Category Archives: Clay Shirky
Did I really just do that? For five years?
#BTV #VT – I don’t think of myself as a blogger, yet this blog turns five years old today… guess it kinda snuck up on me. Hard to imagine I’ve written 1,150 postings over that time. I started blogging a month or two after launching Front Porch Forum, which now has 30,000 households participating, including half of Burlington.
Thanks to the blog’s many regular readers. Our frequent back-and-forth (mostly off-blog) about the quickly heating up “neighbor conversation” online space is fascinating. Dozens of start-ups are now aiming to help neighbors connect. We’re glad for the company. I invite more of them to contribute to the field by frequently blogging about what they’re learning. Hosting sustainable neighborly online discussions across many neighborhoods is not trivial!
Many of the pundits who focus on adjacent spaces — hyperlocal journalism, social networking, daily deals, etc. — are slowly waking to the staggering potential of online neighborhoods. We’ve seen it first hand in our super successful pilot. Neighbors, local businesses, public officials, nonprofits… they all flock to Front Porch Forum and put it to excellent use.
There’s monster demand across North America for connection to place and neighbors. The opposite — which too many of us experience now — is untenable… living with a neutered sense of community, being surrounded by strangers for years on end, not knowing what’s going on in the neighborhood, not feeling a sense of ownership of your place. Ugh.
Here’s to the next five years!
Tweets from a Birmingham jail?
Malcolm Gladwell opens his Oct. 4, 2010 New Yorker article…
At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.
“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.
“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.
By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.
By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell
Cooperation vs. Competion or Regulation
Scott Heiferman’s tweet led me to take a closer look at the work of recent Nobel Laureate (economics) Elinor Ostrom. She studies how cooperation works best in some cases… better than competition or regulation… our two dominant forms of organizing markets. From a Forbes article…
Garrett Hardin called his famous 1968 essay on shared resources “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He argued that a shared village grazing pasture would tend to get overused and eventually destroyed. But even Hardin later acknowledged that shared common resources did not inevitably have to end in destruction, saying that he should have called his essay “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.”
And from Fran Korton’s interview at Shareable…
Fran: It’s interesting that your research is about people learning to cooperate…
Elinor: I have a new book coming out in May entitled Working Together, written with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen. It is on collective actions in the commons. What we’re talking about is how people work together. We’ve used an immense array of different methods to look at this question “case studies, including my own dissertation and Amy’s work, modeling, experiments, large-scale statistical work. We show how people use multiple methods to work together.
Fran: Many people associate “the commons” with Garrett Hardin’s famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”… What’s the difference between your perspective and Hardin’s?
Elinor: Well, I don’t see the human as hopeless. There’s a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems.
If you are in a fishery or have a pasture and you know your family’s long-term benefit is that you don’t destroy it, and if you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if the community doesn’t have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won’t organize, and there will be failures.
Fran: So, are you saying that Hardin is sometimes right?
Elinor: Yes. People say I disproved him, and I come back and say “No, that’s not right. I’ve not disproved him. I’ve shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong.” But he was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It’s just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well.
At the Workshop we’ve done experiments where we create an artificial form of common property such as an imaginary fishery or pasture, and we bring people into a lab and have them make decisions about that property. When we don’t allow any communication among the players, then they overharvest [the commons]. But when people can communicate, particularly on a face-to-face basis, and say, “Well, gee, how about if we do this? How about we do that?” Then they can come to an agreement.
That last bit there about communication leading to better community decisions… love it. It’s so obvious. I guess that’s why it takes a non-economist Nobel Laureate in Economics to explain it to the economists of the world. And, for what it’s worth, her observation jibes with what we see at Front Porch Forum too. FPF leads to better communication among neighbors, more face-to-face conversation, and, in many cases, better community decisions.
Congratulations Dr. Ostrom!
Bill McKibben covers FPF for Yankee Magazine
Amazing! It’s not every day that an author of Bill McKibben‘s statue writes a feature story about Front Porch Forum… let alone with a subtitle of “How New England can save the world!” But there it is… in the March/April 2010 issue of Yankee Magazine. Here’s a snippet…
Susan Comerford, a longtime community organizer and now associate dean for academic affairs and
Credit: William Duke
research at the University of Vermont’s College of Education and Social Services, calls it “the best community organizing tool that’s come along in the last 30 or 40 years.” To understand its importance, says Comerford (who started posting on the forum the day she needed a recommendation for a carpenter), you have to think about what’s happened in the American economy in recent decades.
“It’s not that people care less about community,” she notes. “It’s that the economy has shifted how much people have to work to keep up their standard of living. You don’t have one of the two partners home during the day making all those social connections, providing some sense of safety to the neighborhood. People have less disposable time than they used to.”
In a world like that, a system that lets you sit down for 10 minutes at the end of the day and learn what’s happened to your neighbors should, in Comerford’s view, earn Wood-Lewis one of those MacArthur “genius” grants.
UPDATE: The media coverage of Bill’s look at FPF is growing. Check it out here, starting March 1, 2010.
Media Crap Index… How do you score your media?
How about this? Go ahead and score each form of media on your very own Media Crap Index… MCI.
For example, email channels are flooded with spam, some reports put it at 95% of all messages sent. So, email gets an awful 95% MCI… that is, 95% of email is crap.
But how about other media? TV… considering all channels, 24/7, including ads… my TV MCI = 95% too.
Radio… well, I’m a picky listener… I find myself drawn to a 95% score again.
Daily local newspaper? What I actually read (without regret)… better than above… maybe MCI = 80%.
Facebook… oy… sorry “friends”… my MCI = 95% too.
Twitter… I guess I’ve got to get into some better hashtags or something… MCI = 85%
A question… how easy is it to glean out the non-crap portion from these various streams and let the unwelcomed bulk float away from you ASAP? Spam filtering, when it works, makes email a good fit for me… cutting my email MCI down to about 10%.
But TV and radio? The best filter for me is abandonment… so I instead stream shows/music online that I want to see/hear… but they still come with ads that don’t appeal… so my streaming MCI might be around 25%… much better.
Print daily newspaper… hard to filter… but I’ve been doing it since my first paper route in second grade… so my custom-built neural filter is well-honed, slicing thru the crap ably.
Facebook… well, to confess my Web 2.0 sins, I haven’t managed well, and now I just don’t have the wherewithal to wade in and pluck the lovely items from frothing stream of… what… I guess my Facebook flow calls to mind a tittering group of junior high girls around someone’s locker before 4th period. So I don’t know how — and I’m just not motivated to try — to cut my FB MCI below its painful 95% crap level.
Twitter… I know there are ways to filter… to get the noise down… but I just haven’t seen enough value to convince me to build myself a better experience with a tolerable MCI.
Well, now I’ve likely offended several friends and colleagues, and for that I apologize. I don’t begrudge people their media choices, and I understand that the more popular a media option becomes, the higher its MCI climbs (gotta pay the bills with ads, and you gotta attract the teeming masses). But the hype around today’s darlings can get overwhelming. At what point can we start talking about Facebook like reasonable people did about TV in the 1970s and 80s… they watched a few hours of it every night, but drove to work the next morning with a “Kill your TV” bumper sticker proudly displayed.
So, I look forward to better filtering across the board… drive down those MCIs on the super popular choices. And I’ll keep looking for niches with lower MCI ratings… oh… here’s one… a hand-written letter from a loved one? MCI = 0%!
P.S. I reserve the right to change my mind on this. Educate me, please!
The good, bad and topsey turvey of Pew social isolation study
In trying to digest the conclusions and supporting evidence presented in “Social Isolation and New Technology: How the internet and mobile phones impact Americans’ social networks,” I’m getting a little carsick. It’s a great ride, but I’m having trouble with some of the unexpected hairpin turns.
The authors of this Pew study start with broad conclusions that social isolation in the United States isn’t so bad and the internet, mobile phones and online social networks are essentially making it better. Then, reading on, whiplash approaches from statements like these…
- Users of social networking services are 30% less likely to know their neighbors.
- Users of social networking services are 26% less likely to have used neighbors as a source of companionship.
- With the exception of those who use instant messaging, internet users are 26% less likely to have received small services (e.g., household chores, shopping, repairs, house-sat, lent tools or supplies) from neighbors.
- Internet users are 40% less likely to have been cared for, or had a member of their family cared for, by a neighbor. And, users of social networking services are 39% less likely than other internet users, or 64% less likely than those who do not use the internet, to have received family care from a neighbor.
- Internet users who are frequent users at work are 57% less likely to borrow money from neighbors.
Other points from the Pew study to consider…
Do you know the names of the neighbors who close to you, or not?
- 40% Yes, know all or most
- 30% Yes, know some
- 30% Do not know any
- Apartment dwellers are 60% less likely than home dwellers to know at least some of their neighbors.
- Those who are married or cohabitating are 31% more likely to know their neighbors.
- The likelihood of knowing at least some neighbors increases 3% for every year of age.
- Residential stability, the longer one lives in any one place increases the odds of knowing neighbors; 6% per year.
- The odds that women know at least some neighbors are 41% higher than for men.
- Those with larger, core networks are more likely to know neighbors. The odds are 19% higher per core tie in their network.
- The odds of knowing at least some neighbors are 50% lower for African Americans and 43% less for those of other races, in comparison to white Americans.
And…
And this chart is very interesting (although it calls into question the whole notion of people self-reporting, given the difference between the responses to the two versions of the question)…
More interesting survey results…
- Bloggers are 72% more likely to belong to a local group.
- Those who frequently access the internet at work are 49% more likely to go to a non-fastfood restaurant, 35% more likely to visit a community center, 21% more likely to visit a public park, and 71% more likely to go to a bar.
- However, frequent internet users at work were 26% less likely to visit a library.
- Those who contribute to a blog are 61% more likely to go to a public park than internet users who do not blog.
- Users of social networking websites are 40% more likely to visit a bar, but 36% less likely to visit a religious institution.
- Users of instant messaging are 21% less likely to visit a library than those who do not use IM.
“The Lonely American”
I’m looking forward to a new book by two long-time Harvard professors… The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the 21st Century…
In today’s world, it is more acceptable to be depressed than to be lonely-yet loneliness appears to be
the inevitable byproduct of our frenetic contemporary lifestyle. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, one out of four Americans talked to no one about something of importance to them during the last six months. Another remarkable fact emerged from the 2000 U.S. Census: more people are living alone today than at any point in the country’s history-fully 25 percent of households consist of one person only. In this crucial look at one of America’s few remaining taboo subjects-loneliness-Drs. Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz set out to understand the cultural imperatives, psychological dynamics, and physical mechanisms underlying social isolation.
In The Lonely American, cutting-edge research on the physiological and cognitive effects of social exclusion and emerging work in the neurobiology of attachment uncover startling, sobering ripple effects of loneliness in areas as varied as physical health, children’s emotional problems, substance abuse, and even global warming. Surprising new studies tell a grim truth about social isolation: being disconnected diminishes happiness, health, and longevity; increases aggression; and correlates with increasing rates of violent crime. Loneliness doesn’t apply simply to single people, either-today’s busy parents “cocoon” themselves by devoting most of their non-work hours to children, leaving little time for friends, and other forms of social contact, and unhealthily relying on the marriage to fulfill all social needs.
As a core population of socially isolated individuals and families continues to balloon in size, it is more important than ever to understand the effects of a culture that idealizes busyness and self-reliance. It’s time to bring loneliness-a very real and little-discussed social epidemic with frightening consequences-out into the open, and find a way to navigate the tension between freedom and connection in our lives.
This is one of the central problems that Front Porch Forum addresses… and why we get such strong and emotional responses from folks. Many people simply yearn to connect with their neighbors, and in this day and age that’s not easy to do. Enter FPF.
About Blog
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more
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