Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

Jay Rosen of PressThink: Traditionally, power is seen as a scarce resource. Governments have power, big companies have power, because they have amassed a scarce resource. When we talk about soft power, it's not necessarily scarce, because it happens when people are arranged in a certain way. United We Stand, Divided We Fall notes the difference between what happens when we form a community or when we don't. If we don't, we lack the power, we feel powerless. Soft power is people power, but it's also the social structures that connect people together and give them something in common.

Now, the cost of locating each other, sharing, collaborating, making stuff, etc, is plunging rapidly. A social Moore's law. Now we can do all sorts of things together we couldn't do before. You can't just go to a place and find it; it exists in the space between people.

David Sasaki, Global Voices: Soft power is the power to be heard. Until recently, those people with that power were columnists, journalists; now it's anyone with access to the Net. With Global Voices, we're aggregating the best blogging from around the world, but things like censorship prevent other voices from being heard. So you can't say that _everyone_ has access to power now.

Val Prieto, BabaluBlog: I wanted to blog and tell the story of the Cuban diaspora experience. We're publishing stories from people in Cuba who can't publish there.

Chuck DeFeo: It's the power of grassroots voices being heard. In the 80s and 90s, conservative talk shows help lead the way of giving people a voice through the media. It was a powerful thing. More recently, blogs took off, and it's an extension of what goes on in talk radio. Our website has several thousand radio listeners who are now bloggers, creating contest in conjunction with our radio programming.

Val: We get to participate, have our opinions heard.

Chris Nolan: What about the echo chamber problem?

Sasaki: That's where Global Voices come in. Go to a site like Digg and you find the same stuff over and over. People begin to miss editors who help guide you. GV gets editors who are experts in their region, and curate the best of what's going on there.

Jay: The reason blogs attracted so much attention was because they came first. But it's the content generating tools that are the real change agents. The people out there who used to be called the audience, are still an audience in the sense that they consume media, but they are also connected across to each other. That fact has big implications. All the stuff the audience knows can now be brought to bear. NewAssignment.net is attempting to figure out how to do real reporting given this horizontal dimension of the Net. Imagine how thousands of people could contribute to the creation of one news story. That's the challenge we're tackling. So blogging just opened the door to the world of self publishing.

Chris Nolan: Blogging filled a vacuum in readers' lives.

Chuck DeFeo: I spent a long time in campaign politics before getting into media. Voter participation was a big part of it. Those of us who have been doing this for a while may remember when the question was, when are we gonna have the 1960 moment, when broadcast TV became the dominant medium over radio. I don't think that was a healthy thing, because it eroded grassroots politics, where voters actually participated in the process.

Val Prieto: Cuban Americans are primarily conservative, so you get a certain amount of the echo chamber. But there are always dissenting opinions. It may only be one or two out of 10 comments, but it's there. As long as you foster debate, what's the harm?

Sasaki: I'm really against the echo chamber. Partisanship may be a step up from apathy, but what you want is dialogue and participation.

Audience member: on a day when yet another helicopter gets shot down in Iraq, the news is dominated by the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Media tells us that's the number one story.

Val: But that's because it makes money.

Chris Nolan: With digg.com, people would say it would replace your front page. Digg is a tool; but why isn't it being seen as a tool among newspapers?

DeFeo: Politics is a reflection of the electorate. We're more partisan because the electorate is more partisan. Meanwhile, editors post stories knowing what the audience wants, so yeah, you'll get Anna Nicole Smith.

Gaby Bruna: I was born in the 1980s. I can do anything from what I want from my computer, and my generation was the first one raised during this revolution. Now you can go to social networking sites and find or do anything you'd want to do.

Chris Nolan: but some say social networking is just the best tool ever to direct spam.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: These tools can help bring important social topics to the front, but news hasn't always covered what's important. So we need to find ways of differentiating what we're trying to do.

Jay Rosen: I was talking recently with Jimbo Wales at Wikipedia. I asked him how it all really works. He said the only reason it works is because the wikipedia community come there already knowing what an encyclopedia is. It's already in their head. The commonality of that vision makes the creation of Wikipedia practical. If they didn't have a shared vision, it wouldn't ever work. A successful social media site has tools, people, a community, yeah, but they also have a shared vision.

Sanjeev: Either there's a cultural monolith that informs that vision, or there's a universal idea that defines it.

Jay: It could be a universal human need, but it's more likely a product of our culture. We use the term community very loosely. Most of the things we call communities aren't communities; they're a shared space, a public. A real community has shared values and beliefs that creates the community even before the website even exists. Lots of communities that didn't know they had large numbers now can discover themselves and collaborate online.

Audience member: Sometimes people need to be told what's important. Otherwise we'd all just focus on junk celebrity news. We don't want to hear bad news, even though it's important.

Nolan: It's true because newspapers have abrogated their responsibilities. Popularity determining the news works in some places, but not others.

Georgia Popplewell: I want to tell a story from Global Voices. One of our authors in Tunisia created a Google Map that shows all the prisons in Tunisia. You can click on prisons and get info on jailed dissidents. He got a lot of news coverage, but someone on our discussion asked if it was a bit too sexy for human rights campaigners, and others replied and said that's what we need: better packaging for important stuff that isn't inherently sexy.

Gaby: The greatest democratic value of the Net happens when nonprofits can use the Net to guide people to take positive action. And it requires the right packaging to attract an audience.

Val: All you have is your integrity. Without it, no one will believe what you're writing. You might as well just write about cats rather than something important. I won't accept funds from anyone because I don't want to seem like someone's lackey. Because I'm concerned that if I take money, they'll question my integrity.

Jay: There are new dynamics loose in the world. It doesn't mean the old dynamics disappear. Just because there's new power doesn't mean old power is gone. So what you have instead is a new transparency laid on top of a new transparency. We're trying to figure out the rules, but that doesn't mean you can throw out old rules like editing, judgment, etc. We need to live in a world where both of these systems happen at the same time. Formulas won't work anymore. Market it in a traditional way, you might lose your credibility.

DeFeo: We're trying to figure this out, but like Jay said, we need to have a shared vision for it to work. I think we should double underline this. Successful communities have a shared vision, and now we have the tools to create it ourselves.

Alan Rosenblatt: As someone who teaches people how to use the Net for political change, I think a lot about how the Net gives people power to take action. And shared values are crucial. Informing people is just the most basic part of the Net. It's making connections, internalizing what's at stake for a community, then influencing people in power to make actual changes in society. If it's just talk, talk, talk, then we'll never really have any power.

Sasaki: If you think about it, it's really hard to change someone's mind. If we just go to blogs with the same point of view, no one changes their opinion. Isn't it important to engage in changing minds rather than preaching to the choir? Meanwhile, censorship keeps getting in the way of people using the Internet for social change. A lot of us take for granted we can say what we want, but it's not the enabling tool for a lot of people.

Val: Most Cubans don't have Internet access, so they're pretty much censored completely.

Sanjeev: Think of when those UCLA police tasered a student. You see all these other students shooting footage on their camera phone, but they're not trying to stop it. (Actually, is that true? I thought they were yelling at the police to stop. -andy) We need to do more than get information out there; we need to act as well.

Okay, I'm gonna wrap this up - I'm starting to get hand cramps. -andy