danah boyd: "Step away from the techno-hyperbole"

Here is a post from a current muse, danah boyd. The original article is posted at the WorkingWikily blog, a great resource run by several members of The Monitor Institute team on the West Coast who are studying how network tools and approaches are changing how we organize and work -- in business, politics, and particularly in the social sector.

While boyd acknowledges and understands the positive effects of social networks as well as any of us, her great contribution is the reminder that technology is not equally available or equally transformative for all people, and can often exacerbate “real world” issues. Most importantly, with new technology we have a "dangerous tendency to interpret an advancement as a solution." Social networks are tools to connect people, but it is naive and misguided to think that it will eliminate our most critical problems. We must use technology to highlight the work we need to do to break down division offline. We must be conscious of division offline, and also how we use these networks and platforms to define our work to create social change.

Note: I'm adding very little value-add on top of regurgitating what I heard from boyd herself. I encourage you to check out her research and the other work from The Berkman Center where they are working to "explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards; and to assess the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions."


Reflections on danah boyd at the Personal Democracy Forum

The most provocative moment of the Personal Democracy Forum conference that I attended last week was the speech that danah boyd delivered on “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online.” Boyd opened, “We tend to believe in a certain utopian myth of the internet as the savior. What if this weren’t true?” She followed, “I want you to step away from the techno-hyperbole for just a moment.” Taking Facebook and MySpace use among teenagers as a case study, boyd showed how we self-segregate by race, class, and educational status online, mirroring and magnifying the same social dynamics in the physical world. The choice between Facebook and MySpace for teenagers is not about features or functionality, she said. What she found from interviewing teenagers as part of a three-year study of digital youth, is that they make the choice of where to go online based on “where my friends are,” which leads them to use sites that are used by ”people like me.” Teens typically saw the site they didn’t choose as the place where “other” people go. She sees the class distinctions between the two online services as a result of these class-conscious choices: Facebook users in the U.S. are wealthier, more highly educated, and whiter than their MySpace counterparts.

Boyd asked the crowd: how many of you use Facebook? Nearly everyone raised their hands. MySpace? Just a few brave souls raised their hand in the crowd of mostly American, liberal-leaning, and white politicians, organizers, and technologists. With roughly equal numbers of American visitors to both sites last month, this was a stark reminder that there “is not a universal public” online. The conclusion was important for anyone in the audience interested in communicating with Americans as a whole. Sociologists have long studied “homophily”—the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others. Whites know whites, liberals know liberals, and geeks know geeks. What boyd made clear is that online interaction is no different. “Many of you know people who joined Facebook in the last year,” she said. Heads nodded. “Well, numerous adults have also joined MySpace in the last year. My guess is that not many of you know adults who have recently created accounts on MySpace. Why? Probably because they aren’t like you.”

The point that boyd drove home is a specific case of the concern raised by Cass Sunstein (in Republic.com 2.0) and other thinkers: that the self-directed nature of the Internet could lead to social fragmentation. Online communities often form around shared interests and existing relationships, which leads them to be naturally less diverse than physical communities where location is often chosen out of practicality. Social media is a playground for homophily, and to the extent that we get our information and ideas from people like us, it can insulate us from the broader conversation and amplify our most extreme views.

This phenomenon is even more important for those of us who are working daily to influence politics and social change. If social networks are a modern-day incarnation of the public sphere, that is where politicians should go to hear the voices and concerns of their constituents, where organizers should go to rally people for their causes, and where our researchers and educators should go to share knowledge. But if we forget that race and class are a factor online, assuming that the choice of services is a simple matter of comparative advantage, we risk reinforcing the very divisions that we’re trying to bridge.

5 goals as I turn 25

24 was a great year for me - one where I've been so incredibly inspired by people and ideas.

Thanks to @tedchris @ethanz @scottharrison @nytimeskristoff @newprofit @jnovagratz @acumenfund @afine @sashadicther @amanda @socialedge @zephoria @cshirky @ashokatweets @c_lab @appaffrica @netsquared @gatesfoundation @workingwikily and many others for highlighting the world's biggest issues and helping me find ways I can contribute to the solution.

As I turn 25 - here are five big goals.

1. Supporting innovative nonprofits and social enterprises - domestically and globally - to fight poverty and punch above their weight to drive systemic change in our broken systems.

2. Helping world rethink our models using better data for more targeted solutions. Using data to show what does and does not work. Helping foundations, state governments, philanthropists direct money flows, resources, and human capital towards the most effective solutions.

3. Connecting distributed individuals and groups to create, build, and execute these models. Helping people use technology as a tool to connect global communities, but not assume that it will eliminate all of the serious issues we have to face in the U.S. and globally. Lots of things happen online, social change is not one of them.

4. Helping people understand social and economic inequalities and to really care about others who don't live like them. See Chris Anderson quote below for the importance of this point.

5. Enabling people to be part of the solution - be it fighting homelessness in the U.S. to enabling businesses that serve the base of the pyramid in Pakistan. There is powerful demand for people to do something meaningful, they don't know how and we haven't yet asked them to.

Shades of Grey

This is my blog post from the Acumen Fund Blog, original here.

When you read this post, please check out Acumen Fund and their groundbreaking work. This special group of people has leaders have inspired me to change my life. Thank you Jacqueline, Sasha, Brian, Yasmina, Ann, Rob, and so many others. Enjoy...Last week, I was lucky enough to be involved in a conversation about where Acumen Fund might be in 20 years. We discussed the potential for Acumen to move into new geographies, including potentially investing in the United States. During this discussion, CEO Jacqueline Novogratz made a comment about how “parts of the developing world would look like the developed world and vice versa” in the future.

This comment sparked my memory, and I recalled the Measure of America project, which disaggregates the Human Development Index calculations for the US by state and Congressional district boundaries. This is an amazing, interactive resource using detailed data and new technology to increase awareness and, in doing so, drive change. Measure of America’s mission “is to stimulate a fact-based public debate about and political attention to human development issues in the U.S. and to empower people to hold elected officials accountable for progress on issues we all care about: health, education, and income.”

The New York Times Economix bloggers covered the project under the title, “Rich Country Within a Poor One“. If you have time, check out some of the interactive maps; you will see the story we all know, but in a much more granular level and with a slick interface that helps you really make sense of the information. What emerges of course is nuance – the US is a “rich country” where so many are poor, so many don’t have access to health care or a quality education.

A colleague of mine purchased the project’s book and sent out this jarring stat about the sharpest social gradient among congressional districts in the U.S.: “On average, a resident of the Fourteenth Congressional District (Upper East Side) earns two and a half times as much, lives four years longer, is more than seven times as likely to have a college degree, and is four times less likely to be in poverty than a resident of Sixteenth Congressional District (South Bronx)”

The more data we have, the more clearly we see the there are shades of grey, and the better we can target solutions towards those shades of grey using new tools in the development toolbox and not just our old (and often) blunt instruments. This resonates clearly in the development debate. When Jeffrey Sachs turn his attention towards Bill Easterly and Dambisa Moyo in the Huffington Post he writes about the shades of grey in traditional aid efforts:

“…most Americans know little about the many crucially successful aid efforts, because Moyo, Easterly, and others lump all kinds of programs - the good and the bad - into one big undifferentiated mass, rather than helping people to understand what is working and how it can be expanded, and what is not working, and should therefore be cut back.”

With more data and new technology, we can tell stories in new ways to help people better understand these shades of grey and better target the world’s biggest problems. This, of course, is the game of Hans Rosling, the TED dynamo and Jacqueline’s fellow speaker at TED@State. Every time Hans gets in front of a crowd, he uses the Trendalyzer to dispel our common myths about the developing world. His famous narrative of course is that the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity as the West was, and a host of countries are moving a lot faster than the West did. In his latest TED talk on HIV/AIDS he said:

“…So, when we look at the pattern, one thing comes out very clearly: you see the blue bubbles and people say HIV is very high in Africa. I would say, HIV is very different in Africa. You’ll find the highest HIV rate in the world in African countries, and yet you’ll find Senegal, down here, the same rate as United States. And you’ll find Madagascar, and you’ll find a lot of African countries about as low as the rest of the world. It’s this terrible simplification that there’s one Africa and things go on in one way in Africa. We have to stop that. It’s not respectful, and it’s not very clever to think that way.“

Acumen Fund is doing it work to show how and when markets work for the poor, and when they don’t. It is showing when and where patient capital is an alternative to pure markets or philanthropic efforts. It is defining the standards of social performance for patient capital with Pulse. And how can we not forget Wold Metrics day! Acumen is working every day in a smarter way. Hans Rosling closes with this call to action and so will I:

“We hope that when we act on global problems in the future we will not only have the heart, we will not only have the money, but we will also use the brain.”

Geeks + Gov tomorrow in NYC

Politics are different in a networked age - look at November 2008 (US) or June 2009 (Iran) as evidence. New tools - from social networks to mobile platforms - have changed the way we can fundraise, increase awareness, harness volunteers, drive transparency and accountability for our elected leaders, and ultimately create change.

Great minds in technology and politics come together tomorrow at the Personal Democracy Forum to explore how technology and networks are changing politics, democracy, and society. Now in it's sixth year, this year's conference is titled "We.gov" and focuses on how elections, advocacy, and even governance are becoming more open, participatory and collaborative.

The list of speakers is absolutely top-notch, with a few of the best below:

Craig Newmark (Craiglist founder)
Jeff Jarvis (What would gooogle do?)
Vivek Kundra (White House CIO)
Clay Shirky (Here comes everybody)
Frank Rich (NYT)
Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founer)
Joe Rospars (Obama '08 new media director)
Amanda Rose (Twestival)
Clay Shirky (here comes everybody)
Mayor Mike (NYC)

PDF is the place to be for learning about so many cutting-edge topics at the intersection of technology and politics. We are remaking democracy in a Web 2.0 world and it's fascinating to watch the scale and speed of changes. I hope tomorrow morning brings me a message that my blogger pass is approved (not getting my hopes up as I stupidly signed up this morning), but I at the very least can follow the action with the hashtag #pdf2009. You should too.

The post I wish I wrote

Thanks to Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center for redirecting me to Gaurav Mishra’s "Weblog on Social Media & Social Change." This is a great resource that I look forward to digging into in the coming weeks as I think more about media and technology in India.

Most importantly to my current thinking, Mishra wrote an amazing post synthesizing opinions from the media/blogging world on the "Twitter Revolution" and layering on his unique insight. This is steroid version of my post Twitter an Iran: My Lesson Learned (spoiler alert: I wrote about how we got this story wrong and made it all about us).

In The Irony of Iran's 'Twitter Revolution' Mishra pulls insights from several leading pundits, including Zuckerman, below:

Evgeny Morozov shares my skepticism about “the claims that Twitter has been instrumental in organizing the protests” and thinks that it mostly played a role “in publicizing the violence or the already planned protests and rallies.”

Nancy Scola at TechPresident agrees that, “as we saw in Moldova, the idea of a “Twitter Revolution” isn’t always borne out by the facts, at least to the extent that the uprising would have not taken place without the tool.”

Brand Stone and Noam Cohen at NYT agree with me that “labeling such seemingly spontaneous anti-government demonstrations a “Twitter Revolution” has already become something of a cliché.

Kara Swisher at AllThingsD is annoyed at the media hype for Twitter “because it is how the tools are used by people, more than the tools themselves, that should be the focus.”

Ethan Zuckerman is amazed at “the extent to which reporters from really good newspapers are all asking the same questions.”

Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic reminds the intelligence community that most reports on Twitter are noise, not signal intelligence.

Tom Watson at TechPresident reminds us that there are limits to what technology can do, “especially when men and women are marching in streets patrolled by the troops of an absolutist religious dictatorship, facing soldiers’ guns in public and the noose behind the prison wall.”

Mishra's provides his own analysis...

Various observers have called the protests ‘Facebook/ Twitter protests’, claiming that social media tools have been critical in organizing these protests (Clay Shirky on TED Blog, Lev Glossman in Time, Mark Ambinder at The Atlantic). The #IranElection Twitter feed has indeed been hyperactive all week (Ben Parr in Mashable)

....Twitter is being used in many ways in post-election Iran: for organizing protests, for sharing first hand reports from the ground, for focusing international attention on the protests and for changing the news agenda for international news organizations.

When the dust settles down on the Iran election crisis, we will see that Twitter was more useful as a media tool and not as an organizing tool. We will see that Twitter didn’t really change much in Iran in terms of organizing the protests, but it did play an important role in engaging the international community in the protests and focusing media attention on the protests (see Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy, Daniel Terdiman at CNet and Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW#CNNFail). on

In fact, there are less than 10,000 Twitter users in Iran (Sysomos via BusinessWeek) and less than 100 of them seem to be active. Given these small numbers, it’s quite amazing that their tweets have generated such a multiplier effect via retweets etc. (The number of Twitter users in Iran might be artificially high as of today because of a misguided campaign that asked people to change their Twitter location to Tehran to make it difficult for the Iran government to target dissidents.)

However, the on-ground organizing in Iran is probably happening via mobile phones and offline networks, the same networks that were previously used to mobilize Mousavi’s supporters to go out and vote for him.

...And leaves us with this clincher..

Calling the Iran protests a ‘Twitter Revolution’ is not only distracting but also dangerous because it reduces a legitimate broad-based grassroots movement to what’s quickly becoming a cliche, after Moldova.

Twitter and Iran: My Lesson Learned

Last week I drank the cool-aid about Twitter in Iran. I read about it everywhere. I wrote a post about it. I called Clay Shirky "the master" in said post for singing the praises of social media at this moment.

My thinking has evolved.

I was reading and spouting a over-simplified, Western-centric, narcissistic narrative that this moment was all about social media, especially one social media brand. I still believe in the power of social media to organize in new ways and to work around power structures controlled by a few. I still think Twitter a powerful tool to galvanize the opposition and bypass censored traditional media. I still think this moment was important.

But I think my lens and interpretation was off.

We were singing the praises of Twitter, instead of internalizing what was really going on the streets in Tehran. We focused less on brave defiance in the face of corruption and violent repression in the Middle East by hundreds of thousands, we focused more on our beloved Twitter and facebook. I wrote "Twitter matters" not "watch this moment carefully, mourn the loss of those who are giving their lives in the face of a government that refuses to hold fair elections."

I've read a lot more over the weekend - and I'm smarter for it. The change in my perception and understanding of this moment was sparked by conversation with friend and former colleague Richard Tyson. It was fed by reading people who know a lot more than me, or people who at least give greater reverence to others who have a) a historical perspective and/or b) a better understanding of what the people of Iran want.

Matt Yglesias has taught me not to attribute too much influence to Twitter, and not to have high hopes that this use of social media will prevent brutal repression.

I think I’m going to say “no” to Joe Scarborough’s question Will Twitter and the Internet prevent a Tiananmen Square-styled crackdown in Tehran? Will technology trump theocracy?

I think there’s no doubt that the growth of modern information technology facilitates organizing anti-regime protests in authoritarian states. I don’t think you need to attribute that all to Twitter, as such, but the overall pattern is clear.

Organizing mass demonstrations requires a lot of communication, and things that make communication easier make organizing easier.But when you have your mass protests, you still have the key question. Do the security services just kill a bunch of people (Tiananmen)? Does the regime blink and surrender (Velvet Revolution)? Does the regime attempt surrender, only to be undercut by a hardline coup (USSR, 1991)? Does the regime attempt to resist, only to be undone by a coup (Romania)? Information technology doesn’t seem to me to have anything to do with this. It all has to do with internal regime politics, and the attitudes of the people leading and serving in the security forces.

John Palfrey, Bruce Etling and Robert Faris of the WSJ have emphasized Why the real revolution is on the streets -- and offline. They hit the nail on the head when calling out Biz Stone for his "self-congratulatory aw-shucks post on his blog" when he posted "It's humbling to think that our two-year old company could be playing such a globally meaningful role that state officials find their way toward highlighting our significance."

...And they brought us all down to reality here:

Certainly, a powerful new force is developing here. Citizens who once had little public voice are using cheap Web tools to tell the world about the drama that has unfolded since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of Iran's disputed election. The government succeeded last week in exerting control over Internet use and text-messaging, but Twitter has proven nearly impossible to block. The most common search topic on Twitter for days has been "#iranelection" -- the "hashtag" for discussions on Iran -- and global media outlets are relying on information and images disseminated via Twitter feeds.

Yet for all their promise, there are sharp limits on what Twitter and other Web tools such as Facebook and blogs can do for citizens in authoritarian societies. The 140 characters allowed in a tweet are not the end of politics as we know it -- and at times can even play into the hands of hard-line regimes. No amount of Twittering will force Iran's leaders to change course, as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made clear Friday with his rebuke of the protesters, reportedly followed by the security forces' use of tear gas, batons, water cannons and gunfire to break up demonstrations yesterday. In Iran, as elsewhere, if true revolution is coming, it must happen offline.

In the NYT, Noam Cohen asked, "does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology?" He provides 6 lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of Twitter. The most important of which is this:

5. Twitter Is Self-Correcting but a Misleading Gauge

"For all the democratic traits of Twitter, not all users are equal. A popular, trusted user matters more and, as shown above, can expose others who are suspected of being fakers. In that way, Twitter is a community, with leaders and cliques. Of course, Twitter is a certain kind of community — technology-loving, generally affluent and Western-tilting. In that way, Twitter is a very poor tool for judging popular sentiment in Iran and trying to assess who won the presidential election. Mr. Ahmadinejad, who presumably has some supporters somewhere in Iran, is losing in a North Korean-style landslide on Twitter."

The point is this- there is more nuance here. Being a white, affluent man in Manhattan, getting all jazzed about Twitter and tweeting #iranelection just felt wrong. This post is my small way of self-correcting.

The case has been made: twitter matters

For those on Twitter you can follow the real thing with the hash-tag #IranElection. Those not on Twitter, there is plenty to read on how social media is enabling the fight.

Mashable highlighted how Twitter rescheduled maintenance so not to be down during crucial times during the election. NYT had an article titled, Social Networks Spread Defiance Online.

Matt Sullivan's post was at The Atlantic is called The Revolution Will be Twittered. It is sharp and inspiring. He writes:

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. 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.

It's increasingly clear that Ahmadinejad and the old guard mullahs were caught off-guard by this technology and how it helped galvanize the opposition movement in the last few weeks. That's why they didn't see what those of us surgically attached to modems could spot a mile away: something was happening in Iran. If Drum is right, the mullahs believed their own propaganda about victory until reality hit them so hard so fast, they miscalculated badly and over-reached.

The key force behind this is the next generation, the Millennials, who elected Obama in America and may oust Ahmadinejad in Iran. They want freedom; they are sick of lies; they enjoy life and know hope.

This generation will determine if the world can avoid the apocalypse that will come if the fear-ridden establishments continue to dominate global politics, motivated by terror, armed with nukes, and playing old but now far too dangerous games. This generation will not bypass existing institutions and methods: look at the record turnout in Iran and the massive mobilization of the young and minority vote in the US. But they will use technology to displace old modes and orders. Maybe this revolt will be crushed. But even if it is, the genie has escaped this Islamist bottle.

Clay Shirky's interview at TED is, as always, the ultimate source. When asked what he made of what is going on in Iran right now, Shirky responded:

I'm always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that ... this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.

This is too important not to pay attention. Twitter matters - that is if you care about fighting for freedom.