Social media does a fantastic job of creating noise and through noise you get attention. But noise has no narrative. The decentralized approach has served us brilliantly. Again, I am grateful and in awe of those in the OWS movement who have done what I do not have the courage to do myself.I believe we are rapidly approaching the time when old school Port Huron style organizing is necessary. Reading up on the early days of the last civil rights movement, it took them about 10 years to get to the catalytic moment of 1968. I think we are at our 1968 moment today but don’t have the structure underneath us.

1. from liberty plaza, Adrienne Maree Brown
2. Turning Occupation into Lasting Change, Tom Linzey and Jeff Reifman
3. Occupy Wall Street is Not a Brand, Marty Kearns

Very different perspectives, but some amazing thematic resonance: opportunity, radically democratic process, networks instead of organizations, diversity (of people and ideas).  Will these seeds blossom or wither and wait for the next season of discontent?

Long story short: I’m increasingly convinced that the constant stream of tweets, status updates, Facebook wall posts and the like are causing me more cognitive harm than professional or personal benefit.   And I deeply suspect that they’re harming us as a society, too.  (See “Skinner Box?  There’s an App for that!” for more on this.)

I’m not going cold turkey from the internet.  That’s not what this is about.  I’m going to continue reading email, surfing the web, and maybe taking in a few RSS feeds, since that’s a very convenient way to follow the news.  I will continue to blog (and hope to write more in the future since I won’t be as distracted by constant consumption!)  I might even keep my Facebook account after paring it down to people who are actually real-world personal friends.  But I’m ditching Twitter, unsubscribing from most of my “professional” RSS feeds, and am going to basically pull out of the “real-time web.”  Our brains just aren’t meant to work this way, and I can feel it harming my work, my personal life, and my happiness.

“Surely you just need to manage this stuff better, Jon,” you might be thinking.  Well, maybe, but if you know me, you know that I am an extremely disciplined person and am about as far from an “addictive personality” as it gets.  Heck, I didn’t even have an internet connection at home until 2001, and then only because my wife made me!  If I am suddenly finding myself experiencing addictive behaviors with web 2.0 tools, I’m pretty sure it’s because these qualities are deeply wired into the technology, not into my personality.  Also, if you think that “technology is completely neutral, it’s just about how we use it,” then please go stop and go read “In the Absence of the Sacred” before deciding whether you really want to pursue that line of argument.

So, in short, I won’t be seeing you on Twitter or Facebook so much anymore.   But please do drop me a line, give me a call, let’s go get some coffee or a hoist a pint.  Let’s go for a walk, a hike, a bike ride.  Let’s play some music together, or cook some food.

And if you’re feeling a little stressed out by the constant chatter of your online “friends,” then I invite you to join me in easing back out and into the sunlight.  See you in the real world, person-to-person!

Nicely done!

Watts, for one, didn’t think the gatekeeper model was true. It certainly didn’t match what he’d found studying networks. So he decided to test it in the real world by remounting the Milgram experiment on a massive scale. In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that “hubs”–highly connected people–weren’t crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target. Why did Milgram get it wrong? Watts thinks it’s simply because his sample was so small–only a few dozen letters reached their mark. The dominance of the three friends could have been a statistical accident. “And since Milgram’s finding sort of made sense, nobody even bothered to redo the experiment,” Watts shrugs. But when you perform the experiment with hundreds of successfully completed letters, a different picture emerges: Influentials don’t govern person-to-person communication. We all do.

There’s a really interesting bit about how they experimented with ForwardTrack, which makes viral forwarding activity transparent to the users. It massively increased pass-along traffic. I really want to start working this into more online activism work.

Fortunately, we got a decent video of our eight 5-minute presentations, which you can watch online at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh3hlU97_wo

Warning: the video’s just under an hour, so grab a chair and get comfy.

Thanks to friend-of-ONE/Northwest Jeff Reifman for loaning us his video camera on short notice, and to Drew Bernard for jumping in as lead cinematographer.  Not quite as challenging a shoot as “Heart of Darkness” but not the easiest environment either.

A couple of key ‘grafs:

The network-centric approach had worked pretty much as advertised. Even the theory’s many critics admit net-centric combat helped make an already imposing American military even more effective at locating and killing its foes. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar were broken almost instantly. But network-centric warfare, with its emphasis on fewer, faster-moving troops, turned out to be just about the last thing the US military needed when it came time to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren’t enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace. … “A well-informed but geographically dispersed force,” Garstka and Cebrowski wrote in 1998, should be able to triumph over any foe, regardless of “mission, force size and composition, and geography.” But neither Cebrowski nor Garstka was thinking about the kind of combat where foes blend into the populace and seed any stretch of road with bombs. Lawless towns like this can be pacified only by flooding them with troops — collecting tips and knocking heads. That’s what Prior needs, not more gadgets. “They’re just tools,” he says in his flat Iowa accent. … Locals can’t see the information or update any of those databases with their own intelligence. A key tenet of network theory is that a network’s power grows with every new node. But that’s only if every node gets as good as it gives. In Iraq, the most important nodes in this fight are all but cut off. Meanwhile, insurgent forces cherry-pick the best US tech: disposable email addresses, anonymous Internet accounts, the latest radios. They do everything online: recruiting, fundraising, trading bomb-building tips, spreading propaganda, even selling T-shirts. And every American-financed move to reinforce Iraq’s civilian infrastructure only makes it easier for the insurgents to operate. Every new Internet café is a center for insurgent operations. Every new cell tower means a hundred new nodes on the insurgent network. And, of course, the insurgents know the language and understand the local culture. Which means they plug into Iraq’s larger social web more easily than an American ever could. As John Abizaid, Franks’ successor at Central Command, told a conference earlier this year, “This enemy is better networked than we are.” … But for all that, Cebrowski and Garstka weren’t really writing about network-centric warfare at all. They were writing about a single, network-enabled process: killing. In 1998, to a former fighter jock and missile defender, the two things must have seemed the same. A decade later, it’s pretty clear they aren’t — not with American troops nation-building in Afghanistan, peacekeeping in Kosovo, chasing pirates off Djibouti, delivering disaster relief to Indonesia, and fighting insurgents in Iraq. The fact is, today we rely on our troops to perform all sort of missions that are only loosely connected with traditional combat but are vital to maintaining world security. And it’s all happening while the military is becoming less and less likely to exercise its traditional duties of fighting an old-fashioned war. When is that going to happen again? What potential enemy of the US is going to bother amassing, Saddam-style, army tanks and tens of thousands of troops when the insurgent approach obviously works so well? “The real problem with network-centric warfare is that it helps us only destroy. But in the 21st century, that’s just a sliver of what we’re trying to do,” Nagl says. “It solves a problem I don’t have — fighting some conventional enemy — and helps only a little with a problem I do have: how to build a society in the face of technology-enabled, super-empowered individuals.”

Worth a read in depth for those of us interested in networked strategies for social change.

Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It’s natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a “social scheduling” application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you’ve reached your forties, chances are you’re out-of-touch with more friends than you’re in-touch with: Old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans… Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some. You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please. It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

Facebook’s Terms of Use state:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

According to LegalAndrew.com:

In plain English, this means you’re giving up copyright control of your material. If you upload a photo to Facebook, they can sell copies of it without paying you a cent. If you write lengthy notes (or import your blog posts!), Facebook can turn them into a book, sell a million copies, and pay you nothing.

This is incredibly disrespectful of my intellectual property rights. My photos are my photos. They’re not Facebook’s photos. I shouldn’t have to give up all my rights just to share photos with my friends on Facebook. That’s ridiculous.

For the curious: Flickr’s terms of service are much more respectful:

With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service.

Bottom line?

I’m not going to be posting my photos to Facebook, and I would encourage others who care about intellectual property issues to do the same. Also, I would be very careful about using a “Flickr to Facebook” tool to repost others’ photos to Facebook.

If I find a Creative Commons licensed photo on Flickr, I would clearly not have the right to repost it to a service whose TOS required granting it complete control over the the photo. If I understand correctly, the only photos from others which I might be able to safely post from Flickr to Facebook are those which are marked as being in the public domain.

Sigh. Such are the problems with walled gardens, I suppose.

Here’s a liveblog of my notes:

Gideon Rosenblatt, ONE/Northwest (http://www.onenw.org) Executive Director

We are a capacity builder that helps environmental groups engage people in environmental protection.

Thanks to Aron Thompson, ONE/Northwest board member, for sponsoring.

Topic for tonight: online social networks, and how they can be used for promoting social change.

This is an experiment in community learning. These are new, unfamiliar tools to all of us. This is how we think we can learn about them together.

We’ll have 8 speakers, each of whom will speak to an aspect of online social networking, then turn it over to you for discussion.

Tremendous corporate interest. News Corp bought MySpace for ~$500 million. Microsoft bought a stake of Facebook at a valuation of $15 billion. Current valuation of Starbucks: $18 billion.

Sometimes, these valuations are hype. Sometimes there’s something profound going on. That’s what we’re here to talk about tonight.

We’re seeing some shifts in behavior among environmental organization constituents. A new generation of people are not joining our traditional single-issue membership organizations. They’re doing something else. These social network services seem to be what they’re joining.

Gideon wrote a paper in 2004, Movement As Network, that tried to think through some of these things. Focus was on how to bring people together into networks that could be mobilized quickly around issues, but not be defined by them. It’s old, but still interesting.

Karen Uffelman: MC

Quick icebreaker. 8 speakers coming up. 3 minutes each. Hold questions, time for discussion at the end.

Jodie Tonita demo of Facebook, an online social networking site

I’m “Jane Average.” Facebook entered my life 6 months ago. One of my roles at ONE/Northwest is to organize a conference called Web of Change. Suddenly I started getting invites from people to join. Didn’t know what I wanted to do, but knew that all of the people I would want to do it to were there.

Turned out to be useful for rekindling occasional relationships, helped me find people to invite to the conference. Initially noticed young, social change technology. Canada has very high adoption rate of Facebook, lots of non-20-somethings.

Why I use Facebook instead of email: when I want to be less intrusive. People get Facebook info when they’re in the mood to catch up with people. More personal, more casual than work or personal email.

More recently, Vancouver progressive community has come online along with social change leaders.

(A quick tour of Jodie’s Facebook profile.)

David McDonald, Assistant Professor at UW Information School

Information Schools are the evolution of library schools. Area of research: computer supported cooperative work. How people collaborate with each other using technology.

Academic perspective on interesting issues social networking raises.

What’s really new here?

• Profiles – persistent presentation of self. In some cases, they last forever.
• Explicit articulation of friends. This doesn’t happen offline much.
• Breaking boundaries of physical relationships. We can interact with distant people. (maybe this isn’t very new)
• Maybe this is the “hot new place to see and be seen.”

To me: this is just another way of building an online community.

To have an online community, you must have:

1. Affiliation, a way to join
2. A way to interact and acknowledge each other.
3. Accountability, and standards of behavior/practice
4. Mutual support when members have need.

How does this relate to social networking?

Identity: what are the dimensions of a profile? Sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes implied. Should profiles last forever? What are the implications of that? How will this affect elections 20 years from now? This is gonna get fun!

What are the opportunities for personal interaction and relevation/disclosure of information? How is that structured, and how do those relate to the ends of groups?

How do you keep “bad” behavior in check, while encouraging “desirable” behavior? Who decides the norms?

Privacy! How do you help members of your community understand the significance of what they’re revealing? What is exposed, and to whom? What are the risks?

Alex Steffen, Editor, WorldChanging.com

An online blog about sustainability.

A year ago, we had a problem. We were working on a big book. Our publisher wasn’t big enough to have enough clout to get the book noticed. We had a shoestring budget and an obscure topic. What could we do to break through and get noticed?

What assets do we have? Not money. Not fame. Minimal public profile. Not many connections in the publishing world. But, we have a big reader base and a lot of friends. Those friends have blogs, email lists, lots of ways of connecting to each other.

Also, a friend who worked at Amazon, and knew how Amazon’s ranking algorithms worked. Key fact: all preorders count for first-day sales rank. Strategy: get all of our friends to buy the book on the same day, hoping that this would create enough of a buzz to demonstrate interest. Date: 11 November 2006 or before.

The result: we premiered at #11. The next day, Barnes & Noble bought 18,000 copies, and became a book of the month club selection the next week.

Lesson: it is possible to achieve great results with these strategies. With few resources. But we’ve underinvested even so.

Sasha Summer Cousineau, NARAL Pro-Choice Washington

How NARAL is using MySpace as community organizing tool. My target: high school students through 30-somethings.

Ways that people receive information is changing dramatically. Phones and mail aren’t working as well as they used to. Even since the 2004 election, political messages are changing. (e.g. more text messaging).

Problem: how to bring in more 18-35 year old members, how to educate and mobilize.

We’re still learning. Here’s what we’ve found.

We have a MySpace page. Very intentional about how we’ve built their friends list. Started with people who were already invested: staff, interns, close allies, local celebrity supporters. Asked close friends to feature us to their friends. This led to organic growth.

From there, began searching for people who we could identify as pro-choice. Once we had a critical mass, we used our existing email alert system to invite people to “check it out.” Great response from there.

We don’t allow people to make comments on our stuff without approval. We are very “message oriented” concerned about control of message. We check out people who try to join us without us inviting them first. (We still know that our enemies are probably on there, though.)

People aren’t going there for long conversations, more for quick hits of info and to socialize. Not about building intellectual capital. Be edgy, catchy, and brief! The truth won’t set you free. Be brief, and let people ask you for more.

Organizational website is still the big repository for information. All places are tightly connected to each other: blog, website, YouTube, MySpace, email, etc. People can choose how to receive information.

Organizing success! Summer young professionals event. Event invites, blogs, bulletin posts on MySpace. Good response. Youth Leadership Summit, 70 students, about 10 of whom found us through our social networking tools.

Jeff Reifman, NewsCloud.com

I’m here to talk about the dangers of volunteering for ONE/Northwest.

Themes I’ve been finding in my work developing web applications for social change. Current main project: a collaborative social news bookmarking site. For progressives, built with open-source. A different approach to building a media platform.

Built four Facebook applications. Most recent for a BC energy organization: giving green gifts. A Daily Show video clips application.

Have watched ups and downs of Facebook platform over the past few months.

Concerned that groups are trying to use Facebook, but am skeptical about the potential of corporate-controlled tools to ultimately empower this kind of action. Closed systems that we can’t get out of, and can only do the things they let us do.

Big idea: building networks for individuals to participate and collaborate. Collaboration tools for working together are thin in these social networks.

Theory: building a network, not an island. Groups want to bring people to them, to do what they want them to do. This is challenge, resource intensive, may prevent collaboration. How to do it different: build services, not destinations.

Themes:

• Let people come to your site as they are. Use existing accounts, OpenID
• Promote others’ content, not just yours.
• Inverting. Build tools that allow others to place your content on their sites.

Brian Gershon, Web Collective

A social-mission software developer. ONE/Northwest’s next door neighbor.

What is Google’s OpenSocial? Brand-new. You haven’t missed the boat.

Not a new social network. A platform for building applications that can be run on multiple social networking sites at the same time. May help other sites compete with Facebook. Doesn’t require developers to learn (many) new tricks.

Examples:

• MySpace is adopting OpenSocial as their primary API (application programming interface), how other programs can access their data.
• Flixster: movie rating application that runs on both MySpace and Ning.com
• iLike: music rating and promotion application that runs on multiple platforms. Allows artists to publish once, and have content go across multiple networks.
• LinkedIn: business networking.

Alex Tischenko, Oregon Bus Project

A youth political organizing project. Have been using social networking (primarily Facebook) as part of core programs: bus trips to support progressive candidates and “building votes”, targeted voter registration.

Facebook Group is a core communications tool to get information out to their network.

Also building a Facebook application, launching in January, to support “Days for Democracy” project. Will provide personal webpage for tracking and recognizing people’s volunteer organizing efforts. Facebook badge to go on profile and display that information in Facebook.

Kevin Moore

Unaffiliated.

Sheep vs. cats. Lots of sheep, not very mindful of the big picture. Cats are more intelligent, but hard to herd. Our challenge, how do we herd cats?

Transition from broadcast focus to something else. People want to browse, explore, not be broadcasted at. Not organizational focus. What are your interests? Who do I know that shares that interest?

How to do this? Facebook? Proprietary, they don’t share our social change goals. Something shared, open, not centrally controlled is a good thing, I think.

What does common infrastructure look like? Impractical. Merged organizations? Probably won’t work.

Common technology standards, applications? Shared protocols.

Blogs — shared protocol (RSS). Useful without needing to understand it. How do we develop more powerful, more useful shared protcols.

Whew! That’s it. Time for small group discussion! Here are the questions Karen offered:

1. What questions do you have now after these presentations?

You can discuss in the comments.