The 55th Annual National Conference on Citizenship [1] is taking place today at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Thanks to the leadership of new Executive Director David Smith, a major component of this year’s session is the use of technology and new media as an indication of civic health and a tool for effective community organizing.
The morning’s sessions have already proven interesting and useful for Social Citizens on a variety of levels, and a longer blog is to come, but I just couldn’t wait to pose the following questions to you from this morning’s panel. Sean Parker of Facebook and Bill Galston from the Brookings Institution, engaged in a panel discussion moderated by Joe Trippi entitled “Can Facebook replace face-to-face?” [2]which took an in-depth look at social networks as communities and organizing tools.
The following are scribed quotes from Galston, who challenged conceptions of efficacy and the impact of social tools, and I would like to pose them for group feedback:
- “In the old days, there were gatekeepers and some information just didn’t get out there. A world without gatekeepers is a worse world than one with gatekeepers, even though they are not infallible.”
- “Online organizing is good for latent communities of like-minded people to organize themselves”
- “Definition of ‘common good’ now differs greatly … so, if you’re asking me if these things are alleviating polarization or bringing unity—no, they are not.”
- “Viral nature is good and bad … virality proliferates rumors below the radar”
Stay tuned for more from the NCoC including clips from this interesting discussion.
Comments
Thanks, Kristen, for posting this response to the session. I was sitting in the room, as well, and was glad that the first response from Sean was to reframe the question entirely. I think it's all too easy to put Facebook (or any other new technology) "up against" face-to-face interaction, then wait to watch the fur fly. Sean's great contribution to the conversation was to point out that the question was a false one -- we're no better off if we choose one or the other. Rather, the more important and more helpful question is to ask how the two can complement and reinforce one another.
There are two points with which I would respectfully disagree with Dr. Galston. The first is that "online organizing is good for latent communities of like-minded people to organize themselves." Online organizing (in a social good context) can't do anything that offline organizing can't do. By that, I mean that the internet is a great tool for an organizer's toolbox, but wasn't designed to replace offline interaction. It's a mistake to think about using the internet to catalyze a community that isn't already interested in talking with one another -- that strategy is doomed to failure. However, giving people a tool by which to continue organizing themselves is a good strategy.
The second point that I'd disagree on is Dr. Galston's observation about gatekeepers. Yes, there used to be gatekeepers and, yes, some information didn't get out into public discourse as a result. But the advent of the internet has not demolished those gatekeepers -- I believe that they're still alive and well, but just doing a bad (and hopeless, and a bit desperate) job of managing information. I also find it hard to believe that the world would be a better place with those gatekeepers in full force. Yes, exhaustive access to information has resulted in loads of drivel and inaccuracies -- but is that necessarily bad? Is it better to limit information than to expose drivel or misinformation? Sure, the ability for information to "go viral" gets annoying sometimes (I really, really never want to see a video of a hamster roller-skating again), but at what cost? I'd rather pay the price of a roller-skating hamster for the ability to know that I can access a near-exhaustive quantity (and quality) of information.
Again, thanks to Kristen for the post and to NCoC for the conference. I look forward to further posts and further conversation!
As a Millenial, I feel it’s my duty to defend Sean Parker, but I also think William Galston makes a good point. Facebook initially began, as Sean Parker noted during the debate, as a network for friends to communicate. It’s now becoming more of a social network, like MySpace, for strangers with shared interests to meet and take civic action through applications like Causes. This seems like an obvious example of social media contributing to a more robust civil society; but as Galston argues, the abundance of social networking sites may actually be working against a more cohesive society.
Take the crisis in the newspaper industry: newspapers are folding and the print news industry is (literally and figuratively) shrinking. It’s not that Americans no longer want to read the news, it’s that they’ve found new ways to get the news. Platforms like Twitter allow news stories to travel at Superman-like speed, whereas it can take hours or days for the same stories to circulate in the print news world. At the same time, platforms like Twitter kill hard-facts journalism: news stories shared on the Internet tend to be subjective and more skewed by hearsay and personal bias. The result: While we’re becoming more open to the explosion of information on the Internet, we’re also losing site of what constitutes a fact.
The same phenomenon informs the rapid growth in the number of social networking sites. But with the proliferation of these online communities, each one creating its own definition for what it means to “do good,” we need to ask ourselves whether we are indeed becoming more efficient in the way we engage and collaborate with others online.
We’ve encouraged a similar discussion on our blog: http://pndblog.typepad.com/ [4]. Thanks for posting the full debate clip and inviting us to further this discussion.