Potential consequences of the private control of public spaces

So I'm on an Ethan Zuckerman kick lately, and here's Zuckerman responding to a report in the Guardian that Joe Lieberman was able to pressure Amazon into kicking Wikileaks off their servers in the wake of Wikileak's recent State Department cable dump.

It’s going to be very interesting to hear how Amazon justifies this decision. If the company was required by a court order to remove the content, that’s one thing. If they simply responded to pressure from a US Senator, or to boycott threats, it sends a very disturbing message: that Amazon will remove content under political pressure. Yes, Amazon is within its legal rights to refuse service to a customer… but as I’ve argued previously, they’re a private company responsible for a public space. That’s the nature of the internet – we use it as a space for public discourse, though the sites we use for much of our discussion are owned by private corporations and controlled by terms of service that are significantly more stringent than restrictions on public speech.

In the video I posted below, Zuckerman talks for a bit about Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital, and most specifically about Negroponte's idea that it is hard to build connections in the world of atoms, in the world of tangible things. But, Negroponte predicted way back in 1995, in the emerging future, in the digital world, it would be much easier to build connections because information would move very easily as tiny bits at the speed of light across the globe.

But of course as Zuckerman goes on to point out, things haven't quite turned out that way (not entirely surprising when you remember that we didn't all of a sudden become a new species devoid of clannish tendencies). Information does move very quickly indeed in the digital world, but that information tends to stay within rather closed loops; basically, we talk to people who are like us.

And so, Zuckerman argues, even though we have an amazing physical infrastructure that allows us to transport both goods as well as information all across the globe, if we only focus on that infrastructure, we won't have a very good idea of what is really going on, we won't know what kinds of connections people are building and what they are doing with those connections. And he's quite right, it isn't very useful to look just at the infrastructure, but of course as his quote above makes clear, the infrastructure is still pretty important.

People are certainly aware of the change, but I sometimes wonder whether they appreciate the magnitude of the shift toward private control of our primary places of public discourse. With facebook and twitter you have incredibly important spaces for both public discourse and the private discourse that sustains it being policed by private entities. That simply wasn't the case 20 years ago. Even with the early advent of the internet, information was not as easily policed or controlled or circumscribed as it is today. It is more difficult to limit the content of a phone call, or an email message, or a short wave radio broadcast, or a snail-mail letter without reducing the desirability of the communication in a free and open society. But a post on facebook, or twitter, or this blog post for instance, it's much easier to limit the bounds of that content without materially reducing the desire to communicate through that interface because you can filter out or block just certain messages, or certain audiences from seeing certain messages.

Now, I'm not saying that facebook or twitter or amazon or google are doing anything terribly nefarious (yet), but they and the political-economic power-structure that controls the U.S. are acting in a formative period in our new media environment. Our republic has succeeded in large part thanks to the fact that our government has protected and subsidized the free press throughout our history. As communication moves increasingly through private networks instead of through public or publicly-regulated networks, will we still be able to have the free and open discourse that is so necessary to the success of a governance structure that takes its driving force from the will of the people?

One of my favorite parts of Tocqueville's Democracy in America is when he describes traveling out to the hinterlands of Tennessee or some such frontier place and coming upon a cabin deep in the woods and being dumbfounded that the resident there could speak intelligently on all the major subjects of the day because he received a newspaper. Such a thing would have been unheard of in monarchical France among the "peasants." But newspaper's in the early republic's period were subsidized by the postal service, and that allowed information to flow freely.

Will we be able to say the same about our information 20 years from now? To answer that question we will have to pay close attention to both changes in our communication patterns and in our communication infrastructure.

Ethan Zuckerman on Rewiring Our World

There's a lot to think about here. I will say that I think this works at many different levels in one's life, not just globally. We need people to knock us out of our orbit. We humans love regularity, love pattern, and that can be ok; but too much of a good thing...well, you know. New pathways, new ways of seeing the world, new information, all of these things are healthy and necessary. Whether you're talking about family, work, friends, whatever, it's never good to be locked into the same way of doing things time after time. When you get out of your pattern, and are willing to accept the value of that change, you are often able to learn valuable things about yourself and the world around you that you would never have known before.

The Late Great Leslie Nielsen Shares a Policy Thought

Mayor: Now Drebin, I don't want any trouble like you had on the South Side last year, that's my policy.

Frank Drebin: Well, when I see five weirdos, dressed in togas, stabbing a man in the middle of the park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy!

Mayor: That was a Shakespeare-In-The-Park production of "Julius Caesar," you moron! You killed five actors! Good ones!

RIP Leslie Nielsen

Bottom-up Innovation and the Survival of Organizations

Timothy B. Lee has some wise words to ponder:

So far I’ve described top-down thinking as the tendency to underestimate the effectiveness of bottom-up processes like evolution or Wikipedia, based on the assumption that decentralized systems can’t work well without someone “in charge.” The Innovator’s Dilemma critiques the flip-side of this fallacy: the tendency to believe that when an organization does have someone in charge of it, that that person has a lot of control over the organization’s behavior. In reality, hierarchical organizations have an internal logic that severely constrains the options of the people in charge of them. Bottom-up thinkers in both cases focus on the complexity of the underlying systems, and resist the urge to over-simplify the situation by focusing too much on the people in charge (or lack thereof).

No matter which way you look at or perceive the world there is something you'll be missing. That's why it's so important to view the world from as many different perspectives as possible. I think the advantage of "bottom-up" thinking is that inherently there are more people, and therefore more perspectives, at the "bottom" than there are at the top. This gives people at the bottom more chances to see things that others can't see and then take advantage of them (as long as the system allows for it). So I don't know if I fully agree with Lee on the advantages of "bottom-up-thinkers" being their focus on the complexity of underlying systems. I think that "top-down-thinkers" or the people "in-charge" also often focus on the complexity of a given situation, I just think that their particular vantage point blinds them to things more easily seen from a different position. But Lee draws us to an important point nonetheless. Organizations and the people in charge of them often do not have as many options available to them as they might need to survive and succeed. They are often to their detriment attached to their niche, and when the world changes and that niche goes away they die. The adaptable survive, and one common trait of adaptable people is the ability to look at things from many different perspectives, understand the causes and consequences of various changes in the world quickly, and alter behavior accordingly. This is harder for organizations to accomplish because it requires a lot of engagement with the outside world, and empowering employees at lower tiers within the organization to make important decisions. But it can be done.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Gobble! Gobble!

Gee's Comments about Boise and TCU in Context

Speaking about whether TCU and Boise State deserve to play for the BCS National Title, Ohio State President Gordon Gee said today

Well, I don't know enough about the X's and O's of college football...I do know, having been both a Southeastern Conference president and a Big Ten president, that it's like murderer's row every week for these schools. We do not play the Little Sisters of the Poor. We play very fine schools on any given day. So I think until a university runs through that gantlet that there's some reason to believe that they not be the best teams to [be] in the big ballgame.

In response Pat Forde, ESPN College Football writer and Boise State bandwagon member, tweeted

With all due respect to Ohio State prez Gordon Gee: his Buckeyes would be beaten by both Boise and TCU this year. Perhaps handily.

Then Adam Rittenberg, ESPN Big Ten college football blogger followed up with some non-micro blog style commentary of his own, which included these choice phrases in response to Gee

Ugh. It's just not cool for Goliath to pick on David when Goliath's forehead keeps filling up with welts.

But that's beside the point. The Big Ten is a very tough conference this season. Would Boise State or TCU make it through a Big Ten schedule unscathed? It'd be tough, but it's also possible.

The bigger issue is that Ohio State has a tough time making the strength of schedule argument in 2010. Although the Buckeyes take more scheduling risks than many of their Big Ten brethren, they still face the Eastern Michigans of the world too often.

Then

One thing several Ohio State fans pointed out on my chat is that Gee has just given Boise State or TCU some bulletin-board material if it should face the Buckeyes in a BCS bowl. Ohio State has had a hard enough time beating SEC schools in bowls. Now the Broncos, who have been brilliant in BCS games, or TCU have some extra incentive to beat the Scarlet and Gray.

It's fine for Gee to support a system that is set up to benefit his school. But singling out Boise State and TCU does nothing to help Ohio State.

I disagree with President Gee's premise (and it's a premise that pretty much everyone in the SEC has made with a lot less fanfare), which is that because TCU and Boise State haven't played as strong a schedule (especially in conference it would seem from his comments) as Big Ten and SEC teams play, that that somehow makes them undeserving of playing for the National Title. Both TCU and Boise have been dominant this season, and I don't think there is a team in all of college football that wouldn't have trouble facing them. Both TCU and Boise execute at a very high level, they always play hard and tough and smart, and they aren't afraid of anybody. I think college football is measurably improved by their emergence as legitimate title contenders, and I would love to see either one of them get the chance to play for the National Title against a power conference school so that they can put to rest this idea that they can't compete with and beat the best.

But I also think that Rittenberg is wrong to argue that Gee's words do nothing for Ohio State, and I think that's because he doesn't know Ohio State the University very well, or what Gordon Gee is trying to accomplish there. I know Ohio State pretty well. My Parents still teach there, both since the 1970s, and they've each met and interacted with President Gee on a number of occasions, and I'm an Ohio State alum, and I've also heard President Gee speak on a number of occasions. One of the first anecdotes I heard from my parents about something Gee said when he arrived back at Ohio State on his second go-round as OSU president separated by stints at Brown and Vanderbilt went something along the lines of "I've just been president of two Universities that are not as good as they think they are, and now I'm the president of a University that is better than it thinks it is."

The thing I love about Gordon Gee, the thing that every Ohio State person loves about Gordon Gee, is that he believes Ohio State is a great university and he wants to make absolutely sure that it realizes that it's a great university, which is a much harder thing than it sounds. Ohio is a pathologically modest state, and Ohio State has often, to its detriment, been symptomatic of that pathology. So Gee is trying to give Ohio State confidence, swagger, ambition. He wants it to set its sights high, to believe that it can be the best public institution in America. It's his over-riding message whenever I've heard him talk. And so he likes to trumpet the things that are great about Ohio State, which obviously includes the football team, of which he is unabashedly proud.

Pat Forde and Rittenberg are both reacting to Gee's comments in the light of this present season. Oh no! Bulletin board material for Boise and TCU! Oh, but the Sagarin rankings show that Ohio State's strength of schedule is not much better than TCU or Boise! Oh, Ohio State might not even be able to compete with TCU and Boise! Gee doesn't care. He knows something that he wants all Ohio State fans to know and that is that Ohio State isn't competing with Boise and TCU, Ohio State has already reached the highest level of college football. Ohio State isn't looking for a signature program win, it isn't looking to be taken seriously by the establishment, it is the establishment. Gee doesn't care if Boise or TCU could beat Ohio State this year on a neutral field, he's trying to give an Ohio State program back some of the swagger it lost losing to LSU and Florida in National Title games by reminding everyone that Ohio State isn't worried about the fad schools of the moment because it knows that it's better than that.

There's a story I once heard about Larry Bird at the NBA All-Star Game three point shooting competition. Larry arrives and he's warming up and kind of studying all the other competitors but not saying anything to them, and they're a little uneasy because they don't know quite what he's doing and so they all start staring back at him. Larry smiles at this and says, "I'm just trying to see who's going to be second." Ohio State should always be wondering who's going to be second, that's Gee's point. That's not to say that Ohio State would beat TCU or Boise this year (according to Jeff Sagarin's rankings, TCU and Boise should both be classified as 5 point favorites over Ohio State, which is pretty good, but hardly the slam-dunk Forde implies), but success requires confidence, TCU and Boise know that as well as anyone. Gee is trying to make sure Ohio State has as much confidence as it needs.

Why Hate LeBron?

Michael Rosenberg at Sports Illustrated has one of the better articles I've seen about "Lebron Hatred" and the reasons behind it. The main core of his argument is summed up in this passage.

If we did not love sports, we would not hate LeBron James. He has not sinned against society. He has sinned against competition. And this sounds backward, but it's true: If he had sinned against society, we would have an easier time forgiving him. We all sin against society at some point. In sports, competition is everything.

I think this more or less nails it. LeBron, by working together with D-Wade and Chris Bosh to create a three superstar team, in most people's minds is guilty of taking a shortcut to win a championship. A championship has value because it is difficult to attain, because past champions had to give their blood, sweat, and tears to achieve it. It's cliche, we've all heard it in cheesy sports movies and on NFL Films documentaries, but champions are supposed to have gone above and beyond, are supposed to suffer, to fight back, to look defeat in the eye, to face their demons and in the end triumph in spite of all of it. LeBron though has seemingly found a way around that by simply joining two of the other best players in the game to make things easier for himself. I don't know if that's actually objectively true. As of today, the Miami Heat are 8-6, they have just lost Udonis Haslem, one of their best role players and team leaders, for at least the next four months, if not longer, D-Wade continues to play his no-holds-barred style, which makes him spectacular as well as injury prone, and the Heat seems to have trouble matching up with and defending size. But it's still far to early to tell how good the Heat will be, and they've shown at times already this year that they can be an elite team. If they become that elite team this year, or next, or the year after that, and LeBron, Bosh, and Wade hoist that championship banner, many people will look on and wonder why any of it matters. When the best have conspired to beat the rest is it really such a great achievement? And, won't it something to see if LeBron is 35 and still without a championship? How desperate for achievement will he be then?

San Francisco is beautiful

The Unseen Sea from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

The Geography of High-Paying Jobs - Business - The Atlantic

Richard Florida on the Geography of High-Paying Jobs:

"The geography of high-paying jobs is strikingly uniform. The highest-paying regions are bi-coastal - dominated by metros in the Bay Area and the Bos-Wash corridor. And the pattern holds not just for the highest-paying metros but for all U.S. metros. Pay levels for the three major occupational groups are closely correlated across the U.S. regions. Creative class pay is closely correlated with both service class pay (.86) and working class pay (.67); and service class and working class pay are also closely correlated (.74). This likely reflects regional differences in housing prices and other living costs as well as other structural characteristics of these regions such as human capital, demographic characteristics, and overall productivity. That said, it's important for policymakers as well as for analysts to take into account the systematic geographic differences in pay across U.S. regions. But the striking fact is that a small number of U.S. regions pay considerably more than others for virtually every type of work."

The Geography of High-Paying Jobs - Business - The Atlantic

Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity and Education

Private and Public in the Facebook World

What does it mean to be public in 2010? Where does does the public end and the private begin? Has social media really changed the definition of what it means to be public and private? Or has social media simply made more private things public to more people than was possible in the past?

Human nature changes very slowly (or has so far, at least by our understanding of time). Obviously Mark Zuckerberg (or someone's fatuous imitation of Mark Zuckerberg) was thinking hard about dollar signs and not human behavior when he said didn't believe in privacy.

Everyone believes in privacy, everyone needs privacy, or at least the sense of privacy, the sense that there is a part of this world that is one's own, if only for a moment. That need carves out an essential space within our society where people are able to be themselves, or whatever part of themselves they need to be in that moment. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas argues that this private space is necessary for the effective development of the public sphere. Without the ability to discourse in private, public voices tend too often to flit between the vacillating whims of public opinion. In other words, people become unmoored when they loose their privacy, or sense of it, and public governance is left without the constancy necessary for good decision-making that reasoned judgment provides.

So why is it any supprise that people are upset by Facebook's attempt to reveal their private selves without their permission? Facebook has become a fundamental institution of our social world providing a service that people might even pay for, the ability to connect and interact their entire social network with a click. But Facebook is not yet capable of changing our desire to have a private realm free from the intrusion of public attention. What media does is it changes your perspective on the world, how you see things, and people, as yet, don't want to see their world free of the bonds of propriety that the private realm provides.

To begin with....

Well, it's taken me a while to finally get going on this blog, but I'm going to take a more serious crack at actually writing regularly now that I'm fully healed and settled back into my life.

It can be hard to start writing though. Everyone has something to say, but it is a skill to be able to write or talk or express oneself in any kind of interesting manner consistently over any considerable period of time. The late David Foster Wallace wrote a great piece about a talk radio host, John Ziegler, for the Atlantic about five years ago. In it he makes the following point, which, with minor modifications can be applied to blogging or writing or really any form of human expression as well.

Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don't have names. To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you're saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you're speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you're saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you're discussing.

Producing content on its own is hard, and producing interesting content is harder still.

But the goal is to try, and I think that the act of trying to produce at least a daily post will be a useful exercise for me. If nothing else, it will help me clarify my thinking on the issues and topics I care about.