more challenging by the social revolution--is to equip learners with the knowledge, proficiencies, and dispositions that will suit them well for future learning. There comes a time when the teacher must say, It's time to stop with Scratch and start on something else.

Which is a deep shame, because it's the tinkering, the ability to immerse oneself in participatory media or a learning platform, that fosters a real fluency with the space.

This is a key feature of what it means to learn in new media: the choice to engage with certain tools, to join up with certain affinity spaces, beyond the time required by schools. Clay Shirky writes that the days are gone when we could expect to do things only for money; we're in an era when the greatest innovations emerge not for money but for love.

If learning in new media takes time, passion, and some combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, then on its surface school seems to run anathema to a new media education. In fact, it may be that engagement with participatory practices is exactly what schools need at a time when they are struggling to remain relevant to the real world needs, experiences, and expertises into which learners will ultimately emerge.

"Things fall apart"? SRSLY?

Over at the HASTAC blog, Cathy Davidson has posted a fantastic piece about a so-called "Facebook Exodus."

Davidson's post is called "Is Facebook the Technology from Hell?" and it tackles a New York Times article by Virginia Heffernan that suggests that

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters.... [W]hile people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing — some of them ostentatiously.

Davidson, while acknowledging her affinity for other Heffernan-authored pieces, rightly attacks this article for sloppy research and a bald-faced refusal to interpret data rationally. First, Davidson explains,

The "small but noticeable group" she documents are her friends. Their reasons are the ones that any wise FB user needs to be cautious of. Privacy, mostly. Of course FB is datamining. It's "free," right? Well, no. As every Cat in the Stack user knows by now, the "information is free" fantasy has been over for a long, long time. If it is free, they are gathering information that they can sell on the backend. There is no free lunch and no free Internet.

While it's certainly true, Davidson adds, that Facebook's popularity is declining among the younger demographic and it likely won't remain the behemoth it is now for the rest of time, there's no reason to think it will turn into the "online ghost town" Heffernan believes it's doomed to become--a ghost town, by the way, "run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit."

But Davidson's most important point is this:

methodology, people! We have to hold mainstream media responsible in the same way we hold the Internet bloggers and writers responsible. One's five friends are not necessarily the best filter on the world.

It is passing peculiar that the journalistic revolution--everybody, Clay Shirky writes, is a potential media outlet--is being covered by journalism's old guard, the very people whose vocations are threatened by new media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, blogging applications and forums. Humans have consistently proven their ability to see only what they want to see and ignore the rest; print journalists, for all their training in "objectivity" and "fairness," are really no different.

Of course not all print journalists are focused on studiously ignoring the social revolution, despite the overwhelming likelihood that it will come at the cost of their entire field as we know it today. For proof, just follow any journalist who actively uses Twitter as god intended it (I recommend David Carr, David Pogue, and Rachel Maddow).

Still, the question remains: Given the inherent bias of print media outlets toward print media outlets, how do we decide what to trust? Is it true that Facebook, Twitter and the like are suffering from a decline in popularity, that online reportage is less reliable than print outlets, or, indeed, that print journalism is really in the dire straits it purports to be?

what is new media literacy?

Until about a month ago, I worked for a research group called Project New Media Literacies. During my tenure there, the group's Creative Manager, Anna van Someren, produced the following video to describe our work:


I love this video and think it does a fantastic job describing the focus of Project New Media Literacies. What it doesn't do, however, is answer the question my friend Kathleen asked me the other day: "What is new media literacy?"

Here's my answer: It's like print literacy, only different.


A short definition of print literacy
Think about learning how to read. You start by figuring out words and sounding out short sentences. Kids spend a lot of time learning vocabulary, practicing with different kinds of texts, and writing their own texts. The whole point of that is to increase learners' fluency with the words, symbols, and markers that comprise a language, so that when they encounter an unfamiliar type of text they'll be able to decipher it in context. By learning how to read this

you can also (theoretically) develop an ability to read this:


and this:


and this:


And even if you can't exactly decipher everything included in the examples above, most people would likely at least know what kind of text they were looking at and, even if they didn't know what opah was or whether it tasted good, they would at least know how much it cost to find out.


New Media Literacy
Keep in mind that, though we tend not to think too much about this, there are tons of technologies involved in the creating and communicating of print messages. Word processors are communication technologies, of course, but so are pencils, quill pens, telegraphs--even language itself is a technology--an invention devised to support a specific kind of communication.

New media literacy starts from the premise that digital technologies like email, Twitter, chatrooms and so on are simply new communication resources that can be clustered in the same category as pens, paper, and the printing press. While they're the same class of technologies, however, the types of communication these new digital technologies support are significantly different from those supported by print technologies.


One interesting feature of print literacy is that while it's related to oral literacy--the ability to speak and understand a language--oral literacy and print literacy can in theory and often in practice exist in mutual exclusion. This is because what it takes to interpret the symbols that make up a spoken language (deciphering a series of intentionally ordered sounds) is fundamentally different from what it takes to interpret the symbols of a printed language (deciphering a series of symbols, intentionally ordered). Print literacy, however, is built on the shoulders of oral literacy: While we can easily imagine a powerful public speaker being functionally illiterate, it's practically impossible to picture someone who is able to read but unable to speak or understand the language she can read.

Print literacy and new media literacy are connected and separate in a similar way. In order to master new media platforms and social communication tools, you have to possess a fluency with print media (in addition, increasingly, to visual and sound-based media formats). On the SAT, here's how this all would play out:

oral literacy:print literacy::print literacy:new media literacy

In other words, print literacy is necessary but not sufficient, because the conditions surrounding print media in social communication environments are fundamentally different from those surrounding print media in, for example, a textbook.

The goals behind new media literacy education are, however, the same as those surrounding print literacy education: To support learners' facility with a set of texts and allow them to navigate new media platforms with relative fluency. There's no point in learning how to edit Wikipedia, for example, if it doesn't offer us skills that carry over into other collaborative knowledge-building environments. Twitter might (though I doubt it) flounder and fail within five years, but that doesn't mean learning how to engage with it it pointless. Through Twitter, we can learn how to build and participate in a community that features a largely invisible audience, persistence of information, and tacit but fairly firm rules for engagement. If we can learn how to jump into the world of Twitter, then, we might also learn how to navigate this:


or this:





or this:


All of the above technologies are built on combinations of oral and print literacies, but that doesn't mean knowing how to speak, read, write and understand are enough. The words may be the same, but the social competencies required to decipher them inside of their context are different.

There: new media literacy. It's kind of like learning how to read and write and kind of not like that at all.

blogging burns more calories than watching tv or sleeping

I recently went nearly completely offline for ten full days as I packed and moved from Boston to Indiana, having the unbelievable good fortune along the way to witness the first minutes in the life of my brand new niece, Morgan Brianna DeGeer. During this time, I only found the time and connectivity to publish two blog entries, post four tweets, and enter five Facebook status updates.

Being offline was hard but not impossible, thank god; I halfway expected to suffer from serious irritability and sudden fits of rage and sadness. What I missed most was my daily morning routine of waking up, reaching over to the passenger side of my bed, and grabbing hold of my laptop. This is a routine I'll be glad to get back to.

And I'm not alone, according to a recent New York Times article that describes an increasingly typical A.M. routine:

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

Some people--including some interviewed for the NYTimes article--may decry this new trend as unnatural, antisocial, or unhealthy. I can't speak for the experience of others, but for myself, I disagree with this analysis. (And here I risk being part of what another New York Times article calls a potentially problematic anti-print media "drumbeat." "This drumbeat," Michael Sokolove writes in the piece about the faltering of Philadelphia's major newspapers,

a relentless declaration that print is doomed, may be a problem in and of itself, making it easy to cast anyone who wants to save print as a Luddite.)

Perhaps "lunging" for cellphones and laptops before emptying your bladder might be considered unhealthy, but only if you think of the lunging as on par with waking up and reaching for the TV remote. Watching television, after all, is the ultimate passive activity, burning a mere 68 calories an hour (to the 46 calories burned per hour of dead sleep). But for a lot of people, opening a laptop is practically the diametric opposite of turning on the tv: Instead of watching something someone else made, they get to make something for themselves and others, to build something new out of nearly endless buckets of clay that get replenished by the day, the hour, the minute.

In a previous career trajectory, I was a newly minted poet freshly emerged from an M.F.A. program. Most mornings, I woke up early, flipped open a notebook, and wrote. That activity seems to me now to be innately self-contained and self-absorbed, existing as it did in an intentional vacuum. I don't know how many calories blogging burns per hour, but I know it generates both light and heat for me and, I hope, for other people who land here. It's why I haven't yet been swayed by accusations that blogging, tweeting, and working with social networks are a vain, self-centered and self-aggrandizing acts: When leveraged in the most interesting ways, these media platforms become not only the materials molded out of clay but the raw materials from which others may build their own designs.



Oh, and here's a pic of my new niece. I swear she is exactly as gorgeous as this photo suggests.

be nice or suffer the consequences

why it's more vital than ever for corporations to value and empower their employees

Rumor has it that
Borders employees are being pressured into signing non-blogging contracts. It's an interesting move since, as everybody knows, book stores are like the shangri-la of potential bloggers: overeducated, underemployed, and underpaid, they're just dying for a pastime that challenges them without costing them any money or putting their health at risk, since a good portion of bookstore workers are also uninsured.

I know this because I worked for a Barnes & Noble for two years during and just after college. My coworkers included a classically trained musician, a budding writer who had just finished a master's degree in Joyce studies, and a 30-something brilliant college dropout who called himself Sloth. This was the late 90s, so blogging was not yet a widespread activity, so instead we spent a lot of time...well, mainly we hung out and argued about books.

As A.J. Kohn, the author of the Used Books Blog, argues, this type of crew is well poised to offer Borders virtual reams of free advertising:

Imagine if Borders employees were encouraged to write about the great books just arriving. The hidden gems, the stuff they’ve just read. Tweets about upcoming readings. There are so many ways you could make this work.

There is, Kohn writes, "only one prerequisite, investing and empowering your employees." And it appears, he writes, that this is the one thing that Borders has failed to do.

You can bet that policies restricting the use of social media indicate a deep sense of unrest among employees, many of whom are paid just over a living wage and hanging on so tenuously that they neither dare nor have the energy to vocalize their discontent. I know this well, from my previous experience in the employ of a corporation that restricted, as a matter of policy, social media use among employees.

The corporation was a veterinary hospital chain called VCA, and my branch was VCA South Shore Animal Hospital. (Will they come after me? Will they come after me? Bring it on.) When I worked there a handful of years ago, MySpace and Facebook use was on the rise among employees, and management cracked down on any employee who mentioned the company in entries there. Why? Because there was just so much negative energy that almost no employee who logged on to MySpace with the intention of writing about VCA had the intention of communicating something positive. It was a shitty place to work, with terrible management policies that served to disempower and disenfranchise employees. Wages were criminally low, and support for professional development was nonexistent. While the veterinary care was and still is excellent, customers pay through the teeth for it because of local administrators who value the bottom line over the service they provide to owners who would pay anything to help their pets.

When I worked there, many employees weren't simply dissatisfied; they loathed coming to work. Several explained why on their social networks, and at least one coworker, a receptionist who was kind, caring, and hard-working, was released from employment because of a scathing critique she posted about hospital administrators. (Will they come after me? Will they come after me? I'm ready.)

People wonder how managers catch people posting negative material online. In this case, there was a snitch--someone who trolled MySpace and Facebook looking for fire-able offenses. When he found one, he brought it to the attention of management. Presumably, he was rewarded for this, though certainly not by currying goodwill among his coworkers.

Recently, social marketing guru Faris Yakob posted on his blog a presentation he delivered called "Be Nice or Leave." The crux of his argument is that marketers who want to leverage social media platforms to sell their products don't get to control whether or even how people discuss their goods; if they try, he explained, they will fail. We might apply the "be nice or leave" principle to corporate relationships with employees. It's easier, though less cost-effective, to just oppress your employees and scare or coerce them into silence; but this becomes less possible (and more expensive) nearly by the day, as social platforms make it easier and more interesting to disclose bad policies and bad management.

The other, trickier and more time-intensive approach is to simply create a positive working environment, one that makes employees want to leverage their social platforms of choice to spread the word about their fabulous employer and the wonderful services it provides. Trouble is, lots of employers don't know how to make this kind of environment happen or simply don't care to try.

it might not be a lot but I feel like I'm making the most

living and leaving with less

This is my last weekend in Boston. In a few days, I'll be closing up shop, losing my internet access, piling some items into a truck, and heading to points midwest.

I'm not going to bother using this post to detail the emotional tumult inherent in this kind of move, because that feels lamely self-indulgent, even to someone who spends a huge chunk of her time broadcasting her thoughts on at least three different blog sites (here, here, and here). Besides, you're probably reading this blog for one of two reasons: You know me and therefore care about my emotional state, but have received private updates; or you don't know me and don't particularly care how I'm feeling this morning.

Instead of tearing open my chest and splaying my guts across this post, then, I just want to focus on something interesting I've noticed while packing: It's a whole lot easier to get rid of stuff than it was during my previous moves (of which there have been nearly two dozen in the last 14 years, including three major regional moves and multiple cross-town or cross-state relocations).

For one thing, I no longer need to carry with me certain types of materials. I've gotten rid of hundreds of books, including over a dozen dictionaries, thesauruses, and style guides. (I kept the dictionary I won as a spelling bee champion, but only for sentimental purposes.) I shredded and recycled reams of paper documents: tax returns, credit card bills, rental agreements and contracts. I don't need them. They're all online.

For another thing, we just don't generate as much physical stuff as we used to. My friend and former coworker Debora Lui experienced a complete laptop failure--her second in a year--last summer as she was finishing her master's thesis. While the first failure reduced her to working from "printed pages, (her) memory, or scattered hand-scribbled notes," the second failure was a much different experience. She writes:

Miraculously - with all my Google Doc usage, emailing out, saving my information on remote sites - I found that I not only had one good copy of my thesis, but several copies, saved and transfered at different points of revision. I found that my other files like photographs and videos (which normally I would have been upset about losing) were also strangely distributed across the web through sites like YouTube and Facebook. While I had previously thought of my life as being contained in one place, it was suddenly shown to me as a vast network for links and uploads.

As Deb explains, we--and young people especially--collect and hold on to more everyday detritus than ever: More photos, more written communications, more logged and archived conversations. Yet because of digital technologies, the space this material takes up is so close to zero that it is, as Chris Anderson writes in Free, "too cheap to meter" and "too cheap to matter."

Why not take a hundred photos of yourself posing in front of a full-length mirror? Why not save every email you ever received or sent from every single one of your friends? Eventually your gmail account may hit 5% of its total storage space, but it's more likely that Google will increase storage capacity before you even hit that number.

My buddy Russell Francis, playing on Dorothy Holland's notion of history in person, calls this phenomenon "history in laptop." Summarizing a study he conducted of graduate students' media habits, he writes that

Over time traces of students’ lives, past and present, become ingrained into students’ personal media environment through a process of inherited, evolved and mindful design. Archives of e-mails, letters, essays written as undergraduates, digitised photographs and digitised music collections also started to accumulate on many students’ laptops. Traces of Jacob’s participation in various environmental groups, traces of Jim’s participation in multiple human rights organisations and traces of Clinton’s long history of avid news reading were evident in the links, shortcuts and contacts designed into their personalised mediascapes. Furthermore, traces of their connections to others accumulated as entries in contacts folders and instant messenger ‘buddy lists’; tools that allowed students to remain in touch with former lives and former practised identities.

The point is well taken, though the term itself seems a bit of a red herring. The term seems to imply a history that's located in a concrete place, albeit one that uses space in a way that's much different than, for example, books and letters and mementos do. In fact, history in laptop may be a more accurate term for how identity was stored as recently (and as long ago) as 3-5 years ago; today, history is stored across a virtual space no longer constrained by such silly contraptions as hard drives and memory cards. If my computer crashes, I'm likely to retrieve nearly all of the data that was stored on it--okay, let's say somewhere around 80%. Still, that's an awful lot to retrieve, given that history that resides in the brain is gone as soon as the blood flow is cut off.

Anyway, my point is that I carry around less stuff, and the less will get lesser with every passing year. Interestingly, this makes it easier to drift physically but harder to drift emotionally. We can, and often do, maintain the types of everyday connections with family, friends, and acquaintances that at least approximate the experience of physical promixity. My sister can send me a photo of her wardrobe choice for her first day of law school; we can chat online about which shoes she should wear, where she should buy her books, and how heavy her backpack is. I can follow her blog, her Facebook updates, and her tweets, and she can do the same for me. And, more importantly, all of these things are equally possible for me to do with, for example, the cluster of people I met at a recent conference, whether they live in Boston, Bloomington, or Cape Town.

For now, let's call it "history at large."

why you should invite me to your next party

(hint: because I will entertain your guests with talk of the social revolution)

I was at a party last week when someone asked me what I do for a living. I used the opportunity to engage in what, in retrospect, may have been an ill-timed impromptu pronouncement about the status of the social revolution.

It turns out I'll need to rethink how I use that phrase "social revolution," at least in mixed company, because a tubby drunk man wearing a confusing hat walked up to me and tried to steer the conversation toward war atrocities.

"You can't tell me," he bellowed, "that the atrocities that are happening during the Iraq War are any different from the ones that happened during World War II. It's just that we have more media coverage now."

As I wrote in an earlier post, this is what I've decided to call the Space Odyssey mistake. This particular kind of error is explained by Clay Shirky, who describes a scene from 2001 in which

space stewardesses in pink miniskirts welcome the arriving passenger. This is the perfect, media-ready version of the future--the technology changes, hemlines remain the same, and life goes on much as today, except faster, higher, and shinier.

Lately I've been finding Christopher Kelty's notion of a "recursive public" useful in thinking about what, other than hemlines, have changed. As Kelty describes it in Two Bits (available for download, online browsing, and modulation for free online),

A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.

More to the point, a recursive public is a group of people who exist outside of traditional institutions (governments, churches, schools, corporations) and, when necessary, use this outsider status to hold these entities in check. The engagement of these publics goes far beyond simply protesting decisions or stating their opinions. Kelty, writing about geek culture as a recursive public, explains it thus:

Recursive publics seek to create what might be understood, enigmatically, as a constantly “self-leveling” level playing field. And it is in the attempt to make the playing field self-leveling that they confront and resist forms of power and control that seek to level it to the advantage of one or another large constituency: state, government, corporation, profession. It is important to understand that geeks do not simply want to level the playing field to their advantage—they have no affinity or identity as such. Instead, they wish to devise ways to give the playing field a certain kind of agency, effected through the agency of many different humans, but checked by its technical and legal structure and openness. Geeks do not wish to compete qua capitalists or entrepreneurs unless they can assure themselves that (qua public actors) that they can compete fairly. It is an ethic of justice shot through with an aesthetic of technical elegance and legal cleverness.

This is precisely the difference between 1945 and 2009. It's not just that we have more media coverage but that, as Shirky proclaims, everybody is a potential media outlet--everyone has the potential to join a recursive public, whether impromptu or planned.

In fact, the notion that we can all engage in reportage is perhaps a bit too simplistic, at least until we can adjust what we mean by "journalism." When Facebook users joined up in opposition to a change in Facebook's terms of service and successfully pressed administrators to rethink and reword the terms of service agreement, that was the work of a recursive public, loosely banded and easily disbanded once their purpose had been achieved (if necessary, they will quickly gather again in their virtual space and just as quickly disband). We don't recognize this as journalism, often don't even recognize it as civic engagement--but for those who joined this Facebook knotwork, it's certainly some kind of engagement. And what could be more civic-minded than fighting to define the uses of a public space?

The atrocities of war are approximately the same (though, as always, new technologies mean new modes of torture and murder). What's different is the following:

• Citizens within and outside of the territories in question have the capacity to keep mainstream media outlets honest: Biased, incomplete, and corrupt journalism will no longer stand in for the official story.
  
  
• Citizens can engage in consequential debate, which is to say that serious public conversation about the merits of a particular conflict can gather enough voices to sway public opinion and result in real policy changes more quickly than ever before. This is Vietnam to the power of Internet.
  
  
• Citizens without access to a wide range of new media technologies can still have their experiences broadcast to the world by other members of their recursive public. A cellphone picture of a soldier torturing a civilian, for example, can be quickly distributed for maximum effect.

All in all, it was a good party. Near the end, someone produced a Donald Rumsfeld piñata. We were going to hoist it up and smash it, but it seemed kind of...irrelevant.

I can't believe the Boston Globe is staying open

because now I not only have to change the titles of two recent blogposts, but I have to rail against the lameness of going through all this work to keep something open based purely on its nostalgia factor.

The announcement of the Globe's continued, if tenuous, existence came after parties on each side of the dispute--New York Times, Inc., the conglomerate that owns the paper, on one side; union representatives on the other--offered up a series of hefty concessions. It seems likely, in fact, that the entire hullaballoo over the potential closure of New England's largest paper was intended to generate exactly the kind of public sentiment it garnered: Outrage, disbelief, incredulity and the stubborn insistence that a community isn't a community without a newspaper to bind it.

Nostalgia only takes an argument--or a money pit, even when it's black, white, and read all over--so far. Eventually you come up against some cold, hard truths: That newspapers aren't economically viable, and haven't been for years; that whatever statistics people may pull out, people just don't read newspapers anymore; and that even with the decrease in newspaper readership, we still have by most accounts a better informed and more civically engaged public than we've ever seen.

It's hard to see this, of course, if you depend on traditional models of "informed" and "civically engaged." Today's citizen is more likely to comment on a news story or publish a blogpost than to vote. Today's citizen is more likely to sign an online petition via Facebook or MySpace than to attend a rally. Today's citizen is more likely to post a video to YouTube than to write a letter to the editor of a local newspaper. These actions may not seem like "civic engagement" to the old-school journalist (cf. Russell Crowe in State of Play), but these activities are leading to a real shift in how and when the elites--corporations, school boards, government officials, and so on--both can and choose to listen to the people.

"Society doesn't need newspapers," says Clay Shirky. "What we need is journalism." Okay, sure, the Boston Globe will stick around, at least for now. But media moguls, analysts, and the general public need to stop asking what needs to happen to make newspapers viable. That's no longer a relevant question. The new question is: What journalistic models can replace the traditional newspaper model, and what effects will this have on the public? This is a question that's already being answered, if the so-called "media experts" would just put down their end-is-nigh megaphones and listen to what's going on around them.

Bruno Latour, Facebook, and some Moonbats

On the (misguided) attempt to reduce social media to a series of complex interactions

Do you guys know Bruno Latour?

I'm new to Latour, having been only recently introduced to his work by my friend and colleague, Katie Clinton. A few weeks back we read and discussed a canonical Latour piece, "On Interobjectivity," for our weekly reading group, the Fireside Moonbats.

I'm not going to pretend I understand most of what's going on in this piece. Any attempt to summarize it would just reveal my hem, so I'll leave that to someone better equipped. It's one key idea from that piece that interests me for the purpose of this post: The distinction Latour makes between complexity and complication. He writes:

'Complex' will signify the simultaneous presence in all interactions of a great number of variables, which cannot be treated discretely. 'Complicated' will mean the successive presence of discrete variables, which can be treated one by one, and folded into one another in the form of a black box. Complicated is just as different from complex as simple is.

Latour uses groups of monkeys (complex) in contrast to human societies (complicated). For Latour, "complex" describes a social society wherein interactions between members are intricate and informed by multiple dynamics and variables--but all of these variables are present in the interaction. A society is "complicated" when its moments and interactions are colored by a limitless number of discrete variables, layered throughout history, hidden beneath the surface and spreading out in every cultural direction. As Latour explains,

We say, without giving the matter too much thought, that we engage in 'face to face' interactions. Indeed we do, but the clothing that we are wearing comes from elsewhere and was manufactured a long time ago; the words we use were not formed for this occasion; the walls we have been leaning on were designed by an architect for a client, and constructed by workers - people who are absent today, although their action continues to make itself felt. The very person we are addressing is a product of a history that goes far beyond the framework of our relationship. If one attempted to draw a spatio-temporal map of what is present in the interaction, and to draw up a list of everyone who in one form or another were present, one would not sketch out a well-demarcated frame, but a convoluted network with a multiplicity of highly diverse dates, places and people. Those who believe in social structures often make the same criticism of interactionists, but they draw quite another lesson from it. They suggest that nothing happens in interactions that is not an activation or materialization of what is already completely contained elsewhere in the structure - give or take a few minor adjustments. But interaction does more than adjust, it constructs - we learned this from the monkeys as well as from Goffman and from the ethnomethodologists. However, it displays contradictory forms: it is a framework (which permits circumscription) and a network (which dislocates simultaneity, proximity and personality). Where can those contradictory qualities in humans come from, and why are they so different from interaction as understood by primatologists with respect to naked, co-present monkeys?

If it seems confusing and heady, it is. I suspect it's even more confusing, even headier, than it seems. But the distinction Latour makes--these terms "complex" and "complicated"--have some use for us in considering how to talk about the values and norms of social media. I'm increasingly encountering people who view Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks as as high-tech versions of Foucault's panopticon. For them, too much social media is a bad thing: It means you're always on, it means someone is always watching you.

Add to this a critical mass of media analysts (especially marketers and PR people, who are doing their best to find a way in to a world that seems cultured and maintained by and for the young) seem to work from a general assumption that social media work by leveraging our narcissism. PR guy Brett Borders identifies an entire category of self-absorbed social media users: "Social Media Narcissists." What is a social media narcissist? Borders writes:

There are plenty of people online who have managed to create a sizable audience without much in the way of skills or selfless community contributions. These social media narcissists participate heavily in the online conversation, but if you look closely you will see that most of it is just chatter about themselves, their opinions and their friends.

Some of my friends agree. "It's so weird," said one friend, an academic who's approximately my age, about the phenomenon of the constantly updated Facebook status. "Everybody can see what you're doing, all the time. It's why I've never posted a status update, and why I never will."

My sense of it, though, is that people who think a "close look" at the "chatter" on Facebook, Twitter, and similar networks amounts to self-centered self-promotion either aren't looking as closely as they think they are or are confusing the Latourian notions of complication and complexity. Facebook may seem like a flat social environment in which every monkey is watching every other monkey to figure out where the tribe is going, but in fact, every interaction is the product of an infinite number of variables that exist outside of that moment, that update, and that social environment. In this way, social media is complicated, not simply complex.

Presumably, calling most of what happens in social media "just chatter" is a way to relegate it to meaningless drivel: Picture yourself sitting on the train after a hard day at work. Picture a smiling, absurdly cheerful woman sitting next to you and telling you all about herself, her day, what's on her mind right now. Picture this happening incessantly, consistently, every single day, eventually driving you away from public transportation altogether. Picture yourself buying a nice, sensible SUV.

Nobody likes chatter, after all (even though we all engage in it from time to time). We're a culture that thrives on complication, that doesn't really know what to do with mere complexity. If all that happened within social media sites was chatter, engagement with and use of these tools wouldn't be rising so dramatically.

The game of social media is, after all, figuring out the rules, working through the layers of what seems at first like complexity. We are never exactly the words we type into the "what's on your mind?" box (formerly "What are you doing right now?"), just as we are never just the words we say to the person sitting next to us on the train.

Quick personal example: Recently, I had a friendly argument with a Facebook friend when I posted a link to my blog on her wall. Here's how the interaction went, with names and pics blurred out to protect those not directly affiliated with sleeping alone and starting out early:




Did I violate an unspoken Facebook norm? Oh, probably. What's more interesting to me, though, is the public scolding and my reaction to it. First, if I had violated a similar norm in a "face to face" interaction, this person might have taken me aside to let me know--but she might not have said anything at all, since she wouldn't necessarily have had the authority to do so. She's a friend, but not a close friend; a colleague, but not a coworker. It's not that the social hierarchies that govern our offline existences disappear in online social networks; it's that new hierarchies, new norms for engagement not linked to traditional cultural markers, emerge and get negotiated.

Which is why I reacted so strongly to what amounted to a public scolding. My friend chose to respond to my comment with a scolding instead of simply removing the post, which Facebook makes it pretty easy to do. I had posted something to her wall; she found it inappropriate and assumed the authority to tell me so; and my reaction? I was mad. What right does anybody have to tell me what I can or can't do on Facebook? I thought, outraged and annoyed. That was me questioning whether she really had the authority to chastise me out in the public square, where everybody could see.

If this moment were nothing more than idle chatter, my friend and I would not have reacted as we did. She would have, perhaps, seen my posting as a violation of norms, but she would have chosen to ignore it instead of responding. And I could have ignored her response, but I didn't.

As a complicated society, we are more than Latour's mass of monkeys whose choice of direction for travel arises anew each morning, from "an order that no one member has given, and that none can claim as their own." And Facebook, and other types of social media, provide new words and worlds for intricate, infinite, and complicated relationships, given the users' capacity to make it so.

Montana is on board

Or: Why blogging is cooler than being a "real" journalist

On March 31, sleeping alone and starting out early hit a milestone: It has officially received visitors from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Montana was the last to jump on board, with a visitor from Bozeman apparently completely accidentally landing on my blog for just under one second before having his or her mind blown so completely that his or her Internet Explorer program most likely shut down unexpectedly.

I do spend a decent amount of time publicizing my blog. Most commonly, this involves reading blogs of like-minded bloggers, commenting on their writing, and asking them to visit my site. I also hound my friends and family, basically browbeating them into reading what I write. Why do I bother? Why do I care?

The simplest answer I can provide here is a quote from Clay Shirky: "Everyone is a media outlet."

In my early 20's, I spent a solid two years as a newspaper reporter, moving between three different local weekly papers. (Just to give you a sense of how long ago this was, only one of the three papers had a companion website, but the only material included on this site was a set of phone numbers to reach various staff members. This, by the way, was less than ten years ago.)

My stories were about zoning board decisions, school board meetings, and sporting events. Even if I had been skilled enough to make them interesting, I still wouldn't have captured many readers. In fact, I imagine I had fewer readers as a print reporter than I do as a blogger. This was so even though the material I wrote as a reporter was intended to link directly to the interests of its readers. This was so even though we actually delivered the news to our readers, instead of needing to draw readers to the news.

One difference between newspapers and blogs, of course, is the distance between the presenting of news and the consumption of it. In the newspaper business, the division of labor is pretty clear: A small handful of crack reporters uncover and present the material; the rest of the populace consumes it. If they want to join in on the conversation, they need (and are encouraged) to write a letter to the editor for possible publication in a future edition.

It's relatively burdensome to write a letter to the editor, all things considered, and this was even more true back when I was a reporter than it is now. Let's say you read an article that sparks something in you, such that you think: I have something to say about this. Then you have to turn on your computer or open your laptop and type the damned thing out. It needs to be short and succinct, well written, well organized and lacking any noticeable errors. Then you have to print it out (assuming your printer works and has enough ink left in its cartridge), put it in an envelope, find a stamp, and drop the letter in the mailbox. If the editor finds the letter interesting enough to print, you may see it printed up to two weeks later. Granted, this level of difficulty isn't on par with, say, building the world's largest toothpick mosaic, but still.

Compare this to the types of comments I received to my most heavily visited post to date, "Gearing up for Operation Feel Your Boobies." The founder of Feel Your Boobies, Leigh Hurst, posted a link to my post on the group's Facebook page, at which point the pro-boobies contingent began to weigh in. A few sample comments:

"Would you feel better if the name was Touch Your Titties?"

"I have boobies and I feel them at least once a month! Thank you Leigh!"

"I have to say I didn't think of a sexual connotation at all when I read this name. And I'm not post-feminist; I'm 52 and grew up in the Germaine Greer/Betty Friedan era. The purpose of the group is to get women to think about breast exams. We've heard "do a monthly breast self-exam" for so long we don't think about it anymore. This cute name catches our attention enough to remind us that we haven't done one. I do think the author is reaching for a topic here; Victoria's Secret window displays? Objectifying, fetishizing. Feel Your Boobies? Cute, harmless, purposeful."

What seems to engage people about reading and commenting on blogs is that they can, if they want to, write a thoughtful, well structured and well supported argument. If they don't want to do that, they can sling a one-liner up and have the gratification of seeing it instantly broadcast to other readers.

And now we're back to why I care about expanding my readership base: Because unlike the experience of being a newspaper reporter, my experience of blogging is one of jumping in to a conversation. The goal of print journalism is to break the story. In general, the goal of blogging is to comment on the breaking news. When I speak here on sleeping alone, I'm generally picking up on an idea or news item presented in an online paper or another blog; ideally, my ideas will get picked up by another blogger, and so on, and so on.

News passes to me and through me; as it does, I try to shade it in with a thoughtful comment or two and I do my best to pass it on. Blogging at its best is the exact opposite of that game "Telephone": Each person whispering the story to someone else clarifies, expands upon, and contributes to the story being told.

Conquering the blogosphere, one blogger at a time (and revisiting the Facebook fracas)

I recently learned that sleeping alone has a follower in the Spanish-speaking world. Over at Castor ex Machina, a blog run by a Peruvian college student named Eduardo, a big chunk of my recent post on the battle over Facebook's terms of service agreement got translated and discussed in a post titled "El affaire Facebook y sus posibles interpretaciones" ("The Facebook affair and its possible interpretations").

I don't speak Spanish, so I'm relying on my years of studying other languages, along with a variety of incredibly bad website translators (about which more soon) and, I hope, the reading public of sleeping alone to help. Eduardo writes:

Pero uno de los problemas que me viene a la mente, también, es uno muy básico: Facebook no es un espacio público, es un espacio no sólo privado, sino cuyo sentido de fondo es, también, un sentido económico/comercial. No es que esto, de plano, sea un problema: pero, ¿cómo transforma esto nuestra idea de lo que es un espacio público? Si mañana Facebook quebrara, toda la información, toda la creación, todas las interacciones que existen en el sitio, desaparecerían. ¿El Estado benefactor, entonces, debería preservar este espacio? ¿Es un patrimonio compartido? Y por otro lado, ¿es acaso posible concebir un esfuerzo similar llevado adelante de un modo y por una motivación que no fueran privados?

I believe the (very loose) translation of this paragraph is something like:

But one problem that comes to mind is a very basic one: Facebook is not a public space. It's a privately owned space, one with economic/commercial motives. This isn't on the face of things a problem, but it does give rise to the question: How does Facebook transform our vision of what a public space is? If Facebook failed tomorrow, all the information, all the creations, all the interactions that exist on the site would disappear. Should the government, then, preserve this space? Or is it a shared heritage? And on the other hand, is it possible to conceive of a similar effort carried out in a manner and for reasons that are not commercial?

I do suspect this is a relatively poor translation, and I hope that if Eduardo or other Spanish speakers read this they will help me adhere more closely to the spirit of the passage.

As it is, though, I do think I get a good general sense of what Eduardo is arguing here: Facebook may feel public, but it's run by private interests whose values and motives do not always necessarily align with those of the population of the space. Because Facebook feels like it's ours, tension arises when we're notified that we don't have quite as much agency within the Facebook environment as we had believed. It makes us angry; it leads us to action.

If my interpretation of the rest of Eduardo's post is accurate, he also argues that the action we took in the case of the Facebook battle was in large part conducted by people who had no idea what they were even fighting, and how they were fighting it. Even the response from Facebook during and including the struggle indicated a misunderstanding.

I've been quoting Clay Shirky a lot lately, and I'll just go ahead and do it again. Shirky argues that for a new group to be successful, it must meet three requirements: Promise, tool, and bargain. As he explains,

The promise is the basic "why" for anyone to join or contribute to a group. The tool helps with the "how"—how will the difficulties of coordination be overcome, or at least be held to manageable levels? And the bargain sets the rules of the road: if you are interested in the promise an adopt the tools, what can you expert, and what will be expected of you?

The bargain, Shirky explains, is the hardest to get right because it's so complex and often unspoken. Shirky gives the example of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales moving the project from a .com site to a .org to indicate his intention not to profit off of the work of contributors. The bargain, then, was this: Wikipedians contribute to the work of Wikipedia, and nobody will exploit that work for monetary gain. Encarta, Microsoft's effort at getting an online encyclopedia going, failed because its bargain didn't seem like a bargain:

users had to grant Microsoft permission to "use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission" for a product Microsoft was going to charge money for.

Shirky explains that "this was hardly a bargain at all, as all the power lay with Microsoft, a fact that made the option for user contribution largely irrelevant."

For Facebook, we might say the bargain is something like this: Users get a space where they can manage a wide network of friends, family, and professional and personal acquaintances. They get to keep up with the details of the personal and professional lives of their Facebook friends. They have the option of joining groups, playing games, taking public or semi-public stands on issues that matter to them, and gaining access to photos, links, and other online information that is of deep personal interest to them. In return, Facebook gets to ply users with ads and, to a largely unknown extent (at least by most users), gain access to private and often quite personal information.

This does feel like a bargain to us, especially for younger Facebook members whose entire lives have been lived deep in the morass of corporate-sponsored environments. What's the difference, after all, between attending a sporting event at Coors Field, Invesco Stadium, or Banknorth Gardens and playing Mafia Wars surrounded by ads for whiter teeth and online graduate programs?

Facebook changed the bargain when it suggested that everything users did to contribute to the site was subject to corporate exploitation—even if this was, as posts from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg suggested, a misinterpretation of the revised terms of service, this was how it felt to angry users. Interestingly, Facebook caved to public pressure. They didn't have to; by now, most Facebook users are hooked and will not leave, no matter how angry they get or how loudly they threaten their mutinies. Presumably, then, Zuckerberg et al. had a sense that users felt that the bargain had been violated, and that resentment over this could have resulted in a public relations nightmare.

It doesn't matter, then, whether the users were correct in their interpretation of the terms of service change. What matters is how a change in the terms of service changes the perceived bargain, the agreement between the owners and the users of a space that is represented, in theory if not necessarily in practice, as a public one owned by the people who live there. (Now Zuckerberg and his gang are soliciting users to help collaborate on a "Statement of Rights and Responsibilities," intended to replace the terms of service agreement altogether. You can learn more here.)

Early in this post I promised to elaborate on the issue of ridiculously poor website translators. I don't have the space in this post to do this, so expect to hear more from me on this issue soon.

We win! We win! Or--wait...

This just in: In reaction to protests by its members, Facebook has reversed course on its revised terms of service agreement, returning to the prior terms of service and thereby giving up the ghost on retaining rights to user-posted material even after someone has canceled membership to the site.

This is the new model of civic engagement, a type of activism that goes largely unrecognized by political scientists, cultural theorists, and pollsters but that offers a new model of democratic participation—the struggle over ownership and definition of public spaces, both physical and virtual. It's hard to identify, harder to measure, because it's deeply integrated into the everyday activities of an entire generation whose lives, identities, and self-making increasingly extend into virtual spaces.

This is, after all, a generation whose lives are spent in public spaces developed by corporations but marketed as open, democratic spaces where youth are kings of their domains. Think Facebook or MySpace; think YouTube, Google, Hulu. So much of the sense young people make of their world comes from the information gleaned from corporate-sponsored sites; so much of the identity-building happens on sites designed both for this purpose and for a distinct profit to the site developers. It makes sense, then, that civic engagement for this generation involves not voting but negotiating the parameters for engagement in those online spaces. As Jennifer Earl and Alan Shussman argue, in a culture where corporate entities have an increasingly powerful and important role in the lives of citizens, many people "are protesting against corporations themselves in hopes of directly changing corporate policies or products."

It's a type of engagement that's not readily recognized or easily measured. As we've seen in the Facebook example, much of the activism—the work that traditionally required, at the very least, leaving the house and convening in a public center (a voting station, a canvassing headquarters, a small African country)—happens without anybody noticing, often least of all the person engaging in the activism. Facebook's abrupt decision to return to the previous terms of service policy happened because somebody noticed that Facebook had updated its terms of service. That person blogged about it; others linked to the post or wrote about it on their own blogs, which in turn got linked to by others; eventually Facebook members were posting links to the issue on Facebook—thereby using the site as a center for contestation over the site itself. In this case, the distinction between everyday activities (posting interesting links, sharing or commenting on interesting stories) and activism (using Facebook's affordances to contest a change in its capabilities) is so blurred that it would be difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.

This is what we want, right? A culture in which civic engagement is so seamlessly integrated into the everyday activities that come with being alive that it doesn't even feel like civic engagement, at least how we traditionally define it?

Chalk one up for the critical mass notion of social movement.

If, however, you prefer cynicism, you can take a look at criticalmass.com, the site for a marketing company whose very purpose is to sell more product by leveraging the affordances of 2.0 technologies. Sadly enough, this is a downright beautiful site—the kind I'd want to spend a lot of time exploring.