El Salvador: El Faro

El Faro (“The Beacon” in English) describes itself as “Latin America’s First Digital Newspaper.” That’s a bold claim, but it’s probably also true. El Faro was founded in 1998 to provide an alternative source of news to El Salvador’s mainstream media, which “has traditionally been an instrument of a conservative elite that openly supported ARENA since its beginnings,” in the words of editor and co-founder Carlos Dada. The Argentine group blog el puercoespín published an excellent feature about the history and impact of El Faro a few months back:

El Faro appeared in 1998. In 1998 Nintendo was more serious than the Internet. Google still didn’t exist. Nobody used the Internet; it was just a little toy … El Faro was born almost a decade before the digital revolution would absorb the journalistic profession. And in El Salvador, one of the poorest and most unequal countries in all of Latin America with less than 13% internet penetration in a country that had just concluded a civil war a decade earlier.

For years El Faro was run by young, volunteer journalists and was mostly read by Salvadoreans living in the United States. It started out as a collection of columns and a summary of news from other sources, but soon its novelty attracted the participation of leading intellectuals, which in turn attracted a new generation of ambitious, young journalists. Carlos Dada continues:

Later a very special generation of youth that have already made their mark in the history of Salvadoran journalism began to arrive. While they were studying they approached El Faro and said that they wanted to learn journalism by working here. I had already developed something of a name in the field and so they wanted to learn from me. So that was the deal and they began to work at El Faro without receiving any pay.

El Faro continued for seven years without paying anyone a single cent. Dada says that this isn’t replicable today; that part of El Faro’s appeal was its novelty, but that soon its best reporters moved on to higher paying jobs (that is, jobs that paid) at mainstream newspapers. That is when they began accepting funds from international donors like Open Society Institute, the United Nation, and the Danish government. It is also when they began to focus on long-term reporting projects with a focus on investigative journalism. First they expanded the election coverage, then focused on gangs, and most recently launched a two-year reporting about Salvadoran migration through Mexico to the United States that resulted in two books and a full length documentary movie.

Carlos Dada (standing) with Alvaro Saravia, one of the assassins of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

El Faro’s watershed moment, however, came on March 22nd with the article “How we killed Archbishop Romero,” published on the 30th anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, which was orchestrated by El Salvador’s conservative ARENA party. The article attracted over 70,000 hits in just two days, which brought down the whole website. According to an interview with James Breiner of the Center for Digital Journalism in Guadalajara, Dada says the article quickly spread on Facebook and then via Twitter where “#Romero” became a trending topic.

Peru: IDL Reporteros

El Faro’s ability to attract support for its investigative journalism from international donors surely had to do with Carlos Dada’s journalistic reputation. The same is true in Peru where award-winning investigative journalist Gustavo Gorriti founded IDL Reporteros in October 2009 with a meager team of four investigative journalists, an administrative assistant, a part-time IT assistant and Gorriti who directs the team. Alexandre Gamela published an interview with IDL Reporteros journalist Jacqueline Fowks in April and I’ve written previously about the role they played in the repeal of a congressional decree that would have given impunity to human rights abusers from Peru’s horrendous era of leftist terrorism and state-sponsored, extra-judicial violence. I also highly recommend an interview with Gorriti about IDL Reporteros in el puercoespín.

Nicaragua: Confidencial.ni

Another giant of Latin American journalism is the Nicaraguan Carlos Fernando Chamorro who was featured in a long New York Times Magazine piece last year. (Chamorro also spoke at the Wilson Center last week about “democratic setbacks in Nicaragua.”) This year he was awarded the “Maria Moors Cabot Prize” for outstanding reporting on Latin America and the Caribbean via his TV shows Esta Semana and Esta Noche, his radio show Onda Local, and what was long a weekly newsletter called Confidencial. Today Chamorro and his staff are trying to transform Confidencial from a weekly newsletter to a modern digital news platform. Unlike many of the other projects mentioned in this post, Confidencial, so far, focuses more on opinion, analysis and news than investigative reporting. It is also the only project I mention that distributes a weekly print version with ads that can also be downloaded as a PDF file from the website.

Colombia: La Silla Vacía

In Colombia it is renowned journalist and author Juanita León who decided to found La Silla Vacía in 2009 during her time as an Open Society fellow. Previously she oversaw investigative reporting for the online edition of Semana, Colombia’s largest weekly. There is an hour-long audio podcast with Juanita discussing the project in its infancy on the Open Society website and James Breiner of the Center for Digital Journalism has a fascinating interview with Juanita focuses mostly on her efforts toward financial sustainability.

To make a very clear disclosure, the four examples I cite above are all recipients of funding from Open Society Foundations’ Latin America Program, the same program that employs me as a full-time consultant (along with the Information Program). But they are also practically the only online, non-profit, investigative journalism projects that I am aware of. Ciper based in Chile is probably another example. If you are aware of others that already exist please let me know, but what I am sure of is that we are going to see many more in the years to come.

A recent blog post by the Hewlett Foundation put it well: “Experiments Blossom, but Solutions are Elusive.” After all, launching an “online investigative news site” really requires nothing more than a blog and a topic to investigate, which is probably the easiest option at hand if you’re one of the thousands of professional journalists who have been laid off over the past couple years. This explains why “investigative non-profits” was the big story at last week’s Online News Association conference in Washington DC, why membership of the Nonprofit Investigative Journalism Network has doubled to over 50 member organizations in just the past year, and why the Center for Public Integrity decided to take over the Huffington Post Investigative Fund (with $250,000 of help from the Knight Foundation).

These trends have inspired a wealth of analysis and punditry. “Nonprofit investigative journalism outfits are breaking new ground. Can they sustain themselves?” asks Jill Drew in the Columbia Journalism Review. Or an entire hour-long Diane Rehm Show dedicated to “Not-for-Profit Journalism.” In the American Journalism Review: “The Nonprofit Explosion.” On Radio Open Source: “$30-billion to save journalism.” At the International Journalists Network: Investigative Journalism 2.0. Perhaps the most catchy title: “All the news that’s fit to fund” by John Honderich. And what I believe is the best analysis of non-profit journalism I’ve read so far, Steve Katz’s dissection of “Clay Shirky’s ‘second great age of patronage,’ foundations, and journalism.”

The phenomenon has also caught the attention of media observers in Latin America including Juana Libedinsky from Argentina’s La Nación who declares that philanthropy is rescuing and reviving investigative journalism. Or Uruguayan journalist Miren Gutiérrez who acknowledges with much sobriety that the future of journalism is non-profit.

Predictions aside, what is the impact of non-profit, investigative journalism today? What are the greatest challenges and opportunities? What are the new models for sustainability (both in terms of quality and finances) and what are the new problems confronting the ethics of journalism? Over the next two weeks I’ll be taking a closer look at some of the organizations I have listed above, and at others that have yet to even get off the ground. Among the questions I’ll be asking:

• What is the minimum level of resources needed to consistently engage in hard-hitting investigative journalism that holds the powerful accountable?
• What are the issues that simply can’t be covered in Central America because of safety concerns?
• Do online media invite wider participation from diverse sectors, or is it still the same media elite?
• What are the roles of bloggers, social networks, and traditional media in amplifying the investigative reports published by online non-profits?
• What are the most effective models of financial sustainability, and what are their weaknesses?
• What is the role of databases in their long-term reporting?
• What are their technical challenges?
• Where is there a lack of autonomy?
• What are the demographics of their audiences?
• What are their most popular types of content?
• How do they incentivize their reporters?
• How do they measure their success.
• What is the best role that a donor like Open Society Foundations can play to support effective and sustainable investigative journalism?

Are these the right questions? Should I be asking others? Do you know of any noteworthy investigative journalism projects in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador that I should be aware of? Please do let me know, either by leaving a comment or via email.

Valdis Krebs, an expert in social network analysis, has found over and over again that the happiest and most innovative organizations are those with a healthy intersection of ideas and debates across different teams. Employees are happier and more motivated to work when information and opportunities are spread widely across organizations with as few information bottlenecks as possible. When their work and ideas just filter up through managers without feedback other than their quarterly evaluations they grow despondent and prefer to spend their days on Facebook (a non-hierarchical network!).

I believe that Open Society Institute’s grantmaking shows that it understand the importance of spreading information, opportunities, and social capital across networks. But as an institution OSI still has a lot of room to improve. And they certainly have their challenges. Not only must they share information across their various programs, but also through their impressive list of in-country foundations. My understanding is that these foundations were created to have a fair deal of autonomy from Open Society Institute (the mothership), but they are still expected to collaborate with one another and with each other. In addition, they are also expected to coordinate with other donors in their countries in order to most effectively support civil society and promote issues that donors have in common.

Of course, the networked nature of social media is an ideal way to democratize grant-giving, distribute social capital, and to gauge what the up-and-coming hot issues are by staying tuned to the influential nodes of issue-based networks.

This is why Beth Kanter and I were in New York today for a joint meeting organized by the Information and Media programs, and with the presence of many donors from the various country-based foundations. I’ll admit, it wasn’t the easiest group to work with at the start (the average introduction was something like “Hi, my name is X and I think Twitter is a waste of time”), but by the end of the day I think we made some converts out of what were initially some pretty harsh critics:

Of course I had to pay her to post that, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. But really, this is the thing about Twitter and many similar tools – they don’t make sense until you try them. And for most people they don’t make sense until you try them out for a couple weeks. You have to wait until you come across information that is relevant to you – information that you otherwise wouldn’t have come across – in order to appreciate the advantage of being part of the network.

There is also always an inherent power struggle in teaching networked technologies to people in positions of power. New technologies always take power away from one group and afford it to another. Individuals who are at the top of institutional hierarchies often grow frustrated when they come to understand that it’s increasingly not the position you have but rather the connections you have that lead to information awareness, and to power. Often times the workshops I give are full of people who have been working years – if not decades – to move up the institutional hierarchy to positions of power. They are comfortable being reported to by their team and reporting up to their director. But they are often – and understandably – resistant to enter a network where all that matters is how which connections you have and how well you are able to absorb and parse information.

The best part of my job is seeing the uncontrollable smiles when people finally get it. When they realize that they’ve entered a network, that they are part of the ecosystem. I saw quite a few of those smiles today and they always make me happy.

I constantly come across statistics like this one: just two percent of Wikipedia users account for 75% of participation. And the general assumption is that this says something about human nature itself. But rarely do we take into account that perhaps Wikipedia is not well designed to encourage broad participation. (I have yet to really participate myself because no one has walked me through it and I feel the Wikipedia community is intimidating and not always welcoming.) I’ve come across few researchers out there who are really taking an in-depth look at when and why people participate in communities and platforms like Wikipedia, Global Voices, and Twitter. One such researcher who I’m keeping my eyes on is Judd Antin at Berkeley’s School of Information. His preliminary findings show that how a system is designed – and how welcoming a community is to outsiders – has a significant impact on the ratio between active and passive participation. I’m looking forward to Judd’s PhD thesis – so far he’s dealing with a lot of these issues in a very intelligent way.

At the beginning of today’s workshop the majority of those attending were openly skeptical about social media. (Though they obviously had some interest or they wouldn’t have been there in the first place.) But once Beth and I walked them through how the tools actually work and how different activists and organizations have used those tools to their advantage, everyone in the room opened up to the idea of adopting the tools and techniques themselves. Like every other aspect in life, it’s difficult to really accept something until you understand it.

Every morning we – all seven billion of us – wake up with a certain amount of cognitive energy, our mental fuel tank for the day to come. We use up this cognitive energy every time our brain must process information and apply knowledge. This includes tasks as seemingly mundane as packing a school lunch for our children, and as complex as understanding the fundamentals of quantum mechanics.

On the one hand, today’s competitive knowledge economy is requiring a larger percentage of the world’s population to expend more cognitive energy than human beings have ever done in the past. Software programmers, for example, often spend 60 hours a week thinking about the logical rules behind the applications on our computers and cell phones. The need to make a day’s worth of cognition as efficient as possible has led to a whole industry of productivity gurus, and to a market of “nueroenhancing drugs.”

On the other hand, the efficiency of the modern global economy means that many individuals in the developed world are working far fewer hours than ever before. Tim Ferriss has recruited a large following on the internet by recommending a four-hour work week. Even those who aren’t able to heed Ferriss’ call to abandon the 9 – 5 office life still spend an average of two office hours per day (one-fourth of their working time) surfing the web for personal use. Salary.com estimated that those 2.09 hours of “wasted time” per 8-hour workday add up to $759 billion per year that employers in the United States spent on salaries “for which real work was expected, but not actually performed.”

In terms of discussing cloud intelligence, however, corporate America’s economic loss is far less interesting than what those millions of office employees are doing with their two hours of personal internet use every day.

Cognitive Surplus and The New Socialism

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

Clay Shirky, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

In fact, Clay Shirky points out that in the United States we still spend an average of 100 million hours every single weekend just watching advertisements. What else can you do with 100 million hours? According to Shirky, it took roughly 100 million “thought hours” to build Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia ever assembled and the most popular general reference work on the Internet.

It would be wrong to overstate Shirky’s argument that all of human society is waking from a sitcom-watching slumber to become active producers of online content; after all, most young people today who give up their expensive cable packages for slightly less expensive internet connections are now watching those same sitcoms on their laptops; clips from American Idol dominate YouTube; and the vast majority of the most popular daily search terms on Google are related to celebrity news. The passive consumption that defined decades of television watching, is also a mainstay of today’s connected generation.

Still, even if only an estimated ten percent of internet users actively contribute content, they have already constructed an vast online repository of culture, knowledge, and tools. And we are just at the beginning of what’s to come.

Kevin Kelly calls Wikipedia, Flickr, and Twitter the “vanguard of a cultural movement”, an emerging “global collectivist society.” Amateur photographers, he reminds us, have published over three billion photographs on Flickr. Six billion videos are uploaded to YouTube every month. The blog search engine Technorati tracks over a million blog posts published every single day. Apple’s pervasive iTunes media player serves over 125,000 podcasts, including more than 25,000 video podcasts.

The small minority of internet users who actively contribute content sure do contribute a lot of it. They review restaurants and businesses on Yelp. They fulfill the role of editors by recommending content on Delicious, StumpleUpon, Digg, and Reddit. They share their medical history on Patients Like Me and Google Health. They create high quality maps of their communities on OpenStreetMap and design 3D models of buildings, monuments, and landmarks using Google’s free SketchUp software. They report news just like traditional journalists. On Flickr they help the United States’ Library of Congress describe and contextualize the photographs in their collection. They translate blog posts, articles, magazines, and videos into different languages.

What is even more incredible is that they do this all for free, without receiving any economic compensation whatsoever. Hundreds of millions of internet users are spending a small amount of their day’s cognitive energy not on the work that they are paid to do, but rather the online projects and forms of self-expression that interest them. Kevin Kelly calls it a “New Socialism“, which is based on sharing and community, but not limited by political ideology. (The most active contributors of free content are as likely to idolize Adam Smith as Karl Marx.)

The Cloud: The Third Chapter of the Internet

A little over fifty years ago, Thomas Watson from IBM said that he could foresee a need for perhaps five computers worldwide, and we now know that that figure was wrong, because he overestimated by four.

Clay Shirky, Napster Speech 2

Whether you speak in terms of clouds, streams, or waves (the modern internet sounds like a naturalist’s dreamscape), the recent preview of Google Wave is indicative of a fundamental change that has transformed how we interact with the internet and how the internet enables us to interact with one another.

The modern web was developed in order to enable academics and scientists to share their research with one another. This was done primarily over email, but also with static (and often ugly) web pages. The second chapter began in the 1990′s when, during a bubble of investment, web programmers developed new technologies that made websites more dynamic by using databases, and more interactive thanks to JavaScript and Flash. The investment bubble burst, but those same technologies were implemented to create the tools that make up the internet as we know it today: wikis, blogs, RSS readers, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook.

We have now come to the third chapter of the Internet. The “cloud” refers to all those servers based around the world that store our personal data, but which we rarely ever think about. If you are a Gmail user, then your emails live “in the cloud”, on a server at one of Google’s many server farms. Our daily thoughts, in the form of Twitter messages, live in the cloud, as does our search history, our Facebook activity, all of the pictures we publish on Flickr and Picasa.

Just two years ago I stored all of my text documents on my own computer and would send them via email to anyone who showed interest. If they made edits to my documents, then I would need to update my own local copy. Today my documents are stored “in the cloud”, on Google Docs, where they can be instantly accessed by trusted friends and colleagues. At any time I can access the most recent copy of any document on my computer or mobile phone. Today we don’t just publish information to the internet; we actually create it online and then download it to our computers and cell phones when we need it.

The cloud is growing exponentially. Every day more and more of us spend a small percentage of our cognitive energy to add value to the cloud. And as we do so, the cloud itself becomes more intelligent, a vast social brain in which every internet user is a metaphorical neuron. In fact, the structure of the internet and the processes it depends on is similar to that of the human brain.

The less evolved brain

Neurons in the cingulate cortex of a mouse. [via Wikipedia]

The human brain is by far the most complex organ that three to four billion years of natural selection on this planet have been able to produce. It consists of roughly 100 billion neurons, each linked to 10,000 synaptic connections. Information travels across the brain via small electrical impulses that are transmitted from neuron to neuron, much in the same way that information travels across the internet. Right now, while you’re reading this, billions of small electrical impulses are firing away in your brain as you parse the information, store it in your memory, and apply your own knowledge to add context and challenge what I write.

Visualization of the internet by the Opte Project.

In comparison, the internet is a decidedly less complex and less evolved organ. Internet World Stats estimates that there are 1.6 billion internet users, or “social neurons”. According to one study, the average Facebook user is connected to 164 “friends”, a far cry from the 10,000 synaptic connections between our 100 billion brain cells. In other words, while the internet could one day become self-aware, it is still in the earliest chapters of its evolution. Yet, already there are several examples which reveal how the internet is rapidly becoming humanity’s social nervous system. Joshua-Michele Ross points to the emergency response following the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Obama’s “Project Houdini“, and Google’s global virus forecasting as three manifestations of the networked social brain.

The human brain formed its present structure over 10,000 years ago when our ancestors encountered environments which required the type of advanced reasoning only provided by a larger brain. With a larger brain came moral reasoning, consciousness, and most importantly, language, without which we could not transmit culture and knowledge across generations. The organ we each carry around in our skulls today, however, has evolved little in the past 10,000 years. It formed when our ancestors lived in tribes of roughly 150 people, not mega-cities filled with millions, and personal address books filled with thousands of contacts.

As the cloud continues to expand exponentially with more information, more social neurons, and more connections between them, our own humble human brains will need to adapt in order to make the most effective use of the cloud without succumbing to lifetimes of mere “continuous partial attention.”

No matter how actively or passively we spend our time online, what we can all be sure of is that one day sooner or later our brain will stop functioning and our stay here on planet Earth will conclude. We will remain, of course, in the memories of our friends and family, and also in the bits and bytes of digital footprints that we leave in the cloud for the generations that follow. What they do with the information we leave behind – or, indeed, what the cloud itself does with the information – will depend on a new type of networked evolution that values sharing and community over proprietary protection.

Josh Groban is a pop star. The type of pop star with teenage girls screaming and fainting at every concert and young women waiting in his hotel lobby wherever he travels. These worshipping fans even have a name: Grobanites.

In 2002 the Grobanites decided that they wanted to buy him a birthday present. Here is a man who before turning 21 already had the unending adulation of thousands of women around the planet. What more could he possibly want? So they decided to donate to charity in his name. They ended up raising more than $75,000.

His lawyers absolutely freaked out about the legal implications. Raising $75,000 in someone’s name means being responsible for how that money is used. So the lawyers built the Josh Groban Foundation, a U.S.-registered 501(c)3 which still exists today. But the Grobanites soon discovered that the Josh Groban Foundation was not particularly good at raising money. Essentially they were just there to give a legal identity to what was already taking place.

So the Grobanites registered their own charity, appropriately called “Grobanites for Charity.” In the words of Shirky, their website looks like “1996 throwing up. Like, ‘hey, we have fonts and colors here!‘” It looks like it was built by a bunch of amateurs. Because it was. But unlike most charities, 100% of the donations to the Grobanites for Charity go directly to the recipients.

Why would the Grobanites For Charity separate themselves from the Josh Groban Foundation? One of the reasons is motivation. A researcher once brought in two groups of students and asked them to figure out a complex puzzle. One group of students was paid $15 for their participation while the other group wasn’t. The participants in the study were told that they were being observed to see how quickly and using what strategies they figured out the puzzle. But in fact, the true purpose of the study was to observe them once the researcher left the room and asked them to just hang out for a few minutes while he finished up some details.

The students who were compensated pulled out magazines, zoned out, and started talking. The students who weren’t paid anything kept playing with the puzzle. In other words, there are different types of motivation. Shirky distinguishes them as extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. We all know about our extrinsic motivations: to be rich, famous, fashionable, beautiful, and stylish. Our intrinsic motivations, however, get much less attention and are often disparaged as hippie gibberish. These include the desire to be competent, our ethical alignment with our environment, and the desire to be loved and appreciated. All of these forces are behind the success of the labor behind products like Wikipedia and Global Voices.

It is easy to design for generosity when you know the people you are designing for. It is much more difficult to design for generosity when you have no idea just who is – or will be – feeling generous. That’s because it’s such a recent concept that was never possible before the internet.

As an example of designing for generosity Shirky points us to Howard Forums. In 2001 Howard Chui purchased a cell phone and started blogging about it. He became an expert on this one cell phone model, which attracted readers with other phones who had questions. Howard wasn’t able to answer all their questions so instead he created a forum and told them to ask and answer their questions there. Howard Forums has since become such a valuable resource that customer service representatives of cell phone companies actually point their callers there for answers.

The only people who can discuss a product effectively are those have used it on a daily basis. The customers. If you have part of the answer and I have part of the answer, then together we have a better answer than anyone working for the company could possibly come up with.

On Howard Forums you will see a separate discussion thread for just about every single mobile phone existing on the planet. But one of the most popular threads on the site has nothing to do with phones. It’s called the lounge. You could go there right now and most likely over 100 people will be discussing exercise, their pets, sports, and politics.

In other words, HowardForums succeeded because it built intrinsic motivations into the design. By sharing our knowledge it fulfills our desire to be competent, to share our values with others, and, in messages of positive reinforcement, to be appreciated.

Shirky says that there is no sure-fire way to design for generosity, but he offers these four tips:

1.) Design for intrinsic motivation – where people feel good and feel appreciated.
2.) Love and fame are different. It’s easy to think that being famous is just being loved by lots of people. But being loved by a small group of people is different than being recognized by lots of people.
3.) Autonomy is essential. The reason the Grobanites for Charity started their own 501(c)3 even after Josh Groban’s lawyers created their own is because they wanted it to be their own.
4.) Find the sweet spot between completely open and closed systems. Close a system and it will die; keep it too open and the trolls will decimate it.

My Thoughts

Clay Shirky always has a fascinating internet anecdote up his sleeves that most people don’t know about (until Shirky puts it into a presentation). This is mostly thanks to his hip students at ITP who feed him the freshest news from Brooklyn.

I am particularly interested in designing for generosity because it is exactly what I will be doing over the next six months. Over the past year and a half Rising Voices has grown from a very small initiative to a very large community of activists around the world who want to use participatory media to help empower communities that have largely been ignored by traditional media. There is so much potential in the community that, in the words of Malcolm Gladwell, isn’t being capitalized.

On Tuesday at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society I will be discussing some of my initial thoughts about how Rising Voices can be re-invented and redesigned to capitalize on all that potential and multiply it across communities and institutions that today aren’t even thinking about outreach and training as part of their communications strategy.

Unfortunately Clay Shirky’s presentation also tells us two unmentioned secrets about designing for generosity: 1.) you need to be popular and 2.) you need to be first. The Grobanites for Charity have been successful largely thanks to the celebrity status of Josh Groban. Howard Forums is probably not the best designed system to discuss mobile phones, but it has been so successful because it was the first place where the information was made available. Hopefully on Tuesday we will be able to think of some other strategies other than hiring celebrities and claiming early real estate.

Shirky doesn’t argue that the internet and social media bring about only positive change, but he describes those changes – both positive and negative – with more clarity than anyone else I’ve read. The value isn’t in the content of the book – all if which is available for free just a few clicks away – but rather how well it is presented.

For me, for anyone who has been passionate about social media over the past few years, Here Comes Everybody ends just where it starts getting most interesting. Though the book itself is much broader than its subtitle (“The power of organizing without organizations”) would suggest, it does tend to concentrate on how social media are disrupting organizational structures. But he doesn’t spend any time discussing how ‘non-organizational organizations’ are organizing.

WordPress, Drupal, Mozilla, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Global Voices, Ubuntu: we all really got going around four to six years ago when the business community still saw the internet as one big flop, but we saw social media as a huge opportunity for doing good rather than making money. We started out as communities that were brought together by a creative passion (be it writing, knowledge, programming, whatever). In a relatively short amount of time those communities expanded exponentially and the product/service we collectively created took on both a real and perceived value.

We have all had growing pains as we’ve scaled up and we have all become much more hierarchical. Much more like a traditional organization. It might be possible to organize without organizations, but sustaining those communities – especially when they are collaboratively creating a product or service – seems to bring back those very same structures and chains of command that social media enthusiasts (utopianists?) like myself have spent so much time railing against. I can think of a few different reasons for this, but there are surely many more that I have not thought of. It’s a fascinating topic of research, which is why I will have my eyes on the blog of Lokman Tsui, co-editor of The Hyperlinked Society, who will be researching Global Voices for his Ph.D. dissertation.

The essential building blocks of these books are anecdotes. The authors choose a collection of ten to twenty stories which illustrate how the Internet has affected publishing, privacy, organizational structures, categorization, and even knowledge. They then refer back to those anecdotes as they wax eloquently about how the Internet is disrupting old models and how it will likely continue to do so in the future.

I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about the printed book as a place to discuss the Internet. On the one hand, countless revisions and copyeditors means that, compared to the blog posts these books are based on, their readability is much improved. I am also frequently grateful that I am not distracted by appealing hyperlinks or urgent emails flashing on my screen. But just as often, I do want to click on those links – especially when I feel the author is giving a shallow interpretation of a particular online debate or saga. I also want to be able to leave comments when I disagree with or have something to add to what he writes (they are, so far, all male authors). There is an irony in celebrating the interactivity and directness of the Internet in such a completely non-interactive and gate-keeped medium as the printed book. (Clay Shirky notes that in 1492, almost half a century after movable type appeared, Johannes Trithemius wrote an impassioned defense of the scribal tradition, which ironically depended on movable type to distribute his plea as widely as possible. Shirky, however does not acknowledge that he is relying on movable type to distribute his evangelization of the interactive internet.)

But what really fascinates me about this new genre of books is that there seems to be an unwritten code of ethics which says that once one author uses a particular anecdote, no one else should use the same antecdote. In this way anecdotes become proprietary. Clay Shirky becomes the ‘owner’ of the StolenSidekick anecdote and Lawrence Lessig somehow ‘owns’ the story of Just Think!, a media literacy project for youth in San Francisco. Whoever is able to put into print the most authoritative version of some anecdote is then seemingly ‘licensed’ to use that anecdote in their articles, speaking appearances, and consulting gigs. The anecdotes themselves, of course, are a form of digital folklore which belong to no one and everyone. But when they enter the economy of speaking gigs, book contracts, freelance articles, and research fellowships, they take on a real value which benefits only a handful of people. (Myself included.)

Right now at least three of my friends are in the process of writing books that belong to this same genre. Cyrus is finishing up work on a book that looks at the Internet’s impact in Iran, Senegal, Estonia, and South Korea. Evgeny, on an OSI fellowship, is writing a book on “on how the Internet influences civic engagement and regime stability in countries such as China, Egypt, Russia and Venezuela.” (as is has Antony Lowenstein). And Ethan is writing a book that will likely be along the same lines. They are all friends and I’m curious as to how they will negotiate the use of anecdotes. I am also curious to see when more women and more authors from the developing world will publish popular books about the Internet’s impact. And, finally, what happens when we have more books than we do anecdotes?

Freedom

A couple days ago I wrote that “these days” we have too many choices and that, perhaps, those choices impede our happiness because each decision carries the heavy uncertainty of all the other options we ruled out. From the thoughtful and meaningful emails I received afterwards, it appears that the idea resonates with a lot of people.

Of course, I’m far from the first person to talk about the oppressiveness of choice. It seems like every modern anthropologist and sociologist works the theme into their contemporary talking points. Not long ago, UTNE Reader had a fantastic issue dedicated solely to the study of choice. It was also one of the “thinking democrats’” main arguments against Bush’s social security reform. (Giving Americans choice in how they invest their social security would cause them anxiety that they were making the wrong choices, went the argument.)

Going back even further, Sartre – in the middle of the 20th century – said that humans are too free. They, as in you and me, as in right now, can do absolutely anything the physical properties of the world allow for. And that limitless freedom is so terrifying that we invent boundaries and rituals, rules and commitments to convince ourselves that we are not really so free. “I must live here, I must finish school, I must keep this job, I can’t sleep with more than 10 people, I need to get married,” we tell ourselves because, frankly, life is a lot easier and a lot more comforting when we are told what we must do.

Even further back, Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Return essentially implied that we are free of responsibility for our actions – the choices we choose – because there is no way to know, in the grand scheme of things, which choice was “the best.”

But now, like never before, our lives are inundated with more choices than Nietzsche or Sartre could have ever foreseen. Just imagine if you were born 100 years ago in a rural Guatemalan town of 2,000 people. Imagine the choices you would have had to make throughout your life and compare that to your life today. What we study, our interests, our 13.2 careers, who we date, where we live, what we eat, the music we listen to. the way we dress, who we marry, who we divorce, who we remarry, what car to buy, how many kids we choose to have, our computer operating system, the languages we speak, our friends, our enemies. Choices we don’t even think about because if we did, our heads would explode.

Instead we use a faculty of the brain or body – what’s the difference? – which doesn’t even exist: intuition, or “the gut.” When we choose a career and when we choose to get married, it’s not because we know that we want this job or that person more than all others for the rest of our life. That’s impossible to know. It’s because we believe we’ll be happier if we eliminate the very possibility of choice from here on out.

Familiarity

There are three cafes here in Caracas where I have my morning coffee, palmera or cachito de jamón, and read the newspaper. They are: Coma, el CELARG, and the plaza of el Museo Bellas Artes. I go to these places because they are, by now, familiar. I know what to expect.

But every morning that I return to these three places I also realize that I’m not giving a chance to the other hundreds or thousands of cafes around Caracas. So this morning I chose choice over familiarity. I hopped on metro line 3 and got off where everyone else did – Ciudad Universitaria as it turned out – put on my iPod, and started walking until I found a cafe I liked. Coming out of the metro station, I was faced with a red and yellow mural of Che. Below his iconic portrait were the words “the university doesn’t belong to anyone.” And opposite the mural were about five or six booths – surrounded by Levis-wearing students – selling pirated copies of the latest DVD’s from Hollywood and CD’s of American pop music.

45 minutes later I was still walking. By this point I passed two busy McDonalds and a number of crowded indoor mini-malls. But I couldn’t find a single mom-and-pop’s bakery or cafe. I was reminded of a conversation I had with Luis Carlos just a couple days ago. We had met at one major shopping mall in Chacao only to take motorcycle taxis across town to another major shopping mall where we met with a group of bloggers on our way to a party.

Walking through the second mall’s main corridor Luis Carlos said, “you know, all these malls, they’re all new. They didn’t even exist a couple years ago. Centro San Ignacio, Sambil, el Recreo, this one, all of them are new.”

I commented on how crowded they always were.

“Yeah, because they’ve replaced the plazas and the small stores and the markets. People come here because they’re safe, and clean, and … because everyone else comes here.”

And, because they are familiar. Every mall in Caracas has the same stores with the same layouts. The same restaurants with the same menus. The same food-courts with the same combo meals. You go to a mall, any mall, and you know what you like and what you don’t. There’s no anxiety of whether you should order the pasticho de pollo or filet de atún at some hole-in-the-wall restaurant because you already know that the combo #4 super-sized is for you and you know that it will taste exactly the same every single time. There are no “bad days” at McDonalds.

Or as Megan McArdle puts it:

Standardization reduces volatility. I won’t have the highs – I’ll never have the really great meals at Olive Garden, but I also won’t have a really bad meal.

She said that on a brilliant episode of Christopher Lydon’s Open Source podcast. This particular show, “The End of Free Will,” was named after Clay Shirky’s recent fascinating essay, and deals in part with why we have abandoned independent cafes, restaurants, boutiques, and bookstores in favor of Starbucks, the Cheesecake Factory, Forever 21, and Barnes and Noble.

Both Jim Leff and Clay Shirky place the blame not on the consumer, but rather, manipulative nuero-marketing and brand-awareness by major chains. Each day we need to make thousands and thousands of choices, more than our brains could ever handle, but when we see the familiar green mermaid of Starbucks or freckly face of Wendy’s we’re immediately drawn in, unconsciously, because our brains know, “here is a familiar place, a place where I know what to order, how to order, how to pronounce it.” And we choose the ease of familiarity – despite the mediocre food – over the risk of novelty and uncertainty and potential regret.

I can certainly understand their argument. When Baja Fresh first came out in San Diego – when it was still it’s own small chain – I was an immediate fan. Here’s a place with real grilled chicken, quality ingredients, fresh and unlimited salsa. It didn’t taste like fast food and yet, when I was in a hurry, I could run in, grab a $5 burrito, and run out 20 minutes later. Then, they suckered me. I see their logo and I go in, not because I really want a Baja Fresh burrito, but because I think I do. And they’re not $5 anymore. They’re about $7, which is more expensive than the lunch specials at a lot of really great independent Thai, Mexican, French, Vietnamese … hell, a whole slew of quality and independent restaurants around San Diego.

The third guest on the show, Megan McArdle, does more than just hold her own. By telling people that they are wrong in their choice of Burger King over their local french bistro, she argues, you’re making a value judgement. You may have different aesthetic or culinary preferences, but you can’t tell them they are wrong when they go to a fast food restaurant.

Passing by the second busy McDonalds as I heard this I wondered if she was right. Am I really choosing what is “best” or is my own preferred “brand” an independent cafe with the NY Times and the latest copy of the New Yorker? Furthermore, the “independent cafes” I used to love so much just 5 years ago now hardly exist. And where they do, they are mostly copy-cats of the big chains. I don’t see the same pride in quality of craftsmanship. What I see are plastic wrapped madeleines from Costco – because Starbucks consumers are familiar with them and because everyone is a Starbucks consumer – and a separate menu with more than a dozen kinds of frappuccinos.

Walking Down the Boulevard

Finally I reach – via my rambling, circuitous route – what appears to be a main thoroughfare of restaurants, bars, delis, and cafes. I spot one cafe/bakery with some good looking palmeras and a real espresso machine, but it’s absurdly dark inside and the tables are too close together. Another down the road has a comfortable ambience and air conditioning, but no espresso machine. Across the street is another with a bunch of college kids reading outside. It looks like a good choice and my stomach is starting to rumble with hunger. But eyeing further down the boulevard, I can’t help but wonder if something even better awaits.

And it occurs to me, isn’t this how we make all our choices? Aren’t we always walking down the boulevard, keeping our eyes out for what’s best while wondering if something even better might lie ahead? When do we decide to stop? When do we know that we’ve made a good choice based on all that we’ve seen and all that we haven’t?

Eventually I settled on a cafe that had both fresh palmeras and an espresso machine. My palmera was dry and too flaky, but my cafe marrón (a macchiato) was heavenly. I sat outside and started reading the newspaper, occasionally glancing over at the passerby. Bolivia and Venezuela have signed a military pact to construct military bases around the Bolivian border, the Chilean paper El Mercurio discovered. The “Social Responsibility” supplement had an article on a solar energy project in the Amacuro Delta. Maybe I’ll translate the article to English and post it on the blog, I thought to myself. And I wondered if the other cafe a few blocks back – the one with all the college kids hanging out in front – would have been a better choice.

Who knows. There’s no way to. I take comfort in that. I feel the caffeine take to my bloodstream. I open my notebook and I start to write.