Photo by Adam Fagen of Display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History - http://www.flickr.com/photos/afagen/3155132290/

Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker this week: “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” is a really compelling read, and a nice antidote to technological determinism in our understanding of social meda (the idea that the new technologies shape behavior and determine outcomes rather than interacting with behavior and both shaping and being shaped by the interaction) but ultimately I think he gets it wrong. Gladwell represents networks of weak ties as an absence of organization incapable of achieving meaningful change, and mistakes what has been done via Twitter and Facebook for all that social media and free/open source approaches could be capable of.

Gladwell’s piece centers on two key arguments. First, he debunks the notion of “twitter revolutions” in Iran and Moldova, noting that in both cases the view from the West at best greatly exaggerated the role of social media if not created it out of whole cloth:

As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution . . . . In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation.

The second, more central argument is that:

there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Gladwell demonstrates this by contrasting the lunch-counter sit-ins and voter registration drives of the US civil rights movement of the 1960s with the opening anecdote of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, in which a woman’s lost sidekick is located and returned via social media. Where real activism combines intense ideological commitment and strong ties (this is what drives the civil rights movement), the new faux social media activism relies on networks and weak ties. Participation is high in social media activism specifically because so little is asked of those participating:

Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. . . . Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Or as he more memorably puts it in his concluding salvo:

A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls.

But is that all that networked, weak-tie oriented worlds are good at? Gladwell doesn’t mention the key concept of the Coasean ceiling and Coasean floor, or Shirky’s other examples (the lay Catholic organization Voice of the Faithful for example), other than to mention Wikipedia as a successful example of what weak networks are good for:

Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.

Which, of course, is more or less what Shirky argues about it as well – though with more nuance about wikipedia’s existing control structures. (It’s far from a free for all, as anyone who’s followed the arguments between inclusionists and deletionists or has had a page edit reverted knows). It would be interesting to see what Gladwell would make of Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks, or Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, both of which take a less “popularizing” approach to understanding the key shifts embodied in free software and open source modes of production.

Ultimately I’d say Gladwell mistakes new forms of organization for a complete lack of organization. In trying to define the differences between true activist groups who ferment revolution (high degree of ideological fervor and strong ties) versus faux activism online (weak ties, no significant commitment), Gladwell makes the following comment almost as an aside:

There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?

Leaving aside for the moment the OSCar project and it’s attempt to design/build an open source car, has Gladwell never heard of Linux, or other free software projects on which large numbers of people collaborate quite effectively and in a self-organizing fashion?

It seems to me that there are many clear coherent design principles in Linux, and that the network of participants – while not organized in a traditional corporate hierarchy – does have a centralized leadership structure and lines of authority. Without knocking the insights of Raymond’s Cathedral and the Bazaar, a less hierarchical organizational framework doesn’t mean no organizational framework. Open Source projects have project leads, committers, associations, and all kinds of other organizing mechanisms.

Further, take a look at an organization like the Debian project (organizational structure). They not only have the core organizational structure to keep the project moving, but a quite rigorous new maintainers process which essentially brings those new maintainers into the culture and clarifies the ideological commitments inherent in the community. Just because online ties don’t resemble the strong ties of the past doesn’t mean they are all weak ties. (See Gabriella Coleman‘s wonderful work on ethics in the Debian community).

Contrast Debian with some large traditional, national charitable organizations where the great majority of those involved are really just voting with their annual donation, but have no real insight into the activities of the organization as a whole. Ultimately, what Gladwell fails to see is what importance the new tools – of which Twitter and Facebook are just the most media-celebrated examples – might have for activists who do understand activism. The tools won’t make committed activists out of the uninterested, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t transform the activism of the committed as well over time.

Is it possible to use social media tools as Gladwell describes, to get high participation rates by asking little of the participants? Of course it is. But it’s also possible to use these tools (and others like Status.net, CrabGrass, Drupal, WordPress, etc) to combine together people with high degrees of ideological fervor and a compelling mixture of strong ties and weak ties.

In other words, weak activism (renew your annual membership in the large national organization whose goals you vaguely agree with,, or sign a petition expressing your dislike of something) co-existed with strong activism before the advent of the Internet, and will continue to do so despite it. The more interesting question is what will strong activism groups be able to do more effectively now than they could before.

When strongly committed activists with strong ties to each other are supported and maintained via networks of weak ties and new forms of organization made possible by global scale internet-powered interaction we may well yet see what activism 2.0 looks like.

Cory Doctorow is always worth watching: insightful, funny, often provocative and consistently knowledgeable. OK, so I’m a bit of a boingboing fanboy. And yes, the video was posted weeks ago, but I’m just now getting to it.

In this talk, part of the Cambridge Business Lectures series, Doctorow brings together two key topics which I’ve seen lots of folks discuss separately:

• The Internet as perfect copying machine, including the absurdities of digital restrictions management (DRM) and the necessity for changes to business models as a result of a changing technology landscape
• The Internet as (nearly) perfect mechanism for bringing people together for collective action both serious and banal

It’s a mash up of Lawrence Lessing on copyright (including references back to John Philip Sousa’s concern about atrophying vocal cords if recorded music is allowed to circulate) and Here Comes Everybody era Clay Shirky (discussing the traditional cost of organizing, getting large numbers of people working together as the single largest problem for companies to solve in the information age).

There’s also, though, enough Cory Doctorow here to prevent it from feeling like any kind of rehash or unauthorized, second generation degraded copy. My favorite example:

Paris Hilton’s genitals have joined the undead – they will live forever, stalking the Internet until the last plug is pulled on the last network router.

Doctorow points out th risk that the first discussion – the internet as copy machine – has largely distracted us from the second – the internet as a fundamental connecting machine. Here he overlaps a bit with The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It era Jonathan Zittrain, arguing that we can’t allow the solutions to the former use to kill the value presented by the latter. Or, as Doctorow puts it:

We need to have a balance, a detente, that says to these firms, “You can try to make your living, but you can’t do it at the expense of the system that is delivering all of this public benefit. Not just copying movies, but beyond that – beyond that small parochial concern – allowing us to organise ourselves in ways that ennoble the human condition, and if you make it a choice between the Internet and Police Academy sequels, eventually society is going to vote for the Internet, so you can’t make it that choice.”

Well said, indeed – and I liked some of those Police Academy sequels.

To start with the positive: This is a really solid business book, which sets out a clear methodology (including the Social Technographics Profile and the POST method with which Forrester clients / subscribers are already familiar), walks through a broad range of well explained case studies, and situates the business benefits of the different approaches.

Bernoff and Li have clearly done their research here, talking to a wide variety of companies in different industries about their experiences with “social technologies,” and they do a very astute job of avoiding oversimplification (never suggesting, for example, that every business should follow a simple formula) while also not falling back on the consultant’s refrain (“it depends”) or failing to give real, useful, pragmatic, and actionable advice.

The book is laid out into three key sections (you can see the whole table of contents online):

1. Understanding the Groundswell – in which they lay out the basic context of what has changed and why businesses need new approaches, as well as the social technographics profiles
2. Tapping the Groundswell – in which they lay out the POST method, and walk through all the ways companies can benefit from / leverage this new world
3. The Groundswell Transforms – in which they extend the argument to include how this new set of conditions can transform the enterprise.

Each section is supported by a handful of specific case studies and other examples, which are drawn from a wide variety of industries. There are indices by company and by strategy at the end of the book, so you can quickly find examples from your own vertical or place on the adoption curve.

Li and Bernoff are at their rhetorical best when they are describing the veritable sea change that the groundswell represents:

You cannot ignore this trend. You cannot sit this one out. Unless you are retiring in the next six months, it’s too late to quite and let somebody else handle it. The groundswell trend is unstoppable, and your customers are there. You may go a little slower or a little faster, but you have to move forward. There is no going back.

They also offer solid, sound advice to those looking to manage the cultural change required within an enterprise to successfully pull of “Groundswell thinking”:

• First, start small.
• Second, educate your executives.
• Third, get the right people to run your strategy.
• Fourth, get your agency and technology partners in sync.
• Fifth, plan for the next step and for the long term.

Not exactly radical or wholly original advice, but wrapped in the context of real business decisions made by people facing the issues, and informed by real experiences.

In short, I’d say the book is a must read for anyone from a traditional (by which I mean anything existing before the web) business looking to adapt to the internet age, anyone trying to convince their more traditional colleagues or bosses to adopt new strategies, and anyone hoping to sell such folks consulting and technology services.

Having said all of that, there are some minor blemishes – for example, when did del.icio.us become “a simple downloadable application”? Are they talking about the bookmarklets (javascript buttons for your browser to submit things to del.icio.us)? But that is really an exception in an otherwise well researched and well documented book.

Rather more difficult to ignore is the almost complete absence of Free and Open Source Software from a discussion of “Social Technologies.” There is a section titled “people collaborating: wikis and open source” (the lack of title capitalization is in the original – even the book title is in all lower case), but it really should be called “people collaborating: wikis.” Granted, Bernoff and Li aren’t technology analysts per se – in the sense of analyzing development approaches and platforms – and in the POST methodology technology is the last element. But I’d argue that it is critical to understand the context of mass collaboration rising out of open source communities in order to better understand the mechanisms by which communities are created and sustained, thrive or fail, and interact with each other in an online world.

Instead, the whole of the analysis of this phenomenon comes to a paragraph in which we learn:

The same sort of cooperation [as that which drives wikipedia and other wikis] drives other forms of online collaboration, including open-source software products like Linux (a version of the Unix operating system), Apache (a Web server), and Firefox (a Web browser). In open source, technically adept developers combine their efforts to build, test, and improve software products, and the code is available for all to see. Before you scoff at this form of development, recognize that Linux now underpins many Web servers and consumer electronics devices, including TiVo; Apache is the dominant Web server software on the Internet, and Firefox has gone from zero to over 25 percent market share in less than two years.

That’s it, basically, for open source. No analysis of the massive collaboration efforts behind those projects, or how they are managed, arise, die, become businesses, become communities, etc. No analysis of how these and other open source projects provide either models or anti-patterns to be avoided. Not even any analysis of how the open source development methodology and licensing practices have influenced other cultural practices through things like creative commons licensing, open access, and challenges to many fundamental corporate notions of intellectual property.

Bernoff and Li seem to assume that their reader has no familiarity with and no interest in development – which may be accurate – and don’t seem to have much interest themselves in the impact open source can and has had.

(Readers interested in these issues would do well to check out Chris Kelty’s Two Bits and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody – the former on the cultural significance of free software, the latter on how technology changes have enabled and facilitated changes in social organization – both of which I hope to write more about in the future).

What ultimately left me dissatisfied with the book, however – and here we return to the question of whether this reveals more about me as a reviewer than the text – is that it never steps outside its tightly constructed frame, which essentially comes down to “how do I use this to improve my business”?

It isn’t that I expected, or even wanted, Li and Bernoff to craft a revolutionary manifesto – a sort of Cluetrain II or Wealth of Networks for the MBA set – but that the tone is so relentless in its focus it can begin to feel like the only valid reason for the Internet’s existence (and the only valid use of it now that it exists) is to sell more widgets, make people feel better about the widgets they’ve bought, and maybe help a few companies make better widgets.

It ended up reminding me of one of my favorite 80s movie scenes, from Say Anything, when John Cusack is asked what he wants to do with his life, and answers:

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

Again, to be fair, I’ve got no problem with businesses trying to understand how to adapt to the changing environment the Internet and social media represent, or even with helping businesses figure out how to leverage these new approaches to generate profit or awareness – in fact, that’s a fair description of what I do at Optaros, and what Optaros does more broadly.

It’s just that in the middle of the focus on tapping, listening to, talking with, energizing, embracing, and connecting with the Groundswell (every single chapter title involves doing something with the groundswell or enabling it to do something to your company), there’s precious little exploration of what is driving the Groundswell in the first place, or what it means more broadly as a social and historical phenomenon. Why the groundswell now? What impact is it having on us as a culture, other than just what toothpaste we think is cool?

(Yes, there is a section in the opening chapter on what the groundswell is and why it is happening now – but it is reduced to this level of causality: “These three trends – people’s desire to connect new interactive technologies, and online economics – have created a new era.”)

Ultimately, Groundswell presents “the groundswell” as something which is happening to us – something we are not creating but either passively suffering from or being carried by, like a surfer on a wave. It seems almost a force of a nature – an inevitable technology tsunami – rather than a collective project in which we are all engaged in actively constructing a specific historical reality.

So is it fair to critique Groundswell for staying within its own well-defined purpose? To criticize it for not being The Wealth of Networks?

If what you’re looking for is an eminently readable, well researched, pragmatic guide to business strategies for dealing with this set of social changes, Groundswell delivers. But in doing so, I wish it had taken more time to step outside the framing of this social change as a kind of natural consequence of the inevitable march of technology and understand the set of changes themselves in greater detail.

Disclosures: Forrester sent me a review copy of the book, as they did to a number of bloggers. Optaros co-sponsored a webinar with Josh Bernoff earlier this year on the topic of open innovation. Several of the companies discussed as case studies are or have been Optaros clients, though Optaros was not involved in any of the specific projects described. Swisscom Mobile Labs, an Optaros client project, was a finalist in the groundswell awards. Optaros is a Forrester client. I know a number of people who work there or have worked there.

Clay’s long been a favorite speaker of mine – Perl as an act of love and the cognitive surplus being two other videos featured here – and Chris does a great interview here.

My favorite quote, as you might suspect given the tagline of this blog: “Things are going to get wierder before they get saner.” We’re in the midst of a long transformation – we’ve left point A but point B won’t be clear for some time.

There’s Jonathan Zittrain‘s new book, The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. (In addition to buying a print copy, you can download the pdf version under creative commons license). Presenting on that book, there’s video of Zittrain at Princeton on March 26th, at ISOC-NY on April 11th, and at the Berkman Center the following week. You can also read and comment on the book.

Finally, via Biella Coleman I found this fascinating video from an event April 16th (between the above two videos), from a meeting of the NY Chapter of the Internet Society, talking about “The Futures of the Internet.” The discussion was sponsored by the NYU Information Law Institute, Free Culture @ NYU, and ISOC-NY. (Shirky’s presentation is on the same cognitive surplus theme from his web 2.0 expo keynote I recently blogged about).

The Panelists:

• Clay Shirky, Author: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Adjunct Professor, NYU ITP
• Tim Wu, Author: Who Controls The Internet?, Professor, Columbia Law School
• Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, Rhizome
• Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia and Wikia
• Jonathan Zittrain, Author: The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It, Professor, Oxford University; Visiting Professor, NYU Law,

It’s a lengthy video (1 hour 30 minutes), so I recommend downloading a version and getting comfortable to watch it. But if you’re interested in generativity, free culture, online communities, geek culture, mass collaboration, and the larger questions of the internet-as-public-sphere, it’s well worth it.

Once you’ve watched it, go read Biella’s blog post which raises the question she also asked in the video about the depth of political consciousness in “geek culture” generally and free software communities like Debian in particular, as well as the comment thread following it.

I can’t help but relate the discussion also to ROFLCon, and what I perceived as an unfortunate lack of critical and political framing to the discussion there (with some notable exceptions). Don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of LOLCats and potentially subversive power of humor. But what kind of culture do we hope we’re collectively creating on the ‘net?

One attraction of the internet can be how unlike the offline world it is – but as the line between online communities and “real world” communities blurs (as more and more offline groups and communities become digitally enabled, and more and more online communities develop offline manifestations) do we risk losing the generative freedom the internet has made possible in the last decade?

As we move in the direction of cloud-based and hosted computing platforms like Google App Engine, Amazon EC2, or even the Facebook API and Open Social, do we put at risk the basic freedoms the FSF is organized to fight in support of?

There’s a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln that the best way to predict the future is to create it – so what are we collectively doing to create the future of the internet that preserves its progressive and liberational aspects?

Now (via LaughingSquid) you can watch the video. It’s Clay Shirky’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, on the “cognitive surplus” as a characteristic fueling mass collaboration.

Interestingly, this seems to break my facebook app. No longer resizes the iframe to the right size? Something is trying to call location.toString() and getting denied – my guess is that Blip.tv is trying to track where the video was embedded and facebook doesn’t allow apps inside iframes to access parent location.

You can see all the Web 2.0 Expo videos at Blip.tv or put this rss url into Miro and get a channel: http://web2expo.blip.tv/rss

As you might imagine, Colbert has some difficulty with the “who is paying them?” notion.

Good fun for a Friday afternoon.