my thoughts

Two of my very best friends have launched a fledgling podcast called Somebody’s Wrong on the Internet (SWOTI). It’s a discussion format generally on political issues, with a little bit of pop culture, often with a specific diversity / race angle (both commentators are people of color.)

I’d like to explore an online strategy for the podcast. It’s an interesting challenge because it’s a little bit like a business start-up and but it’s also a little bit like trying to launch a musical career or something.

Neither I nor my friends know much about podcast production – I’m planning to research the podcast landscape to understand the very basics like benchmarks for successful audience size and operating budget. I’d like to explore a way to develop cross-media content – corresponding blogposts that are shareable on Facebook feeds, videos of recording sessions especially with guests, teasers for twitter, maybe an app that brings in content or resources mentioned on the podcast or quizzes or surveys where listeners can provide feedback. Ultimately, I think the best approach is to try to build a community and forum for discussion of thoughtful content that regular listeners can access and contribute to.

POST Structure

People –

• Audience
• Potential guests
• Potential commercial support

Objectives –

• Build credibility
• Build audience: determine reasonable weekly size
• Bring in financial resources: look into an operating budget (do you have to pay to book guests?)

Strategy –

• Create an online following that is engaged in the dialogue
  • provide feedback
  • build a following that will act as further advertisement and brand emissaries
  • generate enough buzz to bring in real guests

Technology –

• Podcast content (obviously)
• Website
• Email distro
• Twitter teasers
• Shareable facebook content

Will have to work through what the promise, the tool, and the bargain all are for the podcast and the potential participants in the community.

Wael Ghonim’s description of seeing the picture of Khaled Mohammed Said’s brutalized body resonated in a strange way with me. The random happenstance, the fascination, the violence, the denial. I’ve felt the same things when seeing videos of American police kill black men posted on my Facebook feed. I will not attempt to liken the Black Lives Matter movement with the dynamics of the Arab Spring beyond this initial comparison – it did get me thinking. The proliferation of social media platforms and the groundswell of information reporting – people publicizing the events of their lives with the ease of a click of a button – does mean that any user can experience the same outrage nearly first hand. Realistically, this has to have some impact on the way people become activated and involved in social movements. Prior to the last decade of technological advance, many people could live in blissful ignorance to so much of the world and what happens in it. The likelihood that I would ever see an actual police altercation, or that Wael Ghonim, in Dubai, would see the Egyptian police brutalize a young man is slim. While we might be told what had happened, it would be easy to deny or turn a blind eye. Now, if I wanted to, I could probably pull up the images of Khaled Said that helped foment a revolutionary change of regime.

 

Ghonim’s facebook page wasn’t the cause of the Arab Spring, Basem Fathy gives a clear chronology of the forces that were bubbling in Egypt for a decade before it. And Ethan Zuckerman also makes a compelling argument about attributing social change solely to the rise of social media. However, he also points out that given a previously formulated concern or grievance, the social media tools are the simplest and easiest for people to use and get their message out. So all this makes me wonder if the advent of wide exposure doesn’t at least speed up or catalyze what would have previously taken decades or generations to boil over. If those who might before have had no idea that something was amiss in the country, suddenly are getting that information casually when they are bored, shouldn’t that amplify and drive so many more to action? And by that same token, does it also lower the bar for what can build and spark change?

 

But maybe the opposite is true? That having more and more dramatic exposure to many issues numbs people to its importance? Or maybe it dilutes the process – in my class on American politics and public policy, we talk about a policy process model where a problem is identified and then coalitions form to build a solution, the solution is implemented and feedback is created for evaluation. It’s just a model for how things should be, obviously policy is rarely made in an orderly feedback-looped process, but it’s the notional idea. If everything becomes radicalized through the population’s facebook feed, what chance is there for measured, compromised policy change? Even in the case of the Arab Spring, where there were truly terrible atrocities going on, can we even argue that the outcome of the social media prompted uprising resulted in the most desirable outcome? Maybe some ignorance on the part of the electorate does provide some leeway for better policy – maybe transparency and urgency somehow makes things worse.

This election really threw me for a loop. The thing about the election that really got me was that it also threw a lot of institutions that I respect and trust for a loop as well. On Wednesday morning, I wasn’t feeling shell-shocked and, quite frankly, betrayed because the candidate I wanted to win lost. I felt that way because the indicators that I have been taught to rely on and the experts I thought were credentialed and judicious and careful, seemed just as surprised as I was. That’s what made me mad.

I think the collective we, and by that I mean the (at this point self-righteous and arrogant) liberals, really thought we were in the Epilogue of the Victory Lab – on the other side of the data-driven, analytics-ized, A/B testing, psychology game side of the political science learning curve. We had every faith that Hillary’s people were using every trick in the Obama book and more that we hadn’t even heard of yet. There’s no way that eight years later, we aren’t even more advanced, right? In this age, where every day we create more content and gather more information than was even created in the first 4-odd millennia of human existence, we must be pretty close to knowing everything about everyone, right? It’s just a matter of applying the now carefully cultivated analysis to it, and pulling the right puppet strings.

As I see it now, this presidential election feels much more like a quote from early in Issenberg’s book…”If you wanted to build a business designed to resist learning from itself…it would look pretty much like the American electoral campaign. Candidates, who effectively serve as chairmen of their corporate boards, tend to come in two types: those who have won their last race and think they have cracked the code, or those who have never done it before and understand little about the increasingly specialized work done by campaign professionals.” The internal conflict with the quote is the same as what that we find in the actual election. If you look at what the victorious candidates in 2008 and 2016 both had in common, in both cases, the candidates were actually the latter type – “those who have never done it before.” Obama and Trump are both basically upstarts who come from outside of Washington, both promising to shake up the status quo, both also bringing new approaches to campaigning and capturing the attention of the country.

Both Republicans (establishment at least) and Democrats completely failed to learn from that element of the 2008 election – we all just focused on the technology and the fundraising and the data. But what about the message? The core, foundational idea, which is actually more aligned with the technological disruption we see everywhere – that the old, cumbersome, exclusive institutions of our lives and our country need to make way for systems that are inclusive and agile and that give people access and a voice and validation. Because that’s exactly what this country is frustrated with in DC and we have clearly signaled that we don’t have the patience for politicians who keep ignoring that. Honestly, Issenberg found the perfect quote here: “’For many voters political preferences may better be considered analogous to cultural tastes – in music, literature, recreational activities, dresss, ethics, speech, social behavior,’ [Lazarsfeld], Berelson, and McPhee later wrote. ‘Both are characterized more by faith than by conviction and by wishful expectation rather than careful prediction of consequences.’” (pg. 120)

Trump, like Obama, harnessed the people’s faith and wishful expectations (as dark or as negative as you choose to interpret them – for the sake of our country, potentially somewhat naively, I’m hoping less racist than just desirous of change) and he did it with less money and staff than Clinton. So what does that actually mean about “the specialized work done by campaign professionals.” Perhaps it means technology in this age of political work allows you to shortcut it? After all, what does it come down to? Finding or persuading your likely undecideds and getting them out to vote. Shortly before the election, in a video teleconference with Trump’s head of media, he told us that he didn’t need ground game, that he could do everything he needed to with data from Facebook and by letting his candidate get his message out. And he wasn’t wrong. Both campaigns had piles of data and millions of dollars, but only one was able to truly capture the faith of enough people (in the right places) arguably through telling lies and promising pipedreams. So where does all this extra data and transparency and information and analysis actually get you? Just lie to the people and tell them what they want to hear.

“Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.” Cold, Clay, that’s so cold. And I’m not even sure whether it’s colder to the newspaper industry or to the former consumers of the newspapers. The fledgling business person in me (one year of business school under my belt with an otherwise largely fact and figure free 8 year career…) immediately thought about the dynamics of consumer behavior. Shirkey’s right, people are clearly not willing to pay for newspaper content just shifted to a digital format, but what is the substitute for a once perfectly profitable endeavor here?

I acknowledge that Shirkey has contextualized the disruption of newspapers as part of a greater revolution and therefore asserts you can’t make projections about how this will all shake out. What’s interesting and potentially quite dark, are the implications in what and how quickly different aspects of newspapers have been substituted – basically what the internet breaks here and what it does or makes better.

Shirkey points out in his blog and in the piece with Anderson and Bell that we can be certain that at the very least, at its existential core, the internet substitutes a way to get material from a private source to the public writ large. This is the essence of the Groundswell, that individuals (or institutions) can now get or convey what they need to other people directly. The first order effect of that on the economics of newspapers specifically, was that advertisers can get their information to consumers in a much more targeted, effective, and affordable way. Newspapers lost nearly all their value as a marketing tool – and it turns out that from an objective economic perspective, that was actually where all the value society put in newspapers.

But what about they other things newspapers also did? And why don’t we as a society value those things? As Nicco pointed out, newspapers, through their controlled access to the public, also focused the attention of the public. That, more than anything is what I think Shirkey is getting at when he talks about it being impossible to know how this revolution will end. Is this the end of a collective societal attention span? And therefore is it also the end of any kind of shared conception of events or culture? Maybe. Shirkey’s right, I can’t say.

There are more things that newspapers did though. They also hold power accountable, they provide a platform for contextualizing information and actions of society players, they construct the common narrative of what has and is happening. These are the things that Shirkey means when he says that we don’t need newspapers but we do need journalism. But what happens when the substitute for that, for journalism, is just anything that is entertaining to people on the internet? What happens when society doesn’t realize they need journalism and investigation of power and mechanisms for accountability? What happens when no one provides the context because we don’t value it enough? This is actually the thing that is breaking in the disruption. If free markets and capitalism are to be trusted, the message here is that we don’t think we need journalism or a rigorous accounting of facts and events by trained, trusted professionals. We don’t value analysis, or context, or due diligence, we will take the word of the people shouting loudest, or closest, or saying the most familiar things. Because that is what is substituting true journalism.

I spent a day canvassing in New Hampshire for another class, the assignment being to see what gets people motivated to be involved in actual campaigns – most of the day was spent knocking on doors for HRC, but on a whim we also visited the Trump office. The thing that most struck me in the long conversations I had with the Trump supporters, was that most of them talked about how they were able to do research and find out the facts themselves. They were proud that they weren’t just going to be feed information by the same news networks, they were figuring out a way around what they clearly thought of as conspiracy. They talked about how important it is not to just trust one source of information, that you need to get the whole story. I agreed with that principal of seeking independent sources of information. The critical difference is the understanding of why you can trust the alternative sources. We still need at least a common idea of what is credible, why something can be believed or trusted. These people clearly had an entirely different conception of what is and has even happened in this country. And that is the tragedy in the diminution of journalism as a profession and service to society. A friend told me that when she was researching conflict resolution, one of the things she took away is that a prerequisite for conflict resolution is that both sides have to have a common understanding of the actual events that occur. And I don’t know that that is possible with the loss of true journalism.

 

**If I had more time or concern, I would try to work through all the calling of Trump supporters as “these people” etc, but that’s what they felt and sounded like to me. Let’s just agree that I sound condescending and unempathetic and promise to work on it in the future for the sake of learning and understanding…

Taking a weird trip down memory lane, I decided to see what Wikipedia had to offer on my last boss, Admiral Michelle Howard. I worked for ADM Howard for just under two years, very closely, first as her Flag Aide and then as her speechwriter while she was the Vice Chief of Naval Operations.

Comprehensiveness

It’s a bit tough to fully consider what is a comprehensive report about a person, particularly one who you know personally. From the perspective of ADM Howard’s career milestones and highlights, everything is present and accurate. Perhaps one of the most important and impactful things about ADM Howard’s public life is the list of all the firsts that she has been…the number of trails she’s blazed and barriers she’s broken. All of those things are captured within the body of the article.

The content that I feel is missing has more to do with capturing more of the quality of her personality, work ethic, and the determination which allowed ADM Howard to succeed to the degree she has. I’m not surprised the article lacks this color, partially because it’s a bit harder to capture given the information that is publically available (and therefore citable) about her. However, I know of several news sources which discuss for example, her early family life, her experience at the Naval Academy, and even discriminatory comments made about her by senior colleagues (for which that colleague was strongly punished.) Indeed, the Wikipedia entry is instead largely a copy and paste of her official Navy biography.

Sourcing

As the most prominently drawn from source is ADM Howard’s official biography, edited by ADM Howard’s staff and approved by her, it is certainly an appropriate and accurate citation. However, where that the only source, one might be concerned. Obviously figures in the public sphere as senior as she is in the military might have motive to portray herself in a particular light or to control the information available about her life and career. Additionally, the Navy on a broader level has an interest in the kind of information available about her and her career. There is a decent list of articles published in reputable news organizations like Bloomberg Politics, The Washington Post, the Navy Times, and press releases from organizations like the NAACP.

Overall, I do think the lack of more personal content I discussed with regard to the comprehensiveness has a lot to do with the sources used (and not used) and the portions of information taken from those. I also think it’s consistent with the kind of messaging and publicity that ADM Howard herself and at the advice of the Navy’s Chief of Information are careful to portray and cultivate.

Neutrality

To a large extent, the content I think is largely missing would likely be considered a bit more controversial or portray the Navy to a disadvantage. For that reason, it’s not hard for me to imagine that the Navy has gone to some effort to the Wikipedia largely aligned with her professional public bio. That said, the information is factually accurate and certainly doesn’t reflect any significant or strong bias in the language and content actually present.

Readibility

The sequencing and language of the article is not the most accessible, particularly for a civilian audience. ADM Howard’s career milestones are all mentioned but they are not discussed chronologically and there is some repetition and redundancy around the list of firsts in her career. The somewhat garbled and overly formal information and language is a barrier for readability and is also my biggest critique of this Wikipedia article overall.

Format

The formatting of the Wikipedia page is good – consistent with other Wikipedia article formats, with functioning links and appropriate categories.

Illustrations

The illustrations which are present are good – fun fact, I was present when her official picture was taken, so it’s interesting to see it in such a public forum. I think the article would benefit from pictures of the ship she historically first captained (USS RUSHMORE.) I know there are also other public pictures of ADM Howard with family (mentioned in the article) and during other historical events mentioned in the article which I think would give more complete visual portrayal to go with the content of the article.

This week, we tackled existence in the virtual world. Obviously, that is overly broad and a bit dramatic, but maybe the key takeaway is that in a lot of basic ways, existence or at least social interaction in the virtual world can be much like how we behave in the real world, with some important differences.

Christakis and Fowler, in their chapter from Connected, introduce their discussion of social networks with the topic of a “massively multi-player game,” World of Warcraft, in which the population experienced a huge epidemic and real doctors and epidemiologist realized that the players behaved similarly to how they might in the real world. The “real behavior” occurred to such an extent that an academic article was published about the possibility of using virtual reality to study real reality. Online connections and ideas influence us in almost the same way that they do in the real world, but often with greater speed and much broader scope.

Now for the important differences. One key aspect of the virtual world is that in addition to the illusions that we actively see – a completely synthetic reality where you can meet people from all over the world or find out information at a touch of a finger, we are also subjecting ourselves to illusions we aren’t aware of. Eli Pariser originally, and Jonathan Stray both discuss the phenomenom of the “filter buble,” where despite our best efforts or perception that we are receiving a broad, representative view of the information on the web, the rise of personalized search and feed means that we are actually only viewing and consuming the things that the algorithm thinks we want to view and consume. This severely limits our access and freedom to move through all the information of the internet…partically because we would never be able to successfully navigate it all without some kind of filter.

Another key difference between how we can (and will) behave in the real world vs the virtual one is the intersection of the two worlds and the rules imposed in each of those worlds. The Economist article touches on how legislation in the real world, Europe to be specific, seeks to edit and control content online – demanding that content be removed from google. Even more interesting, in “The Delete Squad,” Rosen discusses the generation and iteration of content policy as ascribed by private companies like Facebook, Google, and to some degree Twitter.

Of all the ways that the real world and the virtual world mirror one another and constraints and conventions in one impact the constraints and conventions in another, examining the somewhat informal and ad hoc way that policy is being created in the virtual world is informative. Certainly, that is the case for me currently, studying at a school for public policy…so here’s what the Rosen article made me think about.

We’ve heard a lot about the idea of disruption through technology…disruption of how we buy and sell things (amazon, ebay,) disruption in how we get from place to place (uber)…but I wonder if the ubiquitous and fast moving nature of the internet has also generated or obviated the introduction of policy disruption.

In the example of Facebook, ultimately the initial formalization of policy came at the initiative of a 20 something help center worker turned content policy writer. Initially, I questioned his credentials to be part of the policy setting team for such a broadly used common space but then it occurred to me that the start-up culture/phenomenon sees many once-something-elses make it big as a tech mogul because they had an idea for how to do something better or faster or more easily. Should I necessarily rule out the idea of a policy start-upper or policy entrepreneur (after all, my public policy class uses the term though it seems to refer to something pretty different in the world of real life politics and public policy…) And from that, shouldn’t the guy who has to field the actual calls and see the actual content posted…who manages the team who are actually the “first responders” for the content that is reported as questionable, know best? Should he have, if not the best perspective, then a pretty well-informed perspective of what kinds of calls are out there to be made and rules that should govern those calls?

And from that, in some respects, the policy that Willner was instrumental in creating seemed to be more functionally applicable than policies that countries more broadly have adopted. Which was actually Willner’s objective – applicability over nuanced interpretation, such that algorithms or minimally trained “first responders” can make the call rather than lawyers or judges or courts. Is this policy goal better? Certainly, the way that Willner came to be the setter of this policy is much less deliberate than the framing of the constitution and the intentional balancing of power conceived of in the US political and legislative system. And Willner’s decisions may ultimately impact many more people with much less formality around how to change them.

Which brings up the next thing I thought of…the reversal of where the democratic part comes in in these web-policy setting scenarios. Within the context of the web, the “deciders” or policy makers or ultimate actors with power are already in place, often because of where they work or what they invented. While, in a representative democracy, the deciders would most likely be elected (or appointed by elected officials.) On the internet, it’s the policies themselves which are subject to election. It’s when the policies are implemented, that they are exposed to the input…the “vote” of the masses (users) because the internet is a platform on which they can comment. If the users show broad disapproval of the policy itself, then the deciders may reverse themselves, not because they won’t be re-elected, but because they respect and need the users…and even more peculiar, in this system, the opinion of an entire government or influential institution often holds nearly as much water as individual voters.

That said, will the immediate functionalization of policy prove a better lens through which to view the policy process model? Is it better than measures that elected officials subject governmental legislation to? Or just different because they have the optics and re-elections to deal with. The really interesting thing will be if/when we see these tech side actors join the ranks of the public officials…is there a hope that Willner would ever leave Facebook to try to shape the way these decisions are made back in the real world? If he ever did become a public servant (in the traditional sense) would he make better real life policies than other politicians or bureaucrats? Could he accelerate or streamline the policy process model? I think real life policy at the very least, would benefit from his voice and influence.

Note: I want to write like 500 more words on this based on what Erie said about open source policy writing but I’ll refrain.

Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody, explores what happens to social behavior when the advancement of technology eradicates or significantly lessens previous constraints. By and large, this discussion is in the context of the development of the internet, but he parallels with previous technological revolutions, like written word and printing press, as well as mass broadcast capability in radio and television technology. One of the biggest constraint that the internet overcomes is the transactional cost associated with organizing social groups, effectively removing the barriers to sharing information, collaborative creation, even collective action. Additionally, the internet democratizes access to public expression as well as information which forges connections previously too obscure to realistically see regularly.

O’Reilly’s article, “What is Web 2.0,” approaches the internet revolution more from an analysis of the way initial network tools have evolved, growing better and more useful. In several of the topics O’Reilly touches, he attributes this improvement the dynamics Shirky describes – the social behavior the tools allow. Specifically, collective input and intelligence have and will continue to improve file sharing (BitTorrent), the collective wisdom of the blogosphere, and the phenomenon of software above the level of a single device.

Both sources seem to get at a similar insight which I want to explore – that power and success within the internet ecosystem is creating a thing, process, product that appeals to and grows with the multiplicative nature of access the internet provides. Success not only acknowledges, but captures the power of the collectivity of humanity brought together by the internet – even if it’s only for a temporary amount of time. As O’Reilly explains in the Web 2.0 piece, specifically referencing BitTorrent and what makes it ‘2.0,’ “there’s an implicit “architecture of participation”, a built-in ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts primarily as an intelligent broker, connecting the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves.”[1]

Both Shirky and O’Reilly adopt a decidedly positive attitude toward this era of access and participation. Collective intelligence, unless I’ve completely misinterpreted it, points to an aspirational reality where barriers to ‘hearing’ everyone’s voice are broken and therefore, compiled knowledge zeroes ever closer to perfect truth through the increasing contribution of many individuals. But do we hear everyone’s voice? Are we compiling the knowledge of all? Or are we compiling the intelligence of those with access and misinterpreting it as representative of all? Neither author addresses the historical and continuing physical and economic barriers to the technology which means it’s almost always unequally accessible, preventing certain groups from joining this new collective community. Not to mention that this virtual world of voluntary contribution unconstrained by traditional transaction costs still contains social and normative barriers that mean that some groups feel less comfortable or entitled to assert their voices or knowledge.

Just as those who never learned to read after the innovation of the written word were left drastically farther behind than in a time when all were constrained to the knowledge of scribes – lightening the burden of some people’s constraints might end up meaning even more disparate weights distributed to those who are already most weighed down.

I’d like to posit that there’s a fallacy of no constraints – Shirky mentioned that humans still face social constraints, which is why celebrities are still a thing and why users uninitiated in interpreting public access to communication vs communication to the public appropriately get overwhelmed. Since the foundational revolutionary nature of the internet is the degree to which humans can now all “human” together it is conveniently optimistic to forget some of the darker parts of human nature – like unconscious or conscious bias, the Tragedy of the Common, etc. Here Comes Everybody duly pointed out that not everyone contributes the same amount or the same way to collaborative projects like Wikipedia. In fact, the contributions are hugely skewed – as described by the Power rule and curve. Doesn’t it then stand to reason to conclude that the entire collective community of knowledge, publishing, communication, culture is non-representative of large parts of the global population? In fact, the internet might actually be a tool for division as those initiated increasingly access and, in turn, shape what is quickly becoming the canon of human knowledge and the standard for dissemination of information.

The tension of the internet is the opportunity for “the long tail” to be serviced, but the big head still seems to dictate a lot of what’s viewed, considered credible, and purchased, so is this really a democratizing process? What protects the long tail’s equal right to publish, be heard, contribute in as meaningful a way? In my class on inequality and social policy, we talk about how inequality in and of itself isn’t bad, but inequality without mobility potentially is – because that’s one of the things that leads to unequal outcomes and unequal opportunity. As we increasingly laud the phenomenon of collective intelligence, it seems to me that we need a way to ensure that it is, in fact, collective.

[1] http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=2