Will the Revolution be Tweeted?

I just went to a terrific, timely talk by visiting professor Michael Dobbs on social media's role in revolutions. It was a rare treat to be in a room with well-informed experts on media and politics and discuss something that was going on right at that moment. Dobbs gave many examples of the popular press claiming that social media, Twitter in particular, had precipitated the successful revolution in Tunisia and the still-in-progress revolution in Egypt. He brought up examples of techno-utopian views on the subject (e.g. Clay Shirky's TED talk on the revolutionary power of Twitter) as well as rebuttals such as Malcolm Gladwell's piece for the New Yorker.

One question that came to mind during his talk was: when assessing whether or not Twitter and social media are capable of facilitating revolutions, to what are comparing them? And by "we," I mean the users, the public, the press, the critics, anybody. Gladwell essentially compares Twitter and Facebook groups to real world activism. I think he does this because he believes (as do I) that a fair amount of social media activists think of their tweeting or Facebook-group-founding as more similar to participation in a protest than sitting at home passively in front of a television screen and watching it all unfold. They think they're being active, but Gladwell points out that they ultimately have little real power because, unlike civil rights protesters or other activists who actually changed our world, they are not making any real sacrifice; they are not risking much; they are not forming lasting bonds with people for whom they would make some real sacrifice (e.g. a large sum of money, risking one's life, etc). So that, Gladwell says is the key difference between real world protesters and virtual ones: shared sacrifice.

I basically think of online activism the way i think about online "friends": instead of just saying, "online _____ is no substitute for the real thing!", I think it presents us an opportunity to pull apart the real world phenomenon and ask what parts of it are duplicated by the online proxy, what parts of it aren't, and how those parts matter for outcomes of interest. So, what is the point of protesting?

First, its a way to devalue the ruling party's monopoly on physical force. If enough people get out there in the town square and don't back down after being physically threatened and assaulted, then the power to threaten and assault loses its meaning. There's also a "softer" power of protesting crowds: they can choose not to vote for someone, they can choose not to spend their money somewhere. Even if they don't live in a democracy, they can make it even more glaringly apparent to the outside world that they're living in a country that isn't even remotely democratic. Dobbs seemed skeptical that this could result in the overthrow of a repressive regime. It didn't work in Poland, it didn't work in Iran, and it probably wouldn't work here, not unless people make very real, significant sacrifices, ones that couldn't be done online.

Dobbs essentially said that Twitter is a way to share information. Like pamphlets distributed in other revolutions, they are a necessary but not sufficient criteria for revolution. Other things need to be in place: long-standing, easy-to-grasp grievances, for one. But I don't think social media is just a way to get information out. The difference has to do with social pressure. Television was and is quite good at presenting the spectacle of many people behaving a certain way. Combine this spectacle with many little nodes on a network behaving or expressing ideas in the same way and you've got the appearance of consensus, which is a powerful tool.

This gets me to the idea of a tipping point. There is a point at which the contagion of an idea rapidly speeds up, a point at which it seems like "everybody" is buying the same t-shirt or saying the same catch-phrase or using Facebook. These are all fairly benign trends, which makes sense. Buying a certain kind of t-shirt didn't involve much sacrifice: they're all pretty much the same to you, and if this one is popular, even if its a little more expensive, maybe you should buy it. Putting your life on the line or uprooting your family or risking your livelihood (all things that may be called for if you're participating in a revolution) involve significant risk. But those arguing against the revolutionary power of social media miss a key point: social pressure can convince you to make great sacrifices under the right circumstances.

Here's how I think it works. At the start, you need to have a group of people who are very similar to you, the Twitter user, and they have to be engaging in some activity that you were pretty close to doing. Then you might be convinced to do what they're doing. As the number of people doing that thing grows, it starts to matter less and less how similar those people are to you and how predisposed you were to act that way in the first place. When it comes to social pressure, there is an effect of sheer numbers. It doesn't replace or cancel out those other effects, but as the number grows, the effects of similarity and pre-disposition lessen. If you give people who want a revolution a sense that they can pull it off because there are so many other young, unemployed, pissed-off men who are ready to risk jail or a beating, then its more likely to happen than if you didn't give them that sense. This is something that pamphlets or television alone cannot do.

At the end of Dobbs talk, another professor pointed out how many billions of tourist dollars Egypt is losing each day. China's economy can withstand a repressive government, but it doesn't look like this one can. We'll just have to wait and see.

The Medium is the Message: Blog

Reading this recent article in the New Yorker on blog magnate Nick Denton prompted me to revisit McLuhan's adage that the medium is the message. I do not take this phrase to mean that content has no significant effect beyond the medium by which it is accessed, but rather that the medium can influence what content people end up choosing and thus alter the media experience. I also take "medium" not to mean all internet applications but to mean various websites or applications that allow users access to information in unique ways.

Denton's blog empire, which includes Gawker, Gizmodo, and Deadspin, feature a subtle but important tweak to the standard blog format (eloquently encapsulated by Ben McGrath as "links with commentary, presented in reverse chronological order"): it presents statistics on how many people have read and commented on each article. Denton also pays his writers based on the amount of readers their articles garner. There is a kind of herd mentality in readers: they read what is popular, and the more they do this, the more popular those particular articles become. It is worth asking whether the content preferred in this system is different from a system where writers and editors take it upon themselves to design the format and layout of an online publication (as is the case with traditional blogs and online news sites like NYTimes). In the New Yorker article, there seems to be agreement among journalists on both sides of the traditionalist/new wave divide that such a format leads to more "sensational" news preference.

This way of presenting news seems somehow more democratic than traditional editor-selected alternatives. It sounds as though it provides more choice, and that would be better, wouldn't it? In a way, Gawker's innovation is similar to what Google or Reddit or Digg do: they take tons of raw information and they privilege the most popular links. That judgment as to what is worthwhile is made very quickly by users. They scan headlines and if the headline is interesting enough, they click on it. The assumption that this is somehow good rests on some other fundamental assumptions worth questioning:

• We are being held back by gatekeepers (editors) from what we really want. We are used to having the type of content or experiences we have access to being controlled by gatekeepers who may not have our best interests at heart. As long as we can choose for our "selves", we'll be fine. This is, in turn, based on another assumption
  
• As individuals, we are single, desiring, decision-making selves with stable, unique sets of desires.
  

Returning to the "medium is the message" mantra, we could consider the difference between the concerns over television and the concerns over the internet. The case against television was always a case against content. Watching television was bad because most of what was on television was so bad. By contrast, the case against the internet is a case against its users. There are wonderful, amazing, informative, pro-social, productive things one can do on the internet: create and run a business or a charity, disseminate useful, accurate information, take a course online. If people fail to do these things, its not because there is any lack of positive options from which to choose, so it must be their fault.

Denton gives people what they want, and its not the caliber of people that he's polling that leads to the move away from hard news toward gossip. Its the fact that he's accessing our inner hedonists, our immediate selves.

Panic/Panek & Social Media Use

As I write, there is a tornado warning in my area. I have taken the appropriate precautions: I'm in my basement away from the West and South walls. And I brought my laptop. Aside from being the most valuable of all my possessions, my laptop (assuming its connected to the internet, which it is) is quite a valuable thing in this situation.

First, I should say that I have very little personal experience w/ tornadoes. My closest brush was when I visited a friend in Iowa and woke up to an ungodly, sustained siren. Half-conscious, I thought the world might be ending. My knowledge of tornadoes - the odds of them occurring, the damage wrought - was informed by weather channel specials and mediocre Bill Paxton movies. It turned out they were just testing the siren and there was no tornado at all.

So, I had no personal experience w/ this danger, and the second-hand knowledge I had was from unreliable sources. There's this air of paranoia that comes w/ over-preparedness that gets drummed into our heads by authority figures legitimately concerned for our safety. I would assume that this leads us to believe that the odds of encountering a life-threatening earthquake or tornado or hurricane are far higher than it actually is. Am I a fool to be in the basement?

Anyway, back to my laptop. I first knew about the warning via an almost comically old-fashioned medium - the siren. I then went online and tried to go to the weather channel website which wasn't loading, so i turned on the TV and indeed there was a tornado warning. I googled "tornado safety" to confirm my hunch that being in the basement was a good idea. I felt like an idiot for doing this, partly b/c it suggested that I was dependent on technology and possessed no horse sense of my own. Its only a matter of time before I start asking google whether or not I'm in love or where I should move.

Then I went to Twitter, which, aside from being a terrific way of knowing what David Allen Grier had for lunch, really is a great resource for immediate local news and/or reaction to an event. The only other time twitter was of use to me was when my phone wouldn't send/receive texts. I wanted to know whether it was just me or whether the network was down and Twitter told me what was up. Similarly, now, I want to know if I'm a fool for being in my basement. Twitter tells me that, at the very least, I am a fool in good company.

Its funny to imagine people like me, in a basement, who feel the need and have the ability to broadcast something to the outside world about their unusual condition. For every remarkable tweet or blog post or YouTube video of an earthquake, a tornado, or an insurgence, there must be a growing number of false alarms, dispatches from intact basements.

There is something absurd about someone in a time of genuine peril using social media, kind of a "I know I'm about to die a horrible death, but just let me tweet about it first" thing. This is not as absurd as it might initially seem. This is a natural instinct - to reach out, to try to connect w/ as many people as possible. 9/11 happened before the rise of web 2.0, mobile access to social networking sites, etc. People on the planes called the people they loved and left poignant messages. If they had the means, why wouldn't they also want to connect w/ other people they loved?

In reality, these dispatches provide valuable information to others and serve a primal instinct to connect when one's demise (however unlikely) might be near. I think of them as moments in which our survival instincts overcome social mores (the "boy, is this lame" view of the actions) and do something that we "should" be doing.

Now, with the oldest medium of all - my own two ears - I have detected that the storm has passed. That's how they did it in the old days, I suppose, before Twitter, before the emergency broadcast system, before the sirens. Weather.com still says there's a tornado warning. How long do I stay in the basement? Do I believe my ears or do I believe the website?

Mood/situation & the Personal Blog

After reading this week's New York Times Magazine's cover story about blogging and online life in general, I began wondering how exactly "snark," as an attitude, as a writing style, came to take over so much of the blogosphere. Blogger Emily Gould defines it as "smart yet conversational, and often funny in a merciless way," though just how smart and funny such blogs are seem to be in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps her subsequent characterization of their style as "righteously indignant but comically defeated" rings more true. Did several blogs that were written in this style become popular, inspiring other bloggers who wanted to become popular to unconsciously imitate that style?

And what of the people reading and responding to personal diary blogs? What does that tell us about the function of personal blogs for readers?

"They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations."

Keep in mind that Emily's blog on Gawker was only somewhat personal. Like a lot of blogs, its a hybrid of news, commentary, and diary. This kind of hybridization may be an inevitability caused by the desire of bloggers and their advertisers for a broader audience, or so the NYTimes piece suggests.

So, Co-workers contributing ideas: I think of them as co-authors, who then should get some of the revenue generated by the ads on the blog.

Creeps: people are out to pick other people up, on social networking sites, on adultfriendfinder, on blogs, in real life, pretty much everywhere. Rejection doesn't have much of a price in the anonymous world of blogging, so why not act creepy? Maybe she's into creeps.

Enemies: those working out identity issues or trying to affect society in some way. They find someone who represents values that they dislike and publicly express hatred towards them so as to discourage others from holding those views. We may dismiss this behavior as digital vandalism, but like real life vandalism, there are deeper social issues that motivate it that are worth exploring.

Fans: those looking for entertainment.

But maybe calling it "entertainment" or "voyeurism" is to cheapen and misunderstand it. So as to better understand what blog fans are after, I thought I'd engage in a little self-ethnography.

What do I get from reading personal blogs? When I watch TV or movies or read books or listen to music, I seem to want to identify with someone: a character, an author. Behind that desire to identify, I think there's a desire to escape but also to find someone who is in a similar situation, who is feeling what I'm feeling. I want this maybe to learn more about what to do in my mood/situation and to not feel alone in the way I'm feeling, or maybe to feel as though as foul as my mood/situation is, there are people who have it far worse than I do. This kind of "at least I'm not that awful" schadenfrued should be familiar to some fans of Jerry Springer, Flavor or Love, or other reality tv shows. Some fans watch, in part, to feel superior.

Here's the big difference between personal blogs and Big Media content in terms of how we relate to their characters or creators (either as our inferiors or sympathetic individuals whom we can identify with): considering how many millions of personal blog entries there are, I bet you that given the proper search technology, I could find someone who is in nearly the exact same mood/situation that I'm in instead of having to settle for someone whose mood/situation vaguely resembles mine. In fact, I have done this.

When we watch a TV show and read a book, we know that our mood/situation is not exactly like the character's or the author's. Maybe the character is a New York socialite or a farmer, but the story deals with themes that are universal - true love, loyalty, respect, mortality. We draw analogies to our own lives - the lack of respect afforded to Christopher Moltesanti is similar to my situation at work, or Sherman Klump's negative body image and lack of self-confidence is similar to my own. We read stories about people who lived hundreds of years ago in cultures totally dissimilar to our own, and yet somehow we can identify with the characters.

In the oral storytelling tradition before mass-media, stories could be localized or tailored to fit the listeners' lives. Once stories became commodities, then they were forced to be general and universal. We were forced to identify with people who were not like us, which probably had good consequences (we see a world that is more diverse than our particular corner of it) and bad ones (we disavow our heritage and our selves so as to try in vain to become more like the wealthy, beautiful, upbeat people on TV). With the proliferation of personal blogs, maybe stories are becoming more personal than they ever were. And don't think that its the same thing as gossip. Personal blogs function as gossip only when we know the people who are writing or are featured in them.

Imagine thinking of a phrase that described how you felt and being able to search for other people who felt the same way. Or imagine watching a clip from a movie or listening to a song that fits your mood and being able to read about the lives of the other people who were in that mood (fellow viewers and listeners). You can do all that now. And its not always about actually interacting with these like-mooded people. Sometimes, its enough to know they're out there.

Maybe finding someone in the same mood/situation as you will be a dead end. Maybe they'll have nothing new to add and their companionship, if you want to call it that, will feel hollow. But we keep searching, we keep trying to connect.