Philly NetSquared Network Blogs

It’s the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment today, where women voting in the US finally became legal. A tweet by the Women’s Media Center asked if anyone else got irritated by the phrase, “Women were given the right to vote.” And then a number of people responded yes, they were irritated, because it wasn’t given to them, women won the right to vote.

Both of these frames are problematic. It’s challenging to articulate exactly why, but I’m going to give it my best shot–because language has evolved within the same power structures we seek to tear down, we don’t always have the words to describe the problem.

Human rights within both frames are treated as a commodity that is traded. This is based on our market understanding of what we do with commodities: we accumulate, we spend, we give, we win, we lose. But if we really believe that certain rights are inalienable to humans, we can’t and shouldn’t commodify them. By doing so we support a power structure where rights are doled out and taken away at the whims of the dominant paradigm.

It also, in a deeper metaphorical sense, suggests that women aren’t necessarily fully human– they must be given the right to vote, or they must fight and win it for themselves. It’s not assumed that women would naturally vote in the grand scheme of things. We think so now (mostly), but if we continue to use this language, we support the antiquated structures that keep women from being recognized fully as humans.

If you’re into this kind of thing, by the way, and have the patience for heavy academic text, I highly recommend Women, Fire & Dangerous Things by George Lakoff. There’s a section called “Anger, Lust & Rape” that is truly disturbingly insightful as to how unraveling language can reveal our darkest cultural secrets. I’ll see if I can get in touch with George and post the piece here.

Based on the feedback I received on the fabulous panel I moderated at Netroots Nation 2010 (“So You Wanna Change the World: How to Rock on Social Networks“), I decided to share my process for putting together a panel that will knock participants’ socks off. I’ve been the victim of too many snoozy, self-aggrandizing panels to let that happen on anything I put together, and I’d love to see no one ever have that kind of conference experience ever again.

What is absolutely critical from your area expertise that this audience needs to understand? Don’t just think that because you’re an expert in bilateral African swallow evolution that everyone at your conference should know about every nook and cranny. Ask yourself some questions: what are new, key findings that they might not know about? How can a piece of your expertise help the larger conference community grow? Remember that you’re not blessing the audience with your infinite cosmic power; you are providing a service that you want them to benefit from.

Next: choose a title that’s going to rope them in. Don’t be obvious, in most cases– again, think about your audience and what they’ve come to the conference to learn. One of the most frustrating things I see on the political conference circuit are poorly titled token panels like, “Why We Need Women to Win Elections.” First of all, boooooring. Second of all, the people who actually need to hear that message aren’t going to go to a panel called that.

I used the following example from my past as an RA on campus recently. I was responsible for the sexual assault awareness programming for my quad, and I knew that I wouldn’t get students to attend something called “Sexual Assault Awareness Night.” Instead, I stole the idea from a training I’d attended, where we took the name of a popular game show at the time (who remembers “Singled Out“?) and made all of the questions and answers about sexual assault awareness. Yes, it’s tricking people. But sometimes people need to be tricked into getting educated.

Copybloggers’ headline writing series also applies to panel naming in many respects, if you need extra help.

This can be challenging for most of us. We’re pulled in several directions: we want to get famous people onto our panel so that people will come; we want to promote our friends and their work; we want to have people that have interesting ideas. (I was lucky for my Netroots panel, since my panelists fit many of these bills, haha.)

Before you get to the famous and the friends, though, I want you to think about some other questions. First, who’s not just writing smart things about your topic, but who can actually explain them in an engaging way to an audience? Honestly, many writers and academics make terrible presenters. The panelists don’t have to be the most fun or funniest, but they should do more than drone on as they read a prepared statement.

Next, who do you know that has something challenging to say on your topic? You don’t just want panelists who will congratulate each other; you’ll want them to interact and play off each other. That doesn’t mean they have to be douchey or mean, just willing to be a little different if it’s called for.

On the topic of famous people: yes, having one on your panel is extremely helpful for getting people to choose it from all the other panels that are available in that time slot. It’s true. So, if you choose a famous person, maybe consider choosing someone else who’s not so famous, but meets other, stronger criteria above, so they get some elevation out of the process.

Last, but probably most important: Choose people from different genders, races and backgrounds. I’m not saying this to be nice, or even as an ethical argument. People from different backgrounds make for a more interesting panel. It’s like DNA– see this post I wrote about it, which also plays a major role in my book.

Depending on how in-depth your panel is, anywhere from a few weeks to a week before the panel, email your panelists and lay out what you need from them. Come up with 3-4 questions for them to choose from as a guide for what you want the panel to focus on. Make it clear that you want the audience to take away clear, concrete ideas and action items–this is not just story time.

Give them a time limit that they are supposed to work within (generally 7-10minutes is about right for the average panel), and warn them that you will cut them off if they go over.

Tell them that if they are presenting case studies as an illustrative example of how things work or should work, the case studies must be replicable. Too often (especially on panels about social media and blogging), a case that is unbelievably outstanding is presented, and key points about what really made the success–such as participant’s relationships with key influencers–are left out. This is so damaging to the wider community: When people think that all they have to do, for example, is come up with a nice charity idea and ask their friends to help, they become disappointed and turned off of social media when it doesn’t work.

I also advise against using any PowerPoint presentations, unless you have strong images or graphics. (I myself go for the TED-style of PowerPoint, with just large images and one or two words on each slide.) It’s too tempting for a presenter to just read what’s on screen and not engage with the audience at all.

If there are heavy-duty materials that need to be shared, determine ahead of time a place online where you can share each panelist’s materials: a blog, a wiki, SlideShare, etc.

Ask your panelists to meet a half-hour before the panel starts and discuss quickly what each person is going to talk about. Confirm that there are no egregious overlaps in topic. Determine the order that each panelist will present in.

Make sure all your AV is working, and if there are going to be lots of social media users in your audience, choose a hashtag for your panel. (Try just adding a single word to the conference’s main hashtag– for example, we used #nn10rock.)

Get a 2-sentence bio from each of your panelists. Their full bios are either in the conference program or on the conference website, so don’t worry about using the whole thing.

Give an overview of the panel topic: Set the stage for your panelists based on what you know they’re going to present, and ask your audience a few questions about the topic that they can answer with a show of hands. Introduce your panelists with the short bios you gathered.

Let your panelists present, but keep to your promise to cut them off when their time is up. Take notes for questions while they’re speaking.

Start the Q&A period of the panel by asking a few pointed questions based on the notes you took. Ask them to explain one interesting detail further.

When it’s time to open the questions up to the audience, warn them of one very big important point: You will not tolerate anyone who gives an entire history of the project their working on, and then asks a random question at the end. We know you’re just there to self-promote, and we’re interested in having a conversation. Using up a lot of time to ask a question does the whole community a disservice. Instead, say your name, that you’re working on [name of project], and you want to know x. Anything more than that will find you cut off.

I know it sounds harsh, but it’s the only way to get through a lot of questions, and to have a productive Q&A session at most conferences.

At the end of the panel, remind people where they can find the materials online, and then actually gather and post those materials within 24 hours, if possible. Share the materials with wider audiences on Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Invite comment and critique, and improve your panel stylings based on that feedback.

We’ve been together a long time. I still remember so clearly holding my shiny red Pearl in my hands for the first time. It glistened with promise, way back then. It was the summer of 2007.

I was a late adopter (to my fellow geeks, anyway) for a smartphone. For the longest time, I kept my Type-A-like behavior in the digital world in check by not having a device that I could get email on, or surf around on. Finally I caved, and I was thrilled with my little guy. It did everything I needed. A little over a year later, I decided it was time to move on to something bigger, and I bought a Blackberry Bold the day they came out in late 2008.

Blackberry, you did everything I ever wanted you to do well. Primarily, I was utilitarian back then. I wanted email delivered immediately, and to quickly answer it without any fuss. I wanted to be able to look up a few things here and there while I was out in the world. You did that for me. You always came through.

Then things started to change… in me. I started wanting more. I wanted a more robust social networking experience, for example. When those apps finally came to our world, they made you sluggish and hogged your tiny RAM. I’ll tell you straight out– never did I ever want a light saber app. No, I was not that kind of grrl. But dammit, I did want Google Sky Map.

My needs have grown. And you, you so sweetly and staunchly do what you’ve always done exceptionally well. Sure, with my Droid X, I’m settling a little now for a mobile email client that doesn’t do some of the things I need it to (really, Android, we’re getting copy and paste for Gmail this summer?). But there’s just so much more I’m getting–without succombing to one of those other fancy smartphones, and a version of one that just about everyone’s regretting.

Take care, Blackberry. You’ll always hold a special utilitarian place in my heart, and I’ll never say an unkind word about you. I hope one day you can forgive me, and that we’ll be able to be friends. You’re a trooper, I know you’ll pull through.

(AT&T, on the other hand, you can burn in hell.)

Today over at Gizmodo, blogger Joel Johnson posted what was intended to be encouragement and a challenge for his cohorts of the world to start following people who are different than them on Twitter: “Why I Stalk a Sexy Black Woman on Twitter (And Why You Should, Too).”

Conceptually, encouraging dominant cultures to divesify is fabulous –I subscribe to the DNA model of ecosystems and social spaces, so I support it wholeheartedly. As I’ve said in my book and recent talks:

This is a big one: you need to find people who don’t look like you, don’t necessarily think like you, and don’t come from the same places that you do. Creating a thrivable ecosystem–whether that’s an organization or a whole society–is like the evolution of a species. If you have a bunch of the same DNA mixing together, the species mutates poorly and eventually dies off. But bring in variety–new strains of DNA–and you create a stronger species. It’s no different in idea generation. You get a bunch of the same people talking to each other and making the rules for a few millennia, and eventually you’re going to end up with a lack of meaningful advancement.

We need you to be aware of the privilege you bring to the table – whether that’s your race, gender or your tech privilege – and make sure you’re using it responsibly and thoughtfully. Diversity is a strategic imperative for achieving collective goals. As diversity scholar Roosevelt Thomas notes, we all make better decisions–as individuals and as a society–when we account for differences and tensions.

But Johnson sort of, well, pretty much derails from the outset in his attempt. First, and I’m not going to focus on this too much, but “stalking?” Really? C’mon, we know that the world is loaded, painful and supports a culture of dominant violence. Not okay. But, moving along…

Where the argument really goes awry for me is in Johnson’s othering of the woman he follows. He’s turned her into an exotic creature on display, and taken away a little bit of her humanity. For more on exocitization, check out Racialicious’ extensive archive of awesome. There are plenty of ways to talk about race without placing people into positions that feel more like targets than participants.

This is largely about power relationships. Pretending that they don’t exist or don’t influence our decisions on how we interact with one another — especially when we’re different genders, races, sexualities, etc.– just mires us in he-said-she-said. It also perpetuates our bias, prejudices and social systems into the wild, open frontier of the Internet, and that’s a crying shame.

We’re living like fish in water on the Internet right now: We don’t know, or we’re not willing to recognize, that we’re soaking in the same social structures we’ve been living with for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. We’re porting our understanding of the offline world–with all our prejudices, biases, and hierarchies–onto the blank canvas of the Internet. But all we can see is the blank canvas; we remain convinced that the Internet is a pure meritocracy and that if you just work hard enough, you’ll succeed at whatever it is that you’re trying to do. We’ve got to interrupt this pattern now, with conscious effort and action.

Lest I be a big ol’ bully and just rant about what’s wrong, allow me to offer some excerpts from my book that illustrate what I think is a healthier, more productive way to go about things. I’ll start with an example of where I was called out on my own voyeurism–shortly after the Philadelphia pool incident in 2009, and after listening on Twitter to lots of people of color share stories of childhood discrimination.

To share that kind of intimacy requires some sort of explicit or assumed “safe space”–a forum of sorts, where one can express views without threat of abuse or harassment. Safe space requires a tremendous amount of trust, and that trust allowed the people sharing the stories with each other to extend the conversation past the sound bite moments that get played out in media and other traditional public forums. “Usually when people of color talk publicly, it’s about our feelings, our mistakes, and being frank about our shortcomings,” says Ludovic Blain, director of the Progressive Era Project and a longtime social justice activist. “Often when white folks speak in the same setting, it’s about their initiatives and how they’ll make it right. That’s perverted. In the case of the racist pool, the scene was the same: people of color discussing heart-wrenching issues in front of whites. But those people were also doing a rare thing–publicly discussing what whites had done wrong.” The empathy based on shared experience, combined with trust that the conversation would be productive, brought this moment to a more necessarily intense place.

Additionally, people decided to share their stories for many reasons: to release a painful memory and get it off their chests, to connect with others who had experienced similar racism as children, to potentially educate those who needed to hear their memories, and more. Thus, the voyeuristic aspect of the experience was strong. My whiteness was hidden for a moment (via my silence, not sharing a common past experience), and social networks allowed me to enter a conversation that otherwise might have been altered by my presence. I was able to benefit regardless of whether the sharers intended for me to, and that cultural voyeurism needs to be clear when discussing issues that deal with bias around race, gender, class, and other kinds of privilege.

Later in the book, I discuss the kind of cross-pollination of culture that I believe Johnson originally intended to challenge his readers with.

To be clear, we won’t ever eliminate our biases. But we can begin to be explicit about what we learn about ourselves and our social spheres when bias rears its ugly head. Social technology researcher danah boyd suggests a series of questions for that explicit discovery process: “None of us is going to be unbiased. There is no way to be unbiased. The question is: Can you account for your biases? Can you recognize when they get in the way? Can you open up a dialogue, even if it makes you uncomfortable, with people who aren’t like you?” Opening ourselves up to that process and beginning to break out of the way we’ve been thinking about how we assume the world operates (simply because it’s operated like that for a long time) is crucial. We need to listen as selflessly as possible to what others are sharing and make sure that we’re not perpetuating restrictive social structures. … It makes me realize that often those moments are not about me at all–they are about larger injustices that I have a role in changing or stopping altogether, and it’s my job to figure out how to do that.

…

It’s important for people of all stripes and places to engage with those who are different from themselves, but to be blunt, it’s extra important for those who are a couple of notches up on the hierarchy to go through this exercise. Remember, you’re not there as part of some sociology experiment, but because you get that progress is possible only when we participate.

A crucial part of cross-pollination exercises is realizing that your role as ambassador is not to defend your position in the food chain. That’s where a lot of us get into trouble–I know I have. Your job is to recognize what privilege you bring–whether it’s your gender, your class, your race, your sexuality, etc.–and figure out how best you can use it to enable justice for people who don’t share your privilege. Jessica Hoffman, editor of make/shift magazine, pithily captured our collective responsibility to engage in self-reflection in an article she wrote about a white feminist’s role in other social justice movements: “Inexperienced because of privilege, we hadn’t thought well on our feet, and we’d been in a certain denial about how bad things might get; we’d been pissed and well meaning, but not useful [emphasis mine].” It’s the job of all of us to be useful.

Johnson’s utter failure to be useful is instructive of the larger systemic issues we face, not the least of which is the truism, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” A tweet from last year comes to mind on why this is true.

Last night I was poking around the socnets before going to bed, and saw that Beth Kanter had posted a link to Fast Company’s “Influence Project.” I’m keenly interested in ways to measure influence as part of the research fellowship I have with the Center for Social Media at American University, so naturally I was intrigued and signed up. It took me a while to suss out what they’re actually doing. While they recognize that influence isn’t about numbers of followers or fans, this is how they measure:

The scale of your influence, and therefore the size of your photo, is based on two measures.

1. The number of people who directly click on your unique URL link. This is the primary measure of your influence, pure and simple.

2. You will receive partial “credit” for subsequent clicks generated by those who register as a result of your URL. In other words, anyone who comes to the site through your link and registers for their own account will be spreading your influence while they spread theirs. That way, you get some benefit from influencing people who are influential themselves. We will give a diminishing, fractional credit (1/2, ¼, 1/8 etc ) for clicks generated up to six degrees away from your original link.

Hmmmmm.

What I find problematic: It’s still in many ways a popularity contest. Someone with a lot of time on their hands could launch a campaign to focus on generating as many clicks as possible, which would certainly skew the measurements of that person’s true influence– if they’re not actively campaigning, how much are people actually clicking on their links?

Plus there’s the problem of the power law in this case–early popular adopters are going to rise to the top faster than later adopters and benefit the most from the Amway-like pyramid scheme of click benefits.

There’s no good measurement for influence right now. Part of that’s because there’s a Pandora’s box of factors to consider. I may be influential in recommending information about social networks or dog behavior, but completely ineffectual at recommending solid information on the cultures of Lower Slobbovia. Which measure of influence is important? Do we take a mean number of some kind to represent my overall influence in the world? If we did, how much weight should my recommendations on Lower Slobbovia play?

I know people are desperate to have quantitative metrics when it comes to social media, especially when thinking about ROI. I don’t want to see us falling back on paradigms that we’re used to, though, because they’re now becoming outdated and useless. Here’s a smidge of how I address this in Share This!, from the section “Avoiding the Newest Numbers Trap” in Chapter 4:

Someday, maybe even while this book is being printed, my dream of having an application that shows me “interestingness” in the social network sphere will come true. Flickr has this for photographs: There is an algorithm based on “[w]here the click-throughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.” The best part? Interestingness itself, then, is constantly changing, based on these shifting variables, so there’s a good chance of finding both something new and something surprising when one goes spelunking through Flickr’s massive collection of interesting photos.

I’m not going to lie to you: This great shift in authority isn’t the easiest part of social networking’s brave new world to navigate. The tools give us tremendous power to change the culture around us, but they’re new, and our behavior and impressions are still based on operating within a hyper-capitalist-focused, hierarchical mindset. We have a lot of work to do on freeing our minds before the rest of our bits will follow.

Surprisingly, though, the uncertainty of the future of social networking tools is also the good news: Things are still shaking out, and we’re in a position to determine whether the reordering of authority will benefit people who previously did not have the access or the means to make their voices heard. Armed with a fundamental understanding of what’s taking place (by, ahem, reading good books on the subject), you’re primed to make the most of change.

(Thanks to the Women’s Media Center for capturing this appearance.)

One of the things that I didn’t discuss in this segment–simply for the sake of time and to make a direct point–is that Internet access on its own will not significantly change anyone’s life. I have a whole chapter in my book about this; I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes from that chapter:

On top of looking at the pure numbers, we also tend to take on a blunt-force-object view when it comes to Internet access and factors like economic status and education. We assume that if people just get “onto the web,” our problems of jobless- ness and lack of education will be solved. Unfortunately, such a one-dimensional view is not true, nor is it helpful for problem solving. As [Josh] Breitbart notes: “From reading some reports, you might forget that poverty preceded the Internet. You might think that getting poor people online would magically make them wealthy.” Addressing the problems of Internet access and its relationship to societal and structural challenges requires us to understand their interdependent relationship.

The chapter then goes on to explore the work of people like Estzer Hargittai; I go on to summarize:

So, beyond providing access, we must take on the challenge of figuring out how to ensure that those online, with all of the different social and class elements involved, are developing sophisticated skills for getting the most out of the Internet. (And to those doing this work: Note that it’s not just a matter of making sure the have-nots can do what the haves do; Breitbart points out, “[It] means, instead of trying to get people to use the Internet the way that we use it currently, we should be trying to adapt the Internet to work for more people.”)

Read the text and see the slides at the full presentation page.

Thanks to Facebook’s latest round of privacy silliness, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to loads of media outlets on the topic, as well as the future of social networking. Here are a few:

• New York Times: Is There Life After Facebook? (CNN.com refers to the Times story here.)

I spent an hour on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning show, talking with host Kerri Miller and CNET’s Caroline McCarthy:

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I went on CNN International and spoke with awesome host Fionnuala Sweeney:

June is a wild rollercoaster ride of talks and workshops that I’m giving, and I wanted to make sure folks know about the wonderful conferences I’m heading to — hopefully I’ll see you there!

June 3-4: Personal Democracy Forum, New York City. This is one of my favorite conferences all year because it’s one of the few that blend many worlds well together: Technology, electoral politics, advocacy politics and cultural analysis. I’m giving a 10-minute talk on Thursday, June 3, that will (definitively!) answer the question: “Can the Internet fix politics?” Muwahaha. Other luminaries on the speaking roster include Howard Rheingold, Clay Shirky, Cheryl Contee, Jane Hamsher, Arianna Huffington, Esther Dyson, Anil Dash and many, many more. Register today — I’ve got a code to give you $100 off the registration; just email me and ask for it.

June 7-9: America’s Future Now, Washington DC. A yearly pilgramage to DC for progressives, where we talk strategy and tactics for challenging the right-wing agenda. I’ll be moderating a workshop on Tuesday morning, June 8, on social networking with Toby Chaudhuri, and we’ve actually turned it into a gameshow format: Social Media Jeopardy! Contestants will be Lizz Winstead, Garlin Gilchrist II, Scott Goodstein and Heather Holdridge. Also, Monday night, June 7, will see the DC launch of my book, thanks to Toby and Scott of Revolution Messaging, who are throwing me a killer party. Wooooo! Register today for all the goods.

June 9-11: Making Media Connections, Chicago, IL. I’m thrilled to be keynoting this gathering of non-profit communicators, put together by the Community Media Workshop. This year’s theme is “Storytelling and Strategy in the Digital Age,” which hits home strong for me– it’s through our stories that we have always made change, and our shiny new digital tools give us unprecedented capabilities to tell them. Register today for this amazing conference. (PS — That Friday night, June 11, I’ll be reading at Women & Children First, and having a party afterwards nearby.)