Endless Knots

Take that, Gladwell: Vinegar, onions, social networks, and soccer nuts a revolution do make

For anyone who still doubts (Malcolm Gladwell) the role of informal communication, aka social media, in bringing about monumental change before the whole world's very eyes in Egypt, see today's lead story (headlined in print version) of NY Times, "A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History."

Excellent, detailed, and insightful reporting lays out the sequence by which, the online subhead reads*: "Two-year collaboration of dissidents gave birth to a new force — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it."

I've been pondering this post for nearly two hours, trying to figure out a way to summarize the low-tech/high-tech amalgam that so fundamentally reshapes the chemistry of the future. I can't do better than to quote the first few paragraphs, though the whole thing is definitely click-worthy. In fact, I just read a bundle of grafs from one of the jump pages (there are two) to a traveling family member. It's remarkable, friends, right down to the people in Cairo (perhaps elsewhere) protecting themselves with "body armor," if you can call it that, made of "cardboard or plastic bottles...worn under their clothes to protect against riot police bullets."

Here's the beginning of David Kirpatrick and David Sanger's remarkable journalism:

"CAIRO — As protesters in Tahrir Square faced off against pro-government forces, they drew a lesson from their counterparts in Tunisia: 'Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.'

"The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades.

"They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley."

These are big claims for a lede article in the paper of record. The reporters go on to substantiate the assertions in the next section, headlined "Bloggers Lead the Way:"

"The Egyptian revolt was years in the making. Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer and a leading organizer of the April 6 Youth Movement, first became engaged in a political movement known as Kefaya, or Enough, in about 2005. Mr. Maher and others organized their own brigade, Youth for Change. But they could not muster enough followers; arrests decimated their leadership ranks, and many of those left became mired in the timid, legally recognized opposition parties. “What destroyed the movement was the old parties,” said Mr. Maher, who has since been arrested four times.

"By 2008, many of the young organizers had retreated to their computer keyboards and turned into bloggers, attempting to raise support for a wave of isolated labor strikes set off by government privatizations and runaway inflation.

"After a strike that March in the city of Malhalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called for a nationwide general strike for April 6. To promote it, they set up a Facebook group that became the nexus of their movement, which they were determined to keep independent from any of the established political groups...

"Just a few months later, after a strike in the Tunisian city of Hawd el-Mongamy, a group of young online organizers followed the same model, setting up what became the Progressive Youth of Tunisia. The organizers in both countries began exchanging their experiences over Facebook. The Tunisians faced a more pervasive police state than the Egyptians, with less latitude for blogging or press freedom, but their trade unions were stronger and more independent. 'We shared our experience with strikes and blogging,' Mr. Maher recalled."

And on it goes. I could continue excerpting but it's better for you to read it yourself. It is more than evident that those responsible for this miraculous transformation in the geopolitical scene simply used the tools of their time, just as the Committees of Correspondence used a nascent postal service to refine their strategy and tactics among a million or so people in a troublesome land that became the US of A.

Which brings me back to the title of this post: The naysayers around the importance of new media also disparage those who have had the courage to keep at it. Again, it's people who made the difference here. Thank heavens they had such powerful tools with which to communicate.

Last thing: the Times article says the protestors have been strongly influenced by "an American political thinker, Gene Sharp." I've never heard of him. Start following the links from here, which include the Serbian youth movement, Optor!'s, which helped bring down Milosevic.

And when you lose faith again that dictators can be deposed and retreat to thinking that the future looks terribly bleak even in places where there are no dictators, only zealots, turn your attention to the next generation. Perhaps one day "they" could become ideologues too but the best part of this story is that there is no monolithic "they" this time. Just a loosely structured network of energized activists whose architecture of revolution--and tools--are barely understood.

Also, see Nicholas Kristof's "What Egypt Can Teach America" in yesterday's NY Times.

* I never realized before how different the print and online heads are in NYT articles - subtle but different.

Does The New Yorker Need Gladwell?

If reaction to Malcolm Gladwell's latest dump of cold water on the flaming arc between social media and social change is any measure, The New Yorker very much needs this able writer to keep the links flying. He's got the neterati all up in their (our) nodes starting with the headline of his short Februrary 2, 2011, post, "Does Egypt Need Twitter?" Gladwell's two-letter answer: No.

My favorite headline so far comes from Business Insider's Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: "Sorry Malcolm Gladwell, But You're Making Zero Sense On Twitter And Egypt."

For comprehensive deconstruction of Gladwell's 370 words, see David Weinberger's "Gladwell proves too much," where he takes down every syllable of Gladwell's argument. Argument, Gladwell's is, as he throws in provocation after poke ("Whoa. Did you see what Mao just tweeted?" or "Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented.)

Gladwell tries to refute the impact of social media on the Egyptian revolution to prove the central thesis of his New Yorker article from last fall: “'High risk' social activism requires deep roots and strong ties." Its subtitle encapsulates his surrounding hypothesis, "Why the revolution will not be tweeted." (My view/refutation of that article here.)

OK. In 2011, it's hard to resist saying things like "that's just dumb."

But more to the point, as a reporter, Gladwell badly needs a fact-checker. He clearly has not put together any kind of timeline, spoken with anyone in Egypt, or, frankly, observed a primary tenet of journalism: accuracy. Granted his post, which suffers from the blogger-weakness of "off-the-top-of-the-headism," is Gladwell's opinion but he is ignoring the well-documented way things have unfolded, beginning with the Facebook page with its background, We are all Khaled Said.

Even the demonstrators in Tahrir Square have been astonished at what "the youth" have wrought. I'm not going to run this all down--that's a long piece that someone (probably many someones) are working on right now--but a spark was lit and then social media made it very easy for word to spread. And to make plans. And to meetup, as it were.

Second OK: Gladwell's other huge factual error is his view of social activism (as per above, "[it] requires deep roots and strong ties"). True but incomplete. Scores of studies, books, re-studies, and more books have proved that social activism depends both on strong ties AND weak ones.

Mark Granovetter's elegant title to his 1973 groundbreaker, "The Strength of Weak Ties," whom, by the by, Gladwell misinterprets in his original screed, lays the early network science foundation for why social activism depends on both kinds of ties.

The hundreds of thousands, if not millions when you count up all the cities, of people in Egypt don't all have strong ties, Malcolm. Smaller pods of them have very strong links; between/among the pods are weak ties--and the occasional strong ones. The whole thing hangs together--and people keep turning out--because of these loose and strong connections. That's a movement. And it spreads at lightning speed thanks to social media networks, where again the ties are both iron and gossamer.

Fessaging?

I'm not among the favored few who've seen it, my daily reminder of how low my cool rating really is.

The announcement yesterday that Facebook is smushing (tech term) all communication into one (in)coherent stream--Facebook Messaging--makes sense from a purely where-is-that perspective.

Case in point: a call yesterday from a potential client in regard to a possible speaking engagement. I always want to know how people got to us. Mary, the caller, knew instantly, having heard my radio interview on The American Entrepreneur show last summer. But I couldn't remember how the radio show had found me so, as you (at least I guiltily) do (multit-ing even as I warn people against it), I started searching while we were on the phone.

I was able to find all the follow-on conversation between the producer and me but not the original email. Perhaps it was in the NetAge catchall account, I thought, but that should have come through via forwards to me, if it really was directed at me. Maybe I deleted it inadvertently. Maybe it came through LinkedIn? Had it possibly come via Facebook? Or, most unlikely, had it come to my gmail account that no one, including me, uses except for online signups? Finally the answer dawns. The producer had, imagine, called me!

And the other quick example from yesterday: I polled M, J, P, and R on a pricing issue. Since my major mode of communication with two of them (M & J) is via text and I'm prone to text with the other two, I sent the same text to all four. (No, wait, I'm lying: I actually asked J via that really old fashioned method, face-to-face speech.) I had answers rather quickly from all of them. But each was in a different text and I had to "assemble" the results in that super old fashioned medium, my head.

Point is that unified communication, a lofty, long talked about goal, is a great idea. But, as the Washington Post's Melissa Bell notes this morning, echoing my very first reaction, is the privacy concern. Much as I use and love Facebook, sadly the brand is associated with privacy anxiety.

So, will I use it? Not until they invite me...

 

"PPPSSEOT(3)SIL: Please, please, please stop sending e-mails over three (3) sentences in length"

If it makes you laugh once (yes, lol), it's a pretty funny piece.

Twice, well, you're thanking Martin Marks, for "E-mail Auto-Response" in October 25, 2010, New Yorker. Some lols:

"Thank you for your e-mail, which, if it is under three (3) sentences long, I have read...

"If your e-mail has been cc’d to three (3) or more people, and includes complicated yet unresolved logistical information regarding the location, time, or general coördination of an upcoming social gathering involving five (5) or more people, then please wait until two (2) hours after the last respondent has answered and then please call the number provided at the bottom of the e-mail. (Be prepared to detail the conclusions reached by the e-mail chain.)...

"Should you receive a speedy one-to-two-word response, please do not read anything into it. More often than not, such a response doesn’t even correspond to the content of your e-mail..."

And my very favorite:

"In closing, I would like to say that the Internet has become a veritable buzzing, stinging hornet’s nest of pings and pongs and klings and klangs, so please do not e-mail, text-message, instant-message, direct-message, Facebook-message (if you’re still on MySpace or Friendster, that’s just plain creepy), Facebook-chat, iChat, tweet, retweet (don’t even mention Twitter mentions), StumbleUpon, LinkIn with, zoom into, Google Buzz, Plaxify, Jigsaw, Digg, Skype, Spoke, poke, flick, or tag me..."

Read more

Studying Facebook

Seriously. At Bowdoin College, College Offers Facebook Sociology Course.

Enterprise 2.0 aftermath

Some links to what others have written about "How Twitter Changes Everything" and "Leading Collaborative Teams" sessions:

"Enterprise 2.0: Twitter Up, Facebook, MySpace Down," W. David Gardner's piece in Information Week.

And Gardner's piece in the same pub, "Enterprise 2.0: Making Virtual Collaboration Work."

Patti Anklam, who participated on the Twitter panel, provides a great summary and writes about some unspoken-at-the-time thoughts, including the red flag of security, on AppGap, "Twitter in the Enterprise."

Bill Ives, also on AppGap, publishes his insights into and experiences using Twitter, which he also shared in the session, "Twitter as a Business Application."

And finally on AppGap (thanks, AppGappers for all this attention), Jenny Ambrozek's "Enterprise 2.0 2009:Twitter’s Influence Everywhere & A New Realism."

Oh, wait. Someone hated the Twitter sesson. I responded. Twice.

Confirm or ignore? Facebook by the book

My friend Clara Shih uses this video in her Facebook Era presentation. First saw her include it at Webcom Montreal 2009 and thought it so funny that I asked her where she got it. If you're on Facebook, you want to see it. Comes from the BBC Three show "The Wall." The very first person I sent the link to instantly posted it. You might too. 

Facebook and the !Kung

Well, not exactly, but this interview ("Where Gifts and Stories Are Crucial to Survival") with Pauline Wiessner, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, is not to be missed. She talks about how the !Kung (click your tongue to say it or listen to Miriam Makeba sing "The Click Song") maintain social connections across distance and time--and how here in the non-!Kung world we imitate them via social conveniences like Facebook.

First point is that distance is no impediment to intimacy if we are willing to keep those we care about close in our hearts through gifts. Reinforces the truth that many of the most generous people are those with ostensibly the least to give.

Second point is the story-telling. By talking about those who are "away," the !Kung keep them in the conversation. Facebook, Wiessner says, is a contemporary example of how we keep those not in view front and center in a different way.

"People who use it [Facebook] say it keeps memories of distant friends alive and it sometimes brings long-lost relationships back home. We all know of people who’ve been 'friended' by old pals from college and former neighbors they’ve lost touch with. When they see pictures of them and read 'sharings' from their Facebook partners, they are reminded of their presence in their lives."

Here are the opening few paragraphs of Claudia Dreifus's enlightening interview with Wiessner. You have to read it. Make sure you go to the end too where one of the !Kung snags a satellite phone and calls Wiessner in Utah, asking her to buy some soccer shoes for their team, which an American documentary filmmaker had promised to send a few years earlier but never had.

Q. ONE OF THE GROUPS YOU STUDY, THE !KUNG PEOPLE OF SOUTHERN AFRICA’S KALAHARI DESERT, ARE NATIVE TO ONE OF THE MOST UNFORGIVING CORNERS OF THE PLANET. HOW DO THEY SURVIVE IN A PLACE OF FREQUENT DROUGHTS, FLOODS AND FAMINE?

A. They have an intricate system of banking their social relationships and calling on them when times get rough. The system is maintained through gift-giving, storytelling and visiting. It works like insurance does in our culture.

I first arrived in the Kalahari in the early 1970s, when the !Kung were still primarily hunter-gatherers. My question then was: how do people without meat on the hoof, grain in the larder and money in the bank survive hard times?

When I was there for about a year, some answers came. There was a heavy rain. The desert plants died and the wild game dispersed. As people grew hungrier, they began telling vivid stories about loved ones who lived as far as 200 kilometers away. They spoke about how they much missed them. Soon people were busily crafting beautiful objects — gifts. Finally, when push came to shove, 150 !Kung began trekking to the encampments of the people they’d been remembering. There they stayed until conditions in their home area improved.

What I’d witnessed was a structured system at play. The Bushmen used the storytelling to keep feelings for distant persons alive. The gifts are their way of telling the receiver, “I’ve held you in my heart.” Over the years, I saw this repeated many, many times. It would turn out that the !Kung spent as much as three months a year visiting “exchange partners,” and this was the key to their survival.

Were you in NETWORKING? Please pass along

In 1982, Doubleday published Networking: The First Report and Directory, Jeff's and my first book.

The story of how that book came to market someday will, or rather, should appear in the annals of publishing -- first publisher (Methuen, a British publisher aiming to break into the US market) shelved its whole list just after we'd submitted manuscript; Doubleday picked it up, offering more than twice the original advance (great agent at time, Ron Bernstein); we got the contract to do the electronic typsetting, making it the first commercial book to be electronically typeset under auspices of the authors, never having been retyped by its publisher; translated into Japanese by that country's Economic Planning Agency, and on and on -- but alas this post is about the treasure hunt that we're launching here today.

Networking was, as its subtitle says, a "report" on 1600 grassroots and nonprofit networks focused on the seven topics listed on the cover, along with a directory of those networks.

Within the book was everything from the theory and practice of networks -- with a chapter-long essay devoted to each topic -- to the directory itself, organized in various ways -- by organization name, by location, by keyword, and by title of the network's publications.

Those listed range from The Sun Magazine to World Future Society to Franz Schumacher's Intermediate Technology Group (now Practical Action) to Tilth to Aspen Institute to CoEvolution Quarterly to Dr. Dobb's Journal to the National Center for Citizen Involvement, now the Open Library (where our two earliest books, including this one are listed) and Boston Women's Health Book Collective, now Our Bodies, Ourselves, to which we devoted a chapter of its own because of its unique networking skills. The fact that it's still going after nearly forty years makes the point.

We did all the research via networking, beginning with one letter (as in type it, sign it, put it in an envelope, attach a stamp, go to the post office - remember that?) that we sent to one person whom we knew to be a richly connected networker, who suggested nine others, whom we wrote to, who in turn sent us other suggestions -- and within 18 months, we'd received the names of 50,000 "networks" around the world. We wrote to 4000 of them and got back an astonishing 40% response rate - 1600 letters, packages, publications, descriptions, many with heartfelt expressions of why their leaders networked and how they did it. Incredible experience, to say the least. No Internet. Limited email (a little because a few of us pioneers were already online). Need I say: No web, no listservs, and, of course, no Google, Wikipedia, Twitter or Facebook. Just the poor postman, who left a trail of whiskey nips along our sidewalk.

So now it's 2009, more than a quarter-century later and we're wondering how many of those networks have survived (I chose the ones above that I could google). Why now? Not just idle curiosity but intense awareness that there are similarities between the early 1980s and today. Principal among them unemployment, as per Paul O. Flaim's, "Unemployment in 1982: the cost to workers and their families:"

The economy entered 1982 in a severe recession and labor market conditions deteriorated throughout the year. The unemployment rate, already high by historical standards at the onset of the recession in mid-1981, reached 10.8 percent at the end of 1982, higher than at any time in post-World War II history.

A few other interesting stats from then: the Dow was, get ready, 776 in August of that year, down 30% from its high of 1011 five years earlier. And, the drop in exports and spending just announced is mere fractions shy of "the 6.4 percent rate drop seen in the first quarter of 1982, when the economy was in a recession that lasted 16 months," according to Lucia Mutukani's "US economy weakens," in the Feb 29, 2009, Boston Globe.

Clearly, we made it through that tough time, not purely because of networking, of course (I'm not that much of a romantic), but in part because people got together and figured out some things they could do themselves. We're interested in how those networks have survived and intend to include them in the new bit of writing we're engaged in, details to come.

So would you please pass this note along to anyone you know who might have been in the book? When we have a spare minute (ha!), we'll scan the whole list and begin publishing that. Thanks in advance! And, Networking networkers, please post comments here.

Lexulous: there is a just universe

Facebook, whose population is now nearly half the size of the US (it hit 150 million this week, according to the company's blog), is definitely different strokes for different folks. Shortly after I joined, I ran into Ruthie, an old friend from my days in England, who told me that she mainly used Facebook for Scrabulous. I looked it up and soon I was hooked too. As was my friend Judy, with whom I'm played more than one game of Scrabble "in real," both of us having been trained at our mothers' boards, she better than I. Judy is one of the truly great Scrabble players--and she's relentlessly competitive. I rarely if ever win when playing her - or nearly anyone else. For a writer, I'm really not very good at word games.

Well, that didn't last long, the Scrabulous, that is. As I reported with a long face last July, Hasbro took offense and, poof, Scrabulous was gone (see the detailed history in Wikipedia, which no doubt has inaccuracies). In its place from the same developers came Wordscraper, which for me at least didn't compare. Nor did the Hasbro's version of real-Scrabble, with a clunky interface and lacking Scrabulous's functionality.

Now today all of us Scrab-devotees received this message on Facebook from the Indian developer-brothers of this terrific time-waster.

Dear User,

Our game was disabled on Facebook for some time as we were engaged inresolving some legal matters. We are now pleased to provide you withan improved game - LEXULOUS - that you can enjoy in peace with friendsfrom ALL COUNTRIES for free!

Your games in progress, statistics, and messages have been preserved. Good luck, and here's wishing you a very happy 2009 :)

Warm Regards,
Rajat & Jayant Agarwalla

And so, with thanks to Rajat and Jayant and their crack legal team, I resume this game with Judy, who current score aside, will definitely beat me once more: