Social and Political Innovation through Social Media

Last week I attended a great panel on Social and Political Innovation through Social Media as part of Social Media Week NYC. It was hosted by Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) at the New York Times building and organized by Toby Daniels (@tobyd). The panelists included Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and director of online organizing for President Obama's campaign; Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and website covering the intersection of politics and technology; and Jamie Daves, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur with more than ten years of experience in the public sector who has helped found a number of successful nonprofit and political organizations. Here are the highlights from my notes:

Jamie Daves emphasized the disruptive effect new media technologies have always had when they shift the social balance of power to new agents. He also mused whether the two components of democratic capitalism can continue to function in their current forms worldwide given the current trends and uncertainty. Daves said that the rise of social media is creating the largest accrual of social capital we've ever seen. This trend forces corporations to no longer be faceless, and it forces the people who work in business to engage as individuals, leading to an increase in personal responsibility and accountability.

Rasiej said Obama scored points by being the first national candidate to use the pronoun "we." He also noted that an organized minority will always triumph over a disorganized majority, and that social media technologies have lowered the cost of organization.

Chris Hughes noted that the strategy behind my.BarackObama.com was to provide an organizing toolset for supporters to do their own outreach, fund raising, and event hosting.

Rasiej noted that Whitehouse.gov is lackluster so far concerning social media. "Technically every citizen should have their own login," he said. But government doesn't have a Chief Technology Officer to guide things yet, and discussion moderation tools are still imperfect.

Hughes said these things require time, technology, and money. The Bush White House had only one person manning the Web. And the goals are more complex once you're in office, whereas a presidential campaign has one focus: winning.

Daves noted that it was naive of government to be scared of contact when it could actually benefit from the crowd-sourcing of answers. The trick is to connect common strands and the people who weave them. To illustrate his point, Daves cited one of the recent crane crashes here in NYC. There had been numerous citizen complaints about the shakiness of the construction site, but the local government didn't put their comments together into a bigger picture, and the people had no means of finding each other online to amplify their message.

Rasiej said 95 percent of human behavior is about maintaining position, so it's no wonder governments are slow to adapt to new technologies. For example, he came to be known as "wifi guy" when he ran in 2005 for Public Advocate in New York City because he wanted to modernize the city's telecom infrastructure. Nowadays a pejorative and reductive moniker like that might not stick, or might be a positive, because the upside is that social norms change relative to power and technology.

Daves emphasized that the universal service model for broadband connectivity is essential. He cited Pew statistics showing that 75 percent of people 18–24 are active in social networking.

Rasiej replied that older demographics are fast catching up and show some of the strongest growth rates. Globally he said many people will receive a mobile phone before they get access to clean water. Old institutions may fade in the face of these new technologies. One example where mobile phones could prove particularly useful is election monitoring. They may also unleash a new type of grassroots populism. For example, reform of marijuana laws consistently rises to the top of online forums where users are allowed to vote on commonsense priorities for their government.

Daves commented on the roles and responsibilities of old versus new media. We shouldn't look to the New York Times for social solutions, he said. They do a great job articulating the problems, but the mobilization will come from elsewhere.

A question was raised about the economic meltdown and whether this signified a broader meltdown of trust in our society. Hughes responded that transparency is actually natural to Internet technology. Rasiej agreed, stating that in a world of social media it's easier to build than destroy, and there's more vetting than ever before. Everything is recorded, meaning that to fear Big Brother is to fear ourselves.

Another question was raised about the momentum built by the Obama campaign and where it will go now. Hughes, speaking now as a private observer, said they had compiled 13 million emails and that 2 million accounts had been created on my.BarackObama.com, so the infrastructure of a movement does exist and could be channeled into activism, service, and other goals.

A question was raised as to whether social media will chip into the two-party system. Rasiej believes we have drifted into a somewhat post-partisan era where people may be more likely to self-identify as empowered citizens rather than Democrats.

Rasiej also discussed the potential of social media to save politicians from being "sound bited" to death in traditional press conferences. Interactivity can spur a virtuous circle between representatives and their constituents, as was somewhat the case when a cadre of my.BarackObama.com supporters staged the FISA Rebellion, forming a popular group within Obama's own site and threatening to suspend their fund-raising if they didn't get some straight answers from him on warrantless wiretapping. Obama responded directly to prove that he was willing to listen.

Rasiej seemed adamant, however, that social media will not morph government into rule by popular referendum, à la thumbs down in the Coliseum. But I wonder if he isn't being a little preemptive in his reasoning here. If the evolution of technology makes it possible to give more power back to the people, A LOT MORE POWER, why shouldn't it? One can conceive of a People's Digital Parliament rising in parallel to the traditional structures of government and wielding significant influence over legislators. Perhaps it would eventually be annexed to the government as a new branch with specific and limited authority. There may come a day when the dusty documents of a predominantly agrarian society, ingenious though they were, will have to be discarded and rewritten to fit the new ethics, politics, and technologies.

Meanwhile, said Daves, Members of Congress pay attention to four "M" words: Message, Membership, Media, and Money. And Rasiej concluded that there will be no expansion of participatory democracy in America without rebuilding education. Education funding and our view of it has been choked for decades, he said, citing the one hour per week that New York City school children spend on a computer.

BK on FB

Another Burger King campaign to approach the ethical line: Will you sacrifice your digital friends on Facebook for a burger? The Slate video above rightly gets the main points here:

1. a booming business despite the global economic downturn is Internet marketing; the webbier the campaign, the better
2. it is questionable how much people are attached to their digital friends, even though social networks are invaluable
3. even though BK had to pull the Facebook campaign, it will reap the benefits of press exposure

Ethics of Friending and Gossip

This is interesting. An old article on the ethics of Facebook de-friending in Slate magazine is now on the most emailed list. Here is the author's advice on de-friending in 2007:

Is it OK to de-friend someone?

Say you've been too generous with your friending policy, and a gaggle of strangers is now hogging your News Feed. You too can launch a Great Facebook Purge. The beauty of this is that no headline or notification pops up in your ex-friend's inbox announcing, "You've suffered a humiliating rejection at the hands of _________." It's all very stealthy, thus making it the perfect way to deal with promiscuous frienders.

But what if your so-called friend scans through their friend list and notices that you've gone missing? First off, anyone who is policing their Facebook account this rigorously is morbidly obsessed and thus best kept at arm's length. If she confronts you about it, the best strategy is to plead ignorance: Perhaps the site's massive growth has led to some unexpected technical difficulties? Re-friend, then wait at least six months before trying another de-friending.

When we started this blog, people thought an Internet ethics was far fetched, but the idea seems to be catching on--even with those who are not completely aware of it. You may have seen the expose, tell-all story in the New York Times last weekend from the woman who gossiped her way to stardom but now feels a bit dirty about it. This is a funny excerpt from the article (funny in a sad way):

As Henry and I fought, I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative, and Henry wanted to shut me up. His point of view was just as extreme: I wasn’t generously sharing my thoughts; I was compulsively seeking gratification from strangers at the expense of the feelings of someone I actually knew and loved. I told him that writing, especially writing about myself and my surroundings, was a fundamental part of my personality, and that if he wanted to remain in my life, he would need to reconcile himself to being part of the world I described.

After a standoff, he conceded that I should be allowed to put the post back up. As he sulked in the other room, I retyped what I’d written, feeling vindicated but slightly queasy for reasons I didn’t quite understand yet.

That "queasy" feeling is your moral compass trying to tell you something: Stop what you are doing.

Total freedom to act with pure impunity is not a good thing. It is something moral philosophers have talked about throughout history. Sometimes restraint is the kindest thing you can do.

The ironic thing is that this meta-narrative of how the author felt bad about doing something only worked to promote her story and (probably) compound the damage to those hurt. I gave a talk at Net Impact in San Francisco on Friday about Internet ethics. I asked who had read this New York Times article. Everyone had read it but no one could finish it because they were so repulsed by the actions of the author.

If you did make it to the end of the article, you would have seen that the author came around:

I understand that by writing here about how I revealed my intimate life online, I’ve now revealed even more about what happened during the period when I was most exposed. Well, I’m an oversharer — it’s not like I’m entirely reformed. But lately, online, I’ve found myself doing something unexpected: keeping the personal details of my current life to myself. This doesn’t make me feel stifled so much as it makes me feel protected, as if my thoughts might actually be worth honing rather than spewing. But I still have Emily Magazine as a place to spew when I need to. It will never again be the friendly place that it was in 2004 — there are plenty of negative comments now, and I don’t delete them. I still think about closing the door to my online life and locking them out, but then I think of everything else I’d be locking out, and I leave it open.

Is Using Facebook as Data Source Ethical?

A team of researchers from Harvard and UCLA are monitoring the activity of an entire East Coast college’s Facebook activity, reports the IHT today. Scholars are examining the ways in which people connect with one another. But, partly to keep the data clean, the Facebook users do not know they are being watched. Is this kind of study ethical?

One problem is that Facebook is not necessarily representative of the population at large. The IHT article notes that: "Eszter Hargittai, a professor at Northwestern, found in a study that Hispanic students were significantly less likely to use Facebook, and much more likely to use MySpace. White, Asian and Asian-American students, the study found, were much more likely to use Facebook and significantly less likely to use MySpace."

In my mind, this sampling issue came up the other day during Garrett Graff's talk here at the Carnegie Council on his new book “The First Campaign” (listen to his talk here). Graff was talking about how the 2008 U.S. presidential elections will be the first campaign in which technology as both the medium and the message will determine the outcome. But doesn’t that also beg the obvious question:

Won’t those who are more technology-savvy therefore have relatively more influence in the political arena?

A sample bias may also occur in that people who are engaged in politics online might be peculiar in a certain way. Do these people have more time on their hands than do others? It reminds me of a polling data problem: Polls draw from surveys conducted over the phone… What kind of person answers the phone call from a stranger? Related, the people answering the phone surveys are probably the mirror of the techo-savvy since the surveys can only legally be done on land-line phones—something many of the savvy netizens gave up altogether for mobile services.

Another problem with the Facebook study is that the subjects have not given the researchers permission to study them. Feelings are mixed on this issue reports the IHT:

Most researchers acknowledge these limits, yet they are still eager to plumb the site's vast amount of data. The site's users have mixed feelings about being put under the microscope. Katherine Kimmel, 22, a graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, said she found it "fascinating that professors are using something that started solely as a fun social networking tool for entertainment," and she suggested yet another study: how people fill out Facebook's "relationship status" box. "You're not really dating until you put it on Facebook," she said.

But Derrick Clifton, 19, a student at Pomona College in California, said, "I don't feel like academic research has a place on a Web site like Facebook." He added that if it was going to happen, professors should ask students' permission.

Clearly the data would be skewed if the subjects knew they were being studied. If the identify of the particular subjects is withheld in the research findings, it would seem OK. But that is very difficult to do, as researchers discovered last year after AOL made available the search queries of 650,000 users. From the New York Times:

Although the 650,000 AOL users were not personally identified in the data, the logs contained enough information to discern an individual’s identity in some cases.

AOL quickly withdrew the data from its research Web site, but not before it had been downloaded, reposted and made searchable at a number of Web sites. And on Monday, the company dismissed Abdur Chowdhury, the researcher who posted the data, along with another employee. Maureen Govern, AOL’s chief technology officer, resigned.

Ethical Blogging vs. Email

We all know what a hassle it is to wade through hundreds of pieces a spam every week in your inbox just to keep up with your legitimate email correspondence. A Wall Street Journal article yesterday titled “Email’s Friendly Fire” has identified “colleague spam,” email from your coworkers who always press the “reply all” button. The article goes on to offer some solutions in the form of email sorting technology such as ClearContext.

Are we witnessing the death of email? Can blogs help out?

I always suspected the day would come when email would begin to die. First, with the wave of spam growing every year, legitimate email gets lost in the tide. There was an excellent article in the New Yorker in August describing this phenomenon called “Damn Spam: The losing war on junk e-mail”:

As the Web evolves into an increasingly essential part of American life, the sheer volume of spam grows exponentially every year, and so, it would appear, do the sophisticated methods used to send it. Nearly two million e-mails are dispatched every second, a hundred and seventy-one billion messages a day. Most of those messages have something to sell.

Second, corporate spam filters aren’t always accurate in identifying which emails are spam and which are not. I have witnessed several cases in which spam filters have gone berserk in the past few weeks inside my office and at the offices of others. The bottom line is: When you hit that “send” button on email, you can’t be so sure the recipient will get it, open it, and read it. Finally, the addressee can always claim, “I never got your email.”

Why not shift the responsibility on the readers by posting everything on blogs? Indeed, as you know, one of the origins of the blog in its current form was from an ah-ha moment: People emailing to one another discovered that the discussion thread amounted to something of value and thought the discussion could be posted publicly. Many corporations are trying out internal blogs as ways to share ideas and innovations, thus reducing the amount of “colleague spam,” I would hope—assuming their idea was more than “Brownies in the kitchen.”

Essentially communication is diversifying at a rapid pace. Chad Lorenz of Slate magazine declared “The Death of Email” just a few weeks ago. We communicators are hedging against the risk that email may not be infallible. Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, and blogs, I would argue amount to a communications potpourri. The great thing about blogs (and Facebook for that matter) is that you can see your post as soon as it goes online. “I didn’t get the message” can be a thing of the past if people trust the integrity of their message to be viewed by the public.

Perhaps a transparent blog posting in lieu of a secretive email message could save people from becoming victims of embarrassing gossip or other affairs. For private matters, it might be best to make a phone call or do what's sometimes called "Facebook in the flesh."