Sarah Davies

I’m currently studying for the GRE with the hope of getting into the University of Washington’s Executive Master of Science in Information Management program. One of the challenges the GRE uses to separate the men from the boys is a timed essay based on a vague but opinionated prompt. I wrote one today just to practice, and I need blog fodder, so I’m making you read it. This was written in 45 minutes flat without spellcheck. I did have coffee though, so any perceived coherence can be chalked up to the brief clarity that is the gift of caffeine.

Prompt:

The most effective way to understand contemporary culture is to analyze the trends of its youth.

Essay:

No generation has produced more data than today’s youth. Never has so much information gushed from an oppressed people than that which the youth of Iran are broadcasting to the rest of the planet. It is infinitely easier for this generation of youth to understand each other than it has been for any generation in the history of the world. If you wish to understand contemporary culture, the only place to look is to the youth of today.

Instant communication on a global scale has allowed today’s youth to lay bare their lives and their cultures out for all to see. Lest we discount the significance of this fact, remember just a generation ago when a convincing argument could be made that our political enemies are monsters who are nothing like us. The average American, or Iranian, could not fly to the other side of the world to see if these claims were valid. Today’s youth wake up and read messages from friends in six different countries before they get out of bed.

Contemporary culture, however, is a misleading term. When the lines of communication were not so direct, we used representatives like actors and politicians to describe our culture, and our culture appeared more homogenous. It was only possible to buy the books that were carried in your town, so in fact, culture back then actually was more homogenous. Today’s youth see no point in representatives. Why would youth allow an actor or politician to represent them to the world, when it’s simple and easy to represent themselves? The youth of today can order any book they like, and it’s caused them to have a multitude of nuanced perspectives. There is no such thing as contemporary culture anymore. Today’s youth speak with a thousand voices to describe a thousand different cultural backgrounds and experiences.

If culture is so varied, how can we ever hope to understand it? There are several academic projects seeking to answer this question. It is not a question to be taken lightly. Can we look at the backlash from the Iran election, at the terrabytes of data that flowed from Iran in the weeks following that momentous event and draw any meaningful conclusions? We can. There was anger. There was pain. There was fear. These are the places where the many different cultures of Iran coalesced and agreed. We know this because we listened carefully to the many voices of the youth.

Today’s youth have powerful voices. They do not have a homogeneous culture, and the clarity with which we can understand them is sometimes cloudy and fleeting, but if we support more research in this area, if we are willing to try and willing to fail, our understanding will grow over time. This volume of data is a wholly unexpected glut of chaos that the human race has never seen the likes of, but we must break it down into its parts. We must understand it, and in doing so, we will gain a greater understanding of each other.

Today’s interview is with Tim Hwang. Tim founded ROFLCon, Titans of Small Town, Information Superhighway, and XORCon. He is currently a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society with Yochai Benkler.

Sarah: The internet has had a revolutionary effect on societies worldwide, yet academia seems to have utterly failed at documenting and studying it. Why is this such a difficult field to study and how can we get solid research on the ecology of the web?
Tim: The classic response to this is one you really hear a lot: stodgy old ivory-tower fogies don’t think the internet (and internet culture in particular) is important enough to study. While I think there is some truth in that stereotype, I have to say that I think there’s more to the story than just that — after all, there’s plenty of progressive, “with-it” folks in academia that see the value in exploring this space. In spite of this, the fact that universities remain slow to pick up on digital stuff I think suggests a deeper problem in the organizational element of the whole picture. The hierarchies of authority, the standards around publication, and the flexibility of creating and halting projects, all conspire to make it difficult for academia to keep up with the changing ecosystem of the web. Moreover, academic institutions are locked in a system of grants that often tie their hand with regards to what they can spend money on and invest in, which makes them inflexible and slow. We’ve been trying to experiment with new organizing models with The Web Ecology Project, and have been really excited about how things have been going.

Sarah: #iranelection seems to be the first meme that went globally mainstream. It worries me that the meme was almost entirely dependent on Twitter. They could have been DDoS’d or hacked, or paid to shutdown for a week. Are memes vulnerable to their platforms, or would the meme have carried on elsewhere if the platform went down?
Tim: Luckily, memes often aren’t completely platform dependent, so that the shutting down of any particular online space where cultural phenomena is happening won’t necessarily kill it completely. That being said, it’s true that certain platforms make particular activities /easier/ and that the amount of influence or attention that a space commands (or a given user commands in that space) is significant in powering the spread of a practice or an idea online. The “leakage” of memes depends to some extent on the the ease of users to adopt new platforms or their existing membership across platforms. So, there’s a bunch of variables — all told, it looks like from our research that it depends alot on the particulars of a situation. For the Iran Election, I think odds are it would have appeared elsewhere (though potentially in less visible spaces), given the media attention and the activist activity surrounding the event.

Sarah: Where do you see the future of nonprofits moving? It seems like we have to be increasingly agile to move at the speed of the web, to the point that restraints such as narrow mission statements or hierarchical management structures simply can’t compete. You’re involved in the Awesome Foundation, which has just about the broadest mission statement I’ve seen and zero management structure. Is that the future? Can it get even more agile than that?
Tim: The Awesome Foundation tries to keep it real. How many times have people applied for grants, only to try to cloak their real intentions of “hey wow wouldn’t it be great if…” from the granting organization? We’ve tried to eliminate that, make it easy for people to be honest about what they want support to do. There’s an advantage in that, particularly as we’ve tried to pursue lightweight structures that make it dead simple to apply and get money (we actually give the money directly, in cash). Think there’s two possibilities going into the future. One is to be exceedingly lightweight and broad, essentially what we’ve done with the Awesome Foundation. The other is to go entirely the other way — to craft incredibly narrow, incredibly curated groups. However, both of these disperse anti-foundation foundation models have only experimented with relatively small groups and small stakes so far. I think a big question going forwards is — can this scale? How much larger can these models get in terms of people and dollar amounts before they break down? Or is the future just an enormous, disperse framework of highly nimble granting groups? One thing seems clear: old non-profits seem increasingly slow to jump on supporting emerging efforts at the earliest stage.

Sarah: How do we solve copyright?
Tim: Sure, there’s GPL, Creative Commons, BSD, and a whole host of thought, projects (and arguments of the most vicious kind) that have gone into trying to figure out how to repair the structure of intellectual property more generally. Beyond quibbling about the details or whether so-and-so solution is better than that-or-this proposal, I think what all of them have in common is so key is to view the law as a space to be innovated on and experimented with. There’s an inherent risk-averseness to the law and lawyers, and a norm that limits the extent to which people feel they can craft new entities within the law. Though really, there’s no reason for that — even such established entities as “the Corporation” were the creations of legal innovation (really, legal hacking) at some point. This is what’s kept copyright behind as the entire environment has shifted around it — I think what’s necessary is for a shift in thinking about the law as open-ended to possibility and active manipulation in the same way Creative Commons constructed a new interface with the law, rather than something that’s a closed and static.

Sarah: What is it about the internet that makes some people incredibly vitriolic? What is the driving motivation behind youtube comments and death threats to prominent bloggers? Can we change the motivation structure somehow to make people more humane without sacrificing anonymous speech?
Tim: There’s two parts to this. On one hand, there’s some sense that the vitriol and assholery that typifies YouTube comments are actually just part and parcel of the aesthetics of communication on the web. So, there’s a part of me that says to not feed the trolls, take it in stride, move on, etc etc. On the other of course, this flavor of social interaction on the web is occasionally at odds with getting things done, and as you mentioning can be bordering on real danger in the form of death threats or otherwise. Not to make light of this, but I’ve always been fond of Randall Munroe’s proposal of having YouTube comments read back to you before they are posted. It points at the need to leverage design features in online spaces to adjust and shape human interaction. We’ve been looking into this at the Berkman Center with Yochai Benkler’s work — the general idea is to examine a broad range of cases in a quantitative way, and figure out the relationship between these structural features and how people collaborate (or don’t) together.

The purpose of these interviews (in addition to just being fascinating) is to promote my panel proposals at this year’s sxsw. In Generation Y and the Future of Nonprofit Communications, I’ll be talking about how to connect with folks like Willow, who care deeply about their communities, but also have very strong preferences over communication style. In Recruiting and Retaining Generation Y: Cheap But Not Easy , I’ll explain why you need people like Willow on your upper management team in order to keep up with an exponentially accelerating technology market. Please vote for those panels if you feel they would benefit the sxsw community. Today is the last day to vote!

My mom still reads news on an ancient technology called “paper” collected together into a “magazine.” I’m told that it’s similar to printing a blog. Don’t ask me how that’s efficient. Anyhow, she suggested I read a Wired article: The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online by Keven Kelly. She even politely offered to send it to me via snail mail if I couldn’t find it online. How quaint.

The article certainly references the major league players of my generation – Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Creative Commons, the Pirate Party, et al, but it’s aimed at my mother’s generation.

Quoth Kelly:

I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

There certainly are unsoiled terms waiting to be created, but if we insist on using an existing term, “socialism” is a strange one to attach to internet culture.

Quoth Wikipedia:

Socialism refers to any one of various theories of economic organization advocating state or cooperative ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of B.S., and a society characterized by equal opportunities/means for all individuals with a more egalitarian method of compensation based on the full product of the laborer.

The internet culture to which Kelly refers has little “cooperative ownership” and less “compensation.” If we insist on comparing internet culture to a system of state governance, benevolent anarchy might be a more suitable fit.

But if you talk to people who are enmeshed in internet culture, who spend hours editing Wikipedia, and producing articles (like this one) intended to go directly into the public domain, you will find that we don’t use the terms socialism or anarchy to describe our culture. This is a Revolution.

What Keven Kelly fails to grasp is that this is not the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice; this is not a logical progression from Paine and Marx, as his cute infographics would suggest. This is an irreversible shift in the way that humanity understands and interacts with itself. Internet culture is like nothing we have seen before in human behavior.

All generations, I know, would believe that they are New and Different, but consider Iran. What other American generation has watched, hands to hearts, breaths collectively held, hours of footage, hundreds of pictures, thousands of tweets coming in real time from individual citizens on the other side of the planet? What other generation has interacted with itself in this way? People under 30 all over the globe are donning their green ribbons and wrist bands, because this isn’t about politics (mostly). It’s about Revolution.

Internet culture has brought Generation Y together across all borders. Some of us are passionate about unalienated labor and free rational inquiry, but most of us have never read about them. Most of us were simply taught that sharing and helping is the right thing to do. Our generation is the first to have been given the incredible means to publish worldwide instantly. So the question of whether we can help humanity isn’t an overwhelming and daunting one as it was to our parents, it’s a question of whether we have five minutes to hop on Wikipedia and contribute some research. It just so happens that sharing and helping on a global scale can tear down dictatorships, expose corruption, and heal a planet that for too long has suffered from division and misinformation.

In short, while Mr. Kelly is right that there are elements of socialism woven into the fabric of the internet, its bedrock is Revolution.