Technology as Social Art

"Once upon a time, in my lifetime, we wondered about the intelligence of computers that could beat geniuses at chess. Now we measure the intelligence of technology in terms of its capacity to address human need and crisis; to change the architecture of human lives; to reconfigure human consciousness. In that context, it seems fitting to recall that the root of technology, the word, is not science but art -- and that there are individuals now on the front lines of developing technology as a social art."

-- Public radio host Krista Tippett

Social media -- chiefly the mobile Internet and short-form video -- are the future of social advocacy and innovation, panelists attending this year's 2010 Clinton Global Initiative agreed. "Mobility is going to be the way we will all be running our businesses and nonprofits in the future," John Chambers, the Chairman and CEO of Cisco said in a keynote panel moderated by public radio host Krista Tippett. "It will empower a decade of productivity in the developed world and allow us to tackle some of the biggest problems in the developing world in a way we couldn't before. Maybe for the first time we'll be addressing the have-nots in the world. Video is the new voice ... and the most powerful force for change now is the power of the crowd."

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square, and the co-founder and chairman of Twitter, said this new "second wave" of the Web carries with it the potential for large-scale global change because social media are destabilizing tools, making it harder for many in power to speak for others or to manipulate public perception for political gain. Said Dorsey:

"The access to technology and being able to immediately share what you are thinking -- your opinion from anywhere in the world -- allows one to have an understanding with a context that you might not have been familiar with before. When protests were going on in Moldova and Iran, to a lot of Americans and to me in particular, those issues and countries were a black box. But suddenly, we had people on the ground who could share what they were seeing and post videos and it was all happening in real time.

That kind of immediacy and transparency brings a greater social understanding, and we can minimize a lot of the conflict if there is more knowledge...and that is the end goal of this technology."

Arianna Huffington, the co-founder of The Huffington Post and the moderator of another CGI panel on social media last week, cited efforts by authoritarian governments to slow the influence of social media. Chinese government authorities, for example, routinely censor the Internet to try to stem U.S. protest of its human rights violations. "China has learned quickly that shutting down new media -- Facebook and Twitter -- and inviting traditional journalists to have access, instead, will help it spin the official version of events," she said. "...You can always spin traditional journalists ... but it's very difficult to spin millions tweeting."

But most of the change is inevitable, others said. And the most disruptive innovations may be occurring within the social sector, itself -- chiefly in developing countries, said Ory Okolloh, who helped to create Ushahidi, a Web site that crowdsources citizen information to fight information blackouts and government misinformation campaigns, as well as to speed help to those who need it the most in a crisis. Ushahidi's "crisis maps" were used in Haiti to help earthquake survivors find health resources, locate food supplies and track outbreaks of gang violence and looting. Okolloh, a Kenyan activist, lawyer and blogger who lives in South Africa, said social media make it harder for people to be victims of inefficient or corrupt authorities. Africans used to have to "wait for the government" to improve social conditions but "now, we do not have to wait," Okolloh said. "Now, we can self-organize. And just the notion of hierarchy in a traditional crisis on the ground? It used to be Nairobi would have to communicate with Geneva which would have to communicate with New York and it would take forever to determine what people's needs were on the ground. This (social) technology allows the people, themselves, to express their needs in one minute."

Social media also are empowering ordinary people to recalibrate their relationships with one another, Okolloh says. "This technology is agnostic," she said. "It doesn't discriminate man-woman, rich-poor, black-white. African women now have new opportunities," she said, citing as examples the rapid growth in mobile banking services such as M-PESA and the start of thousands of small businesses that can be managed entirely over a mobile phone. "Nobody can tell me, an African woman, to get out of the room because now I own the room," Okolloh said. "Thousands of women can now own the room."

In highlights of other social media discussions at this year's CGI:

* Molly Melching, Executive Director of the African women's health and human rights NGO called Tostan (meaning "breakthrough" in Wolof), said cultural differences need to be acknowledged in the advocacy community's push to put social media tools into the hands of local communities. "You need, in many villages, to explain the benefits and let people work out for themselves how (or whether) they want to proceed," she said. But once consensus is achieved, she said, social media and mobile technologies can change nearly every aspect of local life. Melching, who has lived in Senegal for the past 36 years, said "women no longer have to walk for hours or days to visit the health worker, only to find out he or she isn't there; kids no longer have to go physically from one village to the next to announce a birth or a death. Now, they can just text it. Hours, days are saved. It creates the time and space for new opportunities."

* Pierre Omidyar, founding partner of the Omidyar Nework and founding chairman of eBay, said that social media "fundamentally are changing the relationships between citizens and government." During the post-election uprising in Iran two years ago, he said, "the other side of the story" of the 2009 Iranian elections got out to Americans. Through Twitter, Facebook and video, "Americans began connecting personally to people in the streets and began to realize that people there were, in many ways, just like they were," said Omidyar, a French-born, Iranian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist. "The change in perception that created among Americans about the average Iranian and the connections we now still have will affect what American international policy can be. You can't have an American president standing up and saying we're going to bomb these people anymore. It won't happen now; it can't. Social media fundamentally change the balance of power between ordinary people and government elites."

* Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, said mobile social media can help people get better and more immediate health care. "Think about the mobile technology that exists to enable the poor to have a chip in their phone that will contain their whole health record," she said. "...I met a daily wage earner in Pakistan who got a multiple fracture in his leg. Normally, it would have taken him 2-3 months to get care" but through one of the foundation's grantees, Heartfile, the man's health records are now digital and far more quickly accessible. "We were able to validate him within 72 hours of his injury to receive the care he needed," Rodin said.

* Cherie Blair, a lawyer and the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, told delegates that "we should stop thinking about mobile phones as just a place where we have a chat, and start thinking about these phones as a poor person's computer, where we can all get access to the world of information."

* Mohammad Kilany, co-founder of Souktel Mobile Phone Job Service, offers job-hunting services via text message to thousands of unemployed Palestinian youth. In the Palestinian territories, youth unemployment is nearly 36 percent, Kilany says, but it is difficult for young job-seekers to move from one city to the next in search of work. Few have access to the Internet or to smart phones. "But everyone has a simple cellphone, and it's cheap to text," Kilany says. Souktel asks users to register with the service by texting information about themselves. A user who then texts in "match me" will get job listings that fit his or her skills, including phone numbers to dial. So far, so good. Souktel reaches 15,000 Palestinians and links them to more than 300 employers. "At first, people thought we were idiots," Kilany said. "They didn't believe we could help them find a job with texting. So we invested lots of effort going to universities and talking with employees to convince them of the benefit of letting all people have access to the job market."

For more on CGI's take this year on social media, click here for panel videos.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo: istock.com)

Making Waves

As the "do-good" conference season sputters and slows in the mid-summer heat, here are eight new social media tips and takeaways from the recent National Conference on Volunteering and Service in New York:

* Message shorter. There is one big "missing" in the use of social media, says Twitter co-founder and Chairman Jack Dorsey. Too many groups get their messaging wrong, he says. "You're more successful if you focus on simplifying your message," he told NCVS conferees. "Make sure the message is in as few words as possible."

* Get analytical. Many nonprofits, social enterprises and social service organizations don't have a good sense of analytics, Twitter's Dorsey adds. "Ask yourself: Where are we today? Where do we mark today and where do we plan to go? If you don't know where you're coming from or going to, it's hard to figure out if anything is actually moving or not inside your organization. On the outside, your members and supporters want status updates. They want to know -- before they throw money over the wall -- that you're making progress. It's very, very important to constantly show a sense of momentum and a sense of movement. It can be as simple as updating people in a simple message."

* Compete harder. Sure, collaboration is all the buzz and today's holy grail. But Joe Rospars, a founder of Blue State Digital and on the social media team that put President Obama in the White House, says that for him, two questions come into play for organizations having trouble mobilizing people -- especially "during these in-between times between crises and big moments." His advice? Make sure you're adequately communicating "not only the reasons people should be involved in your cause -- but also why people should choose your organization over another fighting for the same cause." Rospars says most groups get the first part right but miss the second.

* Work harder. Your supporters want to help but they don't want to phone it in -- nor want you to do that, either. "Oftentimes, signing a petition isn't enough to ask," says Rospars. For some people, it's too insignificant. People know when their time is being wasted, Rospars says -- "when things are being phoned in by the staff who aren't thinking about things very deeply." Rospars says if you lose your enthusiasm, so will the people you're trying to engage. "Even on the worst, most busy days, it pays to remember that your responsibility is to the people out there who only have an hour to give," Rospars adds. "Don't waste their time. Make it worthwhile. People will know the difference if you're passionate and urgent and authentic about engaging them."

* Get clear on ROI. "The term, ROI, is widely misused," says social media marketing strategist Paul Gillen. "It's a financial metric. It's not a number of followers, or number of page views, or number of unique visitors. Those things are results, not returns. A return is a financial metric." But don't despair. According to Gillen, anything that can be expressed as a result can be expressed as a financial metric. Next time you're asked what the value is of raising your organization's visibility, do a standard marketing study called a "lift study," Gillen says. "If you have historical data that says that the last time your organization's visibility increased by 5 percentage points, the amount of giving increased 20 percentage points, then that is an ROI," Gillen says. "You can say that if this social media campaign to boost visibility succeeds in raising your visibility by 5 percentage points as determined by a lift study, then you can expect X amount of return for each speaking engagement. It's all in the math."

* Measure the dollar value of your donors. To see how much money a member or a donor is worth over the course of their lifetimes, says Gillen, take the total value of giving to your organization in a year and divide it by the total number of members/donors during that same time period. "If you can draw X number of new members as a result of a social media campaign, you can say that the campaign will yield a specific lifetime value," Gillen says. "When you start to think in those terms, ROI becomes much easier to forecast."

* Measure the dollar value of your followers. Look at the total number of visits to your Web site per tweet stream over a given period, then look at the percentage of those visitors that converted into donors and the value of their donations over any given amount of time. Says Gillen: "Move all of that back up the spreadsheet and see that the value of a follower is, let's say, 2.5 cents. It's a matter of mapping the numbers that you use to see the impact they have on your bottom line."

* Push or pull leaders into the pool. Don't keep social media in a corner. Make it everybody's business, starting at the top. According to Twitter's Dorsey, organizational leaders need to be participating in social media use every day, to make it a part of the culture. "Your leader will make mistakes and will learn from them but what's most significant is that he or she is sharing the learning curve and the lessons throughout the organization," Dorsey says. "Assigning someone else to look at social media can only go so far; it won't speak to the spirit of what your organization is trying to bring to the world." Dorsey also said that leaders must be willing to try new things themselves, both in their personal lives and in their organizational leadership. "It's an attitude and a willingness to jump in that makes all the difference," says Dorsey. "A leader's passion is clear and contagious. Don't shut out the leader or underestimate his or her power, both outside and inside the organization."

Got any tips to add? Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: fotolia.com)

Fishbowl 2.0

At last week's 140 Character Conference in Manhattan, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey told attendees that when he was 15, he tinkered with real-time visualizations of the world; one of his first computer models was of New York City. He plotted the real-time movements of couriers, transit buses, emergency service vehicles, and taxis.

"I followed where they were right at that moment, and what they were doing. As a visualization, it allowed the city of New York to feel very, very small because suddenly, I could see the individual humans that made that city work and function. I never felt closer to a large organization than I did when I saw this on the screen. The next time I felt that was not too long ago, during a speech Barack Obama gave after his first 100 days in office. He was giving a speech and people were updating [their tweets] while he was talking. I never felt closer to my government, never felt it was more approachable, smaller, or more human than in that moment— and it was because I was seeing the inner-most thoughts of people typically placed on top of a pedestal. Those same people suddenly now were on the same level as I was. The transparency that brought to this conversation and to the process of democracy was amazing to me—eye-opening—and it was all unfolding in real-time right in front of me. The transformative power of seeing up close not just how a city works but how government works and how we can participate in the thoughts and actions of the people who comprise our government is huge."

[An hour after Dorsey took the #140conf stage, political blogger Maegan Carberry suggested —much like Andrew Rasiej did a month earlier, at a panel I moderated in Los Angeles about the power of social media—that social media and the self-organized groups they are spawning have begun to destabilize politics-as-usual.]

Can social media help to make a better world—in Iran or anywhere else? Dorsey, for his part, won't speculate. But he urges citizen vigilance as Twitter evolves. “We have this brand new tool and it’s an iteration of many tools we’ve used in the past but now it’s a tool to help us in this experiment in democracy," Dorsey says. "But where are we taking this? What are we doing with this technology? What are we building?"

(Illustration by Tony Soh for istock.com)

Now Media

Amid Iran's continuing protests, much is being said about the “state of now”—what happens to the speed of change when it’s possible to share real-time information and cellphone videos with anyone around the world about major events as they occur. "Now media"—cellphones, the Web, Facebook and Twitter—are redefining what it means to be civically engaged.

“That a new information technology—[so-called “now media” such as Twitter, cellphones, mobile vlogs]—could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times,” blogger Andrew Sullivan gushed in his recent post, The Revolution Will be Twittered, about the public demonstrations in Iran challenging the outcome of Iran's June 12 presidential election. “ …You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.” Political blogger Maegan Carberry, meanwhile, told last week’s 140 Character Conference in Manhattan, the nation’s first all-things-Twitter thoughtfest, that “social media are pushing us into an era of post-partisanship,” where political parties become far less important because group-to-group communication helps people to self-identify common goals. Says NYU new media professor Clay Shirky, "We are living through the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.” The surge of Twitterized news reporting out of Iran, he says, has made the Iranian uprising historically unprecedented. “This is it. The big one,” he told TED interviewers. "This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.” [And Twitter, of all social media, is having impact at the moment because authorities have not yet found a way to shut it down completely.]

Iran, of course, isn’t the first world hotspot where social media have been used to focus global attention in a heartbeat. Cell phone videos and text-messaging by on-the-ground activists were instrumental in exposing the government corruption that was blocking foreign aid to victims of Burma's Cyclone Nargis. Social media also helped to leak word out to the world about the 2007 pro-democracy uprising by Burmese monks; the hardline censorship by Chinese authorities during last summer’s Beijing Olympics, and the extent of China's deadly 2008 earthquake —details of which, says Shirky, would have otherwise taken years to go public.

But whoa, Nellie. While Iran is showing us, again, that social media can—in rocket speed—expose the undercurrents of dissent and the underbelly of corruption in sometimes shocking detail, these tools have not yet been able to originate mass dissent, nor drive widespread reforms, at least not yet. For every successful Net-aided protest, such as the Facebook campaign last year against FARC in Colombia, there are at least a dozen more uprisings that end when authorities shut down the Net or—as with the as-yet unmutable Twitter in Iran—track down agitators and "disappear” them, creating a chilling climate of self-censorship that all but cedes power to those abusing it.

More significant, perhaps, is the power of Twitter and other forms of social media to accelerate the rate at which events play out, regardless of outcome, and how that speed can be destabilizing, in and of itself. Jason Calacanis, the social media entrepreneur and CEO of mahalo.com, calls the Internet "the greatest accelerator since the advent of the written word." Speaking on a panel on social media and politics that I convened and moderated at this year's Milken Global Conference in LA, Calacanis said: "Truth gets wrestled away from the rumors more rapidly now; if you’re on the wrong side of society, you get outed in hyperspeed." Further, he said, "When you're on the wrong side of an issue, it’s very hard to be involved in an online discourse because if you are, the quicker you'll get to the inevitability of being wrong.”

Indeed, the challenge now for Web-powered activists is figuring out how to use these new tools to do more. As Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey told the 140 Character Conference's standing-room-only crowd last week: “We have this brand new tool [Twitter] to help us in this experiment in democracy, but where are we taking this? What are we doing with this technology and how are we sustaining these concepts of immediacy, approachability and transparency to open up the process of every social community from families to the largest governments in the world?”

Great question, Jack. For more debate on the power and future of social media, follow next week’s Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan, which likely will include a late-addition workshop on Iran. And for more on how social media may be already shaping the course of political history, see Clay Shirky’s recent TED talk, below:



(This post by Marcia Stepanek)
(YouTube cellphone video of Iran protesters June 20, 2009, above, courtesy BBC)