Monthly Archives: September 2009

Facebook: civic strengths and weaknesses

Facebook is an “egocentric network.” That’s not a disparaging remark; its egocentrism is a source of its strength. As a Facebook user, you maintain and refine your own profile and explore a network of people who have one thing in common–they are all connected to you. Because we are interested in ourselves and our relationships, participation in an egocentric network is appealing. Millions of people have been motivated to join and to invest time enriching Facebook’s database with text, images, and video (material that benefits others as well as themselves).

To be sure, you can move away from your own page by examining friends’ profiles and their lists of friends; but as you move out into the network, you have access to progressively less information. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature. Facebook protects strangers’ privacy and keeps our focus where our main interests are–close to home.

Facebook does have advantages for doing civic work (discussing issues, organizing events, collaborating to address problems). Nowadays, it is definitely smart to use Facebook to communicate and organize. But it also has limitations, which explain the failure of Facebook’s “Causes” application to raise much money and the decision of the Obama campaign to move off Facebook to MyBarackObama.com.

Because Facebook is an egocentric network, the user cannot see the network from a community or social perspective. Our only vantage point is our own Facebook page, not any place outside the network from which we could see the whole thing. That means that:

    1. We cannot search the network for people who might be interested in our cause, issue, community, or event. (We can search the names of pages, but we can’t do powerful searches that would let us see, for instance, who is several degrees removed from an issue or cause.)

    2. We cannot determine who is central to a network around a place or a cause, so we cannot tell who is most important to persuade or mobilize.

    3. We cannot find paths from ourselves to someone else, unless the target directly accepts our “friend” requests.

    4. We cannot identify strengths or gaps in the network that would be useful to know for diagnostic or planning purposes.

    5. We cannot learn about networks that have formed to deal with issues or communities, unless we have “friend” relationships with members of these networks.

Our emerging network map of the Boston area is the opposite–it’s “community-centered” rather than egocentric. This image shows the part of the existing map that covers Somerville, MA:

As this map grows and we add tools for search and analysis, it will become increasingly powerful for community organizing. But its weakness is the mirror of Facebook’s strength. We need a lot of people to contribute content, not just once, but over time to keep the map current. Because the network is not egocentric, it’s unlikely that people would be motivated to add and update information–even once we make it completely open and “wiki-style.”

That’s why our main goal is to integrate the community-centered map with egocentric networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Our current plan for doing that is here. In essence, we want people to be able to stay where they are (on their egocentric networks) but benefit from the data in the community map without a lot of hassle.

glum councillors

Via the Local Democracy blog, I find myself reading Glum Councillors, a UK blog that “will doggedly collate images of councillors looking glum whilst pointing at holes in the road, wearing hard hats or presenting oversized cheques.” It lives up to its bold promise, providing an impressive collection of images ripped from local politicians’ websites, along with trenchant commentary. For instance …

Who says the Internet hasn’t transformed democracy? When I was a lad, you’d have to wait for years to see a real, live glum politician standing over a brick-and-mortar pothole. Now they’re all just a few clicks away.

Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Orwell

Tolstoy hated Shakespeare and thought that other people’s admiration for him was “a great evil, as is every untruth.” Orwell’s response, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool,” is a rich and wise essay that probably expresses more of what I believe than almost any other 10 pages in English. It includes many interesting asides, for instance, about the relationship between aesthetic and moral judgment, Tolstoy’s personal resemblance to Lear, and–quite timely for us–a warning not to equate libertarianism/anarchism with real love of freedom:

    There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics — a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage — surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.

Orwell is not in the least pious about Shakespeare. His essay is full of high-handed complaints like this one: “Tolstoy is right in saying that Lear is not a very good play, as a play. It is too drawn-out and has too many characters and sub-plots. One wicked daughter would have been quite enough, and Edgar is a superfluous character: indeed it would probably be a better play if Gloucester and both his sons were eliminated.” (I don’t agree in the slightest, but we have to acknowledge Orwell’s independence.)

In any case, the main theme of the essay is a defense of Shakespeare as a “humanist,” and one might summarize the debate as follows. The elderly Tolstoy hated the world because people suffered in it. But he thought (along with Schopenhauer, Gandhi, and Christian ascetics) that the world was so organized that one could achieve happiness and redemption by renouncing the everyday temptations and evils of it. As a person, Tolstoy tried to renounce his title, estate, money, and copyrights–although, like Lear, he found that abdication is not easy. As an author, he also increasingly favored renunciation. As Orwell notes:

    He never said that art, as such, is wicked or meaningless, nor did he even say that technical virtuosity is unimportant. But his main aim, in his later years, was to narrow the range of human consciousness. One’s interests, one’s points of attachment to the physical world and the day-to-day struggle, must be as few and not as many as possible. Literature must consist of parables, stripped of detail and almost independent of language. The parables–this is where Tolstoy differs from the average vulgar puritan–must themselves be works of art, but pleasure and curiosity must be excluded from them.

Shakespeare, in sharp contrast, was a man of the world–to a fault. (“He liked to stand well with the rich and powerful, and was capable of flattering them in the most servile way.”) His love of the world was the essence of his art. It led him away from simplifications, generalizations, theories, and moralistic endings. It made him want to depict every kind of thing and character and to keep his own judgments off the stage. It made him love speech to the extent that he could write complete nonsense for the sheer music of it. “Shakespeare was not a philosopher or a scientist, but he did have curiosity, he loved the surface of the earth and the process of life.”

I am deep into War and Peace but not finished with it, and I cannot say whether the younger Tolstoy was already ascetic enough to be an opposite of Shakespeare. Whether to embrace or renounce “life” is an explicit question for Andrei, Pierre, and Marya, among other characters in War and Peace. When Prince Andrei is gravely wounded at Borodino, he is filled with a love for life that makes him embrace and forgive the odious Anatole Kuragin, whom he had once wanted to kill in a duel. The “life” that Andrei loves is highly abstract; its “best and happiest moments” are exemplified by times when, “in his most distant childhood, … burying his head in the pillows, he had felt happy in the mere consciousness of life.” With your head buried in pillows, you are not aware of anyone in particular. Andrei could be one of those who love humanity but can’t stand people. Shakespeare, I think, was just the opposite–he liked each one of his characters without thinking that the whole business meant anything. “Ripeness is all,” as Edgar puts it (having just seen Lear, Tolstoy-like, defeated).

politeness, protocol, military discipline

I personally found it offensive when Rep. Joe Wilson called the president a liar during a speech to Congress. That’s partly because the president was not, in fact, lying. (Even if some illegal immigrants might occasionally–and illegally–receive health coverage under the president’s plan, he was not “lying” when he said, “the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”) The outburst also showed a lack of personal respect for Barack Obama. One of the reasons that I find such disrespect offensive is that Mr. Obama, as an individual, deserves a high degree of respect. Mr. Wilson and I evidently disagree on that matter, but I am confident he is wrong.

There is a separate question whether people in Mr. Wilson’s position are entitled to call any presidents of the United States “liars.” Many presidents have indeed lied, and some believe we should have less decorum in Washington and more “accountability moments.” The British House of Commons is a spectacle of abuse and recrimination that many find emblematic of democracy. I once watched a particular parliamentary exchange in England with graduate students from the developing world, who were stunned by the freedom it represented. The exchange went something like this:

    Front Bench Labour MP: “If the Prime Minister had spent eighteen years on Robben Island, like Nelson Mandela …”

    Labour backbencher: “As she should!”

    [General uproar, hooting, laughter, denunciations, etc.]

But successful organizations combine such frankness and openness with decorum. The British Prime Minister, for example, is enormously powerful and spends most of his or her time in venues that are completely decorous, controlled, and closed. Prime Minister’s Question Time relieves some pressure within this generally hierarchical system. That hierarchy–greater in some respects than ours–is helpful for obtaining progressive change when the Prime Minister happens to be progressive.

On our side of the ocean, there has been some decline in respect for official leaders. For instance, I’m pretty sure that thirty or fifty years ago, had a president chosen to address the nation’s schoolchildren, school administrators would not have thought it necessary to inform parents. And if they had sent a note home about the speech, most parents would have said, “Well, Johnny, you’d better pay attention in school tomorrow.” Now substantial numbers of parents are quick to attack both the schools and the president for indoctrinating their kids.

This trend is good, in part–reflecting an increase of freedom. It is also bad, in part, especially for progressives who expect the public to entrust more of their money to the federal government. That requires a degree of respect for high public offices and for those who legitimately hold them. Expecting people never to criticize the president would push “respect” much too far. But it seems a reasonable rule that Members of Congress should not blurt out personal attacks during formal speeches. George W. Bush deserved that level of decorum as well as Barack Obama.

Finally, Rep. Wilson is not only a Member of Congress but also a Colonel, US Army (ret.). I’m not sure what to make of Major General Paul D. Eaton’s comment that “Retired Colonel (Representative) Joe Wilson’s conduct last night is a breach of military protocol and represents a further departure from the historic good order and discipline I expected, in the past, to see from the GOP …” I appreciate that respect for democratically elected officials is an important ethic for uniformed military officers. But if military discipline is supposed to cover former officers who serve in Congress, I fear a militarization of this democratic space. Colonel Wilson was not allowed to disparage the Commander in Chief in any public venue. Surely Representative Wilson has a right to bitter attacks on the president, albeit not during a formal address to Congress. Barack Obama is not Mr. Wilson’s Commander in Chief (nor mine), although he is our president.

poor public knowledge does not mean we need more courses

It seems like every week Americans fail a survey about their knowledge of some important matter, and an expert or politician demands that we require students to study it. In my field, for example, American adults show poor knowledge of the Constitution (many more can name the Simpson family than the five freedoms in the First Amendment). Politicians seize upon such statistics to demand that we “teach the Constitution.”

But we do teach the Constitution. It is included in almost all state standards, and often tested on high-stakes exams. At least 80% of high school students take at least one semester of American Government or Civics, which typically revolves around the Constitution. Nevertheless, in an elaborate study that my colleagues and I conducted, we found that (a) studying the Constitution made only a modest impact on students’ ability to answer survey questions about the Constitution; and (b) state requirements made absolutely no difference in what students knew. Even if state requirements did boost students’ knowledge, it would be an open question whether such knowledge lasts.

Besides, we could play this game all day–citing important survey questions that Americans fail to answer correctly, and demanding that these subjects be mandated in our schools. For example:

1. According to the the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation, “45 million Americans think the ocean is a source of fresh water; 120 million think spray cans still have chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in them even though CFCs were banned in 1978; another 120 million people think disposable diapers are the leading problem with landfills when they actually represent about one percent of the problem; and 130 million believe that hydropower is America’s top energy source, when it accounts for just ten percent of the total.” Sounds like an argument for mandatory environmental education–which I would support in principle, but many states already have such mandates.

2. A plurality of Americans believe that “God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years,” even though almost every student has to study evolutionary biology.

3. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “In 2006, more than one-third of the public (37%) thinks HIV might be transmitted through kissing, 22% think it might be transmitted through sharing a drinking glass, and one in six (16%) think it might be transmitted through touching a toilet seat. More than four in ten adults (43%) hold at least one of these misconceptions.”

Before we jump to the conclusion that a curricular mandate would solve any of these problems, we need to ask: 1) Does a snap telephone survey of factual questions yield valid information? (Maybe people would do a lot better if they had a chance to prepare.) 2) Is educating kids the best way to reduce ignorance among adults? (That implies that factual information imparted in high school lasts for decades.) and 3) Do educational mandates cause good outcomes in classrooms? (I doubt it.)

The alternative is to work on improving the actual impact of instruction on important topics.