Micah’s class – 3rd blog

David Duke set Louisiana ablaze beginning in early 1989. The neo-Nazi sympathizer and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard won election to the Louisiana state House and instantly became a symbol of protest by whites against a system that they thought was stacked against them.

I had just joined The Times-Picayune newspaper when Duke was elected. Two months later, the paper’s editors assigned me to investigate Duke. Did we really know everything we should know about him? I would dog Duke for three years as he ran for the United States Senate, governor of Louisiana and finally president.

The class readings for Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” made me think back to those tumultuous days.

Shortly after Duke’s election, a group was created to oppose him. It was called the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism. At the same time, Duke traveled the state and turned out hundreds of supporters practically everywhere he went to speak.

Shirky wrote that the Boston Globe exposed a pedophile priest in 1992. The “outrage dissipated with little change in the church’s behavior in Massachusetts or nationally, no official reaction from the Vatican, no coordinated calls by the laity for Law’s resignation, and no resignation,” Shirky wrote.

Shirky showed how the Internet has made it dramatically easier to organize groups. In 2002, the Globe exposed another pedophile priest, and this time, beginning with an outraged doctor, some 25,000 people across the country came together to create Voice of the Faithful. This time, the Catholic Church could not ignore them. The cardinal in Boston resigned and “the church began to take steps, if halting ones, to publicly reform itself.”

In 2002, Globe readers could email the newspaper’s articles to others with a click, and it was practically as easy to send them to a group as to an individual. Blogs popped up and further publicized the scandal. Ordinary citizens turned to email and blogs to organize themselves. This time, the Catholic Church could not stonewall them.

Zephyr Teachout wrote in “Come Together Right Now: The Internet’s Unlit Fuse” that the dilemma of collective action is that you’ll do something only if others will do it, too. As the 2002 Globe example showed, the new tools make it easier to overcome that dilemma.

It’s even easier today. New groups can use Facebook to get attention and attract supporters. They can amplify their voice through Twitter and any number of social media sites.

So I am left wondering about the old days. How is it that hundreds of people in Louisiana, around the same time as the initial Boston Globe priest expose, came together to create the Louisiana Coalition? How did Duke spread the word so ordinary folks would fill hotel meeting rooms across the state to hear him?

Because it was harder to organize before, does it mean that those who participated were more committed? Malcolm Gladwell certainly seems to think so, from his iconic New Yorker article.

I’m so familiar with today’s new tools that it seems hard to imagine how folks organized themselves before and overcame the collective action dilemma.

Micah’s class – 2nd blog

As a boy, I remember riding on El Camino Real in Palo Alto and seeing the local headquarters for the Elks and Kiwanis. For two years, I played on a Little League team sponsored by the Lions.

As Theda Skocpol wrote in “Diminished Democracy,” changes in society — especially the protests and demonstrations during the 1960s — have disrupted how we organize ourselves. Those civic groups are a casualty as a result.

Women, African-Americans and Latinos – who traditionally did not belong to the civic groups — have gotten better access to good jobs and good schooling in recent decades.

With the decline of the civic groups came the rise of advocacy groups, many of them based in Washington, D.C. They have been led by what Skocpol described as the “professional class” — highly educated and rootless people.

I have first-hand knowledge of that phenomenon because I set out for Washington after graduating from college and got a job as editor of “People & Taxes,” a monthly newspaper published by Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen.

I would defend my work and that of other idealistic colleagues, but the rise of groups like Public Citizen (on the left and the right) are a key part of what Skocpol describes as the diminished democracy. “Today’s advoacy groups are top-down, even when they claim to speak for ordinary people,” she wrote in Chapter 6. “A big gap has opened between local voluntary efforts and professional advocates who seek national influence.”

Another part of that “diminished democracy” could be what Yochai Benkler described in “The Wealth of Networks” as a top-down media where elite broadcasters and newspapers decided what news citizens would get. Ordinary people had a voice, at best, in the letters to the editor column.

The Internet has disrupted the top-down system described by Skocpol and Benkler. In the new “flat world,” anyone can have a platform. Ordinary people can push back against the experts and the mdia elites.

In “The Wealth of Networks,” Benkler also described how left-leaning citizens used the web to organize an advertising boycott of Sinclair Broadcasting in 2004 to protest its decision to braodcast a slanted documentary against John Kerry. He also described how ordinary citizens discovered that Diebold could potentially skew election results with its paper-less voter machines and then publicized these concerns, despite Diebold’s best efforts to stop them. Before Web 2.0, Sinclair and Diebold would have almost certainly pushed forwarded with few impediments. 

In the Digital Age, ordinary citizens can become pundits and gain a following.

In his talk yesterday at the Kennedy School, New York Times political writer Matt Bai described how a businessman in Utah — who thought government was becoming too intrusive — decided to organize a Tea Party movement in Utah using the tools of Social Media. This businessman was so successful that he is now running for governor of Utah, Bai said.

Bai applauded these new form of democracy. I applaud them, too.

 

Micah’s class – first blog

    

     I must confess that until I took Nicco Mele’s fall class, I had little understanding of how the Internet worked or even its underlying principles. I knew nothing about Google other than it served as a super search engine. I couldn’t have identified the meaning of “SEO.” Nicco’s class gave me the basic work tools and taught me basic web literacy.

     The initial class readings on the Internet’s founding fathers in Micah Sifry’s class have given me an even better understanding of the Internet today. The readings show me how their ethos led to the wide-open, decentralized nature we enjoy now.

     As Jonathan Zittrain and Stephen Crocker wrote — and as we have discussed in class — the founders worked in a collegial way and weren’t trying to profit from this new hobby/venture. As Zittrain wrote, “The early Internet designers kept it simple and trusted others to do right.” I loved Crocker’s comment: “They relied on ‘rough consensus and running code.’ There was plenty of natural pressure to adopt standards that worked for everybody.”

   John Perry Barlow’s 1996 manifesto offered the clearest expression of the founding fathers’ radical idealism. “Governments, leave us alone,” he wrote. “You have no sovereignty where we gather….We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

     My sense is that this kind of thinking led to the innovation that has turned the world wide web from a toy for a few computer scientists in the 1970s to perhaps the most powerful media tool since the invention of the printing press. Openness encourages innovation, I believe.

     A New York Times story today on Facebook’s impending IPO captured the dizzying changes online. “Fifteen years ago, AOL was the Internet to most people, five years ago it was Google, now Facebook is the Internet,” said Lise Buyer, a former Google executive who helped guide the company’s initial public offering in 2004.

    IBM, as described by Zittrain, lasted decades before upstarts could challenge its dominance. Now it takes only five years online!

     I was interested in Monday’s class discussion about how Congress attempted to stifle the Internet with the 1996 Telecommunications Act (a measure that prompted Barlow’s screed) and the United Nations’ efforts to impose order. I can only think that we have a better world because they failed. I have to believe that the empowering and democratic forces unleashed by the web are playing a role in throwing out tyrants in the Middle East and reducing poverty in the developing world.

     Of course, the web is not all good. It disrupts industry after industry, and people lose jobs as a result. The downsizing of the Miami Herald, for example, cost me my job as the newspaper’s South American bureau chief. Whole industries are in retreat or are disappearing.

     Not all the people who use the web have good intentions. Bad guys unleash worms and try to steal our identities online. Governments are using and will continue to use the web to try to control the way we think.

     I do believe, on balance, however, that “computers can change your life for the better,” as Stephen Levy wrote in “The Hackers Ethic.” The good today results from the efforts of the founders who insisted on an open and decentralized web.