There used to be a name for what I was doing, "lurking" -- it dates back to a
very different time in the net's history, when usenet and mailing lists were
the main forms of communication. It was hard to talk about lurkers then, for
the obvious reason that no one knew much about them; it hasn't gotten much
easier since.

The idea of lurkers has all but vanished now, buried by a succession of ways to
try and slice and dice them: "eyeballs," pageviews, users, subscribers,
friends, followers, etc, etc. I think these changes are relevant in this
context because Doug's initial questions put a lot of emphasis on expression:
participation and activism on the one hand, and a concern that "social
networks" (as if there were any other kind) might be diminishing the quality of
people's engagement, on the other. But the vast, vast majority of activity
surrounding the net isn't 'expressive' in the sense of leading to overtly
"creative" output: instead, it's people clicking around, reading, absorbing,
procrastinating, relaxing, etc. There seems to be a lot of temptation to
interpret this kind of ambiguity in the worst light, but the fact is that we
don't know what it leads to, in general let alone in any specific instance.

That pessimistic view is closely related to perspective(s) of people who are
trying to make money off of lurkers, because "monetizing" (a really ugly word)
them and their actions sooner or later requires connecting whatever they're
clicking on or reading or whatever to some kind of action -- preferably, some
sort of expenditure.

It took several years, more, for Americans to settle in to the idea of spending
money "on" the net -- and we were coming from a fairly open (I won't say
"liberal") society. But many have, and the result is a net that -- to use
another old geeky phrase -- is deeply intertwingled with consumption. And now
to my point. That intensely sophisticated and commercialized net is the version
that many other societies are encountering in a much fresher way.

That's good and bad. The good news is that it works much better: software,
systems integration, connections, interfaces are much easier to deal with. The
bad news is that it's a much more complicated and risky environment.

For example, the confidentiality of things like server logs tracing people's
activities used to be sacrosanct; now, more and more business models are
metaphorical ways to generate and rent out access to that info. Moreover,
manufacturers on the "hardware" side know very well who their customers are --
national states, telcos, big-league ISPs -- and are happy to tailor their
offerings to the needs of those customers: "firewalls" and filters,
redirection, surveillance.

My point isn't to spread (to use another old geekism) FUD -- Fear, Uncertainty,
and Doubt. NOT AT ALL. Instead, it's to point out that more and more people are
"participating" without even realizing it. They may be experiencing things in
terms very much like Doug proposed: based on the new ideas they're learning
about -- issues, perspectives, organizations, actions -- many are no doubt
sorting out their feelings. But as their thoughts are increasingly expressed in
terms of clicks, what may seem very private to them is less and less so.

In some ways -- and certainly in some contexts -- this is really worrisome. But
if we're going to ask big questions about democracy and sustainable
sociability, it makes sense to take the long view. I'm certain that more access
to information will tend, in the long run, to make people and populations more
cosmopolitan. That's a really good thing.

But it definitely has downsides, too. Steve Cisler, one of my quiet heroes who
passed away a few years ago -- a huge loss -- pointed out to me several years
ago that as more and more people in isolated circumstances "interact" with
idealized representations (which are typically urban), their immediate lives
can very quickly come to seem intolerably remote and dull. And they leave. In
that way (and many others), the net is contributing to the destruction of more
traditional societies.

While the net is hardly the "cause" of urbanization, I don't think there's any
doubt that it's facilitating mass migration. It pulls people with images, it
pushes them by destabilizing traditional markets, and just about everything in
between -- for example, it enables cheap communication with family and friends
(mobile phones, Skype, etc), and by offering more ways to send remunerations
back home. It isn't something you just access, use, or click on.

So the problem is simple (ha!). We can ask how the net is changing this or that
term we're comfortable with, but I think it's a part -- a very central part --
of a much deeper shift: the terms we're comfortable with are less and less able
to describe what's going on. Democracy is an excellent example: people within a
given jurisdiction might have disagreed, even violently, about this or that
issue, but they more or less agreed on the terms of debate. We can't take that
for granted anymore, because if we do we run a very serious risk of excluding
what for lack a better term I'll call new arrivals. Democracy speaks to people
who *know* they live in a particular place; but more and more people are
uncertain, transitional, or tenuously connected to where they happen to be. The
task -- self-determination -- remains the same.

(Oh, and BTW: Twitter and Facebook ain't it.)

I've sprinted though a few dozen impossibly complicated issues in a very
on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand way, which is a bit frustrating. On the one
hand (yes!), I think it's important to acknowledge just how deeply the net is
changing the fabric of the societies (very definitely in the plural) within
which we'll necessarily ask these kinds of questions. On the other hand, I wish
I had some clearer answers.

At this point, the usual conclusion would be something like "and now I'll go
back to lurking." I'll try not to.

Cheers, Ted

Of the way Americans got arrested in the US for the same Twitter activity that they were encouraged to promote in Iran, David said: "This is a contradiction that we must address and come to term with."

Then we went on to explore a few more of the contradictions in online activism, from the unreliability of the swarm, to the manufactured and falsely amplified results of aggregators.

So, my question then is what guidelines can we establish or promote to those who are attracted to this activity? How *do* we "come to terms" with contradictions?

[Micah then asks for clarification, to which Kelly replies,]

I was asking how these two "illegal" demonstrations were comparable
and what your point was in making such a comparison: "Americans were
cheering demonstrations in Iran that would be illegal in America. That
is, marching without a permit from the police got lots of people
arrested in NYC in 2004. But during the burst of international
solidarity around the #iranelection, very few people noted that what
we were supporting in Iran was illegal in America."

It's pretty easy to swarm parts of the network with junk information.
There's an analogy here with social media's impact on music
journalism.

A music critic named Christopher R. Weingarten went on this pretty
epic rant at the 140 Character Conference about how real-time social
media is effectively gutting any value in music journalism. He starts
off by quoting a music aggregation site called Hype Machine's about
section.

"We handpick a set of kickass music blogs and then present what they
discuss for easy analysis, consumption and discovery. Rather than
picking and writing about music ourselves, we think a select group of
passionate people can do a better job, so we amplify their posts and
the audio they choose. This group will produce more vibrant culture
and conversation than a huge social mob, or a rigid hierarchy of
editors."

Weingarten goes on to say that people who use aggregators think they
are getting some kind of alternative view when the reality is that
they're getting a pre-packaged lowest-common-denominator set of
information that serves no other purpose than consumption.

His rant is pretty amazing and has direct relevance on this conversation.

So I'm not always enthused by the idea of a huge social mob that
dictates conversation--that just displaces discussion from actual
humans right back to a top down media model. It's one-way broadcast
communication like corporate media, the only difference being that the
corporate media can get free labor from a crowdsourced pool of people.

It's a fine line between the zeitgeist of a grassroots social fabric
and the death of discourse through search engine optimization.

Here's where he goes off:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/archives/2010/04/dont_believe_th.php

Legba... yes! This is an excellent point about when this technology of dissent comes home to roost and how the U.S. government and other pro-democracy governments react. I actually brought this up in congressional hearing (the U.S. Helsinki Commission), awkwardly titled "Twitter against Tyrants", that I was asked to participate in last October. Other than being the usually homogenous mix of (mostly) white male panelists, it was an interesting discussion.

I was one of the comms centers folk at RNC2004, working with TXTMobs, IAA, Ruckus and so on. The Pittsburgh incident had just happened and was fresh in my mind... and I felt I had to say something, so I blurted this out:

" And while the free world is enamored of these tools and we're here with this hearing, our own federal, state and local law enforcement are often quite fearful of their use at home. So just recently, Elliot Madison, a 41-year-old social worker, was arrested in Pittsburgh and charged with hindering apprehension for prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime.

He was found with a computer and was using Twitter. This is a contradiction that we must address and come to term with. "

You can view the transcript and hearing video here.

I'm also very interested in the question of who (or which audience)
decides whether social media from a country is relevant, particularly
in politically volatile places like Iran, Pakistan, or Kyrgyzstan. Of
course, the Iranian election brought unprecedented global attention to
social media use in the country. Why can't the same be said for
Kyrgyzstan? Sarah Kendzior of Registan.net does a wonderful job
raising these questions in this post, arguing that social media users
in Kyrgyzstan were ignored because they were writing for a local
audience. I'd love to get your perspectives on this.

I just wanted to chime in on how key this is. There's a clear
prioritization of what social media gets repeated to certain
audiences. With Twitter, in the US at least, the network is dominated
by a lot of 30-something "urban sophisticates", often employed in the
IT industry or part of the "creative class", whatever that means. It
gives a really specific bent to what information you see.

Iran is a really fascinating look at this question. During the initial
uprising, the State Department actually intervened to convince Twitter
to reschedule network maintenance so the information could keep
flowing out. Then, during the G20 demonstrations in Pittsburgh last
November, Pennsylvania police burst into the hotel room of two guys
running a comms center, sending out information about the publicly
known movements of police. They got arrested, charged with felonies,
and sent on their way. Days later, federal prosecutors showed up their
house and turned the place upside down. The reasons behind the raid
are still secret and part of a grand jury proceeding.

If you're interested in the case, there's a ton of information up at
http://friendsoftortuga.wordpress.com/

So you've got a situation where a government that's pretty publicly
opposed against the government of another country deliberately
encourages information resonance across a network turns around and
suppresses the same network use within its own borders. I'm a huge
booster of what's happening in Iran, but that's a pretty creepy
dynamic.

Sorry I'm late on joining in. Meatspace activism got in the way pretty
drastically. I know we've moved on but I wanted to start by directly
answering the initial question.

I'm a little apprehensive of the notion of "net activism", largely
because the most successful actions aren't defined simply by
technological interaction, but by networked action. "Net activism" to
me brings to mind a mental space where we divorce who owns the network
from our on-the-ground work. When we use the internet, we're
communicating over spaces we don't own and can never hope to, making
us quasi-legal media squatters. It's something worth keeping in mind
when we talk about this.

I do grassroots radical organizing across the spectrum and I've
witnessed some pretty spectacular uses of network technology,
particularly at large mobilizations (like the old anti-globalization
protests). The one that sticks in my mind was the development of a
project by the Institute for Applied Autonomy called TxtMob back in
about 2003.

TxtMob was this a pre-Twitter microblog service that ran exclusively
via SMS. You would set up a group and you could do group distribution
either through an open group that allowed anyone to post (sending the
message to everyone else subscribed to the group) or an announcement
only list.

I first saw it in action at the 2004 Republican National Convention in
New York. At one point, something like 1200 people suddenly mobilized
on Broadway to disrupt convention delegates who were given free
tickets to Broadway shows, followed by dozens of spontaneous actions
all over Mid-town Manhattan.

TxtMob eventually shut down after Federal prosecutors tried to
subpoena records for the site and the owners decided to simply trash
the servers rather than turning it over. It's also definitely been
technologically surpassed, but the model it set up was a great way to
organize people on an instant level.

I'm actually a little skeptical of the utility of something like
Twitter to on the ground mobilizations. I've used it for a lot of
protests in Washington, DC and because of how it's set up and what
it's for, it seems more suited to sparking and directing dialogue on
that specific network. So you can publicize what you're doing and get
other people to pick up and repeat it and because it's an open network
and searchable, you can get the conversation up to pretty high levels
in the corporate media chain.

The repetition bit is really interesting: Ten years ago, one of the
most successful ways of rapidly communicating at protests was to have
people at the site of whatever thing was taking place would, in
unison, say a short message, fall silent, people behind them would
then repeat the message, fall silent, and so on until 5000 people
learned something like where the cops were within 3 minutes. Tools
like Twitter have the capacity to replicate on a global scale.

You saw something like that happen with the uprising in Iran over the
last year. Twitter wasn't so much useful for coordinating protests due
to the near-total shutdown of service inside Iran, but the story got
picked up and repeated until the entire world was watching. And
because people are repeating things in their own words, it allows for
information resonance instead of one-way broadcast like you get with
traditional corporate media.

If we suppose that people come to the web expecting authenticity then faked videos or false testimony to events undermines its value for sure. However, the multiplicity of sources online also offers its own checks and balances.

People seem to be caught in a debate over whether the web will replace traditional media and I feel this is implicit in your question. I would argue that is the wrong question and that the right one is how can the two forms of media complement each other to ensure the most accurate picture gets out about events.

"People have always used the "social media" of their time to effect change. Without belaboring history, consider that some of the most widely-felt changes in the Western world were made by "bloggers" using the technology of their day. Paul of Tarsus (St. Paul), wrote newsletters (epistles) that substantially influenced Christianity throughout the Mediterranean. Martin Luther brought church abuses to light and initiated the Protestant Reformation through his 95 updates (theses), and Thomas Paine spread his blog (printed pamphlets) about democracy to the masses in the ramp up to the American Revolution."

Similarly to this, rumours have always existed, and similarly photos and videos have always been staged and faked (think about the continuing controversy around the Robert Capa photo of the soldier as he is hit by the bullet during the Spanish civil war). One of the positives about an increasing visual media literacy that comes from more people knowing how to create visual media (because they can just do it on their cellphone or digital camera, or on their computer) is that there is an increasing critical literacy about images we look at and the power of selectivity/editing. And more people with the capacity to analyze, blog and share their views means more capacity to weed out the false videos - one of my colleagues looked at that in the case of some controversial footage from Sri Lanka in this blog: http://hub.witness.org/en/blog/should-you-believe-your-eyes-allegations-doctored-video-sri-lanka

Another trend is tools to draw on the power of the volume of information out there in positive ways - (Craig mentions some in the post above in terms of open government), tools like Ushahidi.com (used to map needs for humanitarian support in Haiti) can help us see multiple information points, including visual information points, and make transparent the range of information on an incident and the patterns. When we see fifteen different sources telling us the same thing, or allowing us to see the patterns and not have to rely on a single account, then we're using the power of multiple information sources to corroborate for ourselves. Perhaps one worry here is the lack of media literacy at a broad level for understanding these visualizations when our human tendency is to think in terms of single-track personal narratives?

There is a surreal nature to our some of the spontaneous solidarity that occurs on global human rights crises, particularly from afar and out of dander - when we join 'Support the Monks in Burma' on Facebook, or turn our Twitter icons green, there is a danger that we feel like that is enough. Just like Nathan I hope that our response online doesn't preclude our response offline, that our response online is equally effective as if we'd made the same effort on another action, or that it doesn't leave us with a feeling we've done something when in fact that feeling of satisfaction shouldn't have come that easily! I worry that we can vicariously take other people's suffering (which we can experience so directly through a YouTube video of the violent repression of a protest) and in our safe worlds of circulating, re-tweeting and sharing information, lose touch with the very direct, painful nature of what is happening on the ground - and how people's lives may well depend on how effective our reaction is, not just that we react at all. As a related concern that we've been looking at in some of our work at WITNESS (see for example our post at http://hub.witness.org/cameraseverywhere) - how do you think about the very real safety, re-victimization, unintended consequence and consent issues involved in our gathering, manipulating, remixing and recirculating of imagery of human rights crises, particularly if we don't act as truly 'ethical witnesses' and act upon the material.

In terms of the superficial aspect of the internet, I think it
parallels the real world to some extent. Most interactions are on the
surface. There are other occasions when you engage in a more
meaningful way with someone or a group of people. But how often does
that happen? The internet multiplies the interactions and increases
the chances of both types of engagement.

That said I still believe that the occasional fake video or the occasional mis-reporting should not undermine our confidence in the medium, in fact it just highlights the human aspect to this use of technology. You have to learn to live with both sides of the coin, knowing the fact that this can sometimes be bad.

Another downside which I see is that the phenomenon of the white screen which allows almost all of us to hide behind it, a facebook event would get hundreds in not thousands of "Will attend" to actually end up having only 5 eventually show up. Says a lot about the power of the 'click', it simply can not be trusted, they may mean well, but it has lost us the human touch level, the importance of having RSVP'd to an event which was previously considered as a corner stone to an unwritten verbal promise that I must attend. Is it that we have slowly begun to deliberately decieve, will that have serious repercussions in our own human lives as time progresses, will be slowly morphing ourselves into untrusted humans, where the no one will put a value on our promise

So I often question the power of the web has it has become merely a chatter box with too much of extraneous noise interspersed with a few moments of brilliance. Often I meet people who are frequent commentators on my articles, behind the white screen they elevate to a larger then life personality, and when you bump across them on Main Street, its more often contrary to what the appear online.

On the flip side - I being a dentist by profession, would have lived a closed limited life spending my time as dentist working 9-5 six days a week in solitude treating the 32 teeth that nature had to offer, had it not been for blogs which I discovered in 2004, had it not been for the Government of Pakistan blocking the Blogspot.com domain in 2005, had it not been for Perviaz Musharaff putting a martial law in 2007 - I probably would have never embarked into the arena of online activism that I so much enjoy today - so I then must ask even myself, have I been liberated, have many others like me found the light to be able to share their freedom of thought so freely - I do not know, but this I can tell - my being part of this online revolution is immensely satisfying and liberating to say the least.

So do I have the right to question the downsides of the net, or is it just that its a web full of people learning and discovering their way across the hyper-connected world that we call Internet

Awab Alvi

Blog: http://teeth.com.pk/blog
Twitter: http://twitter.com/DrAwab

English: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." (162 characters - untweetable w/o edits sadly)

Chinese translation: 我有一个梦想，我的四个孩子将生活在一个有一天，他们不会被判断他们的肤色，而是以他们的品格的国度里生活。(89 characters! tweet away!)

If I can paraphrase, Dr. King was right (as usual) - it *is* about the content of the characters, and not the color (or length) of them.

As a follow-up to this, here is a writeup I did back in 2004 of the proto-Twitter text messaging system I was involved in setting up and running at the 2004 Republican National Convention protests in New York City. We had 10,000+ people "following" us and reporting back via the UPOC and TXTMob services.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/5403691/RNC04-in-160-Character-Bytes

Vahid says:

The downside to the internet for many of us who live online is that we deal with issues on a more superficial basis. No one bothers to read a book or well thought out analysis anymore. It's too long. It requires too much focus. We skim headlines. We're interested in the next quick fix. With a blog post, at least there is the potential for debate. Few bother to engage in that same debate in the comments section of Facebook or engage in a back-and-forth on Twitter.

In terms of those tools changing the focus of activists from the
streets to the computer screen, I don't think the overall percentage
of Iranians actually in Iran using Facebook and Twitter are
significant enough to make a difference.

Did you ever imagine a day when a *blog* and its comments would be considered a higher, more contemplative form of public political activity? Will something come along that makes Twitter seem deep and reflective?

And to Azmat's many cogent points of this weekend, which represent both a great summary of much of what we've expressed so far, and a great preface to the next stage of our conversation, what do we think about the way the Internet so easily becomes part of the "house of mirrors" of media and abstraction? It's one thing to read newspaper reports and then engage with the real world; it's another to learn about the world through Internet sites, and then express ourselves through other Internet sites.

When we find out that an important viral video was faked, does it make us cynical about all of it? Are the reality of repression and the ethereal, unreal quality of media getting confused?

In short, how is the net biased against what we'd like to be doing with it? And how can we safeguard against these pitfalls?

For me personally, it's made me who I am. When I write on a certain
topic, or make a comment, I have to learn to stand by it. Over time,
it has made me a more idealistic person. You detect that among other
Iranian bloggers, too. They may not admit it, but you often see that
when the topic comes up again in a different context, they have
shifted their views. Because we can't have democracy in Iran offline,
the internet is where we are learning to practice it.

Of course there is the double-identity problem here. Because of the
nature of the Iranian government and the huge gap in culture from one
generation to the next, many of us have one personality and set of
ideals online, and another in the other world. So while some bloggers
may spout about democracy online, they may act contrary to it in real
life.

The downside to the internet for many of us who live online is that we
deal with issues on a more superficial basis. No one bothers to read a
book or well thought out analysis anymore. It's too long. It requires
too much focus. We skim headlines. We're interested in the next quick
fix. With a blog post, at least there is the potential for debate. Few
bother to engage in that same debate in the comments section of
Facebook or engage in a back-and-forth on Twitter.

In terms of those tools changing the focus of activists from the
streets to the computer screen, I don't think the overall percentage
of Iranians actually in Iran using Facebook and Twitter are
significant enough to make a difference.

The use of the internet in Iran was and is fascinating to me, not so much for how it enabled information to spread within Iran because that seems to be fairly limited but for how it enabled news to get out of Iran.

Most of the focus has been on the tools, and for sure Twitter is amazing. Beyond the tools though, lost in that debate is a strong analysis of the motivating factors behind the successful use of the web. To the extent it has been covered, people have talked about where CNN failed. However, it is not only that mainstream media has shortcomings, which it does. Rather, it is that Twittter and other types of blogs and social media are now able through their own assets to challenge mainstream media for credible reporting. This is historic. If we are going to understand the potential for what is happening and did happen in Iran, we need to look closely at those unique assets that enable the web to challenge TV news as a credible source.

First, there is the quality of the content. People watch mainstream media to get information and because that information is of a sufficient quality to generate credibility. However, how do we assess quality? One way is clearly presentation and CNN beats a blog or Twitter there hands down. However, probably a more important factor is authenticity and the web crushes CNN there. If people believe they are more likely to get quality content from alternative outlets that is better than the mainstream media, they will gravitate towards it.

Another inherent asset of the web is the human connection. What Twitter and Facebook and the others are doing by connecting people is generating credibility by connecting thousands one at a time, rather than all at once through the shared agreement that millions are watching one program. Those connections are happening at lightening speed. If thousands of people are following posts by an activist in Iran, that lends credibility to the source by our mutual agreement to listen to him/her. This is real alternative media but coming to you with a shared sense of agreement that blurs the line between it and a"mainstream" product.

So when you combine good content, with ease of use and the power of human interaction, what you get is the reporting out of Iran on Twitter or on blogs. It's a brave new world. Like any new world there will be risks and challenges, but it is exciting to watch it develop.

----------

David Nassar
Executive Director
Alliance for Youth Movements

My perspective is of someone watching the radically increasing capacity of the internet (and increasingly, particularly the mobile web) as a place/space for creating and sharing video and visual imagery, and its impact on human rights work - so I'll focus primarily on video online for my perspective on the internet and fighting repression. When WITNESS, where I work, was founded in 1992, coming out of the Rodney King incident, the promise then was of handicams in the hands of human rights activists as a way to document the reality of what was happening on the ground around the world. But that moment was very preliminary - since in the absence of distribution venues for their footage most of the groups and activists we worked with found it extremely hard to get into the mainstream media (which they assumed to be a primary audience). Gatekeepers were not receptive to many of their issues, or didn't want to reflect the complexities in the stories they allowed to be seen. The internet - for many of the groups we work with - adds the distribution and sharing element that was missing at the start, particularly for rapid distribution outside of a specific local space. So, our partners working in eastern Burma can distribute a video on attacks on ethnic minority villages, and have it instantly in the hands of solidarity groups and activists worldwide - and receive half a million hits on it on YouTube over time (though perhaps with a question on the impact of those views, that may be just as relevant as when we look at broadcast viewing figures on TV and wonder what people did as a result). That's not to say that all of groups we work with use the internet as their primary means of distribution to advocacy audiences (we work with many who still rely on distribution of DVDs, or on using video as evidence or in lobbying behind closed doors), but that it gives them a critical way to either share information privately or publicly that they lacked before.

For best examples, there's alot to choose from - and also noting I think we're all still teasing out the linkages between online viewing/engagement and offline activism, particularly with some many variant and hybrid forms of internet-based video media. Over the past two years, WITNESS has featured many of these examples of what's working in terms of video online on our human rights media-sharing site, the Hub (http://hub.witness.org). Within that spectrum of online video for activism there are well-produced and well-edited short viral videos - some of the best examples include 'The Girl Effect' on the importance of prioritizing education and support to girls (highlighted in examples of using video to stop violence against women) or something as hard-hitting as the Amnesty UnsubscribeMe videos, that would never get played on television as PSAs (though '24' might be close), as well as the types of NGO advocacy material like the Burma video I mention above, that can speak to specific audiences with much greater ease than they ever could before. The internet has enabled (and bearing in mind that there are still massive digital divides in terms of access, digital literacy and participation) the circumvention of gatekeepers' control of access to the 'airwaves' and of editorial and a reduced need to prioritize one unitary voice, allowing instead to show the patterns of what is happening (as for example a tool like Ushahidi enables), or provide multiple perspectives on issues that might not otherwise get attention (e.g. ActionAid Nepal's participatory video work to share children's voices from Nepal on climate change) and at a length that is of the creators' choosing.

Then you also have excellent examples of less produced cellphone and handicam video sharing multiple facets of demonstrations or state brutality in Burma, Egypt, US or Iran - and sparking public activism in country and internationally (Iran), official investigations (eventually in Egypt) or news coverage (Burma). In the case of Burma, there is no way the situation there would have had the same amount of attention for the time it did during the Saffron Revolution in 2007 if it had not been for the capacity of bloggers and video-journalists, and human rights activists in the country to shoot, and share video online (captured so clearly in the Oscar-nominated film Burma VJ). Now, there were also repercussions in terms of that video (as activists were identified and targeted), and also questions about how we assess ultimate impact of the coverage, but that's probably for another stage of this conversation. I also want to echo Nathan's observations on the real-time nature of video shared online, and how it creates instant distant witnesses that can be pushed into other forms of activism.

There's also the phenonemon of unintended and intended consequences of video circulating online and being remixed - in the absence of gatekeepers, and understood in the context rising digital media literacy to share, remix and re-edit. So in Burma, one of the cause celebre videos that has done most to compromise any sense of popular trust and integrity for the ruling military junta was the leaked wedding video of the daughter of the dictator, Than Shwe - that showed opulence and ostentation as the country was heading towards crisis. An example of how the internet (plus digital media literacy, increasing access to capture devices and a participatory sensibility) enables remixing of multiple voices in a structured ways, is the work my colleague Chris Michael did with student chapters of the youth anti-genocide coalition STAND where they were encouraged to remix footage that they shot themselves (of key influencers in their state - for example genocide survivors, religious leaders or community leaders) into short videos of material from key voices at a national level and footage from genocidal situations, in order to individually target their state's Senators with personalized videos that spoke to their particular interest and affiliations, encouraging them to support more effective legislation against genocide. It's discussed in this blog post. I also admire the innovation in the Tunisian Prison Map and related projects where Sami Ben-Gharbia and colleagues working in the opposition human rights movement in Tunisia found a way to embed testimonies from political prisoners and their families in the YouTube video layers on GoogleMaps, circumventing the government's attempt to hide these kinds of truths from their citizens. This, as well as the example of the Targhiz Sniper, are in a recent video '10 Tactics for Turning Information into Action' by the group Tactical Technology Collective, that does a great job of highlighting innovative tactics drawing on new information technologies, including the internet.

A final thought... At the heart of much human rights practice is 'making visible' what is happening. That's not to say that that alone is enough - but it's the start, both within national borders and to create the 'boomerang effect' of international, transnational publicity - both for the type of visible violations of civil and political rights like someone being beaten in public by the police (see this recent example from East Timor), but also for more complex, structural issues like access to water or housing. In order to guarantee other rights, communication rights are absolutely essential - i.e. in order to know your rights, understand them, and communicate, mobilize and organize around them to hold people in power accountable people need to be able to access and share information. The right to communicate essentially unlocks people's agency to demand other rights - and for this the internet has opened up new spaces for many people that didn't exist before. Whether they are successfully able to use that communicative space, and what others also do with that space is another matter!

Looking forward to participating in the rest of this conversation!

--
Sam Gregory
Program Director
WITNESS

Did you know another citizen journalist in Burma was just sentenced to thirteen years in jail? AHRC Urgent Appeal: http://bit.ly/cSzedn

Today, while there is no guarantee that you will reach millions of listeners, you don't need millions of dollars, or the right connections, or fame, to reach millions of people. You do need a compelling message, and this is not something everyone has the ability to make. But the barrier to entry into the public conversation is much lower.

To take a pretty unusual example, a middle-aged homeless man using the handle "Slumjack Homeless" can write a comment on a blog post on a relatively low traffic site explaining why he prefers the streets to shelters, and end up featured on the New York Times and BBC websites. A college student named James Kotecki with a cute way of reviewing political videos can become a star on YouTube. A Twitter user named Amanda Ross can rally her friends to launch a grassroots fundraising campaign that, within weeks, raises a quarter million dollars via home-grown events in 200 cities. A campus activist named Farouk Olu Aregbe can create a Facebook group with a million members supporting a presidential candidate, etc. An 80-year-old man can email his 50 closest friends a video of Barack Obama on the campaign trail and have more influence on their votes in a few minutes than it would have taken him if he had to speak to each one personally face-to-face.

2. The Internet is a freer and more interactive medium, and the result is a richer and more diverse public conversation than what we had when the free press was just for those who owned one. Even as the political blogosphere matures, with some bloggers becoming bona fide media stars and longtime journalists taking up blogging, the result is a more democratic medium.
First, bloggers are their own men and women. Being your own boss means you are freer to speak your own mind. It's not surprising that some bloggers have earned large audiences--there has always been strong latent public demand for red-blooded journalism and opinionizing, just not much of that was offered by the old, big corporate media.

And even the bloggers who now work for media conglomerates are subject to the readers and competitors in ways that old media workers never were. It isn't just being exposed to commenters (who can make you smarter or show how dumb you are); it's knowing that you are in competition with other bloggers who are more transparent and interactive--that is what is changing the medium in a small-d democratic way--regardless of how concentrated the traffic may be.

Blogging about politics, unlike the old days of oped columns and talking heads, means being in constant contact with your readers, who collectively exert tremendous influence on the public conversation through their ability to comment, rate and share blog posts.

3. The "netroots" hubs online are far more than mere blogs; they are switching stations for action, not just opinion--sifting the news and pointing readers to all kinds of tangible political activities. For example, there's a lot more going on on the biggest liberal political site, DailyKos, than meets the eye, and anyone who simply equates that site with its founder, Markos Moulitsas, is missing the big picture.

DailyKos is more like a virtual city than it is just a national blog. Kos's personal contribution, contentwise, is about 1%, in terms of words written, of all the content on his site. Likewise, he probably gets a similarly small fraction of the overall number of comments posted on his site every day. The site gets several thousand diary posts a week, and these are read and rated by thousands more. It's also not just focused on national politics; there are all kinds of sub-communities buried inside it focused on more local concerns. There's even a progressive gardening club that "meets" every Friday where people share pictures and news of their gardens. To talk about a site like DailyKos in the same breath as an old media entity like the Washington Post is to compare apples and oranges.

4. The web is flattening, somewhat, the financing of politics, and to a modest but real degree, reducing the importance of large, maxed-out donors on who can become a viable candidate for office.

At the highest level, we've seen an important shift towards smaller donors, according to a careful analysis by the Campaign Finance Institute. Obama had more than 400K individual contributors, more than Bush and Kerry combined in 2004. And the percentage giving under $1000 were 53%, compared to 40% for Bush and 44% for Kerry. [Details here.]

The Democratic hub Actblue has channeled more than $111 million in contributions to more than 3000 Democratic candidates since its founding in 2004, with a median contribution of $50. The small-donor shift isn't as important in down-ballot races as we'd like, but it definitely is making it easier for candidates and members of Congress who want to take a more maverick approach--from Joe Wilson to Alan Grayson.

5. As an abundant medium, the web puts far less of a premium on the sound-biting of politics, and indeed often rewards rich political content. I've written about the rise of the "sound-blast" plenty of times and won't repeat that here, but it isn't just about the fact that Obama's second-most viewed video on YouTube is his 37-minute speech on race. Lots of popular political video clips tend to run anywhere from one to three minutes long; we should recognize this as a tremendous improvement in the public discourse.

To conclude, let me just suggest that it is dangerous to make conclusive statements about such a young and dynamic space. Four years ago, YouTube was just starting. Two years ago Twitter was just starting. Now something like 30 million people now have iPhones, and by 2012 the number of Americans with some kind of smartphone will probably be double or triple that. We are just beginning to scratch the surface of what happens when you combine real-time web access with location services with tools that you can carry anywhere in your pocket.

In spring 2007, one year out from the Beijing Olympics and its global torch relay, China was preparing climbers to take the Olympic torch to the top of Mt. Everest, in order to claim the mountain as their own in front of the world. For Tibetans, this was a terrible insult, heaped on top of all the other political whitewashing and cultural exploitation that was going on there in the lead up to the games. Tenzin Dorjee ("Tendor"), a young Tibetan born in exile and the Director of Students for a Free Tibet, decided to risk his personal freedom, and travel to the Everest basecamp to stage a protest. Unfortunately, that is a location which is about as remote as you can get, at that time under guard by Chinese military, without even guaranteed cell phone coverage. We knew however, that to have an impact and to safeguard Tendor, we needed a way to get footage of the protest out to the world as fast as possible.

Fortunately, the cost of satellite-based net connections have dropped dramatically in recent years, mostly due to the high use by news, humanitarian and military organizations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. I was able to work with Tendor to put together a very affordable and lightweight system that used a satellite modem, laptop and consumer digital video camera setup which could run off battery and solar power. More importantly, we found the right team, willing to take the risk and capable of both mountaineering and tech geekery, because not only would this be a highly sophisticated endeavor, it would also need to be pulled off in the thin air of Tibet.

After traveling for a few days, Tendor was able to make it to Everest and stage his protest, which including a moving speech, the lighting of a Tibetan torch and singing of Tibetan national anthem, all in range of the Chinese camp. They were quickly arrested by the armed military guards in the area and taken away in land rovers for interrogation. Fortunately, Tendor's media support team was able to beam his protest in real-time back to SFT offices in New York, where the protest quickly moved from the real world onto the net. The footage was immediately uploaded to YouTube, released online as downloadable MPEG-4s, and burned onto DVDs that were given to the Associated Press. Blog posts and press releases were published. Social networks and email lists were alerted. The Everest team had been in detention for barely a few hours, yet over 50,000 people around the world had already experienced Tendor's protest directly, and understand the great risk he and the others had taken.

Over the next few days, Tendor and the team were taken through various detention centers on the Tibetan plateau, faced intense interrogation and even had their lives threatened. They were lost to the world for those days with no official information released by the Chinese authorities. The video had made it to the front page of YouTube (in the days where 100,000 views was enough), been covered by blogs including BoingBoing.net, and picked up by major news outlets, with the footage showing internationally on CNN, BBC, VOA, Al Jazeera and local NBC and FOX affiliates in Boston, San Francisco, New York and across the country. Eventually, the late US. Senator Ted Kennedy became personally involved (Tendor's family lives in Boston), and the U.S. State Department began putting tough pressure on the Chinese government to release the protestors (all American citizens). Finally, they were taken to the China-Nepal border, released, and told never to return to China.

Ultimately, the use of the net in this protest allowed for Tendor to take the ultimate risk, while knowing in his heart and mind, that the world would know what he had done almost instantly. In addition, in a media world built on sound bites and story hooks, the idea of "this just happened now on Mt. Everest" helped captivate netizens, sell the story to mainstream media, and garner the support and attention needed to activate our own government representatives before it was too late. In the coming months, every mention of the Chinese Olympic ascent up Everest also mentioned the "Tibet Protest" as the counterpoint to the story. News of the protest spread through Tibet thanks to official shortwave and satellite broadcasts of RFA and VOA Tibet, as well as just word of mouth of "The Tibetan Who Protested on Everest".

Throughout history, untold numbers of activists and dissidents have taken similar risks without the benefit of the net to get their backs, to spread their words, to amplify their cause. That in no way should diminish the nobleness of their acts, but instead, only prove the value that the net has brought to people such as Tendor.

Just search "Everest Protest" on YouTube to see it for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=everest+protest&aq=f

Does the Internet promote freedom of expression and communication, making it a catalyst for democracy and activism? Is the net tilted towards Democracy and participatory society? Meanwhile, do services like Facebook and Twitter encourage virtual and superficial involvement over dedication to the kind of activism that makes a difference? Does it just take people off the streets, blogging safely in their homes where they no longer threaten repressive regimes?

Our participants this month are:

Dr. Awab Alvi - dentist, activist, and political blogger in Pakistan
Azmat Khan - journalist and Pakistan researcher
Kelly Niknejad -  Editor in Chief, Tehran Bureau
Sam Gregory - Witness.org, program director
Vahid - Blogger - vahidonline, Researcher, archivist and media monitor for Tehran Bureau.   http://vahid-online.net
Zahid Jamil - attorney specializing in Internet issues, Pakistan
David Nassar - Executive Director, Alliance for Youth Movements and expert in the democratic development of the Middle East.  
Legba Carrefour - Radical organizer, artist, and writer from Washington, DC
Wael Abbas - Journalist, Blogger, and activist - Cairo, Egypt.  http://www.misrdigital.com  Nathan Freitas - Activist + Inventor, Tech Director for Tibet Action Institute
Micah Sifry - Co-Founder and Editor, The Personal Democracy Forum
Ted Byfield - Nettime moderator, Visiting Fellow, Yale Law School Information Society Project

As some of our participants must hide their real-world identities, we will be conducting our roundtable without photos this month. I'll be back momentarily with the opening topic.

Sometime later this week, we will be beginning the next Roundtable: Freedom. We have enlisted a great group of people, from activists in Asia to theorists in the United States. Please come back. Here's a summary of the topic:

Next month, our PBS DigitalNation Roundtable is about Freedom. Does the Internet promote freedom of expression and communication, making it a catalyst for democracy and activism? Is the net tilted towards Democracy and participatory society? Meanwhile, do services like Facebook and Twitter encourage virtual and superficial involvement over dedication to the kind of activism that makes a difference? Does it just take people off the streets, blogging safely in their homes where they no longer threaten repressive regimes?

Stay tuned. This should be an interesting one, particularly given the current headlines in China, Iran, and Pakistan.

Now, a few thoughts to the topic at hand...

Douglas Rushkoff wrote:

Does the rise of the amateur lead to an unnecessary devaluation of the professional? ... Do representative democracy, academic disciplines and other seemingly elitist artifacts fall by the wayside? Is the rise of the amateur simply the rise of the unpaid worker?

Although I'm with Mark on the importance of the Taoist idea of destroying duality, I totally disagree with the notion that the publicity and visibility of amateurs has eradicated the need for expertise or professionals of any kind. I think that this comes back to Clay's notion that abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. I think that we desperately need people who can really drill down deep in one area because we are not collectively able to do this. I think that what we're losing these days is not experts, but generalists, people who are deeply knowledgeable about a wide range of things. I can't help but be fascinated by the disappearance of classics education at the university of level. What body of knowledge do we collectively have? As a result, we tend to be more narrow and that means that we have experts.

Even at the local level, I think that we continue to turn to people who we individually crown the experts. I know who I turn to when I want new dubstep. And that's a different person than I turn to when I want a doctor recommendation. In both cases, I crown these people experts. That said, they are not professionals.

So that gets us to a different question... what does professional mean today? And what did it mean historically? Was Ben Franklin a professional? I don't think that I have a good handle on what that term even means, except for the ability to get paid. So let me ask a question... For the last decade, I wasn't paid to write but my writing led to countless paid work - consulting, speaking, etc. Does that make me a professional writer? How deeply connected does the money and work have to be?

I also have to ask... What are our investments in maintaining a specific professional cohort or class? Is this about a perpetuation of the 1950s ideal? Might it be better to ask what societal responsibilities and roles we want to make sure are covered and then ask how they can be funded? For example, I know that I want investigative journalism and I don't believe that either the market or bloggers are going to fill this role. I'm far more invested in finding a way for this role to be maintained than finding a way for newspapers to survive. Likewise, I want political representatives but I'm not convinced that the current model is working there either. Nor am I committed to professional politicians. Etc.

Connected to this, I don't believe that elitist artifacts are falling by the wayside. Quite the contrary - we're developing new types of elitist institutions, ones that are primarily privatized and not public. Power is now primarily in the hands of the private (business) elite rather than the public (academic, government) elite. Arguably, these elites are more powerful today than ever before. Private interests now control both academia and government in unprecedented ways, meaning that those private elites have a lot more say over what happens not just in their segment of society but in broader segments. I'm not sure this is a good thing but I'm pretty certain it's a new configuration. (I think it's also important to note that if we were writing this 150 years ago, we would've talked about the military elite... It's interesting to think that the elites probably ebb and flow.)

danah

Many new bloggers feel that they have the same ability as trained,
experienced journalists. Bloggers I have spoken with personally. And I
believe that their ability to differentiate between journalism and
public relations is still, at best, in process.

It's not a matter of some external agency "authorizing" the expert
(many great journalists have not gone to journalism school). It's more
a matter of the marketplace and audience losing the ability to
distinguish, because they feel so (perhaps falsely) empowered by their
newfound access to distribution.

All of this either-or-ness. The truth is and-and-and. /Yes/, online activities promote participatory democracy and the development of new and/or accurate folksonomies, /and/ they also lead people to overestimate the value of their unconsidered posts and opinions. It doesn't seem as though you can have one half of the equation without the other half.

Mark, 100% agreed! Kurt Luther and I have been having a detailed parallel discussion of all this, and he has some excellent concrete examples. Kurt writes:

A great example of this is graphic design or stock photography. Websites that let people create "design me a logo contests" seem to the bane of many a designers' existence. There have been a bunch of organized efforts (and many more blog rants) about how this type of crowdsourced "spec work" is killing the field of design. (e.g.: http://www.no-spec.com/) On the contrary, amateur designers, students, and designers from developing countries argue for these contests because they create opportunities that simply wouldn't be available to them otherwise.

More closely related to our research, there was a lot
of backlash in the animation community when Mass Animation recruited
animators on Facebook (mostly students) to work on their short film
that screened in theaters and earned royalties. Basically, students
were paid $500 to do professional-quality work for a short film that
(I think) made much more money. I asked the director about that, and
if they were setting up a model that future filmmakers might exploit,
but he pointed me to the students who were (again) super-excited to
have the opportunity. What's fair here?
A possible counterexample: After the success of "Paranormal Activity,"
a very low-budget horror film that raked in huge profits at the box
office, Paramount announced it was going to change its funding model
to produce fewer big-budget films and many more micro-budget films. So
instead of investing a few million in one film, they are splitting it
into funding 10-20 $100,000 films. Are these $100,000 filmmakers less
professional than the million-dollar filmmakers? Hard to say (probably
not), but what if the decimal point moved a few places to the left?
Another interesting edge case is Mechanical Turk. Cliff Lampe's keynote
and many other thinkers (e.g. Benkler) talk about financial vs.
social-psychological motivations, and how the latter are often more
powerful. But Mechanical Turk is doing really well, and the fact that
people are willing to do a huge variety of tasks for almost no pay
flies in the face of some of these theories.

I think the main point here is that when it comes to online
contribution (crowdsourcing, whatever), pay models and volunteer
models can co-exist. It's not an either-or situation. We should be
thinking harder about when people should be paid vs. unpaid, from
both the ethical perspective (what's fair?) and the capitalistic
perspective (does it make the product better?).

One is alone. One fills in the blanks for oneself. And yet one feels together, supported by others because of a sense of connection. As in a psychoanalytic session -- where analyst is there but does not see the patient -- one feels supported to say -- whatever. The medium supports a transference to the medium itself. More than mediation, it amplifies and validates.

Alone together.
Together alone.

I think those may be two different modes.

Slashdot comments.
Chatroulette.

Wikipedia depends critically on expertise and to fail to understand this is to fail to understand the phenomenon of Wikipedia completely. Wikipedians insist on "reliable sources" not as a magical incantation but because reliable sources matter, really really matter, if we are to be engaged in a project devoted to the passionate pursuit of truth.

I understand how wikipedia must and does cite "experts" --- although I think it would be fair to say that much of what is actually cited (right now) is not written by world class experts but by journalists, who are almost by definition generalists and not experts. The challenge of citing experts is that it often takes an expert to know where to find them, and to evaluate, or even decode their work. I am not even sure that "truthiness" is best served by experts either. On many subjects I think the tendency of wikipedia to cite journalists (some of whom may be world class expert journalists) provides a better more balanced overview of a subject than citing experts would. In very narrow subjects, you would want more narrow expertise. Has any work been published which analyzed the nature of the citations in wikipedia in terms of what percent point to peer reviewed primary sources (a reasonable proxy for expertise)? Jimmy, do you have a intuitive guess at what portion of current citations point to primary experts? (Setting aside the fact that many facts in wikipedia are not currently cited at all -- although that continues to improve.)

The question of whether or not "real world-class experts" will or should participate in Wikipedia is a complete red herring. They are welcome to do so, and in fact, the community - in general - not only tolerates but celebrates the participation of genuine domain experts. (Although, it must be said, that quite properly merely being a genuine domain expert doesn't give one a free pass in Wikipedia - nor should it.)

But citations are only half of wikipedia's value. Contributors and editors select and arrange those citations. My impression was that few of those contributors and editors were world class experts in the subject they worked on. Yes, experts are welcomed, but how many do? My impression is undoubtedly ignorant, so I have to rely on either your impression, which is much more informed than mine, or on serious analysis. Jimmy, what is your guess for either the proportion of wikipedia's contributors/editors who are world class experts, and/or the percentage of all world class experts who contribute or edit wikipedia? I would guess maybe 10% of the contributions/edits in a piece are from the best experts and that maybe 1% of all experts contribute to the wikipedia entry about their subject. But I'm just guessing. Do you have a better sense or better data?
--

What is the role of individual experts? Will real world-class experts
gravitate to Wikipedia and join in the hive? Have any so far? Will their
expertise even be tolerated? Can experts find a way to sustain their
expertise? (For example right now Roger Ebert is trying to find a direct
subscription model for his expertise in movie reviews.)

Wikipedia depends critically on expertise and to fail to understand this is to fail to understand the phenomenon of Wikipedia completely. Wikipedians insist on "reliable sources" not as a magical incantation but because reliable sources matter, really really matter, if we are to be engaged in a project devoted to the passionate pursuit of truth.

The question of whether or not "real world-class experts" will or should participate in Wikipedia is a complete red herring. They are welcome to do so, and in fact, the community - in general - not only tolerates but celebrates the participation of genuine domain experts. (Although, it must be said, that quite properly merely being a genuine domain expert doesn't give one a free pass in Wikipedia - nor should it.)

I don't expect to see, and I don't want to see, path-breaking research in physics being originally published in Wikipedia. The very idea is a bit demented. We do not have, and do not intend to build, the social structures to support and validate original research in specialist domains. The academic institutions (including journals) which are designed for that are designed quite well and doing a reasonable job. (This is not to say that they are not in need of change, and that their changes can and should be informed by the possibilities of collaboration inherent in new technologies.)

--Jimbo

The wealth of peer produced information and support is an essential component of helping people make that transition--to help them to take on more *agency* in their care, their own lives more broadly. But at the same time, the individual does not yet have the tools or training to know how to sort good info from bad.

We are most definitely in the early days. We are left with a *design challenge*: to develop tools to better support individuals making sense of all the available information and mis-information. To create communities where sense-making is a collaborative effort, and your friends are there to help with the knowledge-building discourse.

One is alone. One fills in the blanks for oneself. And yet one feels together, supported by others because of a sense of connection. As in a psychoanalytic session -- where analyst is there but does not see the patient -- one feels supported to say -- whatever. The medium supports a transference to the medium itself. More than mediation, it amplifies and validates.

For me, hope is to be found in the fact that these are "early days." We feel that we have been with this technology for a long time. In fact, it is all just beginning. There is reason to believe that there will be a delicate negotiation between us and the technology, we will learn to use it better. In the area of privacy, I am hoping for a backlash. Democracy without privacy is hard to accomplish. As is privacy without solitude. Every technology challenges us to reflect on whether it serves our human purposes, an excercise through which we are challenged, again, to ask what they are.

"Destroy duality as you would destroy falsity" says the Taoist proverb.

Is there really any difference between the amateur and the professional? Only insofar as the professional has been able to string the velvet rope around his and his own (they've always been men), declaring this ground professional and that ground, well, something else altogether.

You can go to a professional doctor approved by the AMA. Or you can go to a 'quack' doctor. Like, say, Willem Reich. Who got into boatloads of trouble with the FDA for his 'quack' cures.

This, in all situations, is always about who is doing the authorizing. Who is letting whom into the clubhouse. An essential, shamanic act of 'blessing'.

This seems to be an essential, innate human/primate behavior. Wikipedia has managed to replicate, in its internal structure, precisely the same velvet rope of professionalism that is endemic to the pre-crowdsourced professions. Thus, crowdsourcing is completely beside the point. It does nothing to promote the amateur, necessarily, just as it does nothing to demote the professional, necessarily.

Yet that is only half of the story. What happens when the amateur and professional enter a networked continuum, a polity where some of the nodes are 'professional', while others remain 'amateur'? What distinguishes them? As knowledge and expertise move more freely throughout the network - surely that is the singular feature of the human network - the neat categories get worn away under the pressure from the network. Suddenly, professional and amateur labels matter a lot less than who knows what, and who can put that knowledge to work. This future - entirely utilitarian in this respect - does not invest itself in false distinctions. Only distinctions which can be supported a priori will be sustained by the network. And those distinctions will tend to subside through time, as knowledge and expertise distributes itself through the network.

How much longer are questions about 'amateurs' and 'professionals' meaningful? That's the real question here.

* * *

All of this either-or-ness. The truth is and-and-and. Yes, online activities promote participatory democracy and the development of new and/or accurate folksonomies, and they also lead people to overestimate the value of their unconsidered posts and opinions. It doesn't seem as though you can have one half of the equation without the other half. That which is empowering empowers both the positive and negative aspects of the ego. Some consideration should be made in design of the user experience to avoid circumstances which amplify the ego in less-than-helpful directions, but media always possess the 'Narcissus as Narcosis' quality that McLuhan pointed out in Understanding Media. Nothing is quite so tantalizing as our own image reflected back to us by the instrumentality of mediation. Our own words, unconsidered, illogical, contradictory, vain, mean and quite often intensionally hurtful are like pearls to us. This is almost corprophillia; if our shit stunk as we typed it onto the screen, perhaps we'd love it a little bit less. Perhaps.

Just for the record: I very very strongly disagree with this and think it is absolutely the wrong interpretation - to the core - of every trend we see in the world today. I reject this statement, and the premises behind it, comprehensively and utterly, from top to bottom.

Expertise is more valuable - and more valued - than ever before. The passionate grasp of reality - in detail - by the serious individual who takes 'getting it right' seriously... this is the only thing we have, and indeed, the only thing we have ever had.

That said, I'd like to address this whole 'hypercapitalism' mythology. It sure reads pretty, but it ain't particularly true. People are connecting and hyperconnecting because we are built to connect. Wired from the womb. No one is thinking about the Theory of Surplus Value when they make an edit in Wikipedia, or add a comment to RateMyProfessors.com. They're thinking about sharing, an activity which is equal parts narcissism and altruism.

Almost everything-2.0 stands outside of contemporary discussions of capital. Yes, it can be colonized by capital - though there are some things even late capitalism isn't prepared to digest (Wikileaks) - but has nothing to do with it, is not derived from it, derives no value from it, etc. These are human tribal behaviors that have been amplified to supernormal stimuli by the presence of technological mediators.

OK, that's out of the way. Later today I'll address the either/or questions Douglas has posed. With and-and-and.

Cheers,

Mark

"Proposition: expertise is dead and folk wisdom is all that we have." Well, expertise can't be dead... some people know more about a particular field than others ... it can only be ignored.

Yes, that is what I meant. It is culturally ignored.
--

Some of what gives current expertise a bad name is that those who hold it are not exempt from being gutless, self-serving, and self-deceiving. Did people who understood markets know that loans were being made to people who did not deserve to get loans. Well, yes. But money was to be made, justifications were made, new instruments conceived that masked risk, and at a certain point, it would seem that experts began to believe their own justifications. But they did have an expertise and to conflate unprofessional expert behavior with lack of expertise would be unfortunate. But it happens, routinely.

One of the unfortunate aspects of crumbling of media institutions that used to support expertise is that experts become more isolated and underutilized. A great reporter cannot, cannot support themselves doing a blog because it actually takes serious money to support a serious reporting job.

The rise of the amateur can invigorate a culture. But traditionally, part of being an amateur meant that you knew you were not a professional. You did not have a professional's responsibility, commitments, accountability. The danger is a new hybrid identity where amateurs aspire to take the responsibilities of professionals. Not good.

st

The underlying spirit of this "folk culture" is one of playful participation. Economic desperation and excess disparity spoils the fun. I don't see how anybody in the current economic environment -- jobless recovery... jobless economy... can not want to talk about it.

I suppose I'm taking a very strong materialist view, but I suspect that personal economic concerns undergird the most panicky responses to the cultural impact of crowd/folk culture. We talk today about neo-luddites, but we tend to forget that the actual luddites were about one thing... the machines were taking the source of their livelihood. Now we have disintermediation and folk culture... undoubtedly leading to the devaluation of the profession or expert or special talent, but perhaps more importantly, we have an economic reversal that widens the circle of exclusion that danah boyd spoke about. Up until a couple of years ago, us techno-progressives could brag about an ever widening circle of inclusion. I think that some of us haven't caught up with how big and deep the trouble ahead is and how -- among other things -- it makes people reactive against those who delight in the cultural shifts wrought by technologies.

And then there's the glib part... "Proposition: expertise is dead and folk wisdom is all that we have." Well, expertise can't be dead... some people know more about a particular field than others ... it can only be ignored. One result of this would be that Joe the plumber's opinion on climate change is as good as any scientists etc. But even there, while the culture privileges folk wisdom, expertise (or talent) is still in the game. The problem, though... again, is money. To have an expert, talented class devoting their time and energy to honing a craft requires a healthy flow.

I may sound here like I'm joining the techno-reactionaries in their complaints about crowd culture, but I'm not. I'm a both/and not an either/or type. I think the only big problems we have are economic scarcity and the environment. The other stuff can work itself out.

Amy Bruckman said:

The one field where expertise is changing dramatically is journalism. And that's frankly scary to me. Bloggers fill some of the void, and in some cases may bring more expertise to the task than professional journalists. But we really do need people with the *time* and *mandate* to do solid investigative reporting, and no amount of tweeting from the scene can replace that. We need a new economic model to support professional journalism

a new economic model... if wealth, or it's representative, cash, was not scarce, we would have a new economic model fast. As is, not much good is going to happen...

In the arts, sure we have amateur movies--but we still have professional films. And that's not changing. We have indie games, but we still have blockbuster products by EA and Blizzard. We have easier access to a zillion garage bands, but we still have Lady Gaga and The New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.

The one field where expertise is changing dramatically is journalism. And that's frankly scary to me. Bloggers fill some of the void, and in some cases may bring more expertise to the task than professional journalists. But we really do need people with the *time* and *mandate* to do solid investigative reporting, and no amount of tweeting from the scene can replace that. We need a new economic model to support professional journalism.

My counter-proposition: journalism expertise is in crisis, and everything else is nearly unchanged!

I know that you are trying to link economics into the discussion, but in this particular case, I find it more useful to delink economics. Rathter than talking about devaluation of professionals, I find it more intriguing to consider the devaluation of expertise -- regardless of whether it is paid or unpaid. In the conventional dichotomy I see folks on one side and experts (whether or not they are professional) on the other. Set aside the issue of whether professionals can make a living on their expertise. I am more interested in whether their expertise is needed.

What is the role of individual experts? Will real world-class experts gravitate to Wikipedia and join in the hive? Have any so far? Will their expertise even be tolerated? Can experts find a way to sustain their expertise? (For example right now Roger Ebert is trying to find a direct subscription model for his expertise in movie reviews.)

I can see expertise going the way of oil painters. Portrait painters can mix colors and render a person in amazing detail -- it is an artistic performance. But oil painting is a rarified art form, supported by a few. Unexpert photography is good enough for most of us. Maybe expertise in most subjects becomes an artistic performance -- valued not so much for its service but more because it is so rare and beautiful.

More important, in this fast moving culture is there even time enough to become expert in anything? And why bother if the crowd has a "good enough" expertise? Maybe expertise in most subjects is simply not needed as much any more. Obviously expertise in say html5 programming will be in demand, but maybe the good enough folk-crowd expertise on Roman plumbing is all our society needs.

And in the fast moving technical fields, who is even crazy enough to claim expertise? Are there any artists that have "mastered" Photoshop? Or CGI? Or Maya? You can probably only claim expertise in domains that are dead -- that have stop changing. Maybe even in Ruby and Ajax, the expertise of the crowd is all you can hope for.

Proposition: expertise is dead and folk wisdom is all that we have.

Early on, danahboyd said:

I'd actually like to address the first half of your opening question - "What are the values implicit in both collaborative open source activities and "crowd-sourced" activities" - before addressing the second half. The full question naturally leads us to think about contemporary capitalism and free labor, but the first half is also critical to analyze on its own. Why? Because we must take into account privilege at both the individual and collective levels.

Then RU Sirius added:

I think I may be at my upper limit of bloviating, but I still want to return to danah's point about the economics of this... but indirectly. I'd simply like to throw out this idea...

Rapid Technological Change + Ruthless Hypercapitalism = An Insanely Stressful Society. But the problem is not with the technology but with the socioeconomic paradigm that doesn't have (or want) the tools to cope with it

Also, the last part of the scheduled topics fits this discussion as well:

Folksonomy and the Folks.
Everybody is, indeed, here now - but should everyone be here? Does the rise of the amateur lead to an unnecessary devaluation of the professional? Do collective online activities promote a new form of participatory democracy and the development of new and accurate folksonomies, or rather to they lead people to overestimate the value of their unconsidered posts and opinions? Do representative democracy, academic disciplines and other seemingly elitist artifacts fall by the wayside?

Is the rise of the amateur simply the rise of the unpaid worker? And Clay - is cognitive surplus simply something to be scooped up by corporate powers? Entertainment as free labor?

CONGRESSWOMAN CAROLYN MALONEY JOINS SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER OFFICIALS FOR RELEASE OF 2010 DIGITAL HATE REPORT

NEW YORK, NY - REP. CAROLYN MALONEY (D-NY) WILL JOIN, RABBI ABRAHAM COOPER, ASSOCIATE DEAN OF THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER, A PIONEER IN DIGITAL HATE AND TERROR, AND MARK WEITZMAN, THE CENTER'S DIRCTOR OF GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS FOR THE RELEASE OF THE 2010 DIGITAL TERROR & HATE REPORT "THE GLOBAL REACH" 11:00 AM MONDAY, MARCH 15, 2010, AT THE NEW YORK TOLERANCE CENTER AT 42ND STREET AND SECOND AVENUE. AMONG FINDINGS, THE REPORT FOUND SOCIAL NETWORKING IS INCREASINGLY WEAPON OF CHOICE FOR RACISTS, TERRORISTS, 20% INCREASE TO 11,500 SOCIAL NETWORKS, WEBSITES, FORUMS, BLOGS, TWITTER, ETC (UP FROM 10,000 LAST YEAR), AND THE INTERNET AS THE INCUBATOR AND VALIDATOR OF 9/11, ORGAN THEFT AND OTHER NOTORIOUS 'CONSPIRACY THEORIES.' THE REPORT ALSO INCLUDES FINDINGS THAT THE 'LONE WOLF', ONCE THE DOMAIN OF US DOMESTIC EXTREMISTS, IS NOW HEAVILY PROMOTED BY TERRORIST GROUPS, HATE GAMES, INCLUDING ONE BOMBING HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE VICITIMS CONTINUE TO TARGET YOUNG PEOPLE AND EXPANDED 'HOW-TO' TERRORISTS POSTINGS, INCLUDING BINARY AND LASER TECHNOLOGY. THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER IS AN INTERNATIONAL JEWISH HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO PRESERVING THE MEMORY OF THE HOLOCAUST BY FOSTERING TOLERANCE AND UNDERSTANDING THROUGH COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT, EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH AND SOCIAL ACTION. MEDIA COVERAGE INVITED, RSVP REQUIRED.

Or consider the poor Chinese man who after the Sichuan earthqake blogged that he was terrified and wouldn't sacrifice his life for his mother. He was fired from his job, hounded by the media, and dubbed "the most hated man in China."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92517549

Of course these kinds of incidents happen in all countries--but I think where norms of conformity are higher, they are more problematic. Saying "I wouldn't save my Mom" in China will make you a pariah, but in America may get you a gig on Comedy Central.

Wikipedia has a list of incidents on its page "Internet Vigilantism":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_vigilantism

The lesson for the most hated man in China is easy--be careful what you post! For Puppy Poo Girl, it's more problematic--she didn't post anything online at all. She certainly deserved a littering citation, but she didn't deserve to be publicly vilified.

(I hope Clay will jump in here, because he's written about this so eloquently in Here Comes Everybody!)

-- Amy

Let me focus on US teens for a moment since that's the demographic that I know best. In the US, Pew is seeing access rates at 93% amongst 12-17yos, but what kinds of access they have and what that access means really varies tremendously. (It should also be noted that the remaining 7% are overwhelmingly religious households where the Internet is actively demonized.) This only refers to baseline access. On the ground, we see teens whose only access is in heavily filtered libraries and schools, teens who access via their mobile only, and teens who have dialup when their parents remember to pay the bills. At the other end of the spectrum, we see teens who have their own laptops, continuous access to WiFi, a series of peripherals, and high-end mobile phones. (Basically, akin to what most folks on this list have.) Any teen with access is accessing information (especially Wikipedia) and engaging in some form of communication technology. But the variance is HUGE and, I suspect, increasing. Media literacy (see Henry Jenkins) and skills vary widely (see Eszter Hargittai), resulting in disparities of experience that go beyond just access. So which teens are really participating in the future that we've mapped out? And what happens when US colleges expect a high level of technology skills and media literacy because they assume "digital natives"?

Over and over again in the US, I see institutions and individuals expecting that the "digital natives" are technological experts because they grew up with this around them. And those from privileged backgrounds excel in such environments because they often do have the skills, the experience, the familiarity. What pains me is that the skills learned by those from less privileged environments are often not valued, especially by adults. Poor urban youth were actually among the first to get web-enabled phones - the Sidekick. This was often their primary web access point. Yet it wasn't until the iPhone came out that US companies started thinking about making webpages phone-readable. (Wikipedia excluded of course.)

Outside of the US, the picture gets messier. Access becomes a huge sticking point, with mobile playing a much bigger role (see Jonathan Donner, Genevieve Bell, Jan Chipchase). But we're still seeing huge disparities in terms of participation. In the US, we know that sharing a device radically reduces participation; this is so common outside of the US that we don't even measure the implications of it.

What worries me - and what I feel the need to call out - is not about whether or not everyone in the world will benefit in some ways by information and communication technologies, but whether or not the privileged will benefit more in ways that further magnifies structural inequality. I am certainly seeing this as the US college level, as more privileged US freshman are leaps and bounds ahead of their less privileged peers in terms of technological familiarity, a division that makes educating with technology in the classroom challenging. But my colleagues elsewhere in the world are signaling that this is occurring everywhere. So, yes, while I suspect you'll find lots of folks benefiting from technology as you traverse the world, the question that I think you should be asking is whether or not those of us with more privilege are benefiting at a greater rate than those who have less privilege.

danah

I have been interviewing teens for many years now on virtual experience and there is a sense that experiences on the net can be sufficient unto the day. One feels as though (and feelings count!) one has connections, that one is expressing one's opinion and engaging collaboratively. These feelings are very strong and can be emotionally sustaining. But this online activity, for many people (not for all and the exceptions are important -- there are exciting efforts to harness online activities for political and social action) can feel like a lot. And can feel like all one has time for.

The time issue is important. We give ourselves more and more to do, especially online, and then look to technology to lighten our load. But then, email, maintaining a virtual presence and so forth, becomes ever more a job in itself. Some of the reason people do less of the screen is that they come to see what they have in front of them on the screen as a first priority to deal with. People talk about getting "rid" of their emails. We turned to connectivity to give us more time, but then many end up serving what their devices put before them. I should say that teens, of course, do not email. I use email as a metaphor for online connection. What takes their time is Facebook messaging and texting. Texting can make you feel very connected . . . but here, it may be a technology maximized for accomplishing the rudimentary.

We are drawn, always, to what technology offers, to what it makes easy. What it currently makes easy does not necessarily provide as much emotional sustenance as we might wish, or rather, we come to see what we can have online as the relationships we can have. And we come to see the social action we can have online as the politics we can have.

It would be great to have some data.

Amen. The truth is always more complicated and more interesting than you expect.

I'm definitely irked by "slacktivism." Um, do people think changing your icon green on Twitter is really a form of political action? The point is well taken that the impact of other forms of political action like letter writing or marching are not always obvious either. But still... do people who join a Facebook protest group or change an icon color feel that they've done something, and hence are excused from further action?

On the other side of the coin, folks like Andy Carvin at NPR are doing some absolutely brilliant work on using social media for really meaningful action in the area of disaster response. A group of volunteers made a Haitian Creole translator for smart phones within days after the quake. Volunteers made the 'people finder' application to help people find loved ones, and it's now set up after any major disaster. Stuff that's indisputably real in positive impact and absolutely impossible without the Internet. (Andy's TEDxNYED talk about this was great--video should be online soon.)

>>>
1968, you see a remarkable protest movement that spanned the globe - "with a synchronicity previously unheard of in human history," as Franco Berardi has observed. This was a manifestation of a profoundly physical "mass connectedness," an in-the-streets "mass connectedness," and yet it was spurred and coordinated without any of the information and communication technologies that we today take for granted and often see as marking a revolution in our ability to communicate and collaborate on a large scale.
>>>

Sometimes it feels like nothing has happened since 1968. But that's experiential or existential. I'm not sure how effective all that action was. You know that quote from Zhao Enlai from some time in the 1950s or 60s, when asked about the effects of the French Revolution (1789, not 1968) where he said, "It's too soon to tell"?

In just the last few years, we've seen a series of traumatic political and economic events in the U.S. - unpopular wars, and an excruciating economic meltdown provoked in large measure by the greed of a small, extraordinarily privileged class of people - and yet despite these powerful triggers we've seen almost no sign of any mass protests. Our intensively networked college students have been as quiet as mice.

I think this an astute and important observation. If true, what does it mean if the crowd has moved away from the street?

Could be three answers:

1) Baudrillard's, that the virtual drives out the real, and because the virtual is impotent, we are in a very sad state of affairs.
2) Or it could be that street crowds were no more effective in their goals than virtual crowds, and it is replacing one impotent form with another. (Does marching change policies?)
3) Or it could be since the world has not ended despite the above mentioned failures that virtual crowds are more effective than street crowds, but they use chatting instead of protest to form the culture.

It would be great to have some data. In any case, I think Nick is right that activism has moved from the street to online -- and that makes it a different bird worthy of inspection.

What are the, perhaps, unintended effects unleashed by our mass connectedness?

I wonder if it doesn't act as a political soporific, at least in Western democracies. If you look at, say, 1968, you see a remarkable protest movement that spanned the globe - "with a synchronicity previously unheard of in human history," as Franco Berardi has observed. This was a manifestation of a profoundly physical "mass connectedness," an in-the-streets "mass connectedness," and yet it was spurred and coordinated without any of the information and communication technologies that we today take for granted and often see as marking a revolution in our ability to communicate and collaborate on a large scale. (Even access to telephones was severely limited among the students of 1968.) In just the last few years, we've seen a series of traumatic political and economic events in the U.S. - unpopular wars, and an excruciating economic meltdown provoked in large measure by the greed of a small, extraordinarily privileged class of people - and yet despite these powerful triggers we've seen almost no sign of any mass protests. Our intensively networked college students have been as quiet as mice.

There are, of course, a whole lot factors involved here beyond information and communication technologies, and I know we should be wary of being reductive in assessing the situation. But it does seem strange that the explosion of virtual connectedness in the U.S. has been accompanied by the disappearance of mass political activism in the streets. As we shift increasingly toward virtual communication, where the abstract replaces the concrete, where ironic detachment replaces active engagement, are we sacrificing our capacity for such activism? (I'm not sure, but this may be related to the way that online "crowds," in Western democracies, tend to be deeply embedded in the Web's commercial matrix.) Baudrillard probably would have suggested that this is yet another sign of the triumph of the simulation over the event, the Net being the most powerful technology of simulation the world has ever seen.

I wonder if others on this panel have ideas about how to separate "the crowd" from "the mob"... Is it possible and desirable?

While we may not all be able to agree that networked groups allow for collective innovation on an altogether new level - perhaps we can agree that the Internet allows for forms mob activity we never saw before.

Just the fact that, as Mark alluded to, there is so much power online in being "anonymous," is itself both empowering to those living in repression, but also terribly troubling. In my own experiences with angry online mobs, it was my very identity - my name, address, pictures of my family - that served as the mob's main weapons.

Or, back to the outline:

What are the, perhaps, unintended effects unleashed by our mass connectedness? Does anonymity plus connectivity always equal misbehavior and cruelty? How are we to explain some of the collective anger that seems to be unleashed online - and is it a result of the same anger characterizing much of our society's discourse, or is it the cause?

I think that you're right that this is a deep truth, but one that is
also worrisome because it fundamentally means that those with
privilege stand the greatest opportunities to benefit from new
opportunities that rely on cultural capital and time (regardless of
whether or not economic capital is needed). I don't know that I have
an answer for you as much as I feel the need to highlight that what
we're creating may result in a new form of inequality that, as you've
succinctly put it, has no good checks or balances.

I think that this is worthy of some concern, but I also think that we need to acknowledge that the actual trends on the planet are very strongly in the opposite direction. Far from providing elites with greater and greater access to knowledge while depriving the poor of the same, we see stunning improvements in access to knowledge in some of the poorest places in the world, driven by these technologies.

My point here is that I don't mind us raising the abstract cautionary note, to check our premises, but I find that when we do - we have much to be happy about.

I spend a fair amount of my time traveling the world, looking with my own eyes at what is going on with access to knowledge in the developing world. And it is hard to stand in a slum in the Dominican Republic chatting with teens in an area that has only had legal electricity for 3 years... where they are insanely happy about Wikipedia, youtube, IM, google, and everything that we're all pretty insanely happy about... and remain particularly pessimistic.

The digital divide is going to evaporate quickly, and the major cultural change we're looking at in the next 20 years is the next billion people coming online.

My WoW native informants tell me that WoW is making a major effort to enable casual gaming. They have a new feature that forms a raiding party automatically, so you don't have to work so hard to form a group--and even pulls together folks from different servers. And they're trying now to make all dungeons do-able in an hour. I'm happy to hear they're working on it.

As a point of possibly-relevant history, Wikipedia has never "introduced editing in certain areas". Wikipedia has always been open for wide editing in all areas.

But perhaps I misunderstood your point. :-)

Sorry . . . I meant "rules," some kind of "vetting," I believe it was for prominent people.

My point was the sensibility of all or nothing.

I have been wrestling with this question since I was fortunate enough to work as Sherry's research assistant over the summer of 1992. And I'm sure Sherry will have more profound things to say than I, but I'll take a stab at it:

I have seen oh so many bright young college students struggling to not flunk out because of WoW. When we talk about it in class, people also say that WoW is putting stress on personal relationships, and this is causing them great stress. The value judgment that this is bad for them comes from them. Now does WoW (or Everquest before it, or whatever comes next after it) *cause* bad behavior? No, of course not. But there are a number of features of this kind of game that are seductive for vulnerable people. A few specific design features:

* It can take a long time to get a group together to go adventuring. Once you've spent an hour getting set up, you need to play for a few more hours to get return on your investment.

* You need to stay level with your guild mates. If you like to play with friends, you need to stay roughly level with them. If they play three nights a week but you want to play two, you will rapidly find that you are so far behind them that you can't really go on adventures with them any more. There's pressure to play as much as your friends. (City of Heroes has a nice design to get around this--a system where two people of quite different levels can play together.)

Etc. Some MMOs (like my favorite Puzzle Pirates) explicitly try to make a quicker and more casual experience possible.

Now why is writing "It was a dark and stormy night" level fiction desirable? The reason for me is all about process, not product. Practicing your writing has benefits. Expressing your feelings and thoughts have benefits. I believe in the creative process, and the benefits of that process to the creator--even if there are absolutely no benefits to others from the product.

There are of course also cognitive/social/emotional benefits to the individual from playing games. Jim Gee makes an eloquent case for many of them. But in the end, the cost/benefit analysis to me tallies up way to the cost side--especially for the subset of highly popular games that in their designed features encourage immoderation in quantity of participation.

A remarkable thing about WoW, as I understand it, is that it involves social play, as opposed to simple play with a computer. What's wrong with social play? And why would we prefer people to agonize over bad prose instead?
------

For whatever it's worth, I agree completely with Nick Carr on just about every last detail of what he has said about ideas originating with individual human minds. I think it's a huge mistake to talk about "the wisdom of the crowds" or "collective intelligence" except in some very highly circumscribed ways.

On the other hand, unlike Nick, I think that this observation is so trivial as to be pointless and completely uninteresting. It serves, at worst, as an diversionary tactic in the rhetoric against Web 2.0 - a killer knock-down argument against a foe who doesn't exist.

-----
Sherry Turkle wrote:

This reminds me of how upset so many of my students got when Wikipedia
introduced editing in certain areas. Some went into near-mourning.

As a point of possibly-relevant history, Wikipedia has never "introduced editing in certain areas". Wikipedia has always been open for wide editing in all areas.

But perhaps I misunderstood your point. :-)

--------

Manichean: Nope, not very useful to say it's either-or. The reality is more subtle.

Presentist: The reality of online interaction is an extension of evolution of modes of communication that have been changing for all eternity. People had major anxiety attacks about the invention of the telegraph. Thoreau wrote, "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate....We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic... but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough." Does all that sound familiar? These debates aren't new.

Parochial: Online discourse is richly connected to real life, and we can't understand it if we pretend that it exists in isolation. Look at the Blizzard Convention in Digital Nation. You can't understand WoW as a phenomenon without seeing the way players meet face to face and what role that plays.

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. If not tautological, then at least obvious. Certainly not profound. (And nothing to do with my book, by the way.) But be that as it may:

>In other words, I think generations that did not grow up embedded in
>connective media instinctively require a private place inside their heads
>to construct a thought, and the thought is then tightly binded to a sense
>of identity ... and that is no longer the case.

I don't see this in as sharply generational terms as you do - I think the whole distinction between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" to be pretty facile, frankly - but I do think you're right that there are different styles of thinking, or habits of mind, and that the environment of the Net gives privilege to a certain style (quick, broad, fiercely "interactive," and, as you say, less tightly bound to a sense of personal identity). The type of thinking that is tied to, and gives rise to, a deep personal identity - that underpins the literate and, yes, the Romantic side of human endeavor - gains little or no purchase on the Net. The medium is almost completely blind to that type of thinking. As we move, or are pushed, away from the literate, Romantic style of thinking, upon which the arts and sciences of Western civilization are largely based, and toward a more "tribal" form of intelligence, do we gain something important? I'm sure we do. Do we lose something important? I'm sure we do. Is a degree of "intellectual panic" justified? I would say so, at least for those uncomfortable with the idea of lying back and simply going with the flow.

And, to pick up on the important point that Sherry made and Amy expanded upon, I think this shift in thinking promoted by the Net is a matter of changing the emphasis of our minds' workings, of relocating ourselves on a spectrum. It's not a binary shift between two opposite poles. I haven't read the paper that Amy cites, but "Manichean, presentist, and parochial" do seem like the right adjectives to describe the style of thinking that the Net promotes.

Having said that, I'll use it as a jumping off point to make another attempt to -- in my own very non-granular wide angle way -- raise the issue of distinctions between generations in terms of digital collaboration, because I think something profound may be happening. And I'm not the first to say it, but the boundary between the self and the other seems much more permeable to younger people who live their lives virtually in public. So they are likely to come as close as human beings (at least pre-"borgian" human beings) can get to "having an idea" together. In other words, I think generations that did not grow up embedded in connective media instinctively require a private place inside their heads to construct a thought, and the thought is then tightly binded to a sense of identity ... and that is no longer the case. There's a kind of disinhibition taking place now that is equally instinctive. And if the stuff that results from this sort of fast feedback social "thinking" and creativity and activity seems a bit shallow right now, maybe it's because we (as a species) are new to it.

Apropos of nothing... this all makes me think of Marshall McLuhan and how -- a long time ago -- he talked about the shift in medias from ones that privileged the literate romantic individual to ones that privilege a kind of tribalism a long time ago. And it seems we've had a series of classical intellectual panics ... about "hippies", about gamers, whatever... that seem to be, at least in part, about the classical intellectual losing his or her specialness.

R.U.

Now that I've posed the question, let me give something of an answer.

The essential quality of the network is that it reproduces things. A network copies. A node (an individual) might originate something, this is then presented to the network; this thing (meme?) is copied throughout the network - why it's copied depends on a whole host of factors, including novelty, utility, ability to reinforce human connectedness, etc. (We're still learning what goes into this list, i.e., what makes something salient.)

Although network copies are essentially perfect copies, the nodes are not themselves perfect receivers or transmitters. The nodes have an inherent tendency to change the copy as it passes through the node. To improve it in some individually meaningful way. This corrupted copy is again presented to the network, which takes it up, and copies it along. Which inspires more corruption, more copies, more corruption, and so on, ad infinitum.

Every node is creative. It's difficult to point to an originator. Or to an end point.
This is what happens when humans are sufficiently well-connected together.

Now that we are in agreement, we can move on to more interesting questions, such as what kind of emergent, higher level behavior do we seen in "large groups on the internet"? Do these emergent levels of behavior produce anything new? Anything useful? Or in other words, assuming groups make things individual can't, what really cool and significant things have large hives of humans on the internet made, that could not be made otherwise? That's the real question, right?

Individuals -- and individuality -- count. As you point out, if you have a different set of members, the group will have different ideas.

The point of course is that whatever the Rolling Stones are, it does not reside only in Mick Jagger. Or any individual member. It resides in the group. The group exhibits some behavior, genius, quality --- call it what you want -- that transcends the individual parts.

Are we in agreement now?

As a counter-observation, groups can have ideas that individuals can't. The history of popular music in the 20th century is a history of surprisingly collaborative groups in jazz and rock creating music that simply can't be analyzed as the contribution of an individual mind. Mick Jagger plus a set of session men, no matter how technically skilled, would not have been the Rolling Stones.

I'm not thinking that we should be binary about this, but I do believe we haven't let the crowd speak for itself. It knows what it's done. That may be the problem here. Asking the individual to speak for the crowd may not be very effective.

In Wellman & Gulia's classic paper "Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone," they comment that discourse about the Internet tends to be Manichean (prone to dualisms), presentist (as if we've never worried about these issues before), and parochial (acting as if the Internet is a phenomenon that exists in isolation, rather than richly connected to the rest of life).
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/netsurfers/netsurfers.pdf