I’m at the NetSquared conference in Santa Clara, CA today and tomorrow and will do my best to blog the high points. The theme so far: More voices are joining the public conversation, disrupting and potentially transforming the established order. And it’s early to master this new reality, whether you’re a politician or an advocacy group or an independent activist.
Some of the stand-out moments so far:
-Angela Glover Blackwell, founder of PolicyLink, making an eloquent opening call to make sure we use all this new tech to build a fully inclusive society….and talking about how network effects propelled the Covenant With Black America book to the top of the best-seller lists. It was also refreshing to hear her admit that her own organization is struggling with having one foot in the old-school world of the web (i.e., a website that is “brochure-ware”), and having one foot in a more participatory framework (LouisianaRebuilds.info). “It’s very threatening that voices can now be heard directly and not through us,” she said.
-Paul Saffo and Howard Rheingold, two of the smartest futurists on the planet, talking about disruptive technologies. I found myself disagree with Saffo, but still being very interested in what he had to say. For example, he argued that while “crowds may move fast, but the establishment may move faster,” but I’m not convinced that the establishment–at least the political establishment–gets it at all.
He also made a strikingly old-school assertion that “social movements don’t happen without elites…We need a small number of thought leaders who are publicly visible and charismatic…since we are have limited attention span […] without articulate elites, you can’t hold their attention.” I’ve long thought that social movements don’t happen unless they’re organized, but Saffo appears to think that movements are made up of people who follow leaders through the media.
The conversation circled around politics, and Saffo made a brilliant set of points, by analogy, about how no one has yet figured out how to master the new technology of the internet for politics. In the first half of the 20th century, he said, politicians reacted to the invention of the microphone by going in front of them at rallies by waving their hands and shouting. When radio was invented, many pols just did the same thing. But it was FDR’s genius that he realized that radio was heard in people’s living rooms and thus he chose to whisper, which was more powerful than shouting. LBJ, he said, used the new technology of helicopters to seem to be everywhere on the campaign trail in Texas when he first ran for office.
But today, he noted, “we’re still waiting for the first cybergenic candidate.” I loved his use of the word “cybergenic”–i.e., someone who looks good in cyberspace. The big question his remarks left me with was, will this be something that is more than skin-deep? In other words, is there something inherently different about internet-based communication that makes it harder for politicians or advocates to fake their integrity (to recall Groucho Marx’s great comment), or are we headed for a new kind of mass manipulation? More on that later, I hope…
Rheingold’s main point was that while young people are having so much fun IMing and using social networking sites, the non-profit sector needs to invest in insuring that they learn how to be literate in a civic sense, so their new-found power to network may focus in powerful directions. He also worried out loud about how disruptive technologies might be harnessed to produce greater political amity rather than polarization, and pointed to Wikipedia’s evolving ethos, where anyone who edits a page has a built-in incentive to understand and articulate fairly the views of their diametric opponent, asking if that could be applied somehow in the political arena. For more food for thought on that front he recommended his CooperationCommons.org site.
Dan Gillmor, Ethan Zuckerman and Hong Eun-taek talking about Citizen Journalism.
-Dan is a friend and it’s always great to hear him. Hopefully, he was pushing against an open door when he told the assembled non-profit leaders and activists to listen to their members and empower them: “You have people in your network who collectively know more than you do,” he said, which is the obvious corollary to his own mantra about citizens media. I also can’t resist passing along his joke about podcasting having peaked: “The Pentagon is podcasting…OK, I guess that’s over,” he drily noted.
-Hong Eun-taek is the international editor of OhmyNews, and he shared some very interesting news about the Korean wonder of citizen-driven media. With $11 million in funding from Softbank, OhMynews will soon be launching a Japanese version, and they are currently testing the waters on other countries as well. The English international edition, he said, currently has 1000 citizen reporters in 86 countries, but their ambition is to eventually reach 100,000 reporters and build a newswire service that can rival or surpass the Associated Press. That may sound audacious, but considering that in Korea, OhMynews has 43,000 reporters and claims a nearly 18% share (in 2004) in audience attention, compared to 4% in 2002, this doesn’t seem impossible at all.
-Ethan Zuckerman, god bless him, posted his entire talk on his blog! I wish I knew that before I started taking copious notes! He told two evocative stories, one about the campaign to free the Chinese blogger Hao Wu, and one about Sir Robert Geldolf’s Live8 campaign to aid Africa. I won’t recount them here since you can just read his blog and look at his slides. His key point, however, left me wishing for a conversation.
That is, he argued that in an era when the second billion people in the world to get online are coming on in just six years, the biggest contribution an activist can make is not to speak, but to point to others who are speaking and need to be heard. While I agree with that principle, what I wanted to ask was, with all these new voices, how do we know if anyone is listening–especially, how do we know if this affects people in power?
Tags: net2 nptech