Digital visualization wunderkindJonathan Harris has just launched his latest art and technology effort. Called the Sputnik Observatory for Contemporary Culture, it's a Web site and blog that grew out of a two-year collaboration with New York-based Sputnik, Inc., an organization that documents contemporary culture through intimate, previously unpublished video interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers in the arts, sciences, and technology.
A range of innovators, including Vint Cerf to experimental geographer Trevor Paglen, game designer Will Wright, science writer Philip Ball, and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, among others, share "some of the most provocative human ideas to have emerged in the last few decades," Harris says. [Harris, himself, is featured, explaining his 2005 "We Feel Fine" project, a real-time survey of human emotions on the Web.] Adds Harris:
"The central premise of the Sputnik project is that everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music. Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them; the site itself aims to highlight the interconnections between seemingly disparate thinkers and ideas, using a simple navigational system with no dead-ends, where every thought leads to another thought, akin to swimming the stream of consciousness."
Harris says there are about 200 videos on the site, and will be thousands more added over time. [Sputnik is a Russian word that means "co-traveler." It was the name the Russians gave to the robotic spacecraft missions they created in the 1950s to launch, in 1957, the first human-made object into Earth's orbit.]
YouTube contains a lot of irrelevant content: according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, some 20 hours of new video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.
But all of it represents a new form of cultural literacy, Wesch says—a new language of shared images and intensely personal revelations that can be used to connect people in new ways and, perhaps, even get them to care more about each other.
As a professor of introductory anthropology at Kansas State University, Wesch says he has a “front row seat" from which to watch new cultural trends emerge from the youngest adult generation, and for the past two-and-a-half years, Wesch has been inviting his students to help him analyze the vast YouTube community.
After trawling through mega-gigs of content, watching hours of videos and posting videos of their own, Wesch says, he and his students “are finding that the same conditions of ease and anonymity that enable people to get snarky online" can also encourage them to participate in meaningful and collaborative new projects. In fact, says Wesch, YouTube and other social media can mitigate the cultural tension between teens' conflicting needs for independence and community by offering them "connection without constraints." What looks like narcissism and individuality is actually a search for identity and recognition, Wesch told the digerati attending this week's Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan. “In a society that doesn’t automatically grant identity and recognition, you have to create your own.”
Wesch says he's hopeful that social media will ease the “narcissistic disengagement” of many young people and encourage them to be more politically and civically engaged. Already, he says, some heroes have emerged—including the anonymous YouTube character who filmed himself giving hugs to strangers in the streets, and One World, the person who wore a Guy Fox mask and used his anonymity as a platform for collaboration, asking people to write messages on the palms of their hands and to hold them up to their Webcams for sharing. Millions of people shared this way, mostly about the need to love one another and to look beyond themselves.
“When I’m using a Webcam,” Wesch explains, “I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to it. When you’re Twittering, you’re not talking to me, you’re talking to it. Or when I’m on Facebook, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to it.” The point, says Wesch: When communicating face-to-face, people bring many different versions of themselves into a conversation based on the context of that conversation. “But when you’re sitting in front of a camera, or twittering to hundreds if not thousands of people in a community who you cannot see and who cannot see you, you don’t know who you are talking to or when or in what context, and so [communication via social media] it is forcing a kind of context collapse—a deeper level of self-awareness not present in simple, everyday conversation. People can get deeply self-reflective on YouTube and confessional…and reveal things they would otherwise refuse to reveal, even to their family and close friends.”
Wesch urged the journalists, business developers, and social media specialists attending PDF to start thinking of YouTube as "a new kind of public sphere" where new types of conversations and forms of communication can occur. “The YouTube debates [during last year's presidential election] were flawed in that they allowed TV to dictate that conversation," Wesch says. “We have an opportunity, on YouTube and with other social media, to create a whole new groundwork for the way these [civic] conversations work.”
Wesch then challenged attendees to help the culture move away "from its current state of 'whatever, I don't care' ...to one in which we can say 'I care, let’s do whatever it takes by whatever means necessary.'"
[Wesch connected: attendees stopped tweeting long enough to give him a standing ovation.]
For more about Wesch and his observations about the cultural signifiance of social media, here's a lecture he gave last year at the Library of Congress:
(Webcam photo, top, from The Message video on YouTube)
(I first wrote this post for PopTech and am reposting it here with permission)
For years, many people have been saying the Internet will be a “great social equalizer.” Give everyone access to technology, and social boundaries built on differences in race, class, and income will start to blur, right? Not necessarily, cautions Net researcher danah boyd.
Speaking at this week’s Personal Democracy Forum in New York, boyd said that even among people with access to the Net, long-held social divisions of race, class, and income are beginning to play out online, particularly among teens now choosing which social network they prefer, MySpace or Facebook. “Social media don’t eradicate social divisions,” says boyd, an expert in NextGen behaviors for Microsoft and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “[Social media are] making the old social divisions obvious in totally new ways.”
Consider the perception in the media that MySpace is losing its rivalry with Facebook, boyd says. The numbers tell a different story. ComScore data released two weeks ago show the two social networks running neck-in-neck with about 70 million unique users each, boyd said. So why the disconnect? boyd, who has spent the last four years traveling the United States and talking to teens about their use of social media, says it probably has something to do with how MySpace is being perceived by teens in society.
boyd said it used to be that most kids were on both MySpace and Facebook, but then, during the 2006-2007 school year, boyd started noticing a trend: teens were starting to decide whether to stay with MySpace or jump to Facebook. They were making that choice based on the social categories in which they placed themselves offline. “Increasingly,” says boyd,” (teens) were choosing the site that reflected who they saw as being ‘people like me’ and seeing the ‘other site’ as the place where the ‘other’ people go.”
Here’s one quote from a teen she interviewed, Anastasia, 17, from New York:
“My school is divided into the ‘honors kids,’ the ‘good not-so-honors kids,’ ‘wangstas,’ (boyd says “they pretend to be tough and black but when you live in a suburb in Westchester you can’t claim much ‘hood”), the ‘latinos/hispanics,’ (boyd says “they tend to band together even though they could fit into any other groups”) and the ‘emo kids’ (whose lives, boyd says, “are always filled with woe”). We were all in MySpace with our own little social networks but when Facebook opened its doors to high schoolers, guess who moved and guess who stayed behind?… The first two groups were the first to go and then the ‘wangstas’ split with half of them on Facebook and the rest on MySpace… I shifted with the rest of my school to Facebook and it became the place where the ‘honors kids’ got together and discussed how they were procrastinating over their next AP English essay.”
Teens also are making the choices based on perceived values, tastes, and cultural perceptions, boyd said. Here’s an excerpt from boyd’s interview with Craig, 17, from California:
“The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace. Any high school student who has a Facebook will tell you that MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious. Like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks, and Jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop, and like Macs are more cultured than PC’s, Facebook is of a cooler caliber than MySpace.”
But here’s what boyd says should really “scare the hell out of us.” As teens choose one site over the other, she said, “it’s clear that it’s not just anyone” who leaves MySpace and goes to Facebook. “What we’re seeing is a modern incarnation of white flight,” boyd says.
“Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. …Those who deserted MySpace did so by choice but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.”
And one more thing? “In looking through my data,” boyd says, “I found that teens who prefer Facebook are far more likely to be condescending towards those who use MySpace than vice versa… Teens who use MySpace may (consider) teen Facebook users as ‘stuck-ups’ or ‘goodie two-shoes’ or the ‘good kids.’ But they’re not nearly as harsh in their language as Facebook users are of those who use MySpace.” And only last month, boyd says, she was doing field work in Atlanta where she found a heavy usage of MySpace “among certain groups of youth. They knew of Facebook but had no interest in leaving MySpace to join Facebook.”
Bottom line, says boyd? “…When people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another and they do not communicate with one another, which can and does breed intolerance.” Social network sites are not like email, where it doesn’t matter if you’re on Hotmail or Yahoo. When you choose MySpace or Facebook, boyd says, “you can’t send message to people on the other site. You can’t ‘friend’ people on the other site. There’s a cultural wall between users…and if there’s no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.”
“…If we don’t address this head on,” boyd told the Digerati in the PDF09 audience, “inequality will develop deeper roots that will further cement the divisions in our lives.”
For more on boyd’s survey work about teens and their use of social media, see her blog. Her research papers are listed at danah.org/papers. Another resource is Eszter Hargittai’s article, Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites.
(Wheatpaste remix rendering of Michael Jackson, above, photographed by Ivan Corsa in Manhattan's Soho district and uploaded to globalgraphica.com on November 6, 2008. The image is being shared widely today across the blogosphere via Flickr, Twitter, and other forms of social media)
Excerpt from a Friday post by Fast Company blogger Clay Dillow:
"Upon rumors of Michael Jackson's death in Los Angeles, fans flocked to the Web for confirmation, resulting in an avalanche of searches, Tweets, and page views that crashed Google and brought Twitter to a standstill as the number of Tweets per second doubled in an instant. The online fiasco was a fitting testament to Jackson's legacy: He was beyond famous. Michael Jackson: He played the Berlin Wall. He invented Pop. He beat the rap. He crashed Google."
Michael Jackson died today. ["He had a YouTube account, featuring his innovative music videos, but the embedding on those videos has been disabled," says Salon.com's Liz Shannon Miller.] Jackson's videos were among the first to "go viral" on the Web. Here is a reminder of why they did, with thanks to Miller for her post and shared selection, below:
At last week's 140 Character Conference in Manhattan, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey told attendees that when he was 15, he tinkered with real-time visualizations of the world; one of his first computer models was of New York City. He plotted the real-time movements of couriers, transit buses, emergency service vehicles, and taxis.
"I followed where they were right at that moment, and what they were doing. As a visualization, it allowed the city of New York to feel very, very small because suddenly, I could see the individual humans that made that city work and function. I never felt closer to a large organization than I did when I saw this on the screen.The next time I felt that was not too long ago, during a speech Barack Obama gave after his first 100 days in office. He was giving a speech and people were updating [their tweets] while he was talking. I never felt closer to my government, never felt it was more approachable, smaller, or more human than in that moment— and it was because I was seeing the inner-most thoughts of people typically placed on top of a pedestal. Those same people suddenly now were on the same level as I was. The transparency that brought to this conversation and to the process of democracy was amazing to me—eye-opening—and it was all unfolding in real-time right in front of me. The transformative power of seeing up close not just how a city works but how government works and how we can participate in the thoughts and actions of the people who comprise our government is huge."
Can social media help to make a better world—in Iran or anywhere else? Dorsey, for his part, won't speculate. But he urges citizen vigilance as Twitter evolves. “We have this brand new tool and it’s an iteration of many tools we’ve used in the past but now it’s a tool to help us in this experiment in democracy," Dorsey says. "But where are we taking this? What are we doing with this technology? What are we building?"
Amid Iran's continuing protests, much is being said about the “state of now”—what happens to the speed of change when it’s possible to share real-time information and cellphone videos with anyone around the world about major events as they occur. "Now media"—cellphones, the Web, Facebook and Twitter—are redefining what it means to be civically engaged.
“That a new information technology—[so-called “now media” such as Twitter, cellphones, mobile vlogs]—could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times,” blogger Andrew Sullivan gushed in his recent post, The Revolution Will be Twittered, about the public demonstrations in Iran challenging the outcome of Iran's June 12 presidential election. “ …You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.” Political blogger Maegan Carberry, meanwhile, told last week’s 140 Character Conference in Manhattan, the nation’s first all-things-Twitter thoughtfest, that “social media are pushing us into an era of post-partisanship,” where political parties become far less important because group-to-group communication helps people to self-identify common goals. Says NYU new media professor Clay Shirky, "We are living through the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.” The surge of Twitterized news reporting out of Iran, he says, has made the Iranian uprising historically unprecedented. “This is it. The big one,” he told TED interviewers. "This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.” [And Twitter, of all social media, is having impact at the moment because authorities have not yet found a way to shut it down completely.] Iran, of course, isn’t the first world hotspot where social media have been used to focus global attention in a heartbeat. Cell phone videos and text-messaging by on-the-ground activists were instrumental in exposing the government corruption that was blocking foreign aid to victims of Burma's Cyclone Nargis. Social media also helped to leak word out to the world about the 2007 pro-democracy uprising by Burmese monks; the hardline censorship by Chinese authorities during last summer’s Beijing Olympics, and the extent of China's deadly 2008 earthquake —details of which, says Shirky, would have otherwise taken years to go public.
But whoa, Nellie. While Iran is showing us, again, that social media can—in rocket speed—expose the undercurrents of dissent and the underbelly of corruption in sometimes shocking detail, these tools have not yet been able to originate mass dissent, nor drive widespread reforms, at least not yet. For every successful Net-aided protest, such as the Facebook campaign last year against FARC in Colombia, there are at least a dozen more uprisings that end when authorities shut down the Net or—as with the as-yet unmutable Twitter in Iran—track down agitators and "disappear” them, creating a chilling climate of self-censorship that all but cedes power to those abusing it.
More significant, perhaps, is the power of Twitter and other forms of social media to accelerate the rate at which events play out, regardless of outcome, and how that speed can be destabilizing, in and of itself. Jason Calacanis, the social media entrepreneur and CEO of mahalo.com, calls the Internet "the greatest accelerator since the advent of the written word." Speaking on a panel on social media and politics that I convened and moderated at this year's Milken Global Conference in LA, Calacanis said: "Truth gets wrestled away from the rumors more rapidly now; if you’re on the wrong side of society, you get outed in hyperspeed." Further, he said, "When you're on the wrong side of an issue, it’s very hard to be involved in an online discourse because if you are, the quicker you'll get to the inevitability of being wrong.”
Indeed, the challenge now for Web-powered activists is figuring out how to use these new tools to do more. As Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey told the 140 Character Conference's standing-room-only crowd last week: “We have this brand new tool [Twitter] to help us in this experiment in democracy, but where are we taking this? What are we doing with this technology and how are we sustaining these concepts of immediacy, approachability and transparency to open up the process of every social community from families to the largest governments in the world?”
Great question, Jack. For more debate on the power and future of social media, follow next week’s Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan, which likely will include a late-addition workshop on Iran. And for more on how social media may be already shaping the course of political history, see Clay Shirky’s recent TED talk, below:
(YouTube cellphone video of Iran protesters June 20, 2009, above, courtesy BBC)
Yup, birds do it. Trucks do it. In fact, says Kevin Slavin, founder of area/code, a geo-location firm, we’re just beginning to get interactive with all sorts of objects—Kogi taco trucks that move around LA and tweet you their locations; Nike Air Max sneakers that warn you when they’re so worn, they're hazardous to your ankles; plant sensors that tweet you when their hosts are thirsty, the wash machines in the campus Laundromat at Olin College. (“You can find out, for example, if two or four washers are available, or zero,” Slavin explains. “Saves you a trip. Tells you when your laundry is done.”) Even the River Thames is tweeting now—its water levels, to city inspection engineers.
"This matters. This isn't trivial," Slavin insisted at this week’s 140 Characters Conference in Manhattan, the first-ever, all-things-Twitter conference. He may be right. According to Gartner Research, the amount of data being tweeted by sensor-equipped objects in the world will soon become so huge that by 2012, physical sensor data will account for some 20 percent of all non-video Net traffic.
Still skeptical? Check out Project 28, the 28-mile fence of sensors being built along the Mexican border. “They will soon be tweeting law enforcement authorities about immigration leaks,” Slavin says—and not just in words. Pictures, too. Video.
What next? More Things That Tweet—from automobiles to groceries. Also, look for more trucks to get into the chatter. And don't forget about games: Shark Runner, a game created by Slavin’s firm for the Discovery Channel, staples GPS sensors into the dorsal fins of great white sharks off the coast of California and asks players to guess their next moves.
So, fellow travelers, consider this: If a tree falls in a forest in the near future, odds are it will make a sound—in the form of a tweet to a forest ranger. No kidding. The possibilities, says Slavin, are "deafening.”
(I first wrote this post for PopTech and am reposting it here with permission)
In architectural circles, Adam Kalkin is regarded as something of an oddball. At last fall’s CUSP design conference in Chicago, the New Jersey architect and provocateur delivered an entire lecture wearing a rubber face mask; at the installation of one of his pre-fab homes last summer at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, Kalkin included a 5:26-minute video of himself playing tennis with his mother (the video, itself, a kind of pre-fabrication of a yard). Then, this past spring, in London, Kalkin “performed” John Cage’s controversial 4’33” while holding a violin, interrupting his own, mock-version of the piece after 17 minutes with some words about his work. “Adam continues to be subversive, and subvert what architecture is supposed to be,” Alastair Gordon, a design historian, told a small group that gathered at the Municipal Art Society of New York in March to hear Kalkin speak. The topic was Kalkin’s new book, Quik Build: Adam Kalkin’s ABC of Container Architecture, a survey of 32 Kalkin projects, including Bunny Lane, the home he built for himself and his family that fits a 19th century clapboard cottage inside an industrial hanger. The book also includes Kalkin’s famous Push Button House, a furnished room that unfolds from a shipping container with hydraulic walls. [Check out the video, here.]
But to call Kalkin subversive misses the point. Consider this artist one of the most daring remix artists now pushing at the edges of today’s data-rich culture. Where online satire now has remixer Andrew Fillipone [Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett] and new-wave graphic art has Shepard Fairey [poster remix artist and creator of the iconic Obama Hope poster], architecture has Kalkin. “Some of the remix stuff is amazing,” says Kalkin, who buys surplus shipping containers from the ports of New Jersey for $1,500 to $2,000 each, then remixes and upcycles them into high-end glamour projects like the 12-container, $500,000 Adriance House in northern Maine and Kalkin House at Vermont’s Shelbourne Museum to a new, 12-story, midrise condo project in downtown Salt Lake City.
Sure, Kalkin isn’t the only person using shipping containers to create inexpensive, recyclable housing: Lot-Ek, for one, began offering recycled containers a decade ago as an alternative to chrome-and-glass modernism. But Kalkin is, by far, the most imaginative of the container architects—if not the most philosophical. “I have a fascination with ambiguity…with bending the rules,” says Kalkin, who studied philosophy and linguistics as an undergraduate, specializing in the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein. “In my work, what I like about the use of shipping containers in that it affords a chance to successfully play with people’s expectations and violate their sense of expectation to create surprises. That’s neurologically how we derive pleasure from music; I think it’s the same operation here, with these Quik House projects. The result is so convincing and so exclamatory and so surprising and, like, Whoa! It is all kind of wonderful because of that.”
Kalkin’s love of re-contextualization also is obvious in his lectures: at CUSP in Chicago last fall, he shared one of his favorite examples of remix from the world of entertainment—60s crooner Paul Anka’s rendering of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. Anka doesn’t simply “cover” the Nirvana hit, Kalkin says. “It’s a perfectly unexpected corollary to the grunge thing. Cobain would have never been caught in the same universe as Paul Anka but here’s this orbital leap that works so well when joined that it’s beautiful”—kind of like what Kalkin attempts with his work: new visual and structural dialogues between the old and the new; the organic and synthetic, between one set of ideas and another.
While the downturned economy has all but put a stop to Kalkin’s high-end creations [a recent project to build a Unitarian Church out of containers was dropped, along with some pricey renovations involving some brownstones in Manhattan] the low-rise economy has begun celebrating his work: he was recently asked to build 50 units of affordable container housing in Newark, not far from the docks that supply his stash of materials. And Kalkin is especially excited that his drawing-board designs for refugee dwellings in New Orleans and Afghanistan, featured in his new book, are also getting renewed attention. “In rich countries, containers are constantly going out filled with stuff to places that don’t have stuff or that don’t have anything to ship back, so these containers end up stuck there, as a kind of scrap,” Kalkin says. “There’s an economic asymmetry that makes sure you always have these dead-ends and backlogs of these containers, and they’re usually in economically disadvantaged areas where housing is scarce to begin with. So it actually works, by some mistaken formula, that these things end up in poor areas. The possibilities are terribly exciting.”
(I first wrote this post for PopTech and am re-posting it here with permission)
(Photograph of Adam Kalkin's shipping container house: Peter Aaron/Esto)
A few years ago, MIT media arts professor Alex Pentland distributed one hundred Nokia cell phones to students and faculty. Each was equipped with software that let Pentland’s team map the social interactions of the people carrying the phones. They tracked some 130,000 interactions, including calls, text messages and the proximity of the devices to each other, as measured by Bluetooth.
The goal: to learn about the behaviors of social networks and the types of people who influence their dynamics the most. “We weren’t able to measure this stuff at such a large scale before smart phones,” says Pentland, the author of the recent book, Honest Signals, and the chief of the Human Dynamics Lab at MIT. “By using data from mobile phones, electronic ID badges, or digital media—what I call ‘honest signals’—we can create a God’s-eye view of how people in organizations interact,” Pentland says. "We can even see the rhythms of interaction for everyone in a city.” Mining mobile data this way would be useful, he says, for tracking such things as flu outbreaks and traffic patterns. (See video here)
Pentland calls this new field of dynamic data “reality mining.” Along with Columbia University Chief Scientist Tony Jebara and a half-dozen other location-awareness technologists and researchers, Pentland co-founded Manhattan-based startup Sense Networks a couple of years ago to make commercial use of the data: the company’s Citysense application for iPhones and BlackBerries is one of the company’s first commercial applications of the research. For now, it’s a free download that shows which areas of San Francisco are the No. 1 hotspots for nightlife—where most people are going or gathering at any given time.
“Half of the people in the world have cell phones and are creating data, tons of it now,” says Sense CEO and Co-founder Greg Skibiski. “This data, in a few years, will be the lingua franca of the entire planet about how people move around globally. We believe location data is the best descriptor of who is a human being.” Adds Pentland: “The motion detectors in your iPhone, for example, know if you’re sitting or walking. Web 2.0 stuff is nice but reality-mining is different.”
To be sure, reality mining raises red flags among privacy advocates. Writer Howard Rheingold says: "The same technology that could let you know if a good Chinese restaurant or old friend is in the vicinity could also betray your location to a totalitarian government, neighborhood spammers, and your vindictive ex-spouse.”
But that's why Pentland and Sense Networks are now pushing what they call a New Deal on Data —an informal privacy pact for the mobile Net set that Pentland unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. “People always say, what about my privacy? But what if privacy can go beyond that? Pentland queries. "Like what about data ownership?” The New Deal on Data, Skibiski says, is based on old English common law tenets that give indivdiuals the right of poessession, use, and disposal. "If you’re a company and you're keeping people's location data, your customers should own their own data and have a say over whether they should be destroyed. It's something we all [in the geo-location industry] should be working towards.”
But are they? So far, says Skibiski, MySpace adheres to it and Facebook is considering it. Nokia, which is working with movie theaters in geo-location experiments to measure theater attendance patterns, also supports the proposal. “There’s a need for some guidance here, absolutely, so as to protect against abuse—but most companies get it, I think," says McDowell, who is leading a Nokia experiment for Remax, the real estate company, to enable people to point their iPhones at a house that’s for sale and get information about its dimensions. “I don’t want to know if you’re visiting your girlfriend," she says. "I just want to know if you are driving down the highway at a certain speed so I can predict traffic flows in a region.”
For more on the new world of geo-location services, check out Mathew Honan’s recent take for Wired on the promise and the perils of context-aware devices.
(I first wrote this post for PopTech and am reposting it here with permission)
(I first wrote this post for PopTech and am reposting it here with permission):
Ever since Barack Obama’s strategic use of social media in the last election, people have begun to realize the Internet is reshaping politics—but it’s not just about bringing more young people out to the polls. A panel of thought leaders on social networking in the political world that I convened and moderated at the recent Milken Institute Global Conference 2009 in Los Angeles agreed that social media and the self-organized groups they are spawning have already begun to destabilize the political system, itself.
“Every medium has a signature and for television, it is image. For the Internet, it’s the ability to converse,” said Jason Calacanis, a Net entrepreneur and cofounder and CEO of Mahalo.com. “…Clearly, Obama is better suited for this medium; Democrats and more libertarian people are more suited for it, too. The Net represents a very bad trend for conservatives because they tend to have more extreme, intolerant, non-conversational positions on things. They tend not to do so well online because they can’t converse. The whole point of the Internet is to discuss it, fight it, to have a whole threaded message. The winners of elections now will be the ones able to keep the conversation going and to engage the largest number of people. You have this massive paradigm shift occurring right now, between people who can converse and those not willing to do so. It sort of transcends politics and gets into something even more Socratic in nature.”
Mindy Finn, whose Washington, D.C.-based political strategy firm, Engage, advises Republican candidates, says her firm won’t work with candidates who aren’t philosophically or naturally skewed toward online collaboration and the wisdom of the crowd. “There are certain candidates, frankly, who have come to us and we don’t tell them straight out why we are not going to work with them—but we won’t because we know they’re not going to be successful online,” she said. “They ask me, did we lose because of the Internet? I respond with a big fat no. People didn’t lose because of the Internet. They lost because they were seen as being out of touch…and not understanding the way that people are communicating now via the Internet and via mobile and in groups.”
But the GOP didn’t have a monopoly on social media illiteracy this past election. Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and PopTech Advisory board member, said Hillary Clinton stumbled with a video called Hillary and the Band, an unsuccessful response to the famous will.i.am video made by Obama’s supporters and this one, Dear Mr. President, made by the supporters of John McCain. “In the beginning of the Hillary video, there was this one throw-away line, a young man who says, ‘The blogs went crazy.’ No 25-year-old would ever say the blogs went crazy. Only a 55-year-old writing a script —writing what he or she thinks a 25-year-old would say—would write a line like that.” The result: the video became a “punching bag example” of inauthenticity and online illiteracy, “an effort by a political candidate to try to mold the message to an erroneous perception of what the audience is and how it communicates.” Added Scott Goodstein, a mobile Internet expert who worked on the Obama campaign’s new media team: “When Hillary’s campaign consultants said it looked like the Obama campaign resembled the face of Facebook, the thing they didn’t understand is that the fastest growing segment of Facebook right now is over-50 women. And the Barack Obama Facebook group has doubled since the campaign. People want information.”
But the social media lessons about blogs and mobile engagement that surfaced out of the past election, panelists agreed, will seem small compared to the changes that lie ahead. Far more significantly, panelists agreed, the Web is accelerating civic discourse to speeds that traditional politicians will find hard to match. The Web, they said, is already threatening to render some of the ways in which we currently govern obsolete.
Example: The citizen group called One Million Voices Against FARC, a Facebook group which organized a grassroots campaign in February 2008 to repudiate FARC guerrillas, empowering more than 12 million people to take to the streets in some 190 cities around the world. “We are living in a post-partisan era in which social media tools are allowing people to find the interests they care about the most,” Rasiej said. “People will be able to find each other faster than they will be led by political parties and political movements, and this has already begun to change the political dynamics of the entire planet. Applying technology to politics and expecting it to stay the same is like applying technology to the record industry and expecting it to stay the same. It doesn’t happen that way.
“…I predict that in 40 or 50 years, we won’t have Congress as we know it today,” Rasiej added, saying the ecosystem of how we identify people to lead us is changing dramatically. “Wikipedia is a great example of our new kinds of representatives, people who have built reputations because they know a great deal about one subject or another and have been identified by the crowd as knowing more than others about a subject. If you think about how our Constitution works and how our Congress works, it’s oriented around the fact that we elected these people because they are supposed to get into details and understand the issues that matter to us more than we do. But the reality is that they spend 95% of their time raising money just to keep themselves in office and actually don’t know more about the issues than we do. These new social media tools are going to create a new set of dynamics where we’re going to be able to identify the people who know the most about the issues that matter to us faster than our elections are going to be able to elect them.”
For more on politics and technology, check out the schedule for this year's Personal Democracy Forum, called We.gov, to be held June 29 and 30 in Manhattan.
For a futuristic twist on Earth Day, check out Alan Weisman's new piece for Vanity Fair. Weisman, the author of The World Without Us, looks ahead 50 to 100 years to construct three environmental scenarios—for Las Vegas, Cairo, and Nanisivik, Baffin Island. What could the environment look and feel like in the future in these places?
For bleary-eyed microbloggers, Twitter's 140 characters can sometimes seem way too cumbersome, right? Try Flutter, which chops it all down to just 26 characters. [Yes, they're kidding.] The spoofsters behind Flutter call it nano-blogging. Instead of tweets, try flaps—as in a hummingbird's wings. [And that's just for starters.] Have a look at this mockumentary by Slate V:
Upheavals in the news business have created a shortage of people telling deep and complex stories about critical issues in society, says Cara Mertes, director of the Sundance documentary film program, and that gap is giving rise to a new trend, what Mertes calls “self-designated storytelling”—amateur filmmakers stepping in to fill the void. We caught up with Mertes last week at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford to talk about the changes. “Storytelling is, increasingly, a form of intervention,” she told Cause Global. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation:
What is the climate for documentary film in today’s world? Right now, in this moment, one of the most exciting things is that documentary film has become a kind of international language. I talk about it as being the lingua franca of the issues: it is much less expensive than feature film. You can make a documentary virtually alone, and there are a lot of these kinds of self-designated storytellers in documentary now. Eric Daniel Metzgar, who made Reporter [which debuted at Sundance in January], was one man going. He didn’t even bring a camera person or a sound person. He went with his camera and accompanied Nick Kristof and made the story out of that. So it’s very much an under-the-radar approach to becoming a filmmaker. As I travel around the world, I come across this again and gain—people saying, This is the way I want to tell my story in the world. We see in the West, particularly, an erosion of independent journalism; journalism isn’t filling that gap anymore and so we have documentary filmmakers stepping up and saying, like Eric did, I want to know about the Congo and so I guess I’ll go there and make a film about it.
So it's a combination of globalization and journalism-in-turmoil? Particularly in the United States, “international” has never been a priority; as we become more linked globally, suddenly that linkage is very apparent to people. Every morning, you can wake up now and hear about the stock markets around the world. A year ago, we were not hearing about that as much; now we do hear it—we see it now like the weather. It's embedded in people’s consciousness now that we are interdependent and that is creating a demand for stories that can help us understand what that interdependency means. What are the conflicts? What are the things that are creating an interruption to what we might call a more just society? This transcends politics. Ever since 9/11, we have begun to understand that something could happen to us and we all want to be a little bit more prepared. Documentary is a kind of wake-up call for people; people have a hunger now for knowledge that can help them make better decisions as they move through life.
How are social media influencing documentary filmmaking? There are many different kinds of storytelling strategies we’re seeing deployed now. We’re seeing more and more Flip cameras, and certainly, cell phones are starting to be used to capture content. I don’t think we’re seeing short docs on cell phones—yet. You can’t really edit on a cell phone yet, but you will be able to. We’re going to see yet another transformation [in the evolution of documentary film], I think, and the types of people deciding they want to use visual storytelling will continue to expand. It is an incredibly exciting moment because we’re now seeing a huge range of new participation—you know, the 10-year-old is making documentaries now along with the 45-year-old Oscar-winning documentary maker. The two may seem very far apart but the linkage is that people are using nonfiction storytelling as a way to express themselves. And one might be considered amateur and one is considered a professional—and it’s apples and oranges —but in terms of the desire to explain the world, it’s exactly the same.
What new conversations are surfacing because of this explosion in grassroots filmmaking? I think we’re seeing filmmakers going international in ways we’ve not seen before. Western filmmakers are going internationally to tell stories, and international filmmakers are telling more stories not of their regions. They’re also moving out of their countries to tell stories now. There’s a big change happening in terms of what kinds of stories are being told. It’s all just much more international than it used to be. We’re also seeing filmmakers experiment a lot more. They’re using animation; they’re using reenactments; they’re using incredible soundscapes. Consider Iraq in Fragments by James Longley. He shot this film by himself and he told me that it’s 39 tracks mixed down; so he created a whole score basically on his own, on his own computer. So when you see something like that, it's really moving into a different space in terms of storytelling that is inspired and anchored in documentary—but moves way beyond it.
Why is an empathetic audience better than a sympathetic one? When we work with filmmakers in our labs at Sundance, we dive deep into the story that they are telling. And that sympathy/ empathy question is one of the most sophisticated, complicated questions you can ask about any given story, because ultimately, you’re asking how you want your audience to feel. What do you want them to receive from the story? Filmmakers often think they are making a story that will make their audiences do something when they’re really helping them to feel sympathy. Sympathy is something that people can feel and then move on. Empathy moves audiences to a new place, to action. So at the beginning of Reporter, that’s the very question Eric David Metzgar is asking when he shows you a close-up of an African boy and says, “We’ve been asked to care before.” What Metzgar is doing is pointing out to us, the audience, right away, that we need to do more. He’s telling people that they are going to sit for 90 minutes and they are going to do more than just feel sympathy for this young man.
It’s the question of impact. The most difficult place to get impact is in the West because it’s a place where you have to break through the [media] noise. Ninety percent of our media is filled with ads and commercial media and commercial films, so how do you break through that clutter and get an audience’s attention for documentary? It’s not a storytelling question. It’s a money question. In documentary film, nobody has an ad budget but must because otherwise, nobody’s going to notice that your film is there.
Censorship is also a challenge—especially now, as more documentary work goes international. We fund internationally and we do have to be very careful about how we support our artists. So for instance, we funded a couple of filmmakers in Turkey. They made a film that didn’t really have much of a human rights framework at all but it was about the Kurds in the East and the Turkish government’s ban on teachers teaching kids the Kurdish language. Children there have to learn to speak Turkish first and they’re not supposed to speak Kurdish publicly. These filmmakers did a story about a teacher. In order to get accredited as a teacher, you have to teach in the Eastern part of the country for a year, in the wilderness, serve your time before you can come back and teach in Ankara or Istanbul—the cities you really want to live in.
There were a number of people on our committee who were western human rights experts and they were kind of appalled that these Turkish filmmakers didn’t mention at all the bloodshed, the oppression the Kurds had suffered because of this government policy and so forth. I had to sit there and say, Well, this is true; there have been huge human rights campaigns around the Turks and Kurds, and this is one of the deadliest realities we see with a nationality that’s within another nation-state—and the Kurds are the largest population of people without a country. They have a region but they don’t’ have a country. And there was really no mention of this at all in this film. And I had to think that if they wanted to stay in Turkey—if they don’t want to become diasporic artists—we at Sundance have to support those filmmakers who are developing a kind of metaphorical language—think Russian in the 1930s, right? I’m talking about a kind of metaphorical language through documentary that some filmmakers need to be able to talk about the things that concern them.
So I said listen, if we put just a little card at the front that is a very basic outline to let people know there’s an issue here, then great. We want them to be able to show it in Turkey. We don’t want them to have to move [out of Turkey]. Just because you’re funded by Sundance shouldn’t mean you have to leave your country. Yet this is more common than you might think. We have funded a number of artists who can’t stay in-country any longer because of the documentary film work they are doing. When people become successful filmmakers, the government notices, so we do have a lot of filmmakers who have moved from Middle Eastern countries; there are Chinese filmmakers who live in Canada now because they can no longer work in China. That’s a really important development in the documentary world.
Where is the most creative work being done by young filmmakers? In places in transition—countries in transition that are becoming more democratic, more open, and more free-market—China, for instance. As China becomes more open and more westernized in certain ways, documentary film and filmmaking, generally, will become an increasingly popular avenue that young people will seek out to make a difference. Storytelling in this way is intervention.
"This isn't the next fad. The naive popular narrative that "every generation has its thing" and that climate is ours—that we're the "Facebook generation"—simply does not hold. This isn't about being disaffected and rebellious without a cause. This isn't about dropping out, rejecting the norm, culture-jamming and hacking the system. This isn't even about altruism. It's not just about defending the rights and lives of those who are less fortunate than us and it certainly isn't about polar bears. This is about us. For the Millennial generation, the patronising cliches fall apart, because this isn't about ideals so much as hard science and the terrifying reality that what the scientists have been warning us all about for years—sea-level rises, catastrophic droughts, and melting ice caps—will now happen in our lifetimes. So we become angry when we witness the same generation which let the economic system collapse—and that is leaving my generation with an unfathomable burden of debt—now knowingly setting us on another disastrous course. We know how this story ends, but not because we've read obscure economic treatises or dense theories. We know because scientists are providing measurable, objective evidence that the high-carbon economic model has an in-built, self-destruct mechanism."
The Skoll World Forum at Oxford University ended today, with its leaders and many of its delegates declaring that the failures of the global economy have given legitimacy, at last, to the new field of social entrepreneurship. The growing ranks of business innovators who also want to solve the world's social problems, they said, now seem the best hope for institutional innovation in the 21st century. "Our trusted institutions have turned out to be stunningly untrustworthy, " said Colin Mayer, the dean of the Said Business School, the site of the conference. "While governments around the world believe they are in control and that the old order will soon re-emerge, you can be sure they are not and it won't. Now, more than ever, there is a need and opportunity for institutional innovations."
Social entrepreneurship used to be seen as "an interesting but ephemeral fad," said Skoll Centre Director Pamela Hartigan—but not anymore. Those in mainstream business, academia, government, and the media "are now finding that [this movement] has been, indeed, a harbinger of future organizations, systems, and practices." Jeffrey Skoll, in concluding remarks, urged delegates to step up their leadership efforts in the coming year. He quoted the American economist Paul Romer as saying, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."
Among closing-session highlights:
* Lord David Puttnam, a movie producer [best-known for the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, and The Killing Fields] and president of UNICEF UK, called on conferees to act urgently to overhaul education. Quoting the British author, H.G. Wells, that "the future is a race between education and catastrophe," Puttnam said it is time for every citizen to "get absolutely honest" about the serious challenges facing humanity and to demand "exactly the same degree of honesty from those who seek to lead us and make decisions on our behalf." He quoted from the 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, to sum up the failures of today's wealth-society: "They smashed up things and ... then retreated back into their money and their vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess that they made." Puttnam, however, was most passionate about the need for education innnovation, and showed the first seven minutes of a soon-to-be released documentary that he hopes will do for educational reform what Al Gore's film, Inconvenient Truth did for climate change activism. Here's a short portion of the script:
"What we have now is a [school] system shaped by historical forces but now almost totally bankrupt of ideas for education in the 21st century—and they're betraying most of our children. Public systems of education, paid for by taxation, were invented to meet the needs of the Industrial Economy emerging in the 18th and 19th centuries, when we needed a work force that could do certain sorts of things...The high schools of today were centrally designed in the 19th century...and in the old days, we'd say one-size-fits-all—we'd put 30 kids in a classroom and teach them the same material, which they'd all be expected get in the same way...But just five years from now, much less in 25 years time, we won't know what the world will be like. How adaptable are today's kids going to be? The very best we can do is to prepare young people for a rapidly changing social, technological, economic environment, in which they're going to have to be the most flexible, collaborative, creative generation that has ever been. Education is the most fundamental challenge facing human beings; it will be key to solving all the other problems we've got."
* Soraya Salti, a new Skoll fellow and the senior vice president of MENA, INJAZ al-Arab, an education nonprofit based in Jordan, said the region has strayed far from "the Golden Age of Islam"—a time when "people of different religions and cultures were coming together to move humanity forward." Today, she said, schools across the Arab world have failed their students, fueling unprecedented rates of youth unemployment—30 percent in Saudi Arabia, 37 percent in Syria, 40 percent in Algeria, and 30 percent in Jordan. The irony? A lack of qualified human capital is cited by CEOs in the region as the No. 1 obstacle for growth. "Those who would control and politically mobilize the youth of the Arab world will be the ones who will win in the end," Salti said, paraphrasing a 2008 report by the Brookings Institution in Washington. "Is it going to be government or is it going to be the [radical] Islamists?"
Salti, in this video clip of her talk at the conference, described her recent work to assemble a team of 27 would-be social entrepreneurs from a girls' school in Jamallah to compete for a regional prize for entrepreneurship. It was an example of what her group, INJAZ, is doing to reach more than 100,000 Arab youth in six countries across the Middle East.
(Photo by Holger Gogoli, taken of a wall at the abandoned Alsen cement factory at Itzehoe in Schleswig-Hosltein, Germany)
In the mid-1990s, people began realizing the Internet would transform the world—but the prevailing wisdom at the time was that it would be mostly for the better. One of today's panels of thought leaders at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford agreed it's time to take another look at that assumption.
Charles Leadbeater, a social entrepreneur and author of We-think: the power of mass creativity, said the Internet has, indeed, given more people access to knowledge [and will continue to do so, through such sites as Ushahidi, kiva.org, the new Wikimap Aid, and M-Pesa, a mobile phone-based money exchange service in Kenya]. It's also clear, Leadbeater said, that the Web has begun to topple the top-down, Industrial Age way of managing people and projects into more level, lateral types of conversations, relationships and collaborative teams. "I also think the Web has huge potential to allow knowledge to be deployed in different ways which are not determined by profit," he told Skoll conferees.
Panelists also agreed that the Web—particularly cellphone video-sharing—is empowering many people to hold their leaders accountable for bullying: Witness.org Executive Director Yvette Alberdingk Thijm shared citizen videos that her nonprofit either helped to produce or took viral on the Web in an effort to stop human rights abuses. This mobile phone video, about a California man shot and killed by police, led to the arrests of two officers after it went viral shortly after the incident. [Note the irony of the "danger" sign on the closing door of the subway train that appears at the end of the clip.] Another video, shot on a Flip video camera by Witness.org-trained Yemeni activists, showcases the six-year-old daughter of Yemeni journalist Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani, and her recollections of the day authorities broke into the family's home, beat her father unconscious, and imprisoned him for his pro-democracy views. Witness.org uploaded the video and took it viral; a screen shot of that video, emblazoned with The Hub's logo, was then published by an Arab newspaper. A public uproar ensued and led to the release of al-Khaiwani last September. "Once a story is out in the public sphere, it cannot be removed from public consciousness," Alberdingk Thijm said. "The Web can help shift the dynamics of power."
But citizens, beware. It's getting harder to use the Web for social change. Challenges to the Web's potential for democracy and freedom are growing quickly now, panelists agreed. "The enemy is getting just as smart in using these same tools to silence people yet again," said Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian journalist who is writing a book about censorship and the use of the Internet by authoritarian states.
Morozov cited a half-dozen examples of government and corporate "Net-cleansing"—including cases where companies are hiring "reputation cleansers" to bury Web references to poor corporate track records on Web search engines, while nationalist groups in Africa and the Middle East are using Google maps to mashup census data, so as to better pinpoint minority neighborhoods for targeting. Crowdsourcing also is being used by the governments of Thailand and China to drum up lists of Web sites and blogs critical of the current regimes; the Thai government, Morozov says, asks citizens to nominate Web sites to be blocked for content that offends the king; in China, a "50-cent Army" of some 200,000 or more citizens is paid to post pro-government comments on blogs critical of Beijing authorities. Morozov also says denial-of-service attacks are emerging as powerful tools for silencing political dissent in Georgia, Burma, Russia—and the United States. [During last year's debate in California over the controversial Proposition 08, Morozov says, denial-of-service attacks were used by proponents of the anti-gay proposal to stem the ability of gay and lesbian nonprofits and political action groups to fight the measure.]
"We tend to assume the Net is going to be helping [civil rights advocates] and not the dictators," Morozov says, "but repressive groups and regimes love the Internet, too, and are figuring out how to use it to control others." When asked by moderator Andrew Zolli which side is winning—citizen civil rights activists or the dictators—Morozov said: "Both ends of the spectrum are expanding, but it's very hard for me to deliver an argument that the Net benefits one political side more than the other."
For more on the 50-cent Army and Internet censorship, see Peep Show, an August post on Cause Global about online censorship around the world.
It's often been said that social entrepreneurs, more than others, tend to see the world as something they can shape against all odds: a poll of 200 of the 785 delegates attending the three-day Skoll World Forum at Oxford University seems to prove that perception. According to the poll results, academics and advisers are the "gloomiest" of the social enterprise lot attending the forum, with nearly two-thirds of those responding saying that they are either "moderately pessimistic" [59%] or "highly pessimistic" [6.5%] about the "economic situation."
In contrast, less than half of social entrepreneurs responding to the survey said they felt pessimistic; a full 84% of social entrepreneurs predicted their programs would increase in size or at least stay the same over the next year.
Sally Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, which organized the forum, said only 16% of organizations would be cutting back this year, a contrast to the 40% of nonprofits in the United States that said they would be scaling back or cutting programs this year in a recent U.S.-only poll. And what about the entrepreneurs? Today's poll data also show that almost 87 % of funders attending the Skoll conference [and responding to the poll] say their grants have remained the same or have increased in the past six months; over the coming year, 63 % say they think funding will remain the same or increase.
For more on the optimism of the social entrepreneur and what drives it, see our interview in December [Squalls] with Paul Light, the author of the recent book, The Search for Social Entrepreneurship, about the traits that distinguish these social innovators. Light told CauseGlobal:
I have come to agree that there is something different about the social entrepreneur...What they are is extremely optimistic about their chances of success. They all have very high confidence that they will succeed and they often ignore evidence to the contrary because they believe so strongly that they'll succeed...Additionally, they're not more likely to take risks than others but they do tend through their optimism to stick with it, and when they are told they are going to fail, they actually invest even more energy. They rebel against messages that suggest they're somehow on the wrong track."
For more on social entrepreneurs and how they're faring during the downturn, see this article, Global Heroes, in the May 12 issue of The Economist.
Today through Saturday, we're in Oxford, where the Skoll World Forum for social innovation convenes for its sixth year. Called the "Davos for social entrepreneurs," the event is all about celebrating up-and-coming and established entrepreneurs who don't simply want to get rich but also want to forge innovative solutions to the world's social problems—as well as create new business models for sustainable social problem-solving worldwide. The forum—being held in what Skoll's Oxford Centre Chairman Stephan Chambers today called "the most chilling economic environment we've ever experienced"—is being hosted by Oxford University and Jeff Skoll'ssocial enterprise foundation. [Skoll, who was the first employee and first president of eBay, also is the founder of the independent movie company, Participant Productions.]
Despite the dour global economy, this year's forum has broken all previous attendance records, with some 785 social entrepreneurs from 65 countries in town for the event, including Kailash Satyarthi, chairman of the Global March Against Child Labor; Mary Robinson, founder and president of Peace Worlds Group, and Soraya Salti, senior vice president of INJAZ al-Arab, a youth education and empowerment project in Jordan. A wide range of panels Thursday and Friday will include talks entitled The Uses and Abuses of Power in Social Innovation, Capital Markets in Crisis, Powerful Women: Shifting the Status Quo, Technology and Shifting Power in a Hyper-Connected World, and Tomorrow's News: Models for an Everyone-is-Media World.
Cause Global will be covering parts of the conference. Among highlights so far:
* Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, urged conferees to be "the kinds of leaders who reject the traditional choices between two or more unsatisfactory alternatives and instead create new courses of action in the world." Martin, during an opening ceremony at the historic Sheldonian Theatre, referred to President Obama's inaugural speech, in which Obama asserted: "For our common defense, we reject as false a choice between our safety and our ideals." Rotman said that time and again, highly successful leaders reject unsatisfactory options and create new alternatives. "They understand the power of the paradox," Martin said. "The critical take-away for social entrepreneurs, specifically, is that you must reject the notion that existing business models equal reality. The status-quo business model versus civil society is not a choice but rather the root of a new model, a new set of solutions for our times."
* Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and now president of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalisation Initiative, underscored the importance of government to help bring order to the current "chaotic" climate of change that is being felt around the world. She said:
One of the shifts taking place in this severe economic crisis is a recognition that government matters and that it's very important to the 21st century. We had been in a neo-liberal phase when there was a reduction of government and the private sector was supposed to be so efficient and we didn't need regulation. I am hoping we are now seeing a new era of more appropriate government, governments that are more responsive and also more welcoming to younger people with their tools of the information society. We need for people to become more participative in their communities and societies and their movements. We need more people holding those in power to account. How are social entrepreneurs holding existing institutions to account? We need more of that. It's important to do that and that's what social entrepreneurs and young people with their tools can do very well.
* Ken Brecher, the executive director of the Sundance Institute and an anthropologist by training, delivered an eloquent speech that underscored the importance of passion and persistence in the pursuit of the common good. He received a hearty round of applause when he compared the traits of social entrepreneurs to those traits which characterized and qualified the fearless crews recruited by the early 20th century explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton. [Brecher quoted an advertisement that Shackleton placed in The London Times in 1907: "Wanted: Men for hazardous journey, low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in the event of success."] Brecher also spoke about the perserverance and resilience that characterized the life of the late Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who received an honorary degree from Oxford in 1965, when she was 76 years old, during a ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre [the spot where Skoll conferees were assembled Wednesday night]. Brecher urged social entrepreneurs to heed Akhmatova's example of creativity and passion against brutal odds to bring new levels of sanity to the world. "You can use your skills to bring order from chaos and in doing so fulfill the highest human function, not as visionary but with a strong sense of reality. (Akhmatova's life was) a reproach to those who feel that a single individual can never stand up to the march of history."
The conference, at the Said Business School, continues through Friday. For more on social entrepreneurs and the state of social innovation, see this recent article in The Economist.
Ms. Stepanek is an award-winning journalist and the founding Editor-in-Chief of Contribute Media, a New York-based news and information company that covers the new people and ideas of giving. She is also the author of an upcoming book on social media, and blogs about the use of social media in advocacy and innovation for Contribute Media Online, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, PopTech, and JustMeans.com. This blog covers the new philanthropy movement and the influence of the Internet and social media on popular culture, business innovation, social change advocacy, and the workplace.
