[[Making the Most of Disruption]]
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Howard Rheingold & Paul Saffo, Presenters
Lucy Bernholz, Immoderator
Amit Asaravala, Notetaker

 
Key issues, changes and trends
•    Technology Is a Tool
According to Howard Rheingold:
"The technology is the enabler for ideas to move in ways they weren't able to move before. "
"Politically, it's ideologically neutral."

According to Paul Saffo:
"First we invent our technologies... then we turn around and use our technologies to reinvent ourselves."

•    Examples of Technology Being Used for Social Assistance and Change
According to Howard Rheingold:
Katrina response ("Zack Rosen has great stories about PeopleFinder")
Immigration demonstrations -- were organized with MySpace (founders of MySpace probably didn't expect their social network would be used for this reason.)

•    Web 2.0 Technologies Are Enabling Personal Media
According to Paul Saffo:
"I recommend you take the word information and IT out of your vocabulary.... This is about media. And this is a moment where two decades of information revolution and email and all of that is morphing into a new kind of media. And you need to think of this as media.... This time it's personal media -- and it's profoundly different from mass media."

•    Caution: These Tools Are Just As Easy For The "Bad Guys" To Use
According to Paul Saffo:
"The dark side for those of you working for the forces of good is that the big companies have figured it out."
The fact is that crowds may move fast, but the establishment may move faster.
"Think about MySpace organizing at the margins -- well done folks, but it didn't seem to impact the bills coming out of Congress."
"The fastest growing office park in the world is in Geneva. WIPO is hiring hundreds of lawyers. We have to be involved."

•    Focus On The Youth, Who Will Grow Up With These Tools
According to Howard Rheingold:
I'm interested in teaching youth to use podcasts, blogs, and other technologies to give them "a public voice."
"The ones who are under 25 years old -- the ones who are under 20 years old -- this [world of high-technology] is the world they are native to.... Politically, the decisions being made now are going to affect them then... [We have a] great opportunity to awaken their political activism."

•    Leaders Understand How to Use Technology to Reach Their Constituents
According to Paul Saffo:
President Lyndon B Johnson used helicopters in the 1950s to travel more quickly and therefore see more constituents in more places, thereby gaining an advantage over other candidates.
"We're still waiting for the first cybergenic candidate. Lord knows it wasn't Al Gore. it's not [Howard] Dean. It ain't Hillary Clinton...."

•    Technology Leaders Empower and Organize Their Constituents
According to Howard Rheingold:
"The new kinds of leaders are not charismatic generals but the Tom Sawyer help-me-paint-my-fence types," like Linus Torvalds (Linux) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia).
Jimmy Wales spends almost 300 days a year on the road -- but instead of talking to politicians, he spends his time talking to local groups of Wikipedians
Leaders have the ability to identify a community that can take advantage of technology platforms. For instance, it's no accident that the Wiki platform enabled Wikipedia to grow there.

•    Still, Even Tech Leaders Must Maintain Some Control
According to Howard Rheingold:
To prevent long-running arguments that could threaten the project, Jimmy Wales and Linus Torvalds have final decision-making power for their respective works.
"You can't really have complete, collective decision-making. There needs to be some residue of hierarchy."

•    To Lead, Keep an Eye on Emerging Technologies
According to Paul Saffo:
The challenge is to listen to the medium -- listen to the emerging media, whether wikis or blogs
"If newspapers are the first draft of history, blogs are the scratch pad...."
Think about how politicians used microphones in first half of century -- they stood up and shouted into the microphone. But when that was put together with technology of radio, it was a disaster. Franklin Delano Roosevelt realized that his audience wasn't in an auditorium, but in their living rooms. So he realized it was more powerful to whisper than to shout.

•    Some Healthy Skepticism is Good
According to Paul Saffo:
"This [Web 2.0] is not going to usher in world peace.... You're putting way too many hopes into this."
Remember other promised revolutions:
Airplanes were supposed to bring world peace by revealing lack of political boundaries
Television was to be great educator, but became a "wasteland."
The danger here: are these new technologies going to become a vaster wasteland?

According to Howard Rehingold:
We're not always going to see technologies used for democratic purposes.
"It pays to be skeptical of projecting utopian hopes upon technology."

•    How Do We Protect Our Privacy?
Question from the crowd, a human rights activist:
When I look at MySpace, and Gmail, and SMS, I see a massive surveillance network.... What should I tell my friends who work at Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft the next time they build a better Firewall of China or turn over a journalist to face a term in prison? [[applause from crowd]]

According to Paul Saffo:
"Realize that suits are people...."
"Get to the person who has the biggest influence on them: their teenage children." [Tells story of "educating" a CEO's teenage daughter, who then harangued her father enough to incite him to change his mind about a business decision.]
"Look for points of leverage like that."

According to Howard Rheingold:
"Whatever happened to mistrusting your government?"
"This country was based on fear of tyrants." We have to somehow go back to that.
"I don't have a lot of optimism about putting a stop to the technological capabilities of surveillance." Not all cameras today are digital, not all digital cameras have face recognition technology. Five or ten years from now they will be digital, they will be interconnected, they will know who they're looking at.
Implied: The challenge is to affect policies now so that privacy is protected later.

According to Saffo:
It's real simple: we're at war. And when Americans are at war, our collective IQ drops about 30 points. In World War II, we interned American citizens."
"I don't think you're going to be able to slow or reverse the electronic surveillance that's going on until we're not at war."

•    Patience: Remember That Tools Take Time to Mature
According to Paul Saffo:
"Most technologies take 20 years to become an overnight success."
Television, Internet, even $100 computer project was started 20 years ago

Successful tools and techniques
(Reiterated from above:)
•    Successful Uses of Tools
According to Howard Rheingold:
Katrina response ("Zack Rosen has great stories about PeopleFinder")
Immigration demonstrations -- were organized with MySpace (founders of MySpace probably didn't expect their social network would be used for this reason.)

•    Successful leadership techniques
According to Howard Rheingold:
"The new kinds of leaders are not charismatic generals but the Tom Sawyer help-me-paint-my-fence types," like Linus Torvalds (Linux) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia).
Jimmy Wales spends almost 300 days a year on the road -- but instead of talking to politicians, he spends his time talking to local groups of Wikipedians
Leaders have the ability to identify a community that can take advantage of technology platforms. For instance, it's no accident that the Wiki platform enabled Wikipedia to grow there.

Keys to success
•        

Examples, websites cited:
ï‚°    MySpace: http://www.myspace.com
ï‚°    Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org
ï‚°    Cooperation Commons
http://www.cooperationcommons.org
An interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action, developed in collaboration by the Institute for the Future and Howard Rheingold.



Impact/applicability to social change
•        

Recommendations for individuals and organizations
•     Remember that "Web 2.0" is not going to "usher in world peace," according to Saffo.
•    Listen to emerging media, whether wikis, blogs, or otherwise, according to Saffo.
•    Focus on the youth -- the 20 and 25 year-olds who know how to use these technologies -- and help them awaken their political activism, according to Rheingold.

Actions for Net2 Community
•    Leaders identify communities and empower them with the tools they need to achieve their goals. What tools can you use to empower the communities you serve?