Blogg-Ed Indetermination

In my last post, I reviewed the Sony Touch e-reader. The book I chose to read on it was Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. It seemed like a perfect marriage of medium and message.

Well this marriages got off to a rocky start, but in this case the fault lies more with the e-reader than Shirky’s prose.

The premise of Shirky’s book will not come as a big news to most readers: new technology is changing everything about how groups form, communicate, influence, collaborate, and are managed. Replete with numerous (and sometimes overly-long) examples of how groups have spontaneously or more deliberately formed to address issues ranging from petty theft to child abuse, informal thought experiments to commercial ventures involving millions of people,  Shirks demonstrates the “tetonic shift” that social computing is causing. Shirky writes “The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.” [Note. I'd cite the page number, but it's different depending on which resolution you have the reader set at. So what are you supposed to do?]

Self-organizing groups hold a special fascination for Shirky. He describes the origin of the organization chart in the early railroad business, and how its hierarchical structure caught on in other industries. [I would have thought the org chart was military in origin.] Hierarchical organization works well for awhile, but “at some point an institution simply cannot grow anymore, and still remain functional, because the cost of managing the business will destroy any profit margin.” But for many social groups on the Internet, the “costs don’t fall moderately…they collapse. Thousands of volunteers contribute and moderate content, for free. Loosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure.”

Shirky uses the metaphor of a ladder to describe the group activities that are more easily facilitated by online tools, with the rungs of the ladder,”in order of difficulty… sharing, cooperation, and collective action.”

News organizations in general, and newspapers in particular, are still reeling from the effect of the internet, bloggers, and the proliferation of amateur news reporters on the viability of their businesses. Shirky reminds us that these amateurs are not professional journalists, that “mass professionalization is an oxymoron.” (This offers little solace to the thousands of professional journalists who have been given their walking papers in the last few years.) Such monumental change (and Shirky likens our period ot that following the invention of the printing press) is messy. “Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A to B through a long period of chaos and only then reach B.” The practical effects of anyone being able to claim journalistic privilege in a court of law is unknown, but sounds a bit scary to me.

Chaotic times lead a lot of people to be be scared, and scared people often react with “fight or flight.” Take the music industry, which is using its own user base. Or any other content provider that goes after those who “mash-up” their original works into new creations.

One of the most memorable phrases from Here Comes Everybody is this: “much of what gets published on any given day is public but not for [emphasis added] the public.”

That explains all the idiotic things I run into.

So with so much stuff out there, Shirky tells us that the only reasonable means to make sense of it is to filter it, and technology, which provides an avenue for so much stuff, can also provide a solutions for getting you just the stuff you are interested in. “Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.” Communities of practice, such as those that have formed in Flickr and Wikipedia, are two examples of how legions of amateurs can help make sense, and ensure quality, from the legions of stuff.

As an educator, I am passionately interested in what these new tools may mean for today’s students. Shirky asserts:

Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.

Then Shirky lets fall the other shoe, claiming: “Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it.”

But in the midst of all of this mess there are signs of hope that society can meet the challenge, and be the better for it. In chapter five, “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production,” Shirky writes at length about Wikipedia, and how its model of collaborative writing and editing demonstrates every day the power and possibility of social tools, where “a Wikipedia article is a process, not a product, and as a result, it is never finished.” He concludes the chapter, with this: “When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of scope and longevity that were previously impossible.” And therein lies the hope for making sense out of chaos.

Shirky also weighs in on one of my favorite topics, open source software, and how the open source movement has changed the economics of failure. “Most organizations attempt to reduce the effect of failure by reducing its likelihood.” So Microsoft, Apple, and other commercial firms are risk-averse. But “open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost [emphasis added] of failure.” More risk, means a greater likelihood of big breakthroughs and innovation. “When a company or indeed any organization [might I suggest schools?—ed] finds a strategy that works, the drive to adopt it and stick with it strong. Even if there is a better strategy out there.” The resulting “systematic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.”

Towards the end of his book, Shirky poses a question worth pondering by all of us interested in social media. “The most obvious change is that we are going to get into more groups, many more groups, than have ever existed before. Is this a good thing?” Later, he posits “Arguments about whether new forms of sharing or collaboration are, on balance, good or bad reveal more about the speaker than the subject.” But “To ask the question, ‘Should we allow the spread of these social tools?’ presumes that there is something we could do about it were the answer no. This hypothesis is suspect, precisely because of the kinds of changes involved.” So now that the genie has already escaped the bottle, what do we do? Shirky replies that for himself, “In the last fifteen years I’ve had to unlearn a million [things], because they have stopped being true.” Unlearning: the first step in learning.

Shirky can be a bit long-winded for my taste, but there’s no doubt that he has done his homework and he provides a valuable resource to readers interested in the societal effects of new technologies.

Many moons ago (1962 to be exact), Helen Gurley Brown, the then editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine, published Sex and the Single Girl, which went on to be a best-seller and eventually made into a movie. In many ways it was to the sixties what Sex and the City was to the 2000’s, a manifesto about the sexual freedom of women.

Almost fifty years after the publication of Sex and the Single Girl and just a few years after the airing of the last episodes’ of HBO’s Sex and the City, we now have young women who have very different attitudes about sexuality than perhaps even Brown or Carrie and her posse might imagine; one in which sexually charged text messages (aka “sexting”), including nude photos, is becoming commonplace amongst teens.

Or at least this is the thesis in a wonderful article by Slate columnist Dalia Lithwick, which also appears in this week’s Newsweek magazine. Lithwick describes the conundrum facing parents, school officials, and law enforcement when teens send, receive, and sometimes distribute nude photos of one another. None of us are equipped to deal with this using conventional rules, regulations, or law. And as for the students, as Lithwik says, “We seem to forget that kids can be as tech-savvy as Bill Gates but as gullible as Bambi.”

Right on, Dalia! It would be far too easy to overreact, as some have done, by charging these children with child pornography. (Ironic, no?) As for kicking these kids out of school, they need to be in school where they have a support system to learn how to deal with dumb mistakes.

There are dumb criminals who deserve to be punished, and then there are dumb acts that deserve consequences. As adults, it is incumbent upon us to be able to distinguish between the two and act with justice and compassion in each case.  We know that always holding children to adult standards of conduct is not developmentally defensible. Adults have every right to be concerned and offended by sexting by their children. How we respond more about ourselves and our maturity as it does about our children’s.

When many of us were growing up we were very protective of our bedrooms. We didn’t want anyone coming in to our rooms uninvited; not siblings, not our parents. We posted “Keep out!!!!” or “Danger, Radioactive Materials” signs on our doors. We would, of course, grant access to our friends and then immediately shut the door for privacy. Woe to parents who cleaned our rooms accidentally discovered cigarettes, condoms, alcohol, marijuana, or other contraband. Oh the feelings of betrayal on both sides.

Some things never change. Many teens are still territorial about their private spaces, but these areas now extend to virtual worlds that many parents don’t realize exist. Even if they’ve heard of such things as FaceBook, MySpace, Xanga, or Blogger, they have no idea how much time their teen is spending there. As parents, how can you guide and protect your child when you don’t know where she is? You can not (and should not) be with her every minute of every day whether it is in the physical world or the virtual world. Because of your own familiarity with the risks inherent in the real world you teach her how to safely cross the street, exercise caution with strangers, and how to call for help when they need it. But are you as familiar with the risks in the virtual worlds that your daughter inhabits?

In a survey conducted of random sample of Castilleja upper school students conducted by the Tech Department last spring, 34% of students reported having a personal web site or blog My observation of behavior in the computer labs indicates that this percentage has increased remarkably, and that students in the middle school are also active participants. This is in keeping with national trends being reported as reported in recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times describing a the current generation of teens who have grown up in a digital world. Writers are having a field day inventing clever names for this generation: digital natives, generation M, iKids, the net generation, and screenagers.

What’s a parent to do? Here’s my advice:

1. Educate yourself. Go online and visit the web sites previously mentioned (MySpace, Xanga, Blogger). Google your child’s name and see what (if anything) comes up. Talk with other parents about what experiences they may have had with their children using such web sites. Once you have gathered some information, and your wits, you’re ready for step 2.
2. Talk with your daughter. Ask her if she has a blog, or if she has friends with blogs. (I assure you that at least one of the two answers will be yes.) Converse (this is a conversation, not an interrogation) about blogs: what she likes about them, what she doesn’t like. You may ask her to show you some blogs, including her own if she has one. Ask her who reads her blog (most blogs allow you to be available to the general public or only to invited readers.) This should be an easy conversation, not an awkward one.
3. In a very unscientific survey, I asked about twenty upper schoolers how many of them had blogs. Sixteen raised their hands. Then I asked how many of their parents know that they have a blog. About twelve hands went up. So the good news is that many of you may already know that your child has a blog, or in the very least their are other parents you can speak with who know that their child has a blog. Step three is to make sure that your child understands the attributes of cyberspace that, I find, they often overlook: context, openness, misrepresentation, and persistence.
   • Context. Written communication, the most common form of discourse in blogs, often do not fully convey the context for remarks that are made. Email users understand how easy it is for messages to be misconstrued. Managers have learned that email is NOT a good mechanism to communicate emotionally-laden messages. Teenagers don’t know that. They often write in a stream-of-consciousness mode with little regard for how something may sound to another. Sometimes their remarks can be very hurtful to the people they’re writing about, even when they believe that person is not reading their blog. Which brings us to…
   • Openness. Students, especially middle schoolers who are just getting into this, have no idea how powerful search engines like Google are. Information they think is private may be found by other computers. They may believe that only the friends that they have invited to read their blog are doing so—forgetting how much a social activity this is among friends who gather around a computer to read blogs with one another. I inadvertently caused a few raised eyebrows among some of our seniors in the computer lab the other day by suggesting that college recruiters might be looking at the blogs of applicants.
   • Misrepresentation. I have previously written about cyberbullying, and that a contributor to phenomenon this was the anonymity provided by virtual personas. In addition to anonymity, the web allows you one to create a completely false persona, which is exactly what online predators do. Children need a healthy skepticism of anyone they meet online who they do not know in the physical world.
   • Persistence. In some ways cyberspace seems so fleeting. But this is illusory. Information that is put on a blog may continue to live on even when the blog is “deleted” by the user. It’s been cached by search engines. Backed up on server tapes. Visitors may have downloaded files, examined the HTML code, or even taken screen shots. In short once it’s out there, it’s out there. Students have no idea!
4. Repeat steps 1-3. Keep educating yourself, stay in dialog with your daughter, and help her understand the characteristics of cyberspace that are so easily overlooked.

In conclusion the worse thing you can do is to try to forbid this activity. Many teens, who are already finding ways to assert their independence from their caregivers, will simply find it all the more attractive. And indeed, blogs can be a healthy and entertaining means of self-expression. The key is communication. After all, that’s what blogs are supposed to be all about.