The Networked Class

A friend emailed me yesterday asking for thoughts to this piece by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen entitled "The Digital Disruption" (I assume because she is helping Eric turn the article into a book). In a broad sense, their article is about how technology can promote democracy and openness in emerging democracies. It's a really interesting article for Foreign Affairs, and before discussing it I just want to congratulate the Council on Foreign Relations. It was while I worked at CFR that I realized digital technology was about to change everything. There wasn't anyone there at the time thinking explicitly about technology. Events on the subject were extremely rare. Luckily, all it took to spark my obsession was a single talk given by P.W. Singer, the author of Wired for War. Unfortunately, it was the only talk on technology I could find. In contrast, the head of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, now works there as a Fellow.

My initial reaction to their article is that everything is correct and that they could spend at least a chapter or two (or a whole book) exploring any of the sections in the article. Thus, I think this article has a lot potential to be turned into a good book. I think their topic is extremely important and I have a whole bunch of hunches that I hope will get proven or disproven when they dig into the research.

First, Jared and Eric cite multiple factors that could strengthen democracy or openness. It would be great to read a chapter that prioritizes those factors and tells me what is the most important.

My hunch#1 is that the most important factor will be the diaspora.

The diaspora community of every country exactly matches the profile of groups Clay believes will now be able to organize themselves without organizations. They also match the profile of groups that are not just able, but likely to organize. For example, Clay tells the story of the gay kid out in Iowa, who because of the internet was finally able to realize that "Hey! There are other gay people out there! I'm not the only one." and then "Wow, there are a lot of us." and then "If we got organized, we could fight for our equality, and win."

It also strikes me that the diaspora community might also be the best market for this book and should be the target audience. This book could read as a road map, showing diaspora communities what to do in order to get organized, explaining the theory of online organizing and networks, updating them on what has gone on in this space already and what they should be demanding.

Hunch#2, and you could have guessed it, is that diaspora communities in emerging democracies should demand a way to vote from abroad.

Right now, almost none of these countries have absentee voting. In fact, my very civically engaged friends from Nepal and Singapore and Philippines tell me that they've never voted because they've been studying abroad. Building a way for the diaspora to vote could be the first international project for Democracy Works (I'm excited to see how TurboVote translates into Nepali). I have a few ideas on what the system would look like, but that will be for another time.

Why the insistence on voting? One of my friends from Nepal told me he was afraid people currently living in Nepal would think the diaspora community shouldn't be voting if they don't know the situation on the ground. He then goes on to say that he wants to build an e-referendum site where the diaspora community can share their thoughts on what is going on in the country. My reaction is that he has it reversed. If the Nepali diaspora was actually voting in elections then politicians would want their votes and the rhetoric of politicians would change. Instead of saying "why listen to them, they don't know anything!" politicians would say "we are blessed to have such an involved international community of Nepalis!"

Hunch#3 makes me believe that there is a more important argument for why the diaspora should demand the ability to vote. I bet that in many developing countries more than 50% of the middle class is part of the diaspora.

This isn't true for China, but in Nepal, Singapore, Kenya, and a whole host of other countries the middle class largely lives abroad. The emergence of a middle class is often cited as the key event in moving toward a democratic society. This was what happened in Chile, Eastern Europe, and what makes people optimistic about China. If the diaspora represents the middle class then the middle class of these countries is currently disenfranchised. Democracy requires the moderating voices of the middle class and it will fail if those voices remain disenfranchised.

Hunch#4 is that the diaspora network (consisting of those abroad and their immediate 1st degree connections) represent over 90% of internet users talking across international borders. The diaspora is not only the middle class, but they are also the internationally networked class. They are the ones who bring in outside ideas and arguments.

My conclusion: I hope the book about digital disruption is written for the networked class and how they can build or strengthen democracy back home.

Iranian internet

Clay Shirky describes Iran's green movement as a social media rorschach test. If you believe that social media helps democratic movements than you will highlight the power of mobile video. Without mobile video, Neda never would have become a symbol. If you believe that social media helps crush democratic movements than you will cite how the regime used crowd-sourcing to track down green protestors.

Alec takes the debate about the internet's role in promoting freedom and democracy to its logical conclusion. The US is now helping provide the internet to people in Iran using satellites, but ever since the Revolutionary Guard nationalized Iran's information technology infrastructure, the State has had the upper hand. The Guard can cut off everyone in Iran from the internet if it wants to and the only repercussion would be people's dissatisfaction from losing internet access.

This leads me to believe that the only long-term way for the United States to promote freedom and democracy using the internet is to make shutting down the internet a more risky strategy than allowing organizers to use it. More specifically, when enough Iranians make their living online then shutting down the internet will create more internal unrest than any movement. Interestingly, this conclusion leads back to Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not A Gadget" in which he details that the current architecture of the internet financially empowers those who control the server over those that populate the bazaar.

Of course, the TurboVote perspective brings everything back to voting. The green movement got started because so many people felt that their votes had been stolen. And until the Iranian public trusts that their votes won't be stolen again, the regime will never regain its legitimacy. Since the regime is unlikely to institute mobile election monitoring, or other trust building measures, it is likely that the relationship between the people and the regime has fundamentally changed.

From witness to filter

The truism about modern journalism is that quality investigative journalism and well researched articles are hard to find. Media watchers provide lots of reasons, from the 24-hour news cycle to the decrease in advertising revenue and the segmentation of the news into specialized websites that don't support general civic-minded journalism. For example, online, one doesn't have to flip through front page news stories in order to find the sports section.

"How can we save journalism?" is the question that usually gets asked of media experts. Let me say up front, I will not try to save journalism in the next 500 words. However, trying to get media coverage for TurboVote during our fundraising campaign has given me some ideas about how journalism works right now.

Of the several writers who posted about TurboVote, all post online and the majority of their posts could be described as being a combination of filter and column. Their blogs are like filters in that they curate what links to share and are like columns in that they always add an opinion. Even when a journalist posted just a link to our story in the Atlantic and said nothing else, it could be assumed that their opinion was "I agree with this opinion". Here's the important observation: after getting a brief post in an Atlantic blog, we were able to get seven other journalists to link to that story, but almost no new views or words were added.

I think this is a good way to describe how the vast majority of journalism works right now. Mainstream media is becoming more like a filter and less like a content creator. Assuming that this analysis is right, and that Superman isn't flying in anytime soon to change all the huge dynamic forces leading to this development, then the important question is "where does this path lead?"

The first big impact is that those people who have a message will be solely responsible for creating the original content associated with that message. This has been the case to some extent, but now it is more extreme.

To illustrate, think of Barack Obama and health care reform. The White House created a lot of bullet point arguments about health care, distributing them through social media and their website and tried to get those bullet points through the mainstream media filter. The filter displayed these arguments, but spent at least an equal amount of time displaying the promoters of the "death panel" myth.

A lot of people were disappointed with the media for not doing a better job at dispelling the death panel myth. However, if trends continue, people should accept that disappointment and move on. The mainstream press is going to continue acting like a filter. The people to be disappointed with are those on the other side of the health care debate who did not rise to the challenge of creating content that could compete with death panels.

President Obama, and everyone with a message, needs to complete the transition into a modern media producer. The standard for content coming out of the White House needs to be much higher. The President's message needs to make it through the mainstream media filter and it is competing with the entire internet. Staring into a camera for 5 minutes just doesn't cut it anymore. Luckily, creative content has never been cheaper to produce.