Occasionally Front Porch Forum is criticized for hosting moderated online forums. The critics worry about freedom of speech… giving every hothead unlimited space to vent seems to be some kind of gold standard.
While I recognize the immense value that our Bill of Rights grants us, especially freedom of speech, I also feel that the incivility found on many online spaces stifles free speech from those of us less willing to step down into that kind of environment.
So it was heartening today to read Charles C. Haynes piece on this subject. He writes, in part,…
I want people to read The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends On It, a just-released book by Os Guinness — an influential Christian writer and public philosopher… Guinness urges us to focus on the urgent question that confronts the United States and the world: How do we live with our deepest differences, especially when those differences are religious and ideological?
The answer, he argues, begins with a rejection of extremes on both sides of the culture wars. Say no to a “sacred public square” — where one religion is privileged at the expense of others. And say no to a “naked public square” — where all mention of religion is removed from public life. Both are unconstitutional and unjust.
Guinness proposes an alternative vision of America, a vision consistent with both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment: A “civil public square” where people of all faiths and none are equally free to enter public life on the basis on their convictions and where the government neither imposes nor inhibits religion.
Among other things, a civil public square requires forging a civic agreement to uphold the rights of others, even those with whom we deeply disagree, and a commitment to debate our differences with civility and respect.
Haynes goes on to say…
Civility doesn’t mean we all pretend to agree; it isn’t “niceness” that papers over disagreements. Differences matter — and we should debate them openly and freely. But how we debate, not only what we debate, also matters.
Civility, argues Guinness, doesn’t stifle debate or dissent. On the contrary, genuine civility “helps to strengthen debate because of its respect for the truth, yet all the while keeping debate constructive and within bounds because of its respect for the rights of other people and for the common good.”
A detailed posting about Smalltown.com‘s status today including its acquisition of Local2me.com… worth a read (comments too for a little fun).
While I’m uncertain if Smalltown’s approach has enough juice to keep people tuned in (it’s a souped up yellow pages with some social networking running through it), I am fascinated by their authentically local approach… town by town growth with real people on the ground.
Cameron Marlow, research scientist at Facebook, argues today against Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone thesis and the notion that more time spent commuting reduces a person’s social life. I think Cameron is suggesting that the more one commutes, the more time a person can spend on Facebook… and therefore said lucky soul will have a richer social life.
Perhaps I missed his point. It may be an MIT vs. Harvard thing. I don’t agree with all of Putnam’s conclusions, but I don’t doubt his data and the core of his analysis… Americans are less connected to the community where they live than they have in the past and this is not a good thing. I know that millions of kids (teens and 20s) and people in the tech industry use Facebook… but I just don’t see that as a replacement for a nation full of people richly engaged in local clubs, schools, churches, municipal government, civic organizations, sports, elections, charities, arts, etc.
Facebook is a game and local engagement is about building up the community in which you live. Apples and oranges.
“Facebook is just a game. That’s it, that’s all.” So says Sebastien Provencher. Thank goodness for the holidays and their tendency to break people out of their ruts and send them back home for a bit of grounding…
During the Holidays, I met with my friends and family multiple times and one topic of conversation that came up very often was Facebook. “What’s Facebook?” my mom would ask. “Why are people so fascinated with it” my brother-in-law would add. “It’s useless” or “it’s a waste of time” would also come up very often. The proof of the whole uselessness was the “poking” and the “sending my friends a virtual beer” examples. I tried explaining Facebook the way I’ve explained it many times in this blog but I quickly realized I was getting nowhere. My friends and family members that thought Facebook was useless wouldn’t change opinion even after I explained my big social media theories.
PreFacebook Life of a Techie
Yea these many years ago, I was a kid playing Pong on my family’s vintage black and white TV… I could and did play that thing all day (was it an Odyssey? I think it came from Sears). Then it was Atari… in color! Space Invaders, then Atroids, PacMan and beyond. And I owned a few of the first handheld “videogames”… football and car racing come to mind.
In college, I dragged along my old Atari into the dorm, risking and receiving a bit of ridicule, but soon enough we were engage in epic tournaments of some four player “breakout” type game where each guy tried to protect his king in his castle of bricks… alliances made around the beanbag chair on the shag carpet… daggers plunged into backs… great fun.
Then it was on to music… collecting other people’s music. My chosen low-budget approach was making audio tapes from borrowed or rented albums and recording off the radio (the college station played complete albums)… later CDs.
I was the first person I knew to buy a PDA… a Casio with a full keyboard… oh man I loved that thing. A buddy and I used its built-in spreadsheet software to track a cross-country road trip, among many other uses.
Sometime after grad school, I landed a job that included broadband access at my desk… wow! The web didn’t have much to offer yet, but email was incredible. I corresponded with every old friend and family member I could find that used email (and didn’t try to keep in touch with those who weren’t online).
While I typically worked conscientiously at this job, now I had a growing set of diversions at my fingertips… (1) computer games mysteriously living on my hard drive, (2) music I could play on my CD drive and research on the web, (3) contacts and calendar I could manage on my PDA, and (4) friends and family whom I could email. It’s a miracle that I accomplished as much as I did at that position.
Entertainment’s Place
Which brings me back to Sebastien’s point above about Facebook. I have a Facebook account and I’ve nosed around repeatedly… but for the life of me, I have no interest. Am I the only one not on board? Sometimes I think so… but then I have a moment like Sebastien’s homecoming and I realize that MOST people are not on or deeply into Facebook.
And when I look at my life now… it’s very different than when I was a teenager or in my 20s and spent a large amount of time on entertainment… games, music, socializing. Now, as a husband, father of young kids, son of aging parents, active member of my community (i.e., the place where I live my “first life”), and business owner… well, I’m in a very different place. I’m blessed that my “entertainment” is woven into the daily fabric of a rich and mostly balanced life… very different than emailing distant and fading old friends from a lonely cubicle.
Facebook offers next to nothing for me now. From age 13 to 33 I would have been all over it. But I don’t long for any online tools at this point. In fact, I want to spend less time interacting with and through technology and more with kids, neighbors, extended family and other people in my life. Front Porch Forum evolved out of this situation.
Follow the Kids, Dummy
One last point, many voices can be heard saying we should bow down to Facebook and other services that cater to youth… because obviously that’s the way of the future. Follow the children!
Hmm. I know lots of kids, teenagers and people in their 20s. Lots of wonderful young folks. They bring much to the discussion… but I’m not ready to abdicate my responsibility as an adult, parent and community leader in order to follow the lead of a gang of 17 year olds.
What a loss for all involved if my father had chucked what he was all about and spent his time with me playing Atari, collecting bootlegged Bruce Springsteen and Replacement albums, and trying to keep the connection alive to that guy named Bill from bio class years after we parted ways. No, he was busy doing real things of consequence with real people in real time and space.
And he (and other adults in my life) got me outside, involved in my community, working, to the family dinner table, etc. He didn’t forbid me my “screen time”… but he saw it as play time… not as the guiding principal around which his generation should mold our society.
A New Entertainment Industry Born
Hollywood, pop music, video games… all established entertainment industries. And now Facebook and others have created an industry out of a collection of things we’ve always done (social networking)… souped it all up considerably. I’m interested to see where this all goes, but not keen to jump in or give it too much weight. More and more Americans seem to be spending more and more time, money and emotional energy on entertainment… reminds me of what I recall learning of the latter days of another empire.
Hearing something from someone you know is powerful… increasingly so with every new website, cable TV channel, etc. vying for your attention. From a New York Times op-ed (thanks to Neal Polachek)…
Public trust in all kinds of communication is eroding, with a notable exception: word of mouth. A Roper poll found the number of people who said they get good ideas and information from television ads declined from 1977 to 2003, while the number who said the same about word of mouth increased by 25 percentage points.
Our mid-December survey of Iowa voters found 38 percent saying they trusted information provided by TV ads, while 69 percent trusted “comments from friends, relatives and colleagues.”
This jibes with our experience with Front Porch Forum, which a neighbor recently described as “word-of-mouth accelerated.”
Thanks to Maggie Gundersen for drawing my attention to today’s Washington Post article about PTA-focused Yahoo Groups in the Washington suburbs… worth a read.
Over the past few years, electronic mailing lists have become the main forum for parents across the region to talk about their schools. With just a few keystrokes, the lists offer parents unprecedented power to spread information, to ask a question or answer one, to praise or pillory for an audience of hundreds.
As school e-mail lists multiply in size and reach, they are increasingly becoming ensnared in contests for control of the medium and the message. Principals are accused of trying to silence their discussion-group critics. Parents have allegedly stolen or hijacked e-mail lists. Moderators who step in to halt vitriolic threads are sometimes accused of censorship.
Some of the most contentious school controversies of recent years have played out largely on e-mail lists: reaction over a plan to distribute hip flasks as a senior gift in 2006 at Arlington County‘s H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program; debate about military recruitment at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda in 2005; and discontent, this winter, with a $50 graduation fee at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring.
“It’s the new venue. It’s the new community forum,” said Pat Elder, a Whitman parent who protested the presence of military recruiters on the Whitcom mailing list. “We’re too busy to, you know, meet.”
It goes on to detail some of the disagreements.
This begs for comparison to Front Porch Forum. Somewhat similar technology, scale and local focus… but big differences too. Schools, almost by definition, are breeding grounds for controversy and skirmishes among parents, teachers, admin, politicians, media, etc. And email, especially bulk email, is a notoriously poor medium for resolving conflict. It tends to foster and escalate misunderstanding.
Front Porch Forum tends to turn all that around… building community within neighborhoods. Still, there are lessons here.
G. Patton Hughes writes about his experience operating a hyperlocal news site called paulding.com… one focused on the network and the other on advertising. Some excerpts (well… lots of excerpts)…
Key to this success in the hyperlocal environment is the audience… For myspace it is the peers of the tweens and teens; for facebook, college peers constitute the largest draw. Frankly, one of the main reasons both sites are a success is that most there are probably on the make.
While there is some of that on paulding.com, the draw is infinitely more community minded. Many come to this hyperlocal community because they need the knowledge of those who live and know the community.
The point is each kind of social network targets a different demographic group – and most are places where ‘people like me’ congregate. That the large national social networks seem to target the youth is unmistakable. What is equally obvious is that in the hyperlocal sphere, it is geography rather than the common angst of being pubescent that is at the core of the social mortar.
This meas the hyperlocal network naturally targets adults living in a community. The prom is decidedly less an issue than is deciding the communities future by passing a fire tax. The challenges they face are politics, dealing with government, dealing with the schools, dealing with fulfilling the needs of the family to shelter, feed, clothe, educate, entertain and keep its children safe. All of these processes are at the core of adult involvement in a community. It is their interests, presence and experience and their willingness to share that knowledge that are at the core of the value proposition of the hyperlocal social network.
And…
The power of this network is that as it forms and grows it begins to write the narrative of the life of the community. In doing so it naturally challenges the schools, the newspapers, the politicians and the business community – any and all who previously controlled the public debate. The authority of those who head local institutions will likely find themselves in the midst of unanticipated conflicts.
I just can’t see adults with family and community responsibilities spending all day “poking friends” on Facebook. Seems I’m not alone…
Remember the Gail Sheehy’s book “Passages?” Consider that people in the Internet age are going through one of many stages in life. As they age they will not so much change their media habits as adapt them to the new demands they face. I’m pretty certain they will move on from these national peer group networks and with the nesting instinct, instead turn to tend their gardens in their own backyards. My gut is they will migrate to a hyperlocal social network if one exists in their community and that migration will be an element of their passage from being kids to adults…
I fully believe that hyperlocal networks will become integral to the communities. Part virtual tool, part social network and part news, their function is to aggregate the knowledge and understanding of the adults in a community. As in all networks, it is the people who are the most valuable resource. It is their local knowledge that adds value.
However I question the next point… I think the glue is connecting with those around you rather than local news.
Local news is the glue that brings these largely disparate elements of community life together and only a fool would expect the result to be quiet order. Strife and conflict are as natural an element of the network as are death and taxes. Those who create these hyperlocal social-networks will have to be adept at managing them.
Managing that and bringing together a new kind of community that has more cohesion than dissention is the challenge of the hyperlocal community network builder.
For those who might say, but it is the sales, stupid, I can’t over-emphasize that commerce is the life-blood of a community network and permeates all aspects of the community. The task of the 21st century hyperlocal publisher is to build a virtual social, economic, political and spiritual network that transcends the conflicts of individuals and ultimately unites all elements of the community by telling their individual stories.
The tool is radically different from a newspaper. There will be hundreds or thousands of individual writers conversing. Still, when it is all distilled, the product of the hyperlocal network is just a new kind of journalism.
I can see how this looks like a new kind of journalism to a journalist… but I see it more as a new kind of citizenship… one where lots of people are involved in a open conversation with those around them about issues large and small… a huge departure from the individualism and isolation so in vogue today.
And about ad sales…
The secret of good sales is a good salesperson… give a good salesperson a product like Paulding.com with our average 10,000 daily visits, average 15 pages per visit and 13 minute plus average visit and money will come.
Yes, I’m celebrating a bit because we’ve had our best month yet. Not great but we’re now at about 20 percent of target in revenues up from about 12 percent. Our target revenue is $25,000/mo.
[Also] for a hyperlocal site to get national advertising revenues they’re going to have to either go with Google adsense or find some other kind of national representation.
The first is http://www.thenewsroom.com. This is generating about $250-300/month with my traffic and has given me access to those local stories… The second national site is http://www.adsdaq.com which is serving the purpose of a national advertising representative… They are selling about 25 percent of that inventory and and I’m netting over $300/month from the arrangement.This helps me establish a value the value locally for these front page banners at about $1400/month which, while they don’t sell for that locally, makes for good conversation with locals over the value of advertising on Paulding.com.
And do know that establishing that value proposition is a critical task in local sales… but not nearly as important as a good salesperson.
Great stuff… congratulations and thanks to Paulding.com
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