Talk Lab

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2009-11-30T13:42:00.001-08:00

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Who called?

2008-09-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling really down about the new polling numbers . What is happening? Why is this race so close?

I'm thinking about places to hide and weep, when my phone rings. Its Hope. She's calling from the Obama campaign to invite me to the opening of a field office. She's a volunteer.

Things seem a little better again...

Playing with "lifestreaming"

2008-08-05T21:08:00.000-07:00

After reading this article about "lifestreaming", I got a little curious.

Lifestreaming is apparently a name for software that aggregates all the feeds that you create on the web. For example, your del.icio.us posts, your blog posts, your Flickr posts, your Facebook status posts, etc. all have RSS feeds, and you can tell your lifestreaming service to automatically aggregate all those feeds to create a kind of uber blog.

To show that its different from a blog, some are experimenting with different layouts, such as posts that scroll horizontally like a timeline rather than vertically like a traditional blog.

I'm not really sure what use they are. I could see how it could be usefull for me to look at my own "lifestream" to remember something important I tagged or something on the Internets. But I'm not sure how other people would use a person's lifestream. Or why they would bother.

But in the interests of finding out, I made one, here. So far I'm still not sure why someone else might want to read it, but it is kind of fun seeing all the stuff I've been posting. Heck, its got me posting two blog posts in a row!

Perhaps, though, that's only productivity borne of novelty. We'll see!

GAL Justice

2008-08-05T20:59:00.000-07:00

I've been learning about discussions of Global Administrative Law, which is a legal framework for understanding all the various global bodies that now create so many regulations and standards that are important for how our global society works.

I ran across this article on CNN today about a Justice Department prosecution of individuals who had stolen 40 million credit card numbers.

The article points out that the crime is a global one. "Three of the defendants are from the United States; three are from Estonia; three are from Ukraine, two are from China and one is from Belarus."

The individuals were apparently prosecuted under American law. I'd be curious to know how effective American law is at prosecuting people outside of America who commit crimes like this. Are other countries bound to extradite the perps? Is there an automatic procedure, or does every extradition have to be negotiated individually?

When more crimes can be global like this, what structures of justice are most effective for protecting the rights of the accused, punishing guilty people, and even deciding what the rules for a global justice system should be? Who has the power?

Offshore drilling is useless.

2008-08-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

From TIME magazine:

The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now.

Defending the New Yorker cover

2008-07-20T16:29:00.000-07:00

After reading this article on WireTap magazine criticizing the recent New Yorker cover with the Obamas. Among other things, the article considers the image to be not satire but racism veiled as irony. One comment suggested that the image ought to be contained in the thought bubble of a bigot, to make explicitly clear that the image is "satire". But after reflecting on what the image says, as I should have already, I have come to appreciate the image as I think it was intended - a satire that challenged its readers to make their own judgments, and that implicates all of us in perpetuating the stereotypes it depicts, rather than blaming them on an imaginary bigot.

Good satire challenges the reader's own responsibility to the issue. If the New Yorker cover had a thought bubble from a "Fox News Exec" or a white hillbilly to clarify that the New Yorker does not believe these things about the Obamas, the reader would be excused from considering their own responsibility in propagating the false allegations and stereotypes. "Oh," we might think, "the New Yorker is not saying that I think this, or that our society is painting this picture". By blaming the racist images on another, the cover would excuse us from confronting our own complicity in propogating these ideas, and from considering how we out to respond to them on a personal level (Actually, the same cartoon with a thought bubble around it would be the real piece of racism).

Satire looses its bite when we contextualize it out of its meaning. The most famous piece of satire in perhaps all of English literature is Jonathan Swift's, "A Modest Proposal", in which he suggests that Irish babies ought to be eaten to control the island's population. At no point does he suggest that he's only joking. He also does not provide a literary thought bubble, such as "The following is what a bad person might say". He presents his case about baby eating and relies on the intelligence and morality of the reader to figure out that his piece is satire.

This New Yorker cover challenges us to confront our own stereotypes and make our own judgments. It neither blames the stereotypes on someone other than the reader nor relieves us of the responsibility of thinking about, understanding and then responding to the image ourselves.

When I first saw the cover, I, too, was shocked. But upon reflection, I think have learned a little about stereotypes and my own and my society's often unknowing role in propogating them. And isn't that exactly the point of good satire?

Governance without Government with Al Gore

2008-07-19T18:13:00.000-07:00

Maybe you have seen Al Gore's Challenge to the American people. We should come together as a county and abandon oil in 10 years. There are some interesting aspects in the speech that relate to expanding notions of what counts as governance.

For example, the video looks a great deal like what such a speech would look like if an elected leader had made it. American flags fill the back of the video. He is wearing a dark grey suit and a plain dark red tie, a favorite of Presidential candidates and Presidents alike. The video's framing suggests an official act of government.

Mr. Gore's language also links his challenge to Presidential acts of the past. He explicitly compares his challenge to President Kennedy's successful appeal to send an American to the moon.

The address is almost Presidential. It has the potential to guide viewers to link this challenge with official acts of government, and to view Al Gore's appeal almost like an appeal by government. With Congress and the President suffering historically low approval ratings, what does it mean when other leaders reach out to the country? It reminds me a little of how many of us found more comfort from Rudy Giuliani than the President after the attacks in New York City of 2001.

In both of these cases, it seems the institutions of national government have not filled the needs that many around the county feel. And so we turn to others who we think will lead our governance better than our government is doing.

Its curious that there is a distinction between governance and government, and that the latter is not always doing the former, and that the governed will search for their own sources of governance when their government is getting them what they want (and there are probably plenty of dangers with a situation like that, as well as opportunities).

But abstractions aside, its a little frightening that its happening now. Why is the national government having such a difficult time responding to an increasingly urgent crisis?

Here's the speech (And here's to hoping that we accept the challenge!):

Online organizing against lifting the ban

2008-07-17T17:27:00.000-07:00

Online organizing, with petitions, facebook groups and I recently heard about a Twitter petition, are one way to raise your voice (although don't stop there!).

Here is one petition against lifting the ban on drilling for more offshore oil. If you find others, please post them in the comments.

Only a dysfuctional system would drill for more

2008-07-17T17:15:00.000-07:00

CNN reports that Al Gore has come out strongly opposed to drilling for more oil.

"It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil 10 years from now," Gore said.

Mr. Gore puts very well what many of us have been wanting so badly to articulate. Another way to say it is to adjust an old truism - The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. And the definition of insanity that gets you put away for being a danger to yourself and others is doing the same destructive thing over and over and expecting a different result.

To cure an addiction, you don't give yourself "just a little more" of your drug of choice, you find ways to take yourself off of it entirely.

CNN and Snow on a fine line

2008-04-22T09:36:00.003-07:00

CNN may not have learned much from yesterday's NYTimes
article about media independence.

The New York Times reported that the Pentagon and the Administration have been promoting their message about the Iraq war through the supposedly independent analysts that all of the major news outlets have been employing.

There is nothing wrong with the government trying to get its message out to the public. The problem is this: The news media and the government cultivated an illusion that these individuals were in fact independent voices. They wore the skin of unimpeachable and objective observers of world events. But they were in fact carefully cultivated by the administration to articulate a specific position on Iraq and the conflict there.

And now CNN has hired Tony Snow, former White House Press Secretary, as a political contributor. Perhaps they hired him explicitly to bring a conservative voice to the network. But I hope that CNN is very careful about the kind of commentary they ask from him.

Larry King asked him who would win in November. Tony Snow replied, "I think [Sen. John] McCain's going to win, actually, because I think security and the economy both break his way."

Statements like this are fine if Mr. Snow is clearly portrayed as an advocate and not an objective analyst of political affairs. But it seems like it would be quite easy for him to take on the air of an analyst. At that point, statements of advocacy masked as analysis become at least a little pernicious.

McCain's Borrow and Spend Bill

2008-04-21T19:34:00.000-07:00

S. 2890 a bill introduced by Sen. John McCain.

OpenCongress describes this bill as intended "to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide for a highway fuel tax holiday." The bill will eliminate the gas tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day of 2008.

Even McCain acknowledges that the money of the gas tax goes to something useful. So to make up the difference, his bill will replace the funds lost from the tax with money from the General Treasury. In essence, Sen. McCain is borrowing money from an already cash strapped federal government that is paying for two wars, huge tax cuts for the wealthy, and out-of-control defense spending.

Once again, a leader of the Republican Party is borrowing money from the government and tax-paying citizens to fund a project with only short term benefits and long term negative economic and environmental consequences.

Some complain that the Democratic party likes to "tax and spend". As this bill demonstrates, the Republican party is just as fond of spending (if not more so), but it gets shy when it comes to asking for the funds to pay for its adventures in foreign countries.

Proposing taxes sufficient to their spending would force the GOP to be accountable to an American public that is reluctant to have its money spent on frivolous projects. Instead, the GOP has developed a penchant for cutting taxes and hiding its spending by borrowing.

It borrows from social programs like education and social security. It borrows from the health of the environment. It borrows from workers' livelihoods. It borrows from the resources and the people that the United States needs to rely on in the future.

Collaborative law-making, Law professors debate and a web 2.0 project creates

2008-04-15T19:58:00.000-07:00

Penn Law Professors debate collaborative environmental law-making

Here are their arguments, as I understand them:

Coglianese argues that the purpose of environmental law-making should be the greatest public good, and that collaborative law-making processes become dedicated not to the public good, but to making a deal among competing interests. The results of such processes then often reflect the lowest common denominator to which parties could agree.

Orts argues that command-and-control statutory processes for environmental law-making are just as dominated by deal-making as collaborative processes, but at least the latter invites deal-making into the open. The principle weakness of command-and-control law-making is that (1) law-makers do not have all the information that they would need to make a good decision and a collaborative process would find more information and that (2) policy decisions are value judgments and collaborative processes can enable those who hold opposing values to negotiate a settlement, rather than allowing the decision to be made by third-party policy-makers.

As a partisan of Wiki-wisdom and participatory civil society, I lean towards Orts at first. But Coglianese's criticisms strike several serious blows. For example, I can accept that many policy decisions are values judgments that can't be decided by "experts". When the law-makers are not elected by and accountable to the public, then I would agree that these individuals should not adjudicate the values of a community they do not legitimately represent. But if they are elected officials, they are not alien "experts", but rather individuals chosen precisely to make these value judgments on behalf of the community. In the end I am torn between their two arguments.

So to cut the gordion knot, I'll just point to a different model of collaborative law-making. (Whew. Two paths diverged and I left the forest) At PublicMarkup.org the Sunlight Foundation has written a piece of proposed legislation entitled, "Transparency in Government Act". The bill's text is written like blog entries - un-editable to users. But there is endless space for comments next to the text. And the bill's authors are free to incorporate or not incorporate comments into their text.

This model escapes the deal-making, lowest-common-denominator-finding problem that Coglianese associates with collaborative law-making. How? It says, "Forget you. This is my bill, and it will say exactly what I want it to say". But it is collaborative in two senses. First, it is collaborative in the sense that the software and mission of the site invite participation from internet users. Second, the bill takes shape in public and outside of the traditional avenues of bill creation such as closed Congressional legislative shops.

In this way, PublicMarkup.org does not dilute its strength through collaboration, while at the same time earning the benefits of public participation, debate, fact-gathering and perspective-enlarging.

A caveat: the PublicMarkup.org process is an iterative one. It supplements rather than replaces traditional legislative processes, because its bill must still be introduced, accepted and legitimized by a representatives of the entire community.

I'm so excited about PublicMarkup.org and the prospect of open-source, publicly created legislation that it seems likely there will be more about it on this blog....

:)

Too much division of labor causes a dearth of democracy?

2008-04-15T17:38:00.000-07:00

John Dunn in his book Democracy. A History quotes the French revolutionary theorist, the Abbe Sieyes,

The more a society advances in the arts of trade and production, the moore we see the work connected to public functions should, like private employments, be carried out less expensively and more effectively by men who make it their exclusive occupation.

For one thing, the quote illustrates that Marx was not the first theorist of capitalism to influence and inspire revolutionary thought. Dunn points out that Sieyes' determination that public offices should be held by career public officials in an advanced society comes directly from Adam Smith and his theories of the division of labor.

And today, public functions are often carried out by men and women who exclusively occupy them. Our vision of modern democracy is deeply intertwined with this vision of divided labor throughout society. This vision contrasts sharply with democracy's first fans. In ancient Athens, each citizen (of course, those citizens were only upper class wealthy males) had a responsibility to participate in public life. Today many people shy away from participating in public roles that reach outside of their job description.

What does it mean for a state with democratic aspirations to nurture a culture which tells people to butt out of public affairs unless they are professionals? Do we have a duty to play a role in governing our community?

To the media: don't hush democratic politics!

2008-02-08T10:35:00.000-08:00

CNN is not the only news source saying that "Democrats dread drawn-out, costly campaign."

This is a sort of wacky argument. Elections are supposed to be opportunities for Americans to choose their elected officials. In a related point, a person's vote is supposed to mean something.

Now let's consider the GOP. With Romney gone and Huckabee not doing too well, McCain seems to be the Republican nominee. This is true despite the fact that many Republican states have yet to vote. So every voter who lives in a state that has not yet voted is effectively disenfranchised by the early end of the Republican race for the nomination.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats in states like Maryland and Pennsylvania have a rare opportunity - for the first time in a long time - our votes for the Democratic candidate are meaningful. Don't lets let this power go to our heads.

The power of the vote exists whatever CNN says. But its message is nonetheless damaging. When major media outlets predict winners, those choices become more likely to win simply by virtue of having been choses as a winner. Perceptions of "who is going to win" will influence people's decisions about who to vote for.

So by saying the Democratic party is in trouble because the race might not be over long before the finish line, CNN is supporting the GOP over the Democratic party. This is just as bad as when its analysts suggest the GOP is split and weak because its members disagree with each other.

The democratic process NEEDS conflict. It needs individuals and parties to disagree with one another, and it relies on different interests getting together to hash out compromises and build new common ground.

Message to CNN: Stop stuffing the ballot boxes of public discourse, and let democracy, in all its squalid glory, function as intended.

And to the Democratic Party: Fight. For all you're worth, fight for what you believe in, as long you keep your ethics and your moral standards about you.

Here's to a long race and an exciting convention!

The Wallists - What kind of security do we really want?

2008-02-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

"They made a desert and called it peace"

There is an article in Le Monde today titled (trans. by me) "Israel may build a wall on the Egyptian frontier". This new wall is a response to Monday's suicide attack in Israel in which two Palestinians allegedly slipped into Israel from Egypt. You may also remember a few days ago that Palestinians managed to get through a breach in a border wall into Egypt and transported food, fuel and furniture back into the Gaza Strip.

There are a lot of walls being thrown up in democratic countries these days. Israel has got a big one. US politicians on the right love to talk about "securing the border" with a fence and super-modern surveillance gadgetry. What is behind all this "wallism"? And where's it headed?

I don't know, but it seems to me that many people have been seduced by a particular variety of security. They have come to see "security" as the absence of foreign threats. If you build walls and watch people carefully, you can keep foreign threats away.

Unfortunately, it is hard to determine how far "wallism" would let itself go. If one's answer to feelings of insecurity is to restrict movement and keep people farther apart from each other, domestic security will come to depend increasingly upon walls as well. How to keep inner city crime out of the suburbs? Build a wall. How to keep suburban crime out of the downtown business district? Build a wall. And outside of their home districts, only let people travel to their places of business.

Security is more subtle than walls. It is not just a negative "absence of danger", it is a positive feeling of well-being and connectedness to one's surroundings.

Israel's new wall seems to me to be a sign that it is getting too easy to answer the problems of security by building walls. We are right expect "security" from our politicians, but I don't think we should be so eager to accept such a false solution.

2008-01-20T11:23:00.000-08:00

I am wondering about the real importance of blogging to democracy.

Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture agrees with many other advocates of the blog. He argues that blogs allow for asynchronous public discourse. That is, discourse in which people talk about public issues, but they don't all have to be in the same place at the same time. For decades, local democratic traditions of town halls and the like have been atrophying. Lessig and others believe that blogs create a kind of virtual town hall. They also argue that blogs take control of public discourse out of the hands of the corporations that own the news media.

On the other hand, other internet experts have pointed out, correctly, I think, that the internet tends to make people focus on their own increasingly small areas of interest and expertise. I could read blogs all day and only ever read ones that I agree with.

So are blogs a tool of democracy or of narcissism? I guess it depends on how a blogger uses them. But are there rules or cultural norms that bloggers should be expected to follow to make blogs a more effective space for public debate?

Watch the author of Fast Food Nation on Fora.TV

2007-12-16T09:12:00.000-08:00

I recommend very highly this interview of the author of Fast Food Nation and other important works about the reality of the American economy.

His work serves to illustrate his two most important points. First, he argues that the economy's structure, more than any "evil" power-brokers, that depresses the wages of the poor and middle class, and neglects consumers' safety. He offers the example of a CEO who supports unfair wages to protect his or her corporation's profits. Were this person replaced today, the new CEO tomorrow would have to keep doing the same thing. Its the structure of our economy's laws and regulations that force corporations to behave as they do.

As another example, he recalls speaking with meat packing executives appalled by the conditions of their workers. But as long as any competitor is allowed to abuse employees for the sake of profit, other companies will be forced to do so. Or face losing their businesses.

His second point regards the mythology surrounding the "Free Market". Many corporations and political leaders advocate for diminished government regulation of health standards, environmental standards and wage standards in the name of the "Free Market". But Schlosser points out that even 100 years ago, a pro-business republican administration (Teddy Roosevelt) recognized that left to their own devices and abandoned to the pressures of unregulated competition, corporations themselves would destroy their own markets. Free markets, America understood a century ago, require structure and boundaries to remain free over time.

Of course, Schlosser says all this better than I do, so please check out the video.

Tonight at rehearsal

2007-08-06T19:01:00.000-07:00

Tonight at rehearsal for Anything Goes the male voices were, as usual, a great deal quieter than the ladies'. The women, especially the younger school-aged ones were pretty confident with their parts, even when reading them for the first time. The guys sat nervously and affected macho poses while trying to make sure that wrong notes were too soft to be noticed.

The effect endured when we took a break. Many of the women chatted and most of us men sat with our arms folded or eyes buried pointlessly in sheet music. Real men, we all know, aren't "chatty" (Although research shows men and women talk equally much - manly stoicism is a story we tell and impose)

What difference does our hard concepts of masculinity impose on our government and culture, I wonder? At the least, our community theater might be better. At best?

Carnival of Conflict 4

2007-08-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

Thank you for the excellent posts this month. The Carnival's contributors have highlighted a spectrum of conflicts from the political to the personal. It strikes me that in these, as well as in posts from other editions and from all over the internet, we bloggers tend to be very explicit. Our political commentary is direct and we say precisely what we mean.

Where is the place for illusion in our arguments and critiques? We like to use short metaphors from the arts ("political theater", grandstanding") and and other sources, but even in our metaphors we tend to like our phrases to only mean one thing at a time.

Is it something to do with the medium of blogging? Did we just not learn the art of
storytelling as children? As you go through the posts this month, perhaps you can think about how we are writing, and how that might shape what we say.

And perhaps the ways in which we choose to fight shape the outcomes of our battles.

International

Esther Garvi argues that hate won't bring justice in African politics in Love vs. Hate.

Domestic

What would Jesus do about health care in America? Tracee Sioux argues for universal care as a Christian value.

The United States has had many "Foundings", and Ashok considers two of the earliest in his post, For Resolution: In what way are the Founding Fathers religious?

YID with Lid considers NGO accountability in Israel in the post, New Israel Fund to NGO Monitor: How DARE YOU TELL PEOPLE THE TRUTH!

Steven Silvers discusses the departure of two anti-WalMart political leaders for Presidential campaign jobs. Is he right when he suggests WakeUpWalMart defections might mean union-backed activist groups have done all they can do"?
Democracy vs. universal suffrage by Gavin Putland calls for a new kind of electoral college to rationalize democratic politics.

Lucynda Riley shares an article from the Seattle Times about standardization of schoool curricula in her post, This is why my son is homeschooled.

Is the filibuster a good tool or a grandstanding device in the US Senate? Mad CKane , in her song parody, Yet another filibuster song parody (The Full-a-Bluster Song) , says that the GOP can like it or dislike it, depending on what's convenient.

In Democratic Letter Writers Don't Think and The Writer Who Cried Wolf , Adam Graham criticizes a left-leaning letter to the editor.

Indigo Warrior introduces us to a new blog in Welcome to my Blogspot and shares a conviction about civic responsibility.

Bill Dvorak philosophizes on Politics: the choice that determines humanity's fate

Doug Ragan encourages the right wing to keep taking advantage of the Internet for supporting grassroots politiking on the immigration debate in What Everyone Missed in the Immigration Debate

Personal

There is A Bear in the Neighborhood! and Sheppard Salter asks what to do about it. Laws, safety, doubt and fear all mix to present a dilemma. Could the bear situation also be a metaphore?

Article Syndication: The Sky is the limit so explore and aim for the sky by Mike Harmon offers strategies for spreading your message to readers through the internet.

Kristie Watson discusses the difficulty of resolving arguments when love and money are both involved, and the importance of compromise. The post is Marriage vs. money

Laura Young offers advice for how to stay cool in difficult interactions in Money, Honey, Part 2: Never Assume...

Pres. Hugo Chavez's threat

2007-07-25T13:57:00.000-07:00

CNN's story yesterday about Venezuela's Hugo Chavez: Chavez calls Honduran cardinal 'imperialist clown'

The story itself isn't too surprising, but it reminded me why I think President Chavez is a negative force in the Americas.

I agreed with some lefties' optimism about him when I visited Venezuela in 2006 for the World Social Forum (a gathering of thousands of activists for networking and workshops). One of the crowning events was a rally with Chavez and Cindy Sheehan and other luminaries. Before the rally I could believe in Chavez' role as a liberator and warrior against the tyranny of Western capitalist oppression. It was easy to see and hear about the good things he's done for the country, not least of which is overturning the western idea that national success lies in ever greater reliance on free markets and corporations. Plus, Chavez was hosting the Forum, which focuses exclusively on how nonviolent, diverse activism. It seemed to me he really was categorically different from the way the US Administration likes to portray him.

However the rally was chock full of military symbolism. Chavez's supporters wore red berets. Dancers even attacked with foam swords a black cloth with symbols of corporate logos. In one biography of Chavez, he explains that one goal of his Bolivarian revolution is to ease distinctions between the military and civilians. One one hand this means the military is expected to help civilians more, but one the other hand, it seems to me this philosophy threatens to militarize the entire society.

And the news of Venezuela's treatment of the freedom of the press keeps getting worse. And will Chavez willingly relinquish power, or will he keep amending the constitution to keep himself on top?

In the end, I think neither side is right about Chavez. He's not a bloodthirsty dictator, exploiting the people. But he's not a savior of the left, either. It may be that in his conviction about what is right for his country, he cares more about the ends of achieving justice than the means.

And if the best progressive leaders in history have taught us anything, its that lasting peace must be achieved peacefully, and lasting justice must be achieved justly.

CNN Debates unpredictable?

2007-07-23T19:27:00.001-07:00

Watching the coverage of the CNN YouTube debates, Mr. Cooper and the other pundits seem to be talking a great deal about how the debate format, featuring questions from YouTube users, is a victory for popular participation in politics. "Ordinary people" are able to ask their questions. The debate, they argue is more 'genuine' and unpredictable because the People are asking their questions.

But really? 2,900 people submitted videos. CNN picked 37 to show to the candidates. How unpredictable could they be, when the debate organizers can pick the questions they want to ask from such variety.

I love the format, and I think its very exciting, but in itself its really no less orchestrated than traditional debates. What the format does is shows us the next steps to take - bring citizens deeper into state politics and local politics. Leaders should craft policies that make it easier for citizens to participate and harder for money to talk.

The YouTube CNN debates is a great start, and from steps like this we start rebuilding American democracy.

Blog Carnival #3 - Text Only

2007-06-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Carnival of Conflict's 3rd Edition - Text Only

Most of the conflicts that submitters write about this month are domestic. And I think that leads to an interesting idea about the times we live in. The conflicts around us today tend to be pretty clearly political ones, in which the line between domestic and international is grey. Take one common topic for this Carnival, the war in Iraq. The fighting is completely real, but who still believes it will be resolved through force alone?

Its comforting to believe in non-political contests between rivals' brute strength. For Americans, it is a narrative structure that has served us well in the past, because it makes political questions, questions of identity and culture, much easier. If its us doing it, its right. Maybe its a tactic societies have always used. Probably binary systems of one society coherently struggling against another have never existed, despite the myth. This month's posts seem to confirm that there are not issues that only pertain to "us", an "other", or a clear conflict between these two. When Hakim Abdullah asks, Is Islam Compatible with Democracy? the answer matters to societies on every continent. When Grey Swan asks Are we too tolerant? the answer is important in inner cities as well as in the prison cells of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

The politics of fear, Ian Welsh's topic in Ok, Once More: No Existential Threat , are useful to cast individuals into playing their parts in the old two-sided story. But as Muse points out in How about... Rebuild Sderot Underground? there is no national bunker to seal one society off from the rest of the world. No nation is an island (even those that-technically-are islands), and conflicts between nations are also domestic conflicts as well.

An old poem gives a lesson. In the Iliad , Achilles is the symbol of physical strength and there is no man, not even mighty Hector that can stand against him. But religion, embodied by the fractious greek pantheon, brings him down. It is Odysseus, the most cunning politician of the Argives that finally defeats strong-walled Ilium by tricking them into creating their own defeat. Even all those centuries ago, a poet tells us that conflict is shaped not by arms, but by thought.

I hope you enjoy the Carnival, and please join the discussion!

International

Is censorship right? by Pooj.

Hakim Abdullah asks, Is Islam Compatible with Democracy?

Close Guantanamo demands Anja Merret. There is no excuse, she argues, for the mistreatment of those in American custody in Cuba.

Domestic

Undercover Black Man shares Songs of Negro patriotism , exploring the relationship between race, power and war.

In Is Politics Reducible to Rhetoric?" Ashok tries to untangle politics and rhetoric with help from Machiavelli, the sophists of Greece, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
When the media hurts by Alfa King deals with freedom of the press.

Ian Welsh speaks out against the politics of fear in the United States in Ok, Once More: No Existential Threat

Muse offers a solution to calm fears of terrorism: make everyone live in and underground bunker. The article is How about... Rebuild Sderot Underground?

Partisanship in Congress and divisions caused by the immigration reform bill are Troy Stouffer's subject in Republican Backstabbing and Political Suicide .

Mad Kane targets Mr. Giuliani for parody in The GOP's in for a Rudy Awakening

Hell's Handmaiden finds what she shares in common with a soldier in Me and the Guy in the Army

Are we too tolerant? by Grey Swan discusses how society should respond to memorials to victims (who were sometimes perpetrators) of violent crimes in inner cities.

Lucinda Riley writes about executive privilege and the Bush Administration in This is shocking .

William Dvorak makes a case for anarchism in The Political Norm of Centuries .

eHarmony complaint proves once again that lawsuits are a great way to generate serious publicity for extremist silliness by Steven Silvers is about the press' response to a lawsuit about sexual orientation descrimination.

The legacy of 'Macaca' is alive and well for The Richmond Democrat in this post on YouTube politics and George Allen.

Freethought community still united by vjack

Personal

Chris finds totalitarian and Maoist tendencies in behavior on the web in Wushu and the Second Cultural Revolution

How to complain and get a good result by Paul Michael

A poem from a dead boy by Ken Nubo offers wisdom on living life in the moment.

Male v. Female Spirituality by Brandon Peele examines how people relate to spirituality and philosophy.

Sheppard Salter identifies More Scams that Sabotage the Simple Life

Thanks for coming to the carnival, and I look forward to your responses.
Find out about submitting your work to the carnival here.

Read Ehrenreich's Article

2007-06-12T22:41:00.000-07:00

Her article in The Nation is a fun read as well as an important one. Her point in a nutshell is that the staggeringly vast inequality of America's economy is bad for our economy and our society.

Its no surprise that the ridiculous class differences in the US are bad for democracy, but Ehrenreich also points out that it is bad for the economy too. We talk about sustainability a lot these days, (see Fora.tv for more on this topic) and an economy that concentrates wealth and power in an increasingly small group at an accelerating rate is not a sustainable economy.

My favorite quote from the article: "As the Times puts it: "It's as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent."

But what to do about it? Is it enough to just increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans? There are plenty or corporate jobs that people just wouldn't do if they couldn't make scads of money doing it...is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Are there other strategies that should be used instead/as well? Could there be changes to legal codes governing corporations?

The article is a good read, and a good thought-provoker, too.

Farming co-op?

2007-06-11T22:27:00.000-07:00

I'd like to write more about this idea later, but I'd just like to throw it out there tonight to see if anybody knows any resources I should look at...

What if we started in the county a farming cooperative? Howard County, like many counties, is hemorrhaging farmland, and none, I suspect, is safe from the endless thirst of housing developers to build mcMansions. What if instead the County acquired farmland for community farming?

People would sign up to perform tasks associated with the farm, from working the land to administrative tasks, etc. They would be paid in credits, which would be cashed in for a proportional share of the farm's produce.

This could be a terrific pedagogical tool, allowing students to participate in a project that gets them outside, working on a project with real tangible results and tangible applications of the chemistry, biology, math and other lessons they learn in school. And working side by side with other community members, the farm would help get kids and other community members reconnected to each other.

Also, since work would be by the credit system, and the farm would be open to all who cared to register, people could be very flexible about their schedules, and work as little as they like.

It sounds like a very challenging project to organize, logistically and legally...but I think the potential benefits are pretty substantial. Has something like this already been put into practice?

"Art for sale"

2007-06-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

A new picture I made today:

"Art for sale" is the name. I'm not actually trying to sell anything.

Habermas article about free press

2007-06-04T21:29:00.000-07:00

Jurgen Habermas, one of the foremost theorists of civil society today, argues in How to save the quality press? for state support of the free press.

The core of his argument is that markets, which once supported the independence of the press and its role in a healthy public sphere, now threaten the independence of the press and its role in democracy. When media outlets must be as profitable as possible in order to survive, they will cease to provoke, to introduce new ideas to the public sphere (or the state agenda). They will simply be mirrors that reflect and then reinforce the preconceptions of an increasingly uncritical public.

Habermas states his argument very well, and we can see around us examples of what he fears. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show continuously levels criticism at CNN and other major news outlets for selling news as a consumer commodity and not as a public good. Flash, fear-baiting and celebrity chasing are all tactics media outlets chasing dollars must turn to for survival.

Anderson Cooper said it well during his interview on the Daily Show. Stewart criticized the glitz of CNN television with its 3-D animations, scary-voiced announcers and melodramatic reporting. Cooper replied that you have to play the game. When your ability to report - your ability to communicate with the public - depends on the money you can bring to the station, the winner is going to be the one who feeds news consumers what they want.

Habermas' proposed solution is state support of the media to protect its ability to report honestly. And after reading the article, I'm inclined to agree.

Carnival of Maryland, 8th Edition

2007-06-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

Though she is but small, she is fierce

says Helena about Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream. This edition of the Carnival of Maryland shows that the Old Line state is likewise small but home to many fiercly dedicated to a wide variety of pursuits, from nature to politics and from gaming to graduation.

Which highlights a classic connundrum of our age. How are we to celebrate and promote diversity of perspectives and then draw particular lessons from what we have experienced? Each of us, after seeing these posts, understands "Maryland" a little differently. For me, I feel a little closer now to the state's urban life - its baseball, its bookstores, and to its local government. How do the posts of this edition influence your perception of Maryland?

Derek theorizes about Blizzard's Next Move: The Future After Starcraft II

Images of one of Maryland's best known migratory bird species at Geese in the summer by The Ridger.

Stan Modjesky considers contemporary literary culture from a book-seller's perspective in Book-burning in Kansas City.

A 50 year plan: Social Security by Michael Swartz provides an analysis of social security.

Alwitt Xu provides a list of CSS resources for web design at CSS Tools Collection.

Soccer Dad expresses sympathy for the travails of Orioles' manager, Sam Perlezzo in Embattled.

Exhasperated with overcrowded schools and irresponsible development, John Harris proposes, Wicomico County should enact a building moratorium.

John Harris also shares his perspective on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan in Let us finish our mission.

Commencement by therapydoc explores the author's complicated relationship to graduations. We love them, we dread them, we anticipate them eagerly, and they bore us silly. Why, in the end, do we do it?

Joyce Dowling writes about events in Prince George's County including a Juneteenth even on Creating a Jubilee County: Price George's Co., MD.

Joining the celebration of Rachel Carson's centenary, Pinenut writes about Carson, her connection to Silver Spring, and the events commemorating her life today in Rachel Carson's Silver Spring.

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I hope you have enjoyed the Carnival of Maryland, and I hope you will consider submitting your work to the next edition. Find out how here.

Anti-Globalisation Protest in Germany

2007-06-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

The BBC runs a story today about a large protest rally in Germany to protest the upcoming G-8 meeting there. These protests happen fairly regularly, and the question on the minds of many is: does it work?

Or perhaps more accurately, most have decided their answer to that question, and far too many have decided, NO, protest rallies are not effective at changing policy.

But its not too difficult to see that demonstrations are more effective than they get credit for being. It seems to me they serve three primary purposes.

1) Expose policies as contested: Many CEOs and right-wing think tanks would have people around the world believe that laissez-faire economic policies are generally accepted by the peoples of the developed world as the right way to run international economics. But these policies are not clear cut and there is not consensus about them. A protest demonstrates to undecideds that there is a debate to be had on a subject, and that their participation in the debate is important.

2) Build connections and solidarity within a movement: When thousands of individuals participate in a single rally together, they are likely to strengthen the ties of ideology that bind them. At the rally they may make new contacts with other activists, learn and develop new ideas for further action, and deepen the cultural appeal and strength of the movement. Consider the prevalence of different kinds of political theater during rallies: giant puppets, people in costumes, etc. These are designed to look good in the media, but also to strengthen the social bonds among protesters. Then when marchers go home, they are full of new ideas and energy for carrying the movement forward.

3) Support elites' efforts to change policy: Perhaps the best example of this was the famous Battle in Seattle , when protests helped create an atmosphere in which negotiators from developing countries were more able to resist the pressure of concession-hungry G-8 negotiators. Maybe protests are unlikely to change the minds of those dead-set to oppose them. But they can certainly shape the opinions of those in and out of power who have yet to take an active role in a debate.

So will the rally in Germany be effective in these respects? Tens of thousands of people think so strongly enough to go there. For now, at least, I'm willing to take their word for it.

Learning about art and power

2007-05-30T16:46:00.001-07:00

Today I'm starting research about the relationship between art and power for a short essay.

It seems now that it is a relationship defined, like so many other relationships, by contention among competing forces. There is art that provides alternatives to state power, and this kind of art tends to be emphasized pretty heavily today - art as emancipation for sub-altern groups.

On the other hand many kinds of art have also been defined by ruling classes - the tradition of portrait painting was, at least at first, produced by artists for the wealthy.

One thing that seems pretty constant. Artists, practicing skills that do not directly produce the goods they need for life, need support from other parts of society. Long ago, metal-working artists practiced their craft (and perhaps even invented their craft) for the benefit of kings and nobles. At other times society or wealthy patrons have taken it upon themselves as a collective to support artistic endeavors. In the latter case, artists tend to be more free to do work that is not for the benefit of any particular individual or client, but is rather directed at all of society.

Many questions emerge. What about this artist/not-artist dichotomy? Can people include artistic production in their lives without being solely artists? Is that a possibility that modern digital media make more available or less available than it has been in the past? And would it be positive or negative to have more self-supported amateur artists?

And the boundaries of "art"...is a YouTube video art? Could software be art?

Carnival of Conflict #2

2007-05-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the May 29, 2007 edition of the Carnival of Conflict. Thank you to all who participated this month. We have great posts, and I look forward to the discussion.

For information about the Carnival including a description, archives and instructions for submitting your own posts to the next carnival, visit here.

Iraq is on the minds of many in the Carnival of Conflict this month. Some, such as Anja Merret and madcap discuss the war explicitly. Others are concerned with related issues of international and domestic strife. Faisal Devji considers the relationship of Islam and Christitanity in Europe. Tim , Doug Ragan and Mad Kane are writing about domestic conflict that stems from the war, continents away from policy-makers and some of the citizens concerned about it. (Which asks the question, "could the citizens of Iraq, the US, the UK and other nations talk to each other?)

Other carnies write about other conflicts. Alfa King's topic is labor organizing. Samir poses for the internet age a question that has been on the minds of democratic theorists for centuries. Is it so great to let the people decide? Who died and made us king?

For all the strife around the world and in the pages of this carnival, I think we see here a pretty good example of why democracy is something in which we should continue to engage. John Harper explains his belief that violence takes more shapes than we realize. Even not trusting a person can be a form of violence, he says. Violent conflict, then, is a pattern that reappears at every level of our society, from military conflict in Israel and Palistine (and over Jewish identity) to college campuses to emotionally abusive inlaws. Violent and destructive conflict takes many forms, it seems, but it is one principle repeating in many contexts.

Could it be that strategies for managing interpersonal conflict, such as those discussed by
Chris and CA could help channel conflict in other forms? I think that making this connection among different kinds of conflict is a powerful argument for democratic forms of government.

Democracy, or more simply the ability of individuals to participate in questioning, improving and celebrating society, gives us the chance to understand the perspectives of those in each part of our society. Through discussion (and blog carnivals) violent conflict can be a seed for productive conflict such as respectful debate over ideas and principles.

Thanks so much for your posts this month, and as always, I hope you'll join the discussion below. (And include your comments about how to make the carnival better!)

Enjoy!

International

Anja Merret asks What about the war in Iraq, Mr. Brown?

madcap considers war-time rhetoric in Berlin by Christmas or Just Forget About It

Islam's role in Europe is the subject of Christendom's Muslim Midwife: Part I by Faisal Devji

Tim reacts to a proposal of Senator McCain for a new approach to international peace and conflict in Senator John McCain Envisions A League of Democracies

Domestic

Adam Graham wants to Politicize Everything

Union Leaders demonstrate as NPC holds its first meeting by Alfa King

Sammy Benoit says Tom Friedman is Only Trying to Protect the Jews

Ted Reimers discusses Ways to Increase Security and Safety on College Campuses

Samir asks about democratic fundamentals in Tyrannis Populi: Who are 'the people' anyway and who says they are always right?

If This Is True, My Head May Explode by Mad Kane

Jason Kirk parodies the gun control debate in The Oven Control Debate

Doug Ragan writes about conflict in the US legislative branch in Bush's Approval Rating at 33%, Congress 29%

Bill Towson asks, Is the Military Outdated?

Personal

Withholding Violence by John Harper

Tim Abbott explores a balance between avoiding and seeking conflict in Elephants in the Room

Chris discusses a visual model for dealing with interpersonal conflict in Breaking the Drama Triangle

Alwitt Xu provides a CSS tools collection.

Good Riddance Rosie O'Donnell by Tracy Coenen

Sheila C. introduces her family in My In-Laws Rolled In a Gigantic Nutshell of Chocoloate-Covered Psychosis

Business life lesson - conflict resolution by CA

Thanks for coming to the carnival, and I look forward to your responses.

Find out about submitting your work to the carnival here.

Public Sphere on a Dead Man's Chest: Politics of the Pirates of the Carribean

2007-05-27T21:10:00.000-07:00

Maybe Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is not transcendent political theater, but when I saw it today, I couldn't help but think that it carries a message (intended or not) to today's political climate.

On face value, the politics are simple. An evil corrupt and powerful official is trying to brutally and ruthlessly kill the heroes. The heroes (this is an American film) represent freedom, the oppressed, liberty, etc. etc. This is a perfectly traditional dramatic conflict, although today, it is a little bit subversive. Compare Pirates to the upcoming The Kingdom . The Kingdom seems from the trailer to be an example of a different kind of traditional American film story. Virtuous G-men go into somewhere dangerous to clean out the evil-doers. In these years when dissent from the Government line is considered disloyalty and nearly sedition, telling a story about smelly and drunken but virtuous outsiders resisting and overcoming an evil authority is downright radical.

And the plot thickens. Who is the villain? Not just "The British", a favorite punching bag for American anti-authority films, but an unholy usurpation of British state power by a for profit corporation! (A rejected name for the film was, I've heard, Halliburton on the High Seas )

There are all sorts of things to look at. For example, it seems to me that the pirates could be a kind of middle class. They'd done some pretty terrible things (including enslaving the spirit of the oppressed - Calypso), and no one doubts their devotion to limited self interest.

Also, does Davy Jones have a place in this discussion? Or does his role not extend into the political battle that is happening in the movie?

And the final moral? The pirates unite in the end, but what really saves the day is the heroism of the two cleanest and whitest pirates, Elizabeth and Will. Can the downtrodden never create free social and political space for themselves without defectors from the elite class?

Set sail for liberty. Har, har har. *groan*

House of the woods: Zero-footprint architecture?

2007-05-24T19:48:00.000-07:00

Here is a visual aid to help explain my question/idea.

What if buildings had to leave the ecosystem of the place they are built on the same? So if you built a house in the woods, you'd have to let the woods stay. Only very limited chopping down of trees.

I think it would help us deal with climate change if our culture and built environment were to ease the boundaries of built/wild, or inside/outside. Or perhaps it would be better to say we should let the outside inside. Suburban sprawl is a kind of example of the built world encroaching farther into the unbuilt. Today we need to use our formidable talent for design to reverse the flow - let the outside come into our homes and buildings.

This picture is concept art for one such building. A forest home, with stiff panels for easily constructed and customizable walls, struts to keep it off the forest floor, and a hard top with sealed holes to allow the house to be built around the trees.

A moment reveals plenty of problems with this idea, but maybe ideas like this one could spark debate and discussion over how to do the necessary: reduce the footprint we make as a society, and reduce our cultural propensity to force the natural environment (and even our own natural bodies and minds) into regular shapes with right angles.

Lennon Documentary: stories of the revolution

2007-05-22T21:59:00.000-07:00

The 2006 documentary The U.S. v. John Lennon stirred feelings in me that I think reflect a great question in the American Left currently. People like me have heard stories about optimism crushed by reality. We've heard about touchy-feely naivete. Middle class kids getting their kicks by smoking pot and rebelling against their parents. Unrealistic. The words they used are tainted with the negative light on these activists: "love", "peace", and even "activist". These are the narratives through which we understand the protest movements of the Viet Nam war years.

And these narratives are the ones through which mainstream American culture understands the politics of those days.

There are alternative narratives like the documentary. Democracy in the Streets which I wrote about last month is another counter-narrative. These show another perspective and another set of stories and experiences. There was real intellectual force to the left. And this force was beyond simple anti-war and anti-establishment. Certainly there were real problems. In the operation of political power, hypocrisy and abuse can happen. Miller's book gives a good explanation of some of the problems that developed in the student protest movement. But real vision was present as well. In the documentary Lennon appears in footage calling for peace. He calls for peace everywhere: in the world, in the city, in the bedroom. Everywhere.

So it turn out that social transformation like we talk about today was the goal of some. They hoped to transform people and our social and cultural machines such that we could stop producing the many kinds of violence that appear at every level of our societies. What happened? Why are most narratives today that the peace-niks failed? And why are the peaceful themselves marginalized?

Lennon said at a concert, (I'm paraphrasing) so what if flower power didn't work? We start with something else. He also said that people make a mistake when they say they see kids getting bored with "activism" and think the revolution is over. The revolution, he said, the peaceful transformation of every aspect of society, will take a long time. The stories tell us that ideals of the protest movements were wishy washy and have passed away. But maybe those are just stories. "War is over, if we want it".

Easy web application design

2007-05-22T19:38:00.000-07:00

Scratch is great, and YahooPipes it cool too (although am I the only one who still finds it to have a decent learning curve?). But we still need progress in the 'easy web application design' department. I've been trying to get Ruby on Rails to work, but the tutorials are written for people comfortable with using the Terminal on macs. And usability and command-line interfaces do not often go together.

Is there something that can make web programming as intuitive as the programming of Scratch? or does the computer future depend on educating the public on the methods of object oriented programming and control-view-model architecture?

This old revolution

2007-05-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

The protagonists of the revolutions I know anything about tend to come in two general forms. First, there is a disgruntled elite that, while powerful, isn't as powerful as it would like to be (the new upper class of merchants in America in the 18th cen., the middle class in France in the 18th cen.). Second, they empower a large but previously disenfranchised group to upset the political structure that both groups perceived as deleterious.

We could even put this model in sort of socialist terms, if we were so inclined. In a given power structure, there is a group with excess social labor (labor for effecting social change) and a group with excess social capital (a new class with new wealth and aspirations). Put together excess labor and excess capital and you get growth.

Lets look at today. Some have talked about a green "revolution". Technology will "revolutionize" the way we interact with the environment. Many also talk about a kind of social revolution, reforming government to be more democratic, transformingourselves, our communities, our cities, our farms, our businesses -- everything.

Who are the actors in this revolution? Corporations and think tanks are quite active. For all the democratizing potential of Google, its still a ginormous corporation. "Going green" is not for everybody - it only works if you can afford not to eat processed and easily accessible food. And if you can afford expensive hybrid cars and renovations. And the internet is only good for civic participation for those who care to use it that way. Its easy to talk about politics on the internet if you want to , but are non-political people being drawn into civic life online? As Heather Hopkins' post (which i've cited way too many times) demonstrates, PLENTY of people using social internet tools are not voting. Is it safe to say that if they are not voting, they are not likely to be having other kinds of political influence either?

Maybe we have a disgruntled middle-to-upper-class elite, one that wants to redesign cities and cars and lifestyles. But these (we.) are the enfranchised, seeking to be more enfranchised. Is that enough to save democracy? To save the planet?

Fight me!

2007-05-18T08:29:00.000-07:00

Working on story-sharing

2007-05-17T21:55:00.000-07:00

Hey,
not much today - I'm learning a little about php and xml, (and Ruby on Rails ). The goal is to write or at least design an application for sharing stories of life in Columbia, MD. The ultimate goal is to use citizen journalism here to develop the community's ability to discuss and make decisions collectively. Democracy needs deliberation and the skills and infrastructures and habits of participation.

Right now I'm trying to figure out the design - php? javaScript/XML? Ruby on Rails?

Good Job MySpace

2007-05-16T06:50:00.000-07:00

Clearly, we want internet spaces to be safe for their users, and sex predation is a particularly disgusting form of online violence. But when "North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said 'it's sad that MySpace is going to protect the privacy of sex offenders over the safety of children",( CNN did he really think sex offenders were the only issue?

MySpace takes the position that it will only disclose private information "when proper legal processes are followed." The Attorney Generals of several states did not follow those processes when they sent a letter to MySpace requesting the information.

We want an internet safe from predation, and we also want an internet in which private information can only be shared with third parties (including the government) through open processes enacted by accountable individuals. MySpace is not choosing sex offenders over children. It is choosing rule of law over rule of government officials.

Many in government today seem to feel that as representatives of the law, law does not apply to them. Thank you, MySpace, for taking a stand for individuals' rights.

Scratch from MIT

2007-05-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

Have you played with Scratch? If not, its a program developed at MIT to make it really easy to program animations. Below is a video of how it works, and you can visit my first project. It came out a little goofy, though. That's the problem with Scratch, so far. Its still kind of buggy and idiosyncratic. Hopefully future versions will fix user interface problems like what challenged me. But its a great introduction to the genre of everybody-accessible computer programming. Should we be planning to include more rigorous tech literacy in our school system? We do basic things, like how to use word processing and navigate desktops. But when should we introduce code concepts like loops and logical branching?

Here's Scratch's video to explain itself.

If you have got videos to share here, post them in the comments section.

Web usability - for community, creativity, or commerce?

2007-05-14T08:16:00.000-07:00

On the BBC today is a story, "Web 2.0 Distracts from good design" . "Web usability guru" Jakob Nielson's point is that web 2.0 dynamic content is so trendy today that many sites are overlooking good design. Sites are adding too many tools for enabling community and content creation, and cluttering themselves. Since the vast majority of users are not content creators (90% of users), sites shouldn't cater to them. Mr. Nielson says, "Most people just want to get in, get it and get out." Instead of catering to the minority, sites should focus on quickly giving the information users are seeking.

I think Mr. Nielson (or at least this story) misses the point of web 2.0. The potential of dynamic sites and web applications that enable community-building and content creation is not that this is something that everyone already knows how to use and looks to the web to do. The potential of web 2.0 is to CHANGE how people use the web. Transform it from a place people go only to find information. Web 2.0 design should focus on helping users learn to create content - helping people feel comfortable with the idea of publishing their work online or with the tools for doing that.

Given this goal, Mr. Nielson does have a point. Too many bells and whistles are intimidating, and could drive users away, or back to their old web habits of simply consuming information. Web interfaces should be simple (see Google and Twitter for good examples). But they should be simple not because they should make it easy for people NOT to get involved in content creation and online community.

Today's web sites should draw users into community and online creation, and teach them skills to make online community a positive part of their lives. 90% of people do not have to be shut out of web 2.0 because they don't already like to use it.

Puget Sound Activism on YouTube

2007-05-12T22:48:00.000-07:00

Here's political theater's internet cousin: People for Puget Sound, an environmental protection group, have published soap opera parodies on YouTube. My favorite part of this one is at the end - what on earth is squirting out of that creature's head?
Do these videos work? It got me to visit their site.

Just read Wright, Ronald: A Short History of Progress

2007-05-11T17:59:00.000-07:00

This book explores, from a thorough and scholarly perspective, the modern myth of progress.

Progress, Wright explains, as mainstream Western culture has understood it, is a belief that history moves in one direction. Technology advances, humans become more moral (more civilized, less barbarian), and while there may be accidents, unregulated markets lead a march into an ever brighter future. An individual 100 years from now will almost inevitably be better off than one today, because of the march of material progress.

Wright doesn't dwell on this, but he does point out that this myth is clearly a fiction even today. There are plenty of groups starving around the world now who were perfectly well fed one hundred years ago. And "progress", as we define it, includes a relentless centralization of money and power into the hands of an ever-smaller group of elites. Our continued accumulation of material goods (or rather, the continued accumulation by a tiny ruling class) can only continue as long as there is capital in the form of water, air, land, flora and fauna to take. And when there is nothing left to take from the Earth's existing natural capital? Our civilization will be in a lot of trouble.

And what's more (and the main point of the book): this trend isn't even remotely unique to 'modern' civilization. One large, highly complex human society after another has followed the same path. And one after another depleted its resources, collapsed into infighting over the remnants, and eventually dissolved.

Our society is not different in that plenty of others have followed the pattern: exploit to grow, deplete, implode. But we are different in that previously, civilizations have been local. When the Roman empire fell, other non-Roman parts of the world were still flourishing. But our modern civilization holds the entire planet in its grip. In its economic reach, in its ecological reach, and in its military reach. If things go bad, they go bad for everybody.

Its a short and intense read. I did it in two days and couldn't put it down. And it left me with a driving sense of urgency. We shouldn't wait for technology to save us. We shouldn't wait for our elites to save us. We must now, with the tools we have now. In our cities and towns, we must get together and figure out how to stop exploiting the environment we have. As Wright puts it, the Earth is an investment. We need to live not off the capital, but off the interest.

Joining Twitter and MySpace MyVote

2007-05-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

Well, I decided to try Twitter. I don't expect to use it a lot, cause I'm not really in a Twitter-ing community...That is something I think doesn't get discussed a lot in the blogosphere: The idea of blogging still seems a little silly/unintellectual/nerdy/some combination of those to a lot of people. And its also inconvenient to many, as well - you have to be able to send a lot of text messages to use it when you're not at a computer. And text messages in the US are not as cheap as they might be. Twitter, then, must be a tool mostly for those who've got some cash to spend.

Rheingold in Smart Mobs talked about the Japanese mobile internet model, which is oriented towards youth customers without a lot of money to spend. Contrast that to the American model - serving corporate customers who can afford to spend. And different cultures emerge around these models. One is accessible and appealing to mass society and the other, while appealing, is very elite. If the web 2.0 is to deepen democracy, it has to be available to everybody, not just people who ALREADY have political power.

One idea in this vein: Heather Hopkins found that MySpace users are less likely to vote than others. Maybe we could launch a campaign to use MySpace to get people to vote and talk about the elections?

Anyway, here is my Twitter badge.

follow speeker at http://twitter.com

Last.fm

2007-05-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

If you haven't discovered Last.fm, I recommend you check it out. Its social internet radio, organizing artists, genres and more with tags.

Here's an example of one tool: I typed in Allman Brothers (I'm on a major blues kick, now that I'm learning guitar) and it created a channel of music from artists that have been identified as similar to the Allman Brothers.

Enjoy. I love this tool so far.

Urban Campus: People-centered cities

2007-05-03T09:04:00.000-07:00

Please read Green Streets at BLDG BLOG. I think it hits on a change to our urban/suburban landscape that is both vastly transformative and very do-able.

Imagine a scene: You're traveling to Washington DC, visiting the Smithsonian, perhaps. But you don't drive all the way downtown. Instead you park in a tourist satellite parking lot and hop on the metro into the city. And when you're there, there is hardly another car to be seen. Most streets, formerly for cars, are now exclusively pedestrian thoroughfares, planted with trees and small flower gardens. A few streets are still open for big trucks to make deliveries, and above-ground trams supplement the underground metro. This is a city that doesn't belong to the automobile any more. Its cleaner. Its air is healthier. Its quieter. People have the right of way.

There are many examples of streets closed to automobile traffic in American cities. Streets can close for special events, and car-streets can close more-or-less permanently to become pedestrian walkways. Silver Spring Maryland has a very successful downtown area with one such street, and it is easy to see how the walkway drastically improves the area's appeal.

Cars are divisive in so many ways. Philadelphia is a case study. The Vine Street Expressway and I-95 bound the city on the east and north. I-95 prevents almost all growth beyond it. And Vine Street created, and still maintains, a border between wealthy and poor areas in Philly. They also have a tendency to cast others as obstacles. Other people get in your way in parking lots, in heavy traffic, in drive through lines. There are plenty of places where the presence of others is a boon - a club, a lecture, a play. But its hard to think of situations where the presence of a lot of other cars is positive.

I think the time is here for us to get together with our communities and reduce our reliance on autos. We can develop the technology, the infrastructure and the policy to do it. We just lack the will and leadership, so far, to get together and work out practicable alternatives.

I'm going to spend some time looking for resources, advocacy groups and research that deal with issues relating to this. If you know of good info, please share!

Videos of Presidential Candidates: Clinton at Rutgers from Fora.tv

2007-05-01T15:37:00.000-07:00

I'll be trying to find as many online videos of Presidential Candidates as I can and posting them to Talk Lab. I hope you'll help collect them too. To see all the videos, at least until there is a better repository for them, go to the Candidate Video label on blog posts.

This way, whether its on YouTube, Fora.tv, CSPAN, or anywhere else, we'll have a single source for finding candidates videos, and talking about them too :)

If you know of videos I should include, please let me know, through the comments section or email.

Here's the first: Senator Clinton speaking on Women and Politics at Rutgers University. She does a good job with this speech. The first big chunk is weighed down by tributes of various kinds. Senatorial shout-outs, as it were. But later, when she starts talking about her two main points, she is animated, interesting to hear and even entertaining and thoughtprovoking.

The two main points:
1) Women are a vital force in American Politics.
2) Politics matters. Social change through politics really happens, despite popular myths to the contrary. She gives excellent stories and descriptions of of how political change has improved opportunities for women even during her lifetime.

ps. I recommend skipping a lot of the beginning announcements and tributes. You've heard all that before.

Carnival of Conflict, First Edition

2007-04-30T20:35:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the May 1, 2007 edition of the Carnival of Conflict. Thank you to all who participated in this Carnival, and we look forward to your responses.

For information about the Carnival including a description, archives, and instructions for submitting your posts to the next carnival, visit here.

This Carnival begins with a song. Madeleine Begun Kane's Serenade For The First Sufferers (Political Song Parody) draws creation from conflict. Her satire confronts a deadly serious issue: the monstrously hollow sympathy she sees in the Bush administration for those sacrificing and dying for them. But humor disarms the monster and gives us the space to discuss the problemsas they really are.

Creation out of conflict is a pervasive theme of this edition, as well as the notion that conflicts have a profound influence on producing the political character of a society. The posts here react to a wide variety of conflicts. Writing about issues from global political strife to personal transformation, these bloggers illustrate that conflict (whether political, personal, and in one case, even physical) can be fertile ground for new ideas, deeper reflection, and more nuanced conversation.

Global

TheGoodGovernor writes about the structure of democracy in A framework of politics and democracy - Part II Democracy relies, the author articulates, on many forms of opposition - political dissent, diverse parties, economic competition and more.

Phil for Humanity identifies conflict between human society and our environment in How long can the world sustain the world's population? To a question like this, there is no single answer to be found. It seems to me the point of such a question is guide inquiry, not end it. Is describing a framework of democracy similar?

Domestic

Al Nye's Senator Collins whines on YouTube criticizes the Senator's position on the Iraq war and her response to criticism (she posted on YouTube). Here is good and bad of the politics of a democracy like TheGoodGovernor describes. Political fights can be ugly, but when democracy works well, those fights are fodder for public conversation.

Michael Boldin offers a perspective on responsibility for the military's actions. And he goes on to argue that standing armies themselves often become a tool for states to create armed conflict. They do this, he argues, to perpetuate their own authority. Conflict here is productive, but not in a positive way, according to most measures. His post is Leaders don't kill people.

Council Elections May 2007 by Save the Ribble illustrates another kind of contention in democracies. Politicians want a citizen group's supporters and the group wants its autonomy from electoral politics. Every influential group must negotiate this relationship with institutional power.

Santhros tackles the war in Iraq with Do we need more troops in Iraq? The question of American policy in Iraq has proven to be a divisive one the world over. But it also fuels new kinds of citizen cooperation and debate across state borders.

Whether sex education has a place in schools is, according to Good As It Gets, a major debate in India today. Good As It Gets argues a position in favor of supplying kids with information at Its all about sex baby. The debate is a useful metaphor for democracy in general. "Information is power," the author says, and values, power and political manipulation all intersect in debates like this one.

Chris Gragsone presents his perspective on a debate that shapes American politics - gun control. In his post, Guns are not the issue, he argues that without guns, criminals can still be violent, and crime in society will persist.

Yid with Lid , in French Jews Should Get Out of France While They Still Can , argues that antisemitism is increasing in France. Like many others, this is an issue that involves many kinds of conflicts and other social mechanisms - racial politics, power consolidation, economic frustration, and more.

Personal

Chris discusses using conflict in an explicitly nurturing way in his post, Conflict Resolution: A casualty of non-violent martial arts. Genuine physical conflict in a training space is the key for developing a host of skills for managing and resolving conflict outside of the space. Forbidding conflict inside the dojo robs it of its instructive role.

Katie writes about a very personal and well known conflict: debt. In today's economy, there are good reasons for avoiding debt, and good ones for incurring it (education, investments). What to do? Many turn to advice in the public sphere. Katie's blog caters to those seeking financial advice who are also interested in using their money in socially responsible ways. The post is An age old idea still rings true...just hard to accomplish

The last post will echo the first - with satire. Jon Swift responds to the recent uproar over Alec Baldwin's insults directed at his daughter. Clearly, he explains in Alec Baldwin's Daughter is a Disgrace , its the kid's fault.

There are many shapes to conflict, and there are many ways we react to it. In this first edition, we've started to talk about a few of them. What needs to be said next?

Thanks for coming to the carnival, and I look forward to your responses.
Find out about submitting to the carnival here.

Can YouTube improve politics?

2007-04-28T21:23:00.001-07:00

This video is evidence of the moment we have today - to develop a new kind of participatory, responsive and responsible politics. But this is just the very beginning of the process. Does a dorm room interview indicate elites and non-elites engaging in two way conversations? Or is it just evidence of a new kind of elite? An i-lite? (grin)

Religious conflict in US Society

2007-04-28T19:20:00.000-07:00

This conference from Fora.tv features three religious leaders and formidable intellectuals. They spend the hour of their conference discussing religion in American society and politics today. There is much in what they say that is worth extensive discussion. What I choose here to mention, I choose more because it's what I remember from watching the video yesterday, than from a decision that its the most interesting point.

I thought Rabbi Michael Lerner's point about secularism as a religion was an interesting one. He argues that a secular, science-based world view is one religion among many. It isn't based on anything more fundamental than any other world view. Many have rebutted this point on the grounds that secularism a) doesn't preclude religious faith, and b) follows different rules for establishing truth (religious truths are established, and science is a recognition that scientific truths are mostly unknown)

There is a public sphere argument for distinguishing secularism and religion as well, and that discussion fits well here. A secular society, whose institutions do not give explicit preference of one religion over another, will be more successful in establishing a public sphere where groups of many faiths can interact on equal footing. A secular approach to governance is not a religious approach. Instead it can be a meta-religious approach, in that it allows the creation of a space for organizing how religions interact with each other within that space.

Youth vision for Columbia's future

2007-04-26T22:14:00.000-07:00

Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending a meeting organized by U Maryland senior, Brandon Koch, to build youth participation in Howard County Politics. The ten present offered a variety of perspectives. Most were young college students or recent graduates like me. Three adult community members came, one long-time Columbia resident and one new arrival from Illinois. The third was Mary Kay Sigaty , County Council Member, District 4.

We sat for over an hour and a half talking about how Columbia should develop in the next years. Should we have a dense downtown? What would it look like? How do feel about Columbia now? I was particularly interested in the discussion of identity. Role models for successful downtown areas such as Annapolis and Old Ellicott City are special for their distinctive architectural, cultural and historical identities. It seemed to be a consensus that Columbia develop based on its unique personality (or maybe townality?).

What is Columbia's personality? Like any culture it is open to contention. It is what we make it to be, and every moment residents, by their actions, remake it. One reocurring theme was that we did disliked development for only the sake of profit - development, we felt, should contribute to the overall life and values of the town. Concern for diversity, accessibility, and other principles should guide development as well as the need for profit. I hope that meetings like this will continue and multiply. And I hope that the rest of the County Council pays attention too.

This could be a moment, in Columbia, to learn whole new ways of building participatory local government. By talking to each other and listening to each other about how to make our town better - more prosperous, more welcoming, more beautiful, more environmentally friendly, etc. - we can develop that unique personality that makes Columbia such a good place to call home.

New segment: That movie's got class!

2007-04-26T16:09:00.000-07:00

So we all know that Hollywood is a tremendous money-maker, and one of the most well-known emblems of American culture. But Hollywood (and the rest of America's film industry) has a relationship to society that reflects and influences society all the time. In fact, movies and the rest of us have always had an ongoing conversation about American values and politics.

But today, how much do we think about that conversation? How much do we participate in it explicitly? There are plenty who talk about how terrible it is there is so much sex and violence on the screen. Conversations usually don't go much farther than that.

Introducing, "That movie's got class". In this irregular segment, I want to talk about particular movies, and things they reveal, suggest and advocate for American society. Of course, its a movie, and there could never be a definitive statement about what is or isn't in a film. But its worth thinking about, and its worth thinking about how our own lenses shape what we see in films, and how films shape the lenses through which we see the rest of the world. For example, I'm particularly interested in how films deal with the struggles between poor, marginalized groups and powerful, dominant ones. That's where the name of the segment comes from.

Please feel free to suggest movies to talk about. If you want to write your own analyses, thats great too. Just send your link to me.

Carnival of the Liberals

2007-04-25T14:26:00.000-07:00

BogsBlog , an excellent source for political commentary, and host of this Carnival of the Liberals included a post from this very blog. Its a diverse and well chosen edition of the Carnival, so be sure and check it out.

Host Pete Bogs suggests I might have a response for Spitfire by Lill Hawkins . Her contribution to the Carnival describes her frustration with those who, like her son, feel uninspired and unable to change the world.

She responds with the plain facts that explicitly changing the world is possible. Once there were no spittoons, until people decided they'd had enough of spit everywhere. We could add many, many cases of a few dedicated individuals who were able to convince and cajole an apathetic populace to change their ways. It'd be worth collecting a compilation of such stories, if it weren't that there are so many.

The myth is not that one person can change the world - the myth is that she can't.

But as Lill points out, the perception remains that one against the world is old-fashioned and too difficult to be worthwhile. How can social activists deal with that perception?

I think this is a question important enough that it deserves not an answer, but a conversation. I have a couple ideas to get the ball rolling. One I'm stealing from Alexis de Tocqueville. He says that people need to have particular skills and habits to participate in civic life. And these skills and habits must be learned and taught. And futhermore, they are often learned through other kinds of associations. A person used to working with others in one kind of association, like a sports team, a club, or something else, will be ready to bring those tools to the table when confronted with problems that require civic participation and association. Soccer on saturday mornings may be better for our democracy than we realize.

Second, I think people can be drawn to or pushed away from civic participation by the culture of civic participation. If its appealing, fun, entertaining, and sociable to participate in the civic life of a community, maybe people will be more likely to do so. We found at college that the best way to get students to our political discussion was to make them fun. And sometimes, they liked us enough to come back to the boring ones!

There are many sides to these issues, so I hope you'll read the sources: the Carnival of Liberals and Lill Hawkins, and continue the discussion.

Madison quote from Smart Mobs

2007-04-23T21:26:00.000-07:00

This quote from Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs was, I thought, pretty provocative. So does the Library of Congress - its the words of James Madison it inscribed in its marble walls:

"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy: or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives" (205)

I think its a complicated quote. For all its rosy "knowledge is power" rhetoric, it also is not too far away from justifying all kinds of oppression and condescention rampant in western European culture. I mean, "knowledge will always govern ignorance"? If the principle of subjugation called "white man's burden" ever needed a motto, this would work pretty well.

But on the other hand, it says some great things to our current society, too. In our society where intellectualism is equated with nerdy elites out of touch with reality, and where many view science and education, and spending money on them, as superfluous and silly unless immediate financial returns are possible, its helpful to hear this voice from America's past.

Its okay to be thoughtful and to be a leader. Its okay to be thoughtful and to be a citizen. In fact, our democracy, Madison says, depends on our citizens having the tools and resources to think critically, to be skeptical, to question and to dissent. Our democracy requires us to learn to accept being wrong, to consider new ideas, even transformative and radical ones.

Knowledge is power, says Madison. Today we can add that nuance, compassion and introspection are knowledge.

Net Neutrality

2007-04-22T11:53:00.000-07:00

I think its time to start talking more about Net Neutrality . In a nutshell (sorry if you're familiar with it already), the issue is that the big telecom companies that own the cables (the tubes) through which the internet's data flows have found a new way to make a buck. They can charge users differently for priority access to bandwidth - that is they can make websites pay them to allow fast access to their sites, they can make users pay them to have access to all kinds of services. The end result is an internet where, instead of users picking the most well used sites based on their content, internet service providers decide who has access to what based on how much content providers and users pay.

The magic of the internet today is that it allows anybody to contribute high quality content, and it allows anybody to choose freely what content they use. You want to use Google? Fine. Yahoo? Fine. Something else entirely? Hunky dunky. But if the big telecoms have their way, big search engines, for example, would pay for faster access. So if Google payed more than Yahoo, Google would be faster to use, and Yahoo and any other start up search engine would be too slow to compete. Goodbye, fair competition. (Well, competition on the internet is hardly equal now, but imagine how much worse this could make it!)

A much better explanation of the issue was written by Jevon at Socialwrite.com.

And if you are inspired to learn more, and get involved in supporting net neutrality, visit SaveTheInternet.com

For the sake of executives' revenues, the internet's cultural, democratic and creative potential could evaporate. Hopefully lawmakers can be brought to their senses first.

New motto for Talk Lab

2007-04-22T11:48:00.000-07:00

What do you think?

Talk Lab:

Creativity. Experimentation. Analysis.
Politics, culture and technology under a microscope and on a workbench.

Now with a Diigo meta-page!

2007-04-21T22:18:00.000-07:00

So I'm trying this out - I want to add something to Talk Lab that will provide a space for conversation, not just about a particular post, but about the whole page. i.e., you'd be able to push a button and on the page would appear comments people have made about any part of it - the title, a post, a widget.

I've found one way of doing this, although its not perfect.

is a social annotation service. Its Del.icio.us plus comments. With Diigo, you not only keep bookmarks and share them with others, you also can highlight and comment on sites. These annotations can be public or private. The public annotations are, as Diigo puts it, its like "a giant transparency overlaying on top of all the web pages."

Its not ideal, though, because in order to see the annotations, you have to sign up with Diigo. Its free (I wouldn't use it otherwise), but its a pain, if its not something you want to do anyway.

But to see this page's Diigo meta-page, use the "Diigolet" here. There is no download necessary, just drag the appropriate image to your bookmark bar. I haven't tested it yet, but they may require you to sign up to use it.

This is an experiment, so your feedback is very valuable. What do you think of this? How does this work? Do you know of better alternatives?

Smart Mobs: Impact of the mobile

2007-04-20T17:09:00.000-07:00

I've started reading Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs . Some of it falls into the category of future-oggling (talking about how cool technology is, how great collective action is, etc. without giving much thorough analysis), but that's to be expected. And there are also a great many interesting ideas and discussions in the two chapters I've read so far.

Rheingold's discussion is of the mobile internet - of people keeping connected to their social networks with technology. Right now that technology is cell phones, but it doesn't have to be. He, citing others, compares the difference between the mobile internet and the solid-line internet to the difference between telephones and the telegraph. They used the same infrastructure, and at first many thought the second would be just an extension of its predecessor. But because of the way it was used, it became a technology that transformed society. Could the "mobile internet" be so influential?

There are hints of the social transformation that a mobile-web-connected society might undergo. One sociologist studying youth culture in one well-connected city discussed how the constant text-messaging among teens has changed their approach to space and time. People can be late to a party and skip entirely, but as long they are still texting, they are present. There is a virtual 'place' that really matters, and being in a particular physical place is unnecessary if they are connected to the virtual place.

That seems pretty transformative. Does it get any better? Dunno yet.

Fora.tv, Forum on Sustainable Economy.

2007-04-19T21:01:00.000-07:00

Fora.tv is an exciting new addition to the Web 2.0. It is a site that offers videos of lectures from all across the country, from professors in their armchairs to conferences to actors' interviews to politicians' speeches. It also invites users to comment, add new content, and discuss on forums.

Its motto: "The World is Thinking". It (and similar programs) demonstrates there is a mass market for thoughtful, thought-provoking, educational media. Fora.tv, linked with YouTube, could support some deep conversations.

I recommend a video that I watched. Capitalism 3.0 is a panel hosted by the California Commonwealth Club with leaders in the field of Fair Trade and socially responsible business.

They made the two most important points for advocates of a socially responsible economy:

1. There are great things happening, and capitalism IS compatible with social responsibility, and

2. But don't let down your guard - building a responsible, sustainable economy requires constant work. And there will be cheaters, companies that try to capitalize on the popularity of "organic" products or "all-natural" or "fair-trade". One speaker stressed that advocates must constantly work to raise the bar, to re-define and improve the requirements for sustainability.

The backbone of the sustainable economy is consumers choosing to buy sustainable products from responsible companies, even if they cost more.

And the other point I liked: Workplaces in a responsible economy must nurture and develop the creativity of their employees, must make their working environments pleasant and healthy. Factories for products and services are out - boutiques are in.

One last thing: Does anybody know what kind of effects all this web 2.0 stuff is having on the habit of association-forming of Americans? Is all this digital connectivity sparking other kinds of organizing as well?

Structure of Activism: Corporate or State goverance?

2007-04-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

I wrote recently about student activism in the 1960s. Today I found a great description of student activism in the 1930s.

The activism of the 60s, it turns out, was very much indebted to that of the 30s. Students for a Democratic Society, the famous SDS, was funded for years by the League for Industrial Democracy. It was the Students' League for Industrial Democracy that was one of two founding organizations of the American Student Union. And activist extraordinaire, Walter Reuther was one of the student leaders of the movement in the 30s. According to the site, the movement boasted 500,000 participants at its height.

What brought the movement to an end? If you know, please share! It seems likely that World War II played a big part. But I suspect also that all movements, and student movements in particular have a very short active period of their life cycle. It took 20 years for students to organize on a large scale again (and it wasn't just the Viet Nam war. The student movements of the 60s started before anti-war protest was popular)

Flash forward to today: There are plenty of problems for young people to organize around. Why don't we? We have, I think, a kind of culturally pervasive distaste for formal activist organizations. The non-profits that dominate American Civil Society are organized like corporations. There is an Executive Director, a Board and a strict hierarchy of employees and bosses. Supporters are the consumers - they buy/donate the advocacy or service of the non-profit.

The SDS and its bretheren derived their organizational structure more from government. Members voted on a President, elected a Secretary, paid dues/taxes and debated and voted on the organization's actions.

Perhaps this holds part of the answer to why mass mobilizations of students haven't happened for 40 years? That's twice as long as the last gap. SDS asked new recruits to become citizens of the organization. Non-profits today ask them to be either professionals or consumers.

Today across America we have plenty of professionals, and we have consumers out the wazoo. But do we have enough citizens?

V Tech - Small World

2007-04-17T21:52:00.000-07:00

I came across this story in the Times of India: "Sudden death of an Indian Dream"

I thought it was poignant because of the way it illustrates how close we are to each other all over the world. I think there is something else here, too, but I am not sure what - It could be that it refutes some bloggers' cynicism that media coverage of the shooting has been hypocritical. Not just a ratings draw, this event was particularly traumatizing in a way death on a larger scale in Iraq (or Darfur, or plenty of other places) has not been.

Can we make the connection?

Iraq, VT, and Violence

2007-04-17T13:39:00.000-07:00

Manila Ryce at The Largest Minority today posted about the media's response to the shootings at Virginia Tech. He points out well the hypocrisy of the media's coverage of the shootings. After all, "the death of 32 innocent civilians would be considered a good day in Iraq."

This hypocrisy is hardly the fault of the news media - we all care more deeply and viscerally about terrible events that are either a) closer to us or b) a change from the norm. My high school physics teacher said our bodies are not spedometers, they are accelerometers. Our emotions are similar, measuring changes in our environments rather than absolute values. Who was it that said that "if a million people all the way around the world die, its a shame, but if I stub my toe, I curse the heavens for an hour"? It was somebody famous. And that was pretty close to what he said, anyway. Should this be how we are? Maybe we can't hope to cope with reality if we take every tragedy to heart. That is a sad thought about the world.

But maybe in this case we can use what happened yesterday at VT to guide us towards better dealing with our problems in Iraq. This is what it feels like to lose 32 bright young adults with any combat missions or terror cells. And there families in Iraq that know this pain every day. Or worse: in Iraq maybe it is possible to become deadened to terrible loss of life, day in and day out - to see, hear and touch death, but not feel it. What kind of country is our conflict shaping? What are we making its people become?

So towards answers, and steps forward. Do we stop the violence by shooting more? Do we stop the process of desensitizing by sending more soldiers?

Carnival Button

2007-04-16T15:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to CoolText:

I made a nifty little button for the Blog Carnival:

The "N"s could look a little better, but...

Feel free to post it on your own site. The code is:


< a href="http://talk-lab.blogspot.com/2007/04/carnival-of-conflict.html" > 
< img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/182/462072287_064c1a89e9.jpg?v=0" 
border="0" / > 
< /a >

You will have to get rid of the extra spaces though - if you know of a more elegant way for me to make the code available, please tell!

Coriolanus and Class Conflict -or- The Aristocracy: Screwing the Plebians by Screwing Each Other

2007-04-16T14:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to see Shakespeare's Coriolanus . (Is this one of the plays that the Reduced Shakespeare Company refers to as on of the "apocrypha"?) The production was excellent , with massive, beautiful sets. (Although in retrospect, the sets didn't use space that creatively - door, balcony, that was about it.) The acting was marvelous, too. The program even included a synopsis of the development of alternative interpretations of the text from Shakespeare's day to now.

Coriolanus is a fascinating play because at different times it has been adopted by right and left wings of society. Sometimes the play tells the story of a noble hero, destroyed by the small-mindedness of the madding crowd. Other times it tells the story of a authoritarian brute who detests and betrays the Roman people, for whom he is supposed to act, and whom he is supposed to love.

It is a political play, so much so that Brecht would have been very proud (believing, as he did, that drama should not offer escape from political problems but rather urge people into discontent and action about them). Indeed Bertholt B. may have been proud, since he staged his own version.

Based on my experience, Coriolanus seems to be a decent lipmus test of one's political affiliations. One of the people I saw the show with felt that Coriolanus should have been played more nobly. We ought to be shown, my companion said, his inner strength of character and nobility. I thought he was an animal, more loyal to the aristocrats with whom he waged his games of war than to the people. These he disdained to the point of an irrational hatred (hating that which he fears he is, maybe?). I saw in the play a portrait of how the community of the aristocracy was more loyal to itself than to the people over which it was supposed to be steward. After all it is the aristocrats who speak with common language, common manners, common education. And when the people of Rome take away Coriolanus' nobility? The aristocracy of Rome's enemy welcomes him with open arms (and in this version, even fondles him a little bit)

So there, packed into just a few hours of blood and dialogue, is an excellent example of the re-hash-ability of culture. Its one play, but directors, scholars and viewers can swing it in many ways. Is it too post-modern to say that there is no single meaning for a work of theater or literature or art, but rather a constant struggle over meaning, one generation after another?

Reviewing my favorite office 2.0 form designer applications

2007-04-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

The greatest shortcoming of the Blog Carnival site and infrastructure is that it doesn't make it easy for people who don't have blogs to participate in the carnivals. Now I know its a Blog Carnival and not a magazine, but we're out to lower barriers to participation, yes?

So for the Carnival of Conflict I decided I'd make a simple form for people to submit their own text. Then I'll post it to a new blog that exists just for holding these posts and link to them in the Carnival. Thus if you don't have a blog, or if you just don't want to have your work be posted on your blog (if its a blog for work or something) then you could still make your voice heard.

Of course I quickly found that its harder than I thought to make a web form. Its easy to do the basic code that would make it functional. Just a dash of html and a sprig of php make it taste just right. But those spammers out there - a form has to have all sorts of security built into it to keep people from using it for their own dark purposes.

So I turned once again to the Office 2.0 database , and specifically to the form designer tag. Here is a list of a number of online applications that will let you design a form online, manage the submissions you get to it, and will host your forms and responses for you. And most will do it all for free (as per my MO, the ones that charged for any service, I basically ignored).

So you don't have to, here are summaries of what they offer, and my recommendations.

FormLogix is very powerful but not as friendly to use as it might be. Its form designer looks and feels a lot like a MS application. That makes it look familiar, but it also makes it look cluttered, boxy, and complicated. FormLogix offers great free service as well as a lot of free templates. Plus you can control all the pieces of the form you write. And their publishing options are as good as anybody else's. All in all its very functional, but not a lot of fun to use.

FormSpring has a fairly limited but easy-to-use free service. Its form design tool is less complicated than FormLogix's, but it is still plenty powerful. It makes it easy too add skip/branching logic to your forms - i.e. "only show this field if user says yes to this question". You can edit the appearance of your forms, and you can post them as links, as iframes, and as the full html of the frame. However the free account only lets you do one form, one template and 50 entries. While its good, I can do better --

The form designer I ended up using is: WuFoo . Like the others, it offered a form designer that was of the same style as Formsprings, and it also offers tiered service. But its free service is better than that of other apps. It is easy to write the functional part of the form, and I could (fairly) easily edit the appearance, too, by creating an appearance template and applying that to the form. The publishing options were also varied: I published it online and linked to it as well as posting the code here. On many free services, when people submit, they see a thank you page that also features advertisements. WuFoo's thank you page is pretty nice, and any advertisements are unobtrusive. Managing submissions is easy too, with a tool for reading and editing submissions. (My one complaint is that you can edit what people submit. Why did they do that?) I think what draws me to it the most (besides that its services are mostly better than those of its competitors) is the fun and lighthearted atmosphere of the user experience. Bright colors, curved borders, cartoon logos and informal language make WuFoo an entertaining place to work online.

Nothing is perfect, and all of these services leave something to be desired here and there. But they are almost all good enough (and free enough) that it is easy to be glad they are available. And they show that what is true of restaurants is true of internet sites: the atmosphere is everything.

Excellent article on activism technology

2007-04-11T22:24:00.000-07:00

The excellent blog of WorldChanging.com (colon: Tools Models and Ideas for building a Bright Green Future) has posted an even more excellent article about mobile phones and activism. You can (and please do) read the article here.

I really appreciate the implied point about how significantly the civic culture is influenced by the available technology. It reinforces the point that the community of people working on improving civic culture in the united States has a really big stake in paying attention to and working on improving communication technology.

In the US, because we use mobile phones differently (because of how the system is set up), digital activism seems to be limited to people on their computers. We haven't had episodes of mobiles being used to create instant protests. Maybe there are other reasons for that too - maybe our social groups are too fragmented and diffused to use digital means to contact people who could protest locally?

I dunno. But that is one of the great things about the article - it raises a lot of fascinating questions.

Office 2.0 and activism

2007-04-11T12:51:00.000-07:00

One of the purposes of this blog is to explore and develop better technology tools for civic participation (not just activism, not just discourse). Many of the applications I come across written for "the non-profit community" are pretty ugly, and not that nice to use. Barely functional, but without the kind of easy, glossy interfaces that would make the lives of organizers and activists much more pleasant.

However there are gajillions of free web apps out there designed for everybody. Blogger is one, Google has all kinds of apps that can serve organizers, and there are many others that can be adapted for civic projects.

I've come to think that a powerful and highly customized suite of applications can be cobbled together from the pieces of all the free web apps that are available. Why pay for web hosting when, for the time to learn just a little bit of html, you can get other companies to provide you with web hosting and many other services besides?

These online applications for business, individuals, and any other group are collectively called Office 2.0. The Office 2.0 Database has an excellent collection of dozens of products. There are online voice mail services, there are online database services, there are word processors and web conferencing apps. With a little creativity these applications can make a powerful platform of tools.

The future for activism and the internet lies not in building cathedrals - single websites that provide the user everything they need on a single page on a single server, but in bazaars, where sites mash together services from all over the web and trade ideas and techniques for new combinations of applications.

The Carnival is open to everybody!

2007-04-11T00:07:00.000-07:00

If the form below does not show up, you can find the form for submitting to the carnival here. The best way to submit is still to send me your blog entry's address, but if you don't have a blog, or for some reason don't want to use yours, you can still post to the Carnival of Conflict with this form.

Fill out my Wufoo form!
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Drum circle and Inescapable Order

2007-04-10T13:38:00.000-07:00

I came across this video on YouTube, and it has a pretty interesting comment thread (which is unusual for YouTube, I know :) ). The one that caught my eye most was:

Syrinx:
You'll notice much of it is centered on the one cute long haired brunette!

It highlights a complaint that emerged in the SDS in its later years, and something I've noticed elsewhere too. One of the principles of drum circles is that its an attempt to get rid of hierarchy,formal rules and forms, etc. Out with rules for dancing and let everyone be equal. It mirrors the philosophy that politics should be just as equal and un-ordered.

But the problem is that this philosophy overlooks that unordered-ness and formlessness and lack of imposed structure is not the same as equality. This dance is an excellent example of that.

The drum circle gets rid of patterns, rules, anything that resembles rules imposed on any dancer. But you get rules just the same. Every drum circle in every youth movement finds dancers moving in the same jangly style. And rules and patterns emerge to how people interact, too. In this one, and in many others I expect, the center of focus becomes a particular dancer or two. Thus in the style of dancing and the distribution of attention and influence in the group, an oppressive regime of rules and hierarchy emerges.

This was a problem for the SDS forty years ago. They rejected in their organizational rules formal regulations like hierarchy and voting. They believed in rule by equals arriving together at consensus. Nothing should be imposed on the individual from an authority, be it dictates for behavior or values. Eventually many saw the error of the philosophy. It worked badly for women, for example. Misogyny was rampant, according to some.

If you throw a pile of blocks on the floor, you've imposed no order, no structure. But when they land, there are reasons the blocks stay in the pile they are in, and do not shift to some other kind of pile. There is structure, though it may not look like it.

Isn't it better, then, to talk about the structure? In block tossing, dancing and social organization, isn't it better for us to discuss and decide the precise rules that will govern the structure connecting elements (blocks or people)? We don't need to be afraid of creating laws, and authorities and rules. In fact we must have them, and they must be good, and responsive to input, and they must seek out injustice and reform themselves to correct it if we hope to have a society that is free and equal.

N. Gingrich's Contest Announcement

2007-04-09T23:59:00.001-07:00

While Mr. Gingrich's message makes my skin crawl , it (along with the responses it has generated) presents a very interesting possibility for the role of elites on YouTube. Its worth pointing out that for all YouTube's "democratizing influence", Newt's stardom gives him instant credibility and influence in an environment that is ruled by searches for already popular content.

But that aside, he is creating a space for anybody to participate in a national conversation about a political issue. And that part I like. Maybe we could get some elites with good ideas for America to start similar conversations?

Carnival of Conflict

2007-04-09T09:46:00.000-07:00

Intro

We find conflict everywhere in our lives. Brothers fight with sisters, kids argue with parents, parents bicker. Every neighborhoods has its share of arguments. National politics seems like its defining characteristic is argument. There is conflict in businesses up and down the ranks. There is international conflict that at times can turn deadly. But no matter in which community a conflict occurs, all conflicts share a few characteristics. Always it is individuals doing the fighting, the dissenting, the arguing. Always in conflict there are choices about how to behave, and serious consequences for those choices.

We tend to understand conflict as a weakness in a community. If our allies disagree with our policy, they're no longer to be trusted as friends. If our significant others dispute with us, there is something wrong with the relationship.

But conflict is not all bad. In fact conflict is an essential part of making any community strong, dynamic and healthy. When conflict is well managed, it makes all parties to it, as well as the community as a whole, more powerful and more cohesive. We need conflict in our politics and society. And we need to understand how to use it, too. We need to understand how dissent becomes resentment, and disagreement becomes violence. Our society needs conflict, and it needs it to be well managed and productive, not destructive.

The Carnival of Conflict is for sharing perspectives, experiences, opinions and research on conflict of all kinds. The Carnival is for making connections across disciplines, genres and all kinds of other barriers. It is for exploring how people cultivate positive, healthy kinds of conflict into our lives and politics.

Rules for submission

The Carnival of Conflict is open to all perspectives on cultivating healthy dissent.
Personal stories, scholarly analysis, vlogs and much more all can share equal space on the Carnival.

The Carnival will post on the last Tuesday of every month. More often if there is enough volume. Send your submissions to nathan dot c dot vogel at gmail.com.

The host (for now, that's me ) will read all the submissions and include as many of them as possible. Its the host's discretion if posts seem inappropriate, or if there are too many and some must be left out.

The bottom line is: we want to hear your point of view. Who knows what associations of ideas and principles and people are possible? So have fun, submit your piece, and enjoy the Carnival.

Yours,

Speeker

UPDATE: If you don't have a blog, but would like to contribute, no problem! Of course, you could just start a blog here or here. But if not, you can email me your submission to nathan dot c dot vogel at gmail.com. (In the future I'll look for a more elegant way of helping you post without having an actual blog) I look forward to hearing from you.

UPDATE 2: You can add the badge for this carnival using the code here

Port Huron Statement and infighting in the Left

2007-04-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

This most recent section of James Miller's book describes the creation of the Port Huron Statement by the SDS and the subsequent fight over its content (and the independence of SDS from its parent organization the League for Industrial Democracy, an old school bastion of the left that had cut its teeth fighting to create a political left that was not corrupted by Communism and Stalinism.

In the Port Huron Statement, the SDS reflected a spreading political feeling of the time - that Communist Russia was not as insane and malevolent as the previous generation of politicians and activists had thought. Dis-armament and Detente might be possible, and the left no longer needed to be so rabid about its anti-communism. But the LID's leadership wouldn't have it, and many of its leaders tried to condemn and even destroy the SDS for its unwillingness to completely shut out anyone remotely associated with the Communist Party. This infighting within the left almost (and perhaps indirectly did) destroyed the nascent student movement.

I've noticed that a lot at conferences and meetings, both on the left and at non-partisan gatherings (I'm underexposed to deliberations of the right, but I bet the same problems exist). In-fighting is a terrible danger.

Now we shouldn't stop arguing with each other. Disagreements are the lifeblood of an organization. Of any relationship, really, even romantic ones. So we shouldn't try to eliminate disagreements. What we need are norms and practices for dealing with them effectively. We need to learn to USE disagreement - make it fun, make disagreement an expected and normal PART of the experience of being in a community.

We have a tendency to think that disagreement is a sign of weakness within a group (international relations and everywhere else). But its not. What is important is how we deal with disagreement in such a way that everyone still feels a stake in the community whether they get their way or not.

everyplace is everyplace else.

2007-04-02T11:19:00.001-07:00

Here in Kansas. Could be md or pa. must technology and culture always homogenize place?

Project proposal

2007-04-01T21:19:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,
I'll be away for a couple of days visiting family in Missouri. So besides an occasional cell phone photo + caption I won't be posting. But while I'm away, I would like to start a discussion about a project I am thinking about.

I'd like to share the stories and strategies of a range of student leaders - across the US, if I can. There are a few different reasons why I'm interested in this. First, there are so many stories that deserve telling, including many worthy stories of the triumphs and tragedies of creative students, and I'd love to help get a few of them told. Second, my own experience has shown me, and this book about the SDS and Haber (and many other works) has reinforced, that one of the major reasons that student movements don't last, and the creativity, hard work, experience, energy and intelligence of student leaders doesn't accumulate in the projects they begin is because of the lack of a community of youth social leadership whose memory is longer than the few years of the average college education. There are so many programs for creating that community - Idealist, Campus Progress and so many more. And they are all doing a wonderful job. But it'd be nice, I think, to have one more voice talking about what young people are doing to develop participatory politics. And what if it caught on as, like, a thing to do? To share and talk about stories and strategies for local, regional and national activism? Activism doesn't have yet very effective tools for sharing, developing and critiquing ideas and action. Maybe the best way to do that is to help the community develop the tools, and maybe this could help that process.

So that's my idea. I'd love to hear what you think of it, and if you have suggestions for people I should interview, I'd love to hear those ideas too. You can comment on the blog, and you can also email me: nathan dot c dot vogel at gmail.com

Cheers!

How we are mis-approaching "Wiki Politics"

2007-03-31T12:34:00.000-07:00

I know mis-approaching is not a word. This is the postmodern era, so deal with it.
"Wiki Politics" is a really exciting sounding idea. The journal Re-Public will soon be releasing a special issue dedicated to the idea of "Wiki Politics". When we talk about WP, we are referring to the famous Wikipedia , the marvel of collaboration and collective intelligence we all love so dearly. The principles of Wikipedia are marvelously democratic on one level. By which I mean: Anyone can participate, and anyone can access all the information. On another level its missing some pretty crucial features - Wikipedia is not about teaching or nurturing. If you have something to contribute, good on ya, but if you've got nothing to say, or even if what you say is not appreciated by the community, your voice will never get heard. Your contributions, if you make any, will be erased and fade into obscurity. The Framers of the Constitution feared the tyranny of the masses, and there are few explicit protections against it WikiPedia land. This is true for the internet too. Anyone can participate in any way they like, linking their sites to whatever sites they choose. And from this very egalitarian beginning arises a very un-egalitarian result. The popularity of websites follows a Power Law . A tiny number of sites have almost ALL the connections, and almost all the sites have only 1 or 0 connections. City populations and wealth also follow power laws. Scholars have referred to it as the "rich get richer" principle. And where the rich get richer, they also become more influential, and this erodes the egalitarian basis of the society.

So "Wiki Politics" as we understand it from WikiPedia is lacking in this way. It doesn't actively seek to recover its under-performers from the dustbin of history. But there is another problem with our talk about "Wiki Politics": implementation. The principles of Wiki Politics are great (with reservations), but often our idea of implementing Wiki Politics is to create a Politics Wiki . This sounds logical enough. But Wiki Politics is a translation into internet-speak of an old idea: "Participatory Politics". "Wiki" is a misleading term because it implies that this political social transformation should be founded on a particular software application.

A Wiki is really good at sharing information people already know. Its also good for helping people come up with norms to regulate how some disputes are resolved. Since Wiki's are so flexible, its easy to imagine how they could have all kinds of uses: notices of direct action events, debates about policy and theory, and much more. But participatory politics will need a lot more than just Wikis. It needs blogs to support more deliberative conversations. It needs youtube to support visual interaction among people far distant. It needs schools - really good ones that are publicly available - to make sure everyone has the tools and understanding to participate in the body politic. Participatory politics needs citizens to have health care and welfare. How will you help govern if you are too sick to leave your house or if you have to work 14 hours a day at menial jobs? Wiki Politics fosters trust, encourages negotiation, cooperation, and participation. We need to support the values of egalitarianism everywhere in society, not just on a software platform, for Wiki Politics to be possible.

Amazing video and the tradition of participatory politics

2007-03-31T12:30:00.001-07:00

Guess which is me in this video. I've found more to the story of the student political movement of the 1960s, too. It seems that this notion is a major tradition among student activists. Starting as early as the 60s (and perhaps before?) there were students working to affect politicization of the student body. I remember at Haverford when I first started talking about a Student Political Network one prof. pointed me to a former student who had done something similar years before. It seems reasonable to guess from this that the student politization movement has been a consistent low-level presence in the American student body for decades. But why, with all these smart young cookies has it not been successful?
I think one culprit is the lack of connection among the students who work at it. Their period of engagement in the issue is short (around 4 years), and there are few enough and there are few enough institutionalized programs for connecting subsequent generations of students that over and over students must start from scratch. Consequently, the movement (if it can fairly be called one movement) can never even develop a particularly robust ideology. What would participatory politics look like? What would it mean? What do students need to do achieve them? These are all questions that don't get a chance to be answered in ways that stand the test of time.

I also think there is hubris in the goal of "transforming the body politic" and politicizing individuals. And it may be important for students to feel like they are inventing the movement from scratch. Its hard to feel like an entrepreneur when you're aware of how big and long-term the team you're working for really is.

So does the movement really need better institutionalizing of memory and expertise? Haber's long-term dedication to the SDS suggests the power that accumulating experience can have. On the other hand, one of the goals of the "particpatory politics" movement is to get more and more people to be entrepreneurial in their civic action, and so there are certainly risks to establishing traditional organizations. I would work on this problem now, but its Saturday. ;) Instead I think I'll go juggle.

You Tube Interview on political video

2007-03-30T12:59:00.001-07:00

Besides the content, there are a number of things about this video that highlight emerging forms of communication and other changes to society. The format is novel, as the interviewer never actually spoke to the interviewee. I haven't been following this story, and I'm caught by the references to his lost job. Why did his video cause him to lose his job? And more universally, its a problem today that one's digital IP is often a source of contention with employers. What are the rules (what should they be?) about how strictly an employer can control one's IP outside of the office?

The Individual and the Law

2007-03-29T22:55:00.001-07:00

Your Del.ico.us tags are your own intellectual property. So are the content of other social networking and many office 2.0 applications. Camera phones are ubiquitous and hopefully other digital recording devices will become more so (why do camera's have to be so darn expensive?). But this clip illustrates two troubling things about this trend so far: almost nobody understands our legal system as it relates to media and IP well enough (even the police) and too many are responding to the spread of information by wanting to shut it down. Openness and fast communication may be the greatest boons of web2.0, but they are generating enemies as well friends.

Student Activism 1960s and today, p. 1 - Short version

2007-03-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

Well, that last post was godawfully long! Here is the short version.

I. Student activism in the early 1960s was VERY similar to that today. Most students were apathetic (or percieved to be so) and a small number of politics nerds. Many of these spent their time trying to convert the rest to their political lifestyle. There are other similarities, too, including a focus on building non-hierarchical organizations and communities, experimentation with forms of activism. An important point that DIDN'T make it into the last post is also that their ideology was not Marxist. In fact it was thoroughly steeped in good old fashion American (and even Jeffersonian) individualism.

II. But the Civil Rights movement made the most important difference between then and now, it seems to me. The civil rights movement gave students their 'in' into political action. Techniques of resistance to segregation allowed non-political students to dip into political action just a little bit at a time.

III. But then I think the CR Movement (and later the anti-war movement) eroded the student political movement. The student political movement was about getting students to actively push social change everywhere they saw need, and to feel a constant responsibility to be socially aware and active. But the CR Mmt. and the anti-war movement may have left people too issue-centric. My theory, that I would like to subject to scrutiny (mine and yours) , is that the student political movement dissolved because it was unable to transform issue-centric activists into citizens with a universal feeling of responsibility towards participation.

The long version is much cooler than this one, so I recommend you still read it. And the book I'm basing all this on, which I cite in the long version.

Cheers!

Student Activism - 1960s and Now. Part 1.

2007-03-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

The 1960s are legendary (and infamous) for their student political movements. At no time before or since have American students seemed to be a powerful force for social change. Today young organizers hear stories of those years with awe and sometimes a sense of superiority. It is a shame, some of us think, that students cannot muster such enthusiasm and energy. If only we could rekindle that spirit again! But some of us also hold a degree of disdain for those defeated idealists. Imagine the naivete of thinking that as a young student you could change the world. Imagine the hubris of thinking that as a privileged member of the middle class and a college educated elite you even have the right to try.

There are many kinds of feelings among students considering the mythology of that dramatic time period. But what really happened? Were young radicals naive and arrogant? Were they just crunchy hippies on acid trips? What was so different about that time? I picked up Democracy in the Streets to see if I might learn a little bit about the era.

Perhaps I could find insights into why young people were active then, and we scorn activism now. What was the ideology that fed the mass movements? What kinds of organizational structures made them possible? Why did they dissolve in the end? What would it take today to rekindle civic participation among youth? I've read only the beginning of the story so far, and I'll keep posting as the story develops. But what I've learned has surprised me. The beginning of the New Left is almost exactly the same story as that of student activism in the last few years. The similarities come so thick and fast its creepy.

Students were considered, then as now, a pretty apathetic bunch. Back then even voting was forbidden to most students. Like today, a few were hyper-political activists. Many of these saw as their objective "to re-create [...] the art of political discussion with a democratic and non-sectarian flavor" (55, the words of Tom Hayden). One founder of the New Left, Alan Haber, "stressed his vision of the campus as 'a laboratory where students test ideas and techniques which are later used in all areas of society" (33). Organizations such as Talk Lab , , Penn State's Social Awareness Committee and many others follow exactly this same model. A very small number of students want to create an atmosphere on campus of political awareness. In the bleakest interpretation, a group of young politicos are trying to turn everyone else into young politicos. Tom Hayden was right when he said this tiny movement is, in a sense, evangelical.

Students in the early 60s were experimenting with many of the same organizational structures and ideas on how to reform society. The famous Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee "sharply distinguished itself from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Martin Luther King by its emphasis on 'group-centered leadership" (56). Activists talked about building a participatory democracy, and focused energy on building non-hierarchical communities on their own campuses.

In an article written for The Michigan Daily [Tom Hayden] suggested [...] 'The University must work relentlessly at being a face-to-face, rather than a mass society. [...] To foster a sense of genuine community required a 'democratization of decision-making'.

The public sphere is brimming with activists and scholars discussing participatory politics and non-hierarchical organizational structures. What I never realized, and what I think has escaped the notice of many of today's activists, is that these ideas are not at all new.

However student activists in the early 1960s had two things that modern students do not. First, the President of the United States proclaimed his support for youth power. In his inaugural address in 1961, Kennedy announced, "Let the word go forth from this time and place [...] to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." (55) Whether Presidential support helped student organizers, or whether it was simply a reflection of a broader social belief in the potential of young people to contribute to society, I do not know. Either way, it couldn't be bad for student political participation.

Second, the Civil Rights Movement became an essential resource for organizers as well (I think) as a source of the movement's demise. The positive influence on the nascent student political movement is clear. The hatred and segregation in the South gave students a clear enemy. And resistance in the South gave college students their first taste of political participation. The book's author, James Miller, explains that boycotts and sit-ins inspired by actions of SNCC "were an organizer's dream. 'They required a minimal commitment,' says Sharon Jeffry. ' People had to talk about it and say that that's what they were doing. But it was only two hours in the afternoon" (34). People become politically active in small increments, and the civil rights movement gave student organizers the tools to make that happen.

I'm beginning to suspect that the civil rights movement also became a problem for student politics too. Alan Haber argued that students needed "an organization that could illuminate the connections between issues like the arms race, poverty and racism and the discontents of the student body". (23) The student political movement was about engaging students in participating in democracy, helping them organize, helping them learn how to be active and aware citizens in every facet of society. The civil rights campaign gave tools to bring students into participation in politics. From there, students would be ready to participate in other areas of society too, fighting for change where ever they saw it needed. However I think it is possible that the civil rights movement subsumed the nascent student political movement. I think it is even more likely that the anti war movement finished off what was left of the student political movement. And then when the war ended, nothing was left to carry forward the energy, experience and habits of activists.

But i don't know yet. Maybe more reading in this excellent book will get me closer to the answer. And please feel free to share your thoughts about student activism now and then.

Bridging a cultural divide in America

2007-03-27T21:10:00.000-07:00

This post on Campus Progress is an opinion piece in which the author argues that progressive activists have reason to advocate their causes in the southern states. The author concedes the task is difficult because of discrimination in the southern states and elitism in northern ones.

The firestorm of angry responses from conservative individuals, many of whom said they were from southern states, is breathtaking. Response after response rails at the author and the article. The article clearly crossed an inviolable line in the minds of most of the responders. That which must not be criticized was threatened.

While the vehemence of this article is staggering, I've come across this divide elsewhere too, in personal conversations, in news articles. There are groups within the United States that cannot talk to each other, it seems. Our homework for the next 50 years: learn how to bridge that gap. I'm going to try to do some homework on the subject, although I'm also trying to get through some history of the 1960s. Any suggestions on places to look are appreciated.

Activism and governance

2007-03-27T16:46:00.000-07:00

One of the purposes of this blog is to explore how activism works. Social change happens whether people try to change society or not. But its called activism when people try to change it explicitly.

Is it activism when it's the government that tries to change society explicitly? I guess we'd all mostly agree that that is more properly called governance. What then is the distinction between activism and governance? It seems to be that part of governance (governance includes enforcement too) is explicit social action by the state and activism is explicit social action by non-state actors.

Today, perhaps, that distinction is becoming problematic. There is a plethora of public-private partnerships that even include privatized military forces . And (I think this is more prevalent in other parts of the world) there are non-state actors, for example Hamas , that provide many services that could be considered the responsibility of the state. In other words, non-state actors are providing enforcement. This doesn't make them states, though. Military contractors are not (technically at least :/ ) sovereign.

What does this mean for activism? As enforcement responsibilities erode from state institutions, perhaps so too will social action responsibilities? This may seem like good news for "participatory democracy" but I, for one, am far more comfortable keeping the enforcement powers strictly in the hands of a civilian controlled and popularly elected state. Is there a paradox here? Is the flow of one kind of authority out of the state a precursor of another flow? Can we have a society in which social action (deciding on the rules and norms) is shared by all but enforcement is limited to the state? Or maybe these aren't useful conceptual models at all.

All I know is, this clip from FreshCreation is pretty amazing.

Yack - More meta content

2007-03-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

Today I found YackPack , one of the Office 2.0 web applications. This one is for facilitating voice communication among members of a group (a project team, a class, any group, really). There are 3 ways to use the service.

1. Live chat - On YackPack's website or with an embedded widget you can chat live with anyone from your group that is currently online.

2. Messaging - From the site of your group's YackPack, you can record and send messages to other group members.

3. YackCast - Like messaging, except with the YackCast, messages and responses are strung together to create a single audio conversation.

Here is the Talk Lab Yack . I've got a sore throat today so I haven't made any audio messages myself yet.

This is a neat service, but doesn't quite give me what I'd like it to give.

Given the constriction on only group members being allowed to add messages, it enables people who are already working together to talk, but doesn't make it very easy for people who are not already working together to connect.

I think something like blog services offer for commenting would be really useful. A widget could allow people to record responses to the site's YackCast by simply giving their names and websites. I don't think it would be especially vulnerable to spamming because the YackCast records voice.

I'm going to play around with it some more, and maybe put a badge for it on this site.

The YackCast and other Office 2.0 applications are just a little closer to making the mobile office possible. Using online office management tools, everything you'll need to run an organization will be online. Even the data and documents will be available from anywhere you'd like to access it. Who wants to work in a cubicle lit by overhead florescent lights when it will be just as easy to work at home, at Starbucks, by the pool, or anyplace else you'd like?

Trailfire trail of Carnival Citizen responses

2007-03-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

Well here it is. It is a trail of the Carnival Citizen Carnival Blog on Church and State.
Its a neat tool and it has potential. I think it could partner very effectively with the Carnival Blog idea. It gives you a slide show of web sites and when the sites are tied together in content but not in actual web address, this tool can link them together. It is a step towards adding towards the meta level of the Internet, in which information is organized not just by how authors wrote it but by how users understand it. Its related to Diigo in that respect. If it were popular enough, you could use it as a database for searching, looking for websites connected to each other by trails. Shared text wouldn't be necessary for pages to be linked. They would be linked by human judgment.

However it does have quite a few problems. The interface for creating trails is pretty awful, I think. You add the plugin to your firefox browser and to make a trail, you push the button on the browser. A popup appears and a sidebar. The website at which you are adds itself automatically to the trail you select.

I look forward to seeing how it develops. Maybe authors could put buttons on their websites that link to all the trails the cite their page? There must be all kinds of functionality that could be added. But is the TrailFire architecture open enough to allow users to add new functionality?

(that is an interesting requirement, by the way. When else has it been an advantage for a product to provide its users the tools to reshape the product?

Blog Carnival and Trailfire

2007-03-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

Sum of My Parts an excellent blog by a researcher studying social networks posted a short time ago (couldn't find that post unfortunately) that she fears the decline of inter-blog conversation. Too many blogs, she was finding, don't talk to each other or cite each other. Rather they site the same pages and papers that other blogs cite.

I am happy to report the discovery of the Blog Carnival . In a Carnival, a blogger will host a theme discussion. Participant bloggers will send in their submissions. Then the host will accept the ones he or she thinks fit the theme and will then post them, and write short responses and descriptions of them.

The effect is to create a group of posts talking to the same issue and to each other. This is an excellent boon to blog conversation, and its great for bloggers (like me!) who are trying to get a little more exposure, and trying to find the community in which they'd like to participate.

Building on Bruce's comment , one could put together a Trailfire trail of all the pieces of a carnival, so one could click through the summary, then the pieces the summary indicates.

I may do that tonight, if I get a chance. But first I must enjoy the beautiful weather. All computer and no outside makes Jack an incomplete individual.

Percolation and social movements

2007-03-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

Oh goody! I found one. The paper, "An application of percolation theory to political science" by two professors in Tokyo:

Kazuyuki Ikko Takahashi (Meiji University, Tokyo)
Ryosuke Murai (University of Electronics and Communication, Tokyo)

Unfortunately I couldn't understand their model very well, partly due to my ignorance of percolation theory and partly to difficult-to-read English. Basically what they look at is how a social model can spread in a society.

They break society into three kinds of actors: regular people, supporters and activists. The regular people, it seems are just sitting there waiting to be converted. Supporters ascribe to a social movement but they don't recruit anyone. Activists recruit.

How they got to their results, I don't understand very well, yet (it'd help if I could run my own simulations of innovation-spread in a social network, but i haven't found anything to let me do that. :( )* But what they found was that a social movement can create an infinite cluster (one that reaches throughout the network) with just 50% of the population. And there can be far fewer supporters if there are also a few activists.

However their model doesn't adequately deal with the topology of the network. Each actor in their model can only make 3 connections, and my impression is that those connections were limited to a lattice - that is if all actors/nodes made all three connections, you'd have a lattice of little triangles. There'd be no small-world effect or scale-free network effect.

What I'd like to do is look at percolation in a bi-partite graph where one layer is the graph of people and the other is the graph of groups they belong to.

(Note: future models should also examine how different groups bestow different levels of influence on their members. i.e. family and school influences are stronger than political party)

*How often to I end a parenthetical remark with an emoticon? I really want to find some way around that awkward double-parenthese thing.

Protest movements are SO not now.

2007-03-20T19:30:00.000-07:00

Today on my way somewhere else, I stopped by the Climate Crisis Action day in DC. This is the crowd by 11:00am.

It was a little disappointing. And my mom , who actually went to the rally, felt unsatisified. The march was boring, basically. Like all the others I've been to, everybody stands around trying to hear somebody talking about politics through a sound system that does more harm than good. Its no wonder that many of my friends look down on protest events. "They never accomplish anything" goes the complaint.

But there are many examples of very successful protest movements. The 1963 March on Washington brought the Civil Rights movement to the forefront of American politics. Optor! is a student protest movement credited with bringing to an end to Slobodan Milisovec's rule. Duncan Watts (whose excellent book, Six Degrees I just finished reading today) also mentions "thirteen sensational weeks in 1989" when thousands of residents of Leipzig, Germany took the streets in the hundreds of thousands and led to the demise of the Berlin Wall.

The lesson I take is that there is more to the story of protest movements than "they don't work". There has been a lot of research into this already, which I'd like to find out more about. And I also had an idea from Watts' book. He talked about how innovations and diseases spread throughout a whole society by first coming to dominate a "percolating cluster". Percolation theory is a whole field of study, it turns out. In the model, a new idea or disease won't spread unless it finds a kind of home-base mini-network to propogate it throughout the rest of the system. Once the percolating cluster has been dominated, the rest of the network is sure to follow.

Maybe protest movements are most effective because of their role as a "percolating cluster" for social change. I'd like to find out more about the theory, but it seems to make sense on face value.

If this is true, the goal of a protest movement is NOT to win a single policy goal - rather it is to build a densely connected network of individuals sharing a particular attitude towards a kind of policy issue. This attitude, nurtured by this rich community, then can tumble out and infect the rest of society.

I think this suggests a few strategies for protest movements. But all this deserves more organized consideration and broader discussion, so I'll leave it here for now. Maybe I'll do a few posts about in a series?

Storymapping software

2007-03-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

So here is a storymapping social network site. It lets you create maps, tag locations on them, add some limited content to the tags, and trace routes as well. The web app is Wayfaring . Here is a simple map I made of the olde Alma Mater with a route to the theater at the neighboring college I would perform at:

You can probably see here that the site is fun to play with, and its social networking element is nice, too, allowing you to share waypoints, maps, etc. You can also track the maps of other users. And it has the most essential feature, the ability to embed the maps you make elsewhere. But I found that it is a little rough still though. The search function didn't seem to work. I entered Haverford, PA and it couldn't find it. I had to drag the map all the way across the country to get to where I wanted to go. Maybe I'm just using it wrong.

Anyway, its a great tool, and I hope it gets better.

ps. This is not even remotely related, but I found episodes of the Original Batman series. Holy Web 2.0, Batman!

Idea for commenting on websites

2007-03-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

Diigo is a service, like I said in the last post, that could be used for creating commentary on any website. But a person would have to be a Diigo user in order to see the commentary. If Diigo had a competitor in the meta-page industry (I'm calling it that because the comments would make a content-layer with the original page as the foundation and inspiration for the new page) people could only see the commentary of users using their service be it Diigo or something else.

Instead we need a standard for meta-page commenting. My idea is similar to the RSS feeds.

RSS feeds have a button on the page which accesses the feed. Users would access the meta-page by clicking a similar link/button. This would activate the code that comprises the meta page. Bubbles would appear over the content of the page, and a pop-out window would appear which would provide the interface for navigating and adding to the page.

There are numerous challenges - how would bubbles be located on the page? In absolute terms by pixels? Relative terms by locating them within certain page elements? Maybe either one?

Commenting on websites and videos.

2007-03-15T11:52:00.000-07:00

Today's post on PART a transliteracy blog links to two fascinating websites. BubblePLY and Mojiti both offer the same basic service. They allow users to add comments to videos. There are sort of two ways the comments attach - some comments are public and create a running conversation on the video. Other comments are exclusive. This creates a new video that simply adds one voice's commentary to a video.

YouTube does already have a kind of conversation in the form of video replies and comments on videos. But these two other services allow comments to be inside the video itself- the commenter controls where in the video they appear and also what they look like, where on the video they appear (comments can be under a main character, they can appear as a text bubble from a puppet's mouth, or anything else in that vein.

This is a terrific new step in making the web interactive. But they need to go a bit farther - their service, of commenting on videos, needs to be available from anywhere on the web. Diigo a social bookmarking and web page annotation page has a good idea - their service allows you to comment on web pages. The most common practice is to add private comments that only the writer can see. But there is also the potential for users to write public comments on the web page. Its easy to imagine how a web page could acquire a new level of content of the conversation of those commenting on the web page itself. Diigo offers a Firefox extension that makes it possible for you, the user, to use the diigo service from your browser (i.e., no need to visit Diigo) Delicious does a similar thing. The video pages could learn from this feature.

Web 2.0 and political opportunities

2007-03-09T17:29:00.000-08:00

I asked myself, why has Web 2.0 and all of this exciting technology we're all buzzing about not reformed democracy? Why are democratic habits and practices atrophying around the world? For the United States, I have part of an answer...there aren't opportunities for citizens to wield effective authority in governance. An vanishingly small elite group of leaders make decisions and there is not infrastructure for the general public to participate.

The extent to which the general public can participate is simply to participate in semi-annual elections in which citizens are reduced to consumers. We each have one vote/dollar and can spend it as we see fit. Here web technologies are doing some good. The George Allen campaign debacle illustrates how the web can make politicians accountable to the entire electorate for what they say. One commentator complained that YouTube prevented politicians from being able to 'hone their message'
to particular audiences. If you look at it another way, YouTube is preventing pandering - if you say something to one group, everybody is gonna know it, and you'd better not pretend you think something different (unless you change your mind. But learning to accept politicians changing their minds is a skill that we need some practice with!)

But besides holding politicians accountable for everything they say, what else would count as an enhancement for participatory democracy? A closer relationship to individuals and government? Given the current strength of hierarchy in government, there are too few decisionmakers for them to be able to make meaningful connections to many of us. The poor dears would be overwhelmed. How would government function if it were less centralized? There would certainly be problems with that. Oh, I'm confused.

By the way -
In post-modern society there isn't a clear definition of the 'general public'. Individuals' relation to governance is on a sliding scale. Identifying two classes - the leaders and the followers - is misleading, perhaps. On the other hand, there could be a power rule in effect. People with government power accumulate more and more. The other name of the power rule, by the way, is the "rich get richer" rule. That's a topic for further discussion, though.

Socrates online

2007-03-09T09:43:00.000-08:00

So my Mom found these online Yale lectures here . There are many amazing topics, and I really recommend them. Through that I also found a series of great speeches from history. Last night I listened to Socrates' defense before the Athenian court. I enjoy Socrates a great deal - in his dialogues he is such a jerk all the time that he is enormously entertaining. And I guess the philosophy is important too. But after listening to his defense, I find it easy to imagine that I would have voted to make him drink from the cup too. Take a listen for yourself. You can find it on Itunes.

Wiki Politics

2007-03-08T10:52:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a paper today, that I don't know if I will finish in time. The journal Re-Public which is a very neat journal about the future of democracy in the super-connected world of today and, hopefully, also tomorrow.

The journal asks for papers that discuss Wiki Politics - Papers that discuss "the openings for democratic theory and practice" that are created by new technologies like Wikis and other children of the read/write web. Its due by the end of tomorrow, so I don't know if I'll get anything in, but I'd like to take a stab at it.

For understanding Wiki Politics, we first need to decide what a Wiki Political system is, and then to decide what it would feel like for the individual. As it turns out, the answers to these questions are different.

A Wiki Political system refers to a system in which a very large number of individuals participates actively in governance of their society. It requires tools and social mores that enable and encourage every individual to not only accept the opinions and follow the decisions of others, citizens must create opinions to influence others and make decisions regarding the system which governs them. Every individual would be substantially autonomous but would have the inclination, habit and ability to choose to work to support the good of the society. Howard Simeon in 1773 discussed this as the freedom, not from restrictions, but to work for the good of the society. Since then, scholars have discussed this distinction as the difference between the 'freedom from' and the 'freedom to' (Clark 2004)

A Wiki Political system will rely on people understanding their responsibilities to the system as a whole, and to all of its members. "With great power comes great responsibility" (Was that Pres. Bush or Spiderman?)

This is sort of what I want to write about - the ethical and behavioral obligations of individuals in a society of Wiki politics. A wiki society must be one which enjoys diversity, creativity, and nurtures its citizens to teach them the skills and principles necessary for participation.

The web and the senses

2007-03-07T10:55:00.000-08:00

In the future...

The whole body will be useful for interacting with the web - see this article on full body game controllers .

This article also from the BBC discusses technology for adding scent to the computing experience.

And sound is already essential to the internet experience. Podcasting is everywhere and today I found a very cool site called Odeo, which facilitates sharing sound in mp3 form. I know its hardly the only site that does that - the innovation of Odeo is that they allow you, by giving you an account, to keep an online playlist of songs, syndicate your playlist and preferred channels by RSS or other formats, subscribe to your list on Itunes, and also subscribe to other people's personal channels. This makes it possible for your music to become an easily reached part of your personal internet platform - the customized workbench of tools from many sources that bring you the content that you want.

All this adds up to an internet that is a much more immersive experience. It may even become misleading to call it the internet, as technological connectivity becomes part of everything we do, Everything will be connected in some way to the internet. It won't make sense anymore to define the 'internet' as something different from regular experience.

Storytelling online links

2007-03-06T05:25:00.000-08:00

Speaking of storytelling, I found the Oort Cloud yesterday. Its a site for anyone who wants to submit science fiction and fantasy stories. Like One Million Penguins and the Theater Wiki site I work on a little bit, it is trying to bring publishing into the internet age. Gone are the days of big-money publishing houses holding all the keys to the castle of ...er...publishment. Anyway, I think its interesting to compare the different ways these projects set up the rules for their publishing system. I like Oort Clouds: they structure it so each story is like a post to a single blog. That way, every story goes up on the whole communities radar once, and if the readers like it right away, it'll stay up. It keeps the playing field even, or even-er, to give everybody some airtime.

Storytelling

2007-03-05T11:01:00.000-08:00

I came across this video of a lecture about how storytelling is important for nonprofits thanks to PART, a blog about transliteracy . The speaker's major points are that

Storytelling is a fundamental tool human brains understand information (He uses statistical and anecdotal evidence for this)
American society and governance relies on 4 archtypical stories
Non-profit orgs. should learn to tell stories much better, and
A story consists of three main parts - a character with a goal, obstacles to his/her achievement, and a payoff at the end.

The idea that there are a few foundational stories, which different groups emphasize in different proportions depending on their goals, is very similar to George Lakoff's framing argument in Don't think of an elephant

I bring it up for a few different reasons. Its a great lecture, for one thing. Watching lectures online is one of my new favorite things to do. (I'm pretty cool, after all) He is entertaining and thought provoking. He mixes narrative with declarations about the way things work and employs humor well, of self-deprecating and other varieties.

And storytelling is a form of communication that social activists will do well to cultivate. Many, including Lakoff and Reich have made the point that the left has lost much of its ability or dispostion to tell compelling stories. I am certainly no storyteller, and my tendency to talk about my intellectual goals, ideas, and principles in academic terms (i.e., talking about them explicitly as goals, ideas and principles) has certainly made it hard to share my passion for them with others. Its a difficult lesson to learn - that the way to communicate abstract ideas is indirectly.

This points to what many like me might consider to be a limitation of 'storytelling' and the kind of communication it represents. Storytelling, or communicating anecdotal examples of larger ideas, doesn't really even claim to be exhaustive and precise. If we want to talk about poverty, academic language will try to engage the whole issue, naming parts of it, identifying trends, patterns, flows of behavior, money and information. It will try to identify different kinds of poverty, state causes, and in general try to be as specific and explicit about the issue as possible. A story will not be explicit. A story might be about a poor person, and his or her life. All those elements about causes and repercussions and nuances should be in a good story, but they will not be named. The listener or reader must search for them.

And there is a major limitation with stories. Their power is their emotional appeal, but there also is the danger. A story can hide its misleading picture of reality through pandering to emotional appeal. Or because a story's meaning comes from the listener's understanding of its content, one story will deliver multiple meanings to different listeners. (But this happens with academic work too)

Also, writing a good story requires understanding all those things that academic language names. The left's problem is that it relies too heavily on academic understanding of problems, leading to facts that others cannot share easily. The problem of the right is that it relies too heavily on stories. It denies that what might appeal to intuition in a story might not actually be true in the real world. Both errors are dangerous.

Living in the corner of the network

2007-03-01T13:26:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about what it is like to be a node in different kinds of social networks. How does the subjective experience of a node (if its also a person) depend on the structure?
Consider a star-shaped network like the one in this post . The hub and the spokes must have each a very different outlook on the world. The hub must feel very important, but also very pressured by the information, desires, messages and everything else flowing from its spokes. If the hub is, for example, a politician, I can imagine how she might be both important to the spokes (constituents, staffers, etc.) as well as constrained by them, bounded and defined by them.
What about a more regular network, in which the number of links to vertices/nodes/individuals are more equal across all nodes?

This network is a little more evenly distributed. Every node in the network is an individual, with a full complement of emotions, thoughts, dreams, plans and experiences. And each has a different perspective on the world.

Imagine the red node is you. Your entire experience of the world is limited to a very small part of it. This is as true for dots as for people. How do you decide what to trust? What to believe? I know these are questions much discussed already, but it is the kind of question that is always useful to go over more, I think. After all, each of us dots has a unique perspective on the world, and it may be that only by sharing our perspectives can we get a sense of the whole picture.

Related tid-bit: this book describes a philosophy of the universe which originated in Asia: the god (or gods, I can't remember, or find the exact passage) has a net of an infinite number of gems with an infinite number of faces on each one, and all the gems are tied together. And in the infinite faces of each gem are the reflections of all the rest.

Intelligence in the workplace

2007-02-26T09:19:00.000-08:00

This post from Headshift mentions a BBC article which identifies information over-stimulation as a factor which can adversely effect employees. Distraction by email and phone and other sources can reduce a person's functional intelligence. John Adams told his son, "A scholar is made alone". Reflection is a mental space where intelligence can grow and be nurtured.

Does this present a paradox when contrasted with argument of the popular book Blink? The premise of this idea is that people make excellent decisions based on split second intuition. So which is it? Do people think best by reflection or by immediate intuition?

I think a balance seems likely. To everything, turn turn, turn. We need to find ways for the workplace to foster both short-term decision-making and long-term reflection.

On a related note, this article from LiveScience.com about American job satisfaction paints a grim picture. Fewer than half of Americans are satisfied with their jobs, and the problem gets worse as study subjects get younger. And the problem is on a downward trend.

Just as we are starting to try to design our way out of a climate crisis (or at least its worst effects), we have a responsibility to try to design work environments and processes that are healthy and appealing to us. A maxim of software design is that software should change to meet the needs of the user, not the other way around. The same is true of our workplaces. The workplace should be shaped not to force us into unnatural processes, but rather should nurture and unlock our innate creative and productive potentials.

Maintaining a network as it segments

2007-02-21T16:45:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I'm way beyond where I can back up what I say with proof or mathematical models, but I was musing on the paper I talked about yesterday (That link seems not to work anymore- any ideas?). If a network tends to diverge into different camps given the right circumstances, and if those circumstances exist in most human networks (we can certainly see evidence of divergence all over the place), there could be strategies for balancing this effect to maintain a single community.

Here is one idea - In a network that has split into two camps, an actor could be added to create new connections. In the picture, the new actor and its links are blue and purple, respectively. In the social activism world, this translates to individuals who decide it will be their role to identify the cleavages within a community and work to bridge those cleavages. New avenues for transmitting ideas, concerns and strategies could open up. On the other hand, 'cleavages' between networks exist for a number of reasons. There could be geographic ones, the bridging of which requires only someone willing to do the legwork getting between the groups. There could also be ideological cleavages which would be harder to bridge. The job of the 'bridger' would be to negotiate some kind of common rules for interaction, or to even translate the information flowing from one network into something palatable for the other network (opportunities for sticky situations abound there!)

This second drawing depicts a hub and spoke/tree network. The new actor here connects spokes. This actor becomes kind of an alternative hub. In any hub and spoke network, the more spokes rely on the hub, the more fragile the network is. Just imagine trying to find something on the internet if Google shut down. So the actor reduces the whole network's dependence on the central hub.

Finally, for both of these models, the actor's final goal is not to just increase connection to itself, but to enable the nodes to which it connects to connect to each other. The network's dependence on the new actor will diminish, and the new actor's final success will be its own obsolescence. A victory brings the end of the victor's usefulness.

Wouldn't it be fun if we could test what happens in a network adding these kinds of activist nodes? You mean that wasn't your plan for the weekend already?

Social Networks fall apart

2007-02-20T10:04:00.000-08:00

I posted a few days ago a model of a book-buying network over time. The researchers found that over time, a network which began as an undifferentiated and evenly connected network (every node attaching to other nodes with about an average number of links and without favoring any particular type of node) gradually changes. Certain links become favored and other links diminish in strength. Eventually where there was one network, three separate ones emerge.

This is an interesting phenomenon with implications for how a society governs itself. Where else does this segmentation occur? Why? And what social engines can affect it, making segmentation more pronounced or less pronounced? I thought I would take a look to see if I could find more information about it.

I found this paper which asks, "Why do populations often self-organize into antagonistic groups even in the absence of competition over scarce resources? " I can't promise that I understand the findings correctly (and I definitely don't understand them completely), but they do seem to find that especially in a large population, social segmentation is likely to occur.

Here is why: They assume, based on previous models, that actors change based on influences of their neighbors, either through attraction to similar actors or revulsion from dissimilar actors. In previous models in which actors tried to be more like their similar neighbors and tried to associate with similar actors, researchers had found a powerful force that led to total homogeneity of a network. But if actors instead emulate similar neighbors not out of homophilia but out of xenophobia, distinct communities are likely to emerge and can even become persistent indefinitely.

The authors of The Federalist Papers decided that a large republic would be more stable than a small one because the number of factions would be so large that none could overpower the entire state. These findings seem to support the Framers' conclusion from 200 years ago. In a large network such as the United States, individuals are driven, not into homogeneity but a number of disparate groups.

On the other hand John Dewey still pointed out the homogenizing effect of modern technology. He was speaking of the railroads, but the internet is but a railroad for ones and zeros. And homogenization still seems to happen. The article's findings don't say that a population splinters itself into as many camps as their are actors. But the model only accounts for two camps. If people are driven only away from those dissimilar and driven to become more like those they are driven too, will each actor eventually create its own unique camp?

Also, what role does linking play? I didn't understand, from the article, how one actor is linked to another. How does an actor acquire neighbors? What happens to a network when new links become possible? Is a network's size determined by its number of actors, or by the distance from one actor to another? I could imagine that the population trends toward heterogeneity when there can be greater distance between actors, but that when the distance shrinks (because new technologies, for example) the effect toward homogeneity becomes stronger. What role does distance between actors play in the balance between segmenting and unifying forces?

Links to good introductory information on the mathematics of networks

2007-02-17T21:28:00.000-08:00

Networks as an abstract organizing principle may be one of the most important (or at least fashionable) areas of study in a number of fields, from business to economics to math. I think it will also help designing networks of activists to understand what the laws of networks are. As this article says, "These laws of networks may prove as robust and universal as Newton's laws of motion". We wouldn't design a hangglider without at least a familiarity with gravity, so maybe it will help to study the basics of the new mathematics of networks. And if not, its also just pretty cool to find out about all these rules we never even knew we were following. (And we can't break 'em, if we don't know what they are :) )

"Network Theory's New Math" at CNET

Site about Actor-Network Theory from the University of Colorado.

More on the way, and if you find anything useful, let us know!

Cheers,
Speeker