Sinbad vs. the Mermaids (& what it means to "Extreme Democracy")
Thomas Friedman (New York Times) writes on October 5, 2005 of the
cultural gulf off the coast of Iraq. This is a steep chasm the
advocates of Extreme Democracy don't see.
"...Iraq is a multiethnic society that had to be held together by a
dictator's iron fist. What Iraqis are struggling with today is whether
they can forge their own social contract in which Kurds, Shiites and
Sunnis can live together - without an iron fist. That is critical
because virtually every Arab state today is a mix of religions and
ethnicities held together by a hard or soft fist. If Iraqis can find a
way to live together, any people out here can, and democracy has a
future. If the Iraqis can't, probably no one can, and we can look
forward to dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world - with all
the pathologies they bring - forever. But change is hard.
"When the Iraqi Navy drops you off on the Chosin, a guided-missile
cruiser, two things just hit you in the face: one is the diversity of
the U.S. Navy - blacks, whites, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, atheists,
Muslims, all working together, bound by a shared idea, not an iron
fist. To be sure, it took America a good 150 years after independence
to embrace pluralism and women's rights, and we're still working at
it...."
"Somewhere along the way we forgot that
underpinning each transaction was a relationship...." (below)
Yup, and sometimes those relationships are dynamic, chasm spanning
complexity.
Social
Network Dynamics and Participatory Politics
"Somewhere along the way we forgot that
underpinning each transaction was a relationship. At scale this means
financial credit. But there is value in the small. The smaller
transactions that are underpinned by social capital yield emergent
patterns that are perhaps more disruptive."
a Wified book chapter at Eventspace: Openfield
(This is a draft chapter for the O'Reilly book on Extreme
Democracy, edited by Jon Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe.)
Social
software and politics
This is something I wrote for the
discussion on the WELL; thought it
would be worth reposting here:
This has been a high-level discussion of the subjects we cover in the
book, but before we're done, we should get to the nitty gritty... the
actual technologies and how they're built. Blogs are important in this
context, but they're not everything. Along with the ascendance of the
blog came a whole social software movement that was gathering steam
around 2002. Social software is pretty much any software that supports
community or collaborative work over computer networks, i.e. the
Internet. Nancy White ( http://www.fullcirc.com/) and I had a discussion
as I was putting together a presentation for an online conference
around that time, and we realized that the real strength of social
software was in combining tools, as in the "happenings" Joi Ito set up,
with Ross Mayfield's help and input, to bring a bunch of us together
online for the discussions that fed into the Emergent Democracy paper
we include in _Extreme Democracy_. The happening was multimodal:
teleconference plus IRC chat plus wiki (and later QuickTopic for a
stage of collaboration on the paper). The chat supported the call by
allowing visual cues: you could see when someone wanted to speak, and
there was a way for participants to show thumbs up or down (by using a
greencard or redcard widget, and there was a yellowcard for a ho-hum
response to an idea). The wiki was for note-taking and, later, for
collaboration on the text. The first version was Microsoft Word, and
that was added to Quicktopic which has a way for you to upload a Word
document and gather comments. Finally Joi added a version to his wiki,
more comments were added, and that's the piece that I edited for the
book.
Social software applications included blogs, content syndication (RSS,
Atom), forums, chats, instant messaging, collaborative editing, social
network platforms like LinkedIn and Orkut, social bookmarking
(del.icio.us), tagging (del.icio.us, flickr), etc. The purpose of my
Deanspace piece in the book was to establish that project not just in
the context of the Dean campaign, but also in the context of the social
software movement, which had become very robust by then, and which
influenced Zack Rosen, Neil Drumm et al. to pull that project together.
Like many social software instigators, they were influenced by Reed's
Law, which is David Reed's insight that the utility or value of large
networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with
the size of the network. (See Reed's essay "That Sneaky Exponential -
Beyond Metcalfe's Law to the Power of Community Building" -
http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html).
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