Politics
Personal Democracy Forum, Part 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/19/2007 - 10:02I had been wondering if I would manage to live blog and get any posts up during PDF. How much time would the chat backchannel take up? What role would Twitter take? Initially, there weren’t a lot of people on the backchannel. It wasn’t displayed on the screen. Twitter was doing much better, and I added many attendees of PDF to my Twitter friends list. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sitting anywhere near a power outlet and my network connectivity got spotty as my batteries started going.
So, I didn’t live blog. Instead I started writing my notes of the conversation between Tom Friedman and Eric Schmidt on my laptop and then later in the notes section of the program.
It was an informal discussion and I’m sure that others will write more detailed descriptions of the talk than I will. Eric observed that this felt a lot like a Google meeting, with everyone online, and no one looking at the speakers. Tom asked Eric questions like where Google is going and if he thinks Moore’s Law applies to searches. Eric responded by talking about the focus on searches, advertisements and applications. He spoke about a network effect where more information was constantly becoming available.
They talked about efforts by Bahrain, China, and Thailand to limit access to Google. In Bahrain, the issue was about citizens seeing how much land the royal family had using Google Earth. Google was asked to shut this down and it generated a larger blacklash than simply ignoring the issue probably would have. In Thailand, there were issues about criticizing the King who is revered and it is illegal to lampoon. The generals who took over the country in a recent coup attempted to apply this to them as well. In China, Google restricts searches, but lets people know when there are items that they couldn’t return in the search. With all of this Schmidt believes, users find ways to adapt and get the information that they need.
This got to a key issue. With improvements in searching and personalized searches, how do we make sure that we don’t get stuck with people finding only information to reinforce their biases? Schmidt spoke a bit about the need for better media education. He spoke about people developing truth detectors, about people looking at politics in a television and a post-television way. He spoke about people wanting to connect and to be greeted in a personalized way. He felt that people will be less likely to take something as unquestioned truth when they first read it.
Schmidt was asked about how Google hires and what his interview was like. Schmidt spoke about a fairly rigorous algorithm looking at GPAs and how well respected the university was. He spoke about the importance of having a passion beyond work, noting the amateur rocket scientists and astrophysicists that they’ve hired. This fits with my thoughts about finding people who are passionate about what they are doing, about people who love what they are doing, who are, in the original sense of the word, amateurs. More on this when I talk about one of the later sessions.
When Schmidt went to his first interview at Google, the person interviewing him had his picture and lots of biographical information that had been retrieved from the web. This led to a lively discussion about personal privacy and the problem of kids putting up online information that they might not want potential employers to see in the years to come. It was suggested that if President Bush’s college years were on Facebook, with plenty of pictures snapped from cellphones at parties, he never would have become President. Schmidt suggested that everyone should be able to change their name at 21 and start with a clean slate. I think 21 is a fairly arbitrary number, and we would be better to recognize that we all have youthful indiscretions, even as we get older, and we need to stop focusing so much on these sorts of things.
There was a discussion about how we defend our reputations, and one idea suggested dismissively was that we could simply live our lives the way Paris Hilton does and let it all hang out there. I think we need to be careful about too glibly dismissing this idea.
Friedman observed later on that when it comes to comments about public figures online, “Whatever can be done, will be done. Will it be done by you or to you?” He repeated this in a later session and I think it is an important point. To the extent that you are a public figure, you should probably be actively defining who you are, your identity needs to be done by you. The problem of Paris Hilton, isn’t that it is being done by her, but that she is doing it to herself.
Perhaps some of this relates to a different part of the discussion. It was noted that people behave differently when they have a camera in their face. They tend to think in terms of television and it was wondered how much this is generational. Online video needs to be shorter, more informal, more entertaining. It was noted that YouTube viewers tend to select five to ten videos of three minutes each as their watching preferences.
There were many other interesting topics touched on during the discussion, but these were the ones that jumped out at me as the most interesting.
(Tags: pdf2007)
Personal Democracy Forum, part 1
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/18/2007 - 22:28At 7:30 this morning, I arrived at the 2007 Personal Democracy Forum. I’ve been to every Personal Democracy Forum that they’ve had, so this was old home week for me. It started off with a networking breakfast where I ran into many old friends. Even at 7:30, there were plenty of people sitting off in one corner or another doing their networking via the internet, and one person quipped that there were likely to be many people added as friends on Facebook or MySpace during the networking breakfast.
Andrew Rasiej gave the welcoming remarks and we went to the first speaker, Larry Lessig. Larry’s talk was entitled Free Culture, Free Politics. I’ve read Larry’s blog, but never heard him speak in person. It was an engaging talk.
He started off bewailing the either/or thinking, which I’ve also talked about as black and white thinking or binary thinking. He spoke about it in terms of copyright. Many people present copyright as either you are completely for it, RIAA style, including things like the DMCA and CTEA, or you are completely against it. He pointed out how this is a false dichotomy and went on to provide good examples.
Before he went into that, he explored a tactic of staunch copyright defenders to portray anyone opposed to anything other than the strictest interpretation of copyright laws as ‘communists’.
I don’t want to move on from this without exploring what I think is an important underlying theme. So many of the battles are between a radical individualism, every man for himself, where any sort of collaboration is unacceptable, and an idea that we are all in this together, part of a community, that has some sense of responsibility to our brother, to our neighbors, a sense that there are times when we can and should work together for the common good.
"Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy"
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/17/2007 - 16:38Be subversive, click here.
Interaction and interactivity
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/16/2007 - 08:57On a mailing list about media education, I got into a discussion about my post, Videoblogging as an antidote to too much TV. I spoke about the interaction that our time in front of computers engenders.
Some people spoke about the interaction that television engenders, whether it be kids yelling out answers to Blue’s Clues, or adults cursing pundits on the Sunday morning political talk shows. One person drew an interesting discussion between interaction and interactivity. He included the examples above as examples of interaction, and also mentioned the intellectual engagement. Yet he reserved the word interactive for iterative exchanges.
This morning, I read through the emails that piled up since last night. So far today, I’ve gone through 87 emails. Two of them I responded to, and three of them resulted in me visiting a website and taking action. Some of the other emails caused me to stop and think and may feed into some sort of action in the future, but weren’t all that interactive.
I think this ties nicely into my blog post yesterday about Keeping Personal Democracy Personal. It seems as if so much of the online political actions is focused on either fundraising, where the only interaction is writing a check, list building, where the only interaction is signing up on a website, or at best, getting people to contact there elected officials to express the view supported by the email blaster. There is almost no interactivity.
To a certain extent, this makes sense. It is a lot of work to develop and maintain a truly interactive online presence. There are many emails to be responded to. Many comments on webpages to process. Yet without this, we are missing the power that online communications can bring. Instead we end up with responses like I received to my blog post:
I am sick and tired of being treated as an internet cash cow. So annoyed that I have absolutely given up giving or responding. Their total lack of interest in anything but money or their own egos leaves me stone cold.
What can we do to promote interactivity?
(Tags: PDF2007)
(Cross posted at Greater Democracy)
Keeping Personal Democracy Personal
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/15/2007 - 11:50This Friday, I will attend Personal Democracy Forum. This is its fourth year, and I’ve made it every year so far. In 2004, I had been doing a lot of volunteer work with Gov. Dean’s Presidential campaign. When Gov. Dean ended his campaign, my wife decided to run for State Representative and I was her campaign manager. Democracy was all very personal to me.
By 2006, I had gone from a volunteer through being the paid BlogMaster for John DeStefano’s gubernatorial campaign and then technology coordinator for Ned Lamont’s U.S. Senate bid. It seemed like all of my friends from the Dean campaign had gone through similar, or even more profound changes as they all worked in professional roles with campaigns or with vendors servicing campaigns. Somehow, it all started to seem a bit less personal.
People that lived in Connecticut became records in one database or another. They became donors, volunteers, and voters. They were categorized, high dollar, or low dollar, super volunteers, or volunteers that love to offer advice, but not work. They became likely voters, ones and fives.
After last year’s conference, I spent a bit of time pondering how to keep Personal Democracy Forum personal. My thoughts never solidified enough to become a blog post. Thoughts revolved around the contrast between broadcast politics and networked politics. After all, with broadcast politics, the viewer is nothing but a viewer to be categorized, but with networked politics, everyone is an important part of the network, right?
Well, as I listen to so many online campaign strategists, I wonder how many people are really recognizing the importance of every node on the network, other than its ability to generate cash or message.
Perhaps some of this comes from a hierarchical view of networks, sending out messages to various nodes, but not encouraging communication back, or lateral communication between nodes. Or, perhaps, it comes from looking at the nodes on the network as nodes.
We are talking about real living people. People who have feelings, hopes, desires, fears; people trying to figure out how to pay for health insurance, college, or even food and housing. We are talking about people worried about a sick relative, morning the death of a loved one or celebrating a new birth, a graduation or a wedding.