Category Archives: Public Service, Civics, Government, Activism

Social Networking == Social Division?

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You would think after 20 years of the Web, we would come to a better understanding that it either helps us connect, or helps us segregate. You’d be wrong.

Following is some research and reading. But first…

What do you think? How diverse are the people you associate with as friends on Facebook or Twitter? Big range in class, race, religion, sex, age? Or are you judging diversity in terms of how many of your friends like Star Wars and Star Trek? If you’re a liberal, how many conservatives? If you’re a conservative, how many liberals? Libertarians? DC versus Marvel? Spiderman versus Twilight? Protestant versus Catholic versus Jewish versus Muslim?

I work in a career that smashes many of these distinctions, except four I can think of (more on that in a bit). There is a wide variety to religious practice, sources of entertainment, favorite music, and political leanings (although there is a libertarian streak). Programmers, as a whole are all very diverse in these areas. Our online social networks reflect this.

Now on to the four ares where we are far too much alike – class, age, sex, and race. Programmers tend to come from middle class households, be mid-twenties to mid-thirties, male (and heterosexual-male at that), and white, middle-eastern, or asian. And yes, our online social networks reflect this as well.

Me and many of my contemporaries fool ourselves into thinking we’re diverse – but you have to agree – those four are rather a *big* four. If we live in environments that are half women and half black, how come our online social networks and our workplaces do not reflect that?

In the end, I tend not to believe that social networking leads to social division or helps to bring people who are different together. I think it simply reflects our reality all too well. My hope is it doesn’t reinforce it. That what we are building will lead us towards greater connection with one another, no matter where we come from, no matter who we are.

Now onto the links:

danah boyd: “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online” PDF 2009: we’re seeing a social media landscape where participation “choice” leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions.

Joshua-Michéle Ross: Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age – Part One:
More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.

Joshua-Michéle Ross: Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age – Part Two: Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller

Joshua-Michéle Ross: Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age – Part Three: The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control.

NYTimes: David Brooks: Cellphones, Texts and Lovers: People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.

Pew Research: Social Isolation and New Technology : People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

Teenagers and children from Pennsylvania failed by “those who knew but failed to speak” and “those who saw but failed to act.”

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The more I hear of what happened in Luzerne, the more my heart breaks.

Summary: Over five years over 6000 children were driven into the PA juvenile ‘justice’ system while a judge received kickbacks.

Inquirer: William Ecenbarger: Luzerne officials deny knowing of abuse

Inquirer: Deferential culture abetted rotten judges:

An 11-member Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice has been created to identify “those who knew but failed to speak” and “those who saw but failed to act.” The commission, which held hearings in Wilkes-Barre this week, faces a daunting task, because complicity in the scandal goes beyond even the lawyers, elected officials, school administrators, teachers, probation officers, and prosecutors charged with protecting the children who were victimized.

The parents of the victims are also to blame. They had a responsibility to ask why Ciavarella did not allow legal representation for their children. If they couldn’t afford counsel, they should have demanded that the court appoint a public defender, which is a constitutional right. And they should have appealed when their children were incarcerated for what didn’t even amount to a misdemeanor.

The reasons for their negligence are deeply rooted. They are products of a regional culture that emphasizes deference to public officials and retribution for those who challenge authority.

The Pennsylvania Juvenile Law Center is seeking out those who’ve been effected by this, anonymously if so desired.

It has a page detailing the corruption and the ongoing fallout.

40 year old ongoing study into preschool still providing insight

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American RadioWorks: Emily Hanford: Early Lessons: “doing well in school, and in life, is about more than a test score.”:

“Now you’re getting into something really deep,” says economist James Heckman. “How is it that motivation is affected? What causes motivation?”

Heckman is a Nobel laureate who teaches at the University of Chicago. Preschool was not among his interests until he came across the Perry Study several years ago. What caught his attention is the apparent paradox at its core: The people who went to preschool were not “smarter” than their peers, but they did better.

The assumption at the heart of a lot of economic theory is that measured intelligence is the key to everything. But with the Perry Preschool children, something else made the difference. It was not IQ. Heckman is now working with psychologists to try to understand how the preschool may have affected the development of what he calls “non-cognitive” skills, things like motivation, sociability and the ability to work with others.

These are critical skills that help people succeed at school, at work – and in life.

And as it turns out, the Perry preschool children did do better in life.

Economic Crisis related links for October 31st, 2009

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LA Independent: A one-man street team: Once one of Hollywood’s homeless, Mark Horvath turns his knack for storytelling into a personalized video chronicle of a national tragedy.: Through his experiences, he has come to realize that the only way to truly stop homelessness is by getting people off streets, and into homes and jobs.

NYTimes: Foreclosures Force Ex-Homeowners to Turn to Shelters: “So, as lean times endure and paychecks disappear, homeless shelters are absorbing those who have run out of alternatives.”

Homeless Resource Center: Fonfield-Ayinla, Gladys : My Experience Parenting While Homeless: It was never a goal of mine to be homeless, but it happened.

NYTimes: Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways : oreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens.

NYTimes: For Runaways, Sex Buys Survival: Nearly a third of the children who flee or are kicked out of their homes each year engage in sex for food, drugs or a place to stay, according to a variety of studies published in academic and public health journals.

Will Bunch: “The day Philly stopped being a joke”

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Will Bunch: “The day Philly stopped being a joke”:

Everyone said the real problem was that Philadelphia — the nation’s sixth largest city and fourth largest TV market, birthplace of both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution — was a victim of a strange condition: low civic self-esteem. And what brought that on? A lot of things, some of them self-inflicted like our “corrupt and content” political culture — but there was also a severe case of sibling jealousy, the sibling being our colonial cousin of New York City.

Even at the start of the 19th Century, Philadelphia was still the center of the nation’s culture and higher learning — and then the Industrial Revolution hit. Philly plunged right in, manufacturing everything under the sun, from steam locomotives to Stetson hats. New York decided instead to manage — and occasionally gamble — the profits. You know how that worked out (when was the last time you wore a Stetson hat — or were transported by a steam locomotive?) Just 100 miles to the northeast, New York became a black-hole-like force, sucking the energy from Philadelphia, stealing everything from our talented college grads to foreign tourists who never even saw the nation’s founding city as they whizzed down the New Jersey Turnpike from the Statue of Liberty to the Washington Monument. New York got Broadway, the UN, the World’s Fair…and baseball. The Yankees won more World Series’ than any other team, while the Phillies lost more games than any other franchise in America — in any sport. Even the Mets, who didn’t exist until 1962, won a World Series before the Phillies finally did in 1980.

Bad behavior became the mask for a city’s collective anxiety. It wasn’t just the notorious 700 Level at the dank, concrete Veterans Stadium, where wearing an opponent’s jersey meant maybe sparing your life…maybe. Here at the Philadelphia Daily News, back when the Eagles became title contenders (but nothing more, of course) in the 2000s, we had a regular feature that inside the newsroom was officially known as “hater’s guides” to the cities that the Eagles were playing that week, even if the “city” was actually a Wisconsin Nice burg like Green Bay. You didn’t need Sigmund Freud to diagnose the pathology of Philly’s “haters guides.”

Then there was a day when everything seemed to change.

Read the whole thing. It’s fantastic.

Whitehouse.gov moves to Drupal

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Dries Buytaert: Whitehouse.gov using Drupal

Tim O’Reilly: Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal

PDF: WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal

Content Here: Is Drupal the right platform for whitehouse.gov?

I think you can trace this way back to 2004 and Howard Dean’s run for the presidency. Their team chose Drupal as the framework to leverage for their web efforts and it paid off as part of what was the most Internet-savvy campaign by that time. Inspired by that campaign and their use of technology, I had relaunched Philly Future in fact.

Dries Buytaert says of the choice:

First of all, I think Drupal is a perfect match for President Barack Obama’s push for an open and transparent government — Drupal provides a great mix of traditional web content management features and social features that enable open communication and participation. This combination is what we refer to as social publishing and is why so many people use Drupal. Furthermore, I think Drupal is a great fit in terms of President Barack Obama’s desire to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal’s flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems. In other words, Drupal is a great match for the U.S. government.

I can’t help but agree.

Lawrence Lessig shakes the faithful?

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TNR: Lawrence Lessig: Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government.

Yes – you read that title right.

Lessig connects the dots from newspapers to the music industry and the ripple effects taking place – everything having to do with the architecture of the Internet and the dynamics set forth.

You need to read the full piece because it is not ‘against transparency’ – far from it – but it does call for a sense of concern and realism to settle into conversations about transparency as means to an end. Ultimately, in regards to government, it is a call to reform, specifically election finance reform – and I agree with much of it.

Reformers rarely feel responsible for the bad that their fantastic new reform effects. Their focus is always on the good. The bad is someone else’s problem. It may well be asking too much to imagine more than this. But as we see the consequences of changes that many of us view as good, we might wonder whether more good might have been done had more responsibility been in the mix. The music industry was never going to like the Internet, but its war against the technology might well have been less hysterical and self-defeating if better and more balanced alternatives had been pressed from the beginning. No one can dislike Craigslist (or Craig), but we all would have benefited from a clearer recognition of what was about to be lost. Internet triumphalism is not a public good.

Likewise with transparency. There is no questioning the good that transparency creates in a wide range of contexts, government especially. But we should also recognize that the collateral consequence of that good need not itself be good. And if that collateral bad is busy certifying to the American public what it thinks it already knows, we should think carefully about how to avoid it. Sunlight may well be a great disinfectant. But as anyone who has ever waded through a swamp knows, it has other effects as well.

Related:

O’Reilly Radar: Carl Malamud: Larry Lessig and Naked Transparency

David Larry Lessig: Beyond Transparency, and Net Triumphalism

Aaron Swartz: Transparency Is Bunk

It’s too easy to go for sound bites and miss the real story – on re-reading “The Freak Revolution Manifesto”

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I am guilty of living in the place “The Freak Manifesto” is meant to reach.

Consuming news media 24-7. Not just CNN, but news on every station I can tune into. All the while subscribing to over a hundred RSS feeds tracking stories from innumerable sources on subjects ranging from software engineering to politics, to the future of news journalism, to comic books. Facebook. Twitter. Blogging. Email. Cycle, rinse, repeat.

I feel constantly at odds with myself over the time I spend at home, at work, trying to sharpen the saw and keep myself open friends, family, new experiences. Be a good dad. A good husband. A good co-worker. A good brother, a good friend. Amidst this, trying to figure out how to make a positive change in the world some how, never feeling as though I’ve repaid my debts to those who took a chance on me.

I pretty much feel like I serve all my cares poorly, the guitar on the wall gathering dust.

In that original context I reviewed “The Freak Manifesto”, and in that context I absorbed the headings and pull quotes and missed the greater context of the whole document, which is a bit of a rallying cry for people such as myself, and probably you too if you can relate (I’m sure you can).

Upon re-reading, I don’t find myself agreeing with just 6 of the 44 pages – those that prescribe disconnecting from the control paradigm. It’s not the goal I have a problem with – the goal is admirable and something to work towards – it’s the how.

For example, this section rightly calls out the ills in public education and then suggests home schooling as the solution. I want to *fix* public education, not withdraw from it. A very radical choice here would be to encourage those not attending parent teacher meetings and school board meetings to get involved. Be heard. Fight loud. Hopefully we will live up to this when my daughter starts school – public or otherwise.

Honestly, we (Richelle, my wife, and I) might be looking back at this and realize our choices were incorrect. So our views on this are liable to change over time to those more in agreement with the paper or maybe in some other direction. Parenting is definitively learn-as-you-go and we’re going to adjust as we do so for what works Emma, our daughter.

Then there is the section also advocates opting out of politics. My generation had already done that prior to 2000 and look what happened – George Bush Jr. was elected. My generations’ belief that politics were inconsequential had real consequence. No one thinks the last ten years would have been the same had Al Gore been president. I’m happy to see my generation opting in now. Hopefully its not too late. Sure politics is a game within a game as the paper rightly posits. But change is more likely to happen when there are those on the inside as well as out fighting for it.

And its that last thought that carries for me. Read it. Be challenged. Think.

Don’t do like I did – don’t skim. Read it and let it stir. The world needs people awake and aware. The only way that happens is by confronting ourselves with things that don’t fit our comfort zones, and instead of violently screaming out ‘You Lie!’ – taking a deep breath and recognizing not only are there different points of view, but maybe they have something to teach us. That’s what the “The Freak Manifesto” ultimately is about to me.

I owe the authors an apology for that original interpretation – Thank you for writing it and getting it out here.

Links on thinking, parenting, teaching, creating for October 4th, 2009

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Boston.com: Inside the Baby Mind:

One of the most surprising implications of this new research concerns baby consciousness, or what babies actually experience as they interact with the outside world. While scientists and doctors have traditionally assumed that babies are much less conscious than adults – this is why, until the 1970s, many infants underwent surgery without anesthesia – that view is being overturned. Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even the most mundane activities seem new and exciting. “For a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time,” Gopnik says. “Just go for a walk with a 2-year-old. You’ll quickly realize that they’re seeing things you don’t even notice.”

Boston.com: Thinking literally: The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world:

Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature–or position, texture, size, shape, or weight–abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us.

NYTimes: Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control? :

In the end, the most lasting effect of the Tools of the Mind studies may be to challenge some of our basic ideas about the boundary between work and play. Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work. When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what was new and potentially important about the program. “We often think about play as relaxing and doing what you want to do,” she explained. “Maybe it’s an American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools does — and maybe what we all need to do — is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”

NurtureShock: Are Time-outs for Tots Conditional Love? :

The real problem with Kohn’s articles is that, already, there is a lot of confusion about when to praise, and his pieces just add to it. They give the impression that parents must make a choice between unconditional love on the one side, and praise and punishment on the other. And that’s just not true.

Most research finds that kids need rules and structure – not as a form of prison, but a scaffold of autonomy they can build on.

Oberlin College professor Nancy Darling has surveyed thousands of adolescents, in the US, the Philippines, and Chile. She’s found that when parents set no rules, or when parents fail to enforce rules they’ve set, it sends a message that parents simply don’t care about their kids’ well-being or the kids’ actions. The adolescents think the parents just can’t be bothered by their transgressions.

While combining praise with a statement of love is problematic. For example, “You’re such a smart girl, and I love you,” sends a child a message that if she’s no longer is smart, the love will stop. But there’s nothing in the research that says parents should stop saying, “I love you.” It just that they should stop combining displays of love and affection and praise for achievement. Keep them separate. Once again, this isn’t an either or situation.

Stanford professor Carol Dweck’s perspective on praise is that – when we praise or punish – we need to make it clear that we are responding to what a child does, not who they are. We shouldn’t say “Bad Boy!” when the kid breaks a vase, and we shouldn’t say “Boy Genius!” when he made a vase in art class. Both “Bad Boy” and “Boy Genius” are wild overstatements of what we really think.

Instead, we can simply say, “You know you shouldn’t play ball in the house,” and “You worked really hard on that vase, didn’t you?” those are fine.

Beyond the moment, they teach children that we pay attention to what they are doing, and that we can be trusted to give them a fair and accurate response when they need it. Lessons we want them to remember when they’re 17, and they have a broken heart or just had a fender-bender.

As I said earlier, we just don’t have to make a choice between praise, punishment and unconditional love. That’s just a false choice.

“Connect with yourself, connect with others, connect with the world, connect with the Infinite”

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Read – “The Freak Revolution Manifesto” (via Susie Madrak)

There’s a lot in the piece that resonates, but the parts that cheer you on to opt-out of various things, well they stand in opposition to connection, to “coming off the mountaintop” as the paper puts it. So it is a piece that is at odds with itself.

Still, its worth a good read.

Some supporting science – BioEd Online: Conformists may kill civilizations

And from Bruce Eckel comes some related thoughts after reading Po Bronson’s “What Should I Do With My Life?”:

I’m reading Po Bronson’s “What Should I Do With My Life?” which is brilliant on many levels. For one thing, it’s the anti-self-help book; it’s just stories from talking to people, and by no means is everyone successful.

And it’s dense, by which I mean not fluffy but packed with insight. He spent years researching and developing this book, and his own struggle is woven into it. Indeed, it’s not about formulas and answers, but about the struggle itself.

One observation set me back. There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got “practical” and did something else “first.” The idea was that they’d be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.

But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the “practical” career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you’re doing.