In case you were looking for the lighter side of the State of the Union, you've come to the right place. Sonal and Deanna, while eating pie and playing this drinking game, are here for your entertainment. We'll kick things off around 8pm or so… maybe closer to 8:30 once we figure out the pie situation.
This was shot in June 2009 in Toronto for GetInvolved. It was a really fun conversation with the producers… I talk about free-for-all organizing, how influence is changing, the importance of authenticity–and I start the first Twitter Anon meeting, to boot.
Some more thoughts on my previous post, and a couple of things to clear up. Two misconceptions arose from my post because I chose not to lay out a lot exposition on some of my own beliefs on how the world works. Let me rectify that now.
A post from Internet analyst/author/smart-person Clay Shirky titled "A Rant About Women" has got quite the discussion going around the Intertubes. Read (or at least skim) it before continuing; let me also take this introductory opportunity to do the obligatory feminist thing and thank the dude for taking time out of his busy schedule to wrestle with the giant questions of why don't women do as well as men at X. Here it comes… thank you. OK, so I'm being a wee bit sarcastic, but seriously: it really is nice to see these conversations happen outside of the usual suspected fora of listservs, blogs, etc, all for and by the ladies.
Much of the resulting discussion has been a bit heavy-handed on both sides– "OMG, he's totally right!" "OMG, he's totally wrong!" Some great points have already been well covered by others, especially Jezebel blogger Anna's point that women aren't allowed culturally to be the aggressive jerks that successful men are. This was also the place where I had the most visceral reaction — the conclusion that we need to teach women to be more like men: more assertive and aggressive, demanding of what they want and need. This approach to solving the "where are teh womenz" problem misses the mark in a way that 70s & 80s power feminism also missed the mark for me. The "we're just as good as men" statements and subsequent actions set the wrong frame. It assumes:
The devastation that Haiti is facing after the earthquakes and aftershocks from yesterday is flooring. That a country already so hard hit by utter economic and political distress could be nailed with such a fierce disaster is emotionally wrenching for many of us. And lately, when we're hard hit, we take to social networks to work out our pain and find a way to manage it.
There are several opportunities we have at hand, and before I run off to a morning meeting, I wanted to address some of the ups and downs of dealing with disasters via technologies. The biggest thing we need to be aware of right now is the role our own egos play in these situations. We have a desperate need to feel useful in situations that make us feel helpless, and the ease with which we can share our thoughts and stories amplifies ways we think we're being helpful when we're dealing with emotionally charged material. We need to be aware of our impulses and sort out what's good and what's not so good. Here's my take:
Getting the word out, the good stuff. People have been passing along word from the Red Cross, Mercy Corps, Yele and other organizations on easy and fast ways to donate money to relief efforts– especially via txt message. You can send a text message on your phone, for example, to 90999 with the word HAITI, and that will donate $10 to the RedCross' fund. The charge will appear on your next phone bill.
The abilitiy to read and see news coming from inside Haiti via everyday people, like many other situations recently, is also fascinating, and incredibly powerful. We aren't reliant on potentially corrupt or broken information structures (like government news agencies, for example) to find out what's happening in real time.
Getting the word out, the challenging stuff. The other side of the ability to share information quickly and easily is that the potential for the spread of misinformation is high. We aren't physiologically equipped to deal with highly charged situations via new technologies, in many cases– our brains are built to rely on a variety of cues to filter and respond, and those cues are often missing when reading updates on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.
Because we've established trust with the people that we communicate with online, we automatically assign that trust, or authority, over to situations that don't necessarily warrant it. Because I generally trust my friends to post smart/thoughtful things, the urge to repost what seems like important information from them in times of crisis without verifying it first is high. We have to change this behavior, and look for ways to establish authority of sources (without falling back on old models of only giving institutions like news orgs and governments the authority) and to verify what we share before doing so.
I wrote about this a whole bunch in Share This!, and I'm going to post those sections this afternoon when I return. Stay tuned…
UPDATE: The relevant sections from the book are now up. Start with "Stop, Drop and … Think."
On Saturday, I gave a the closing keynote talk at Organizing 2.0 here in NYC, a one-day conference designed to bring together labor folks, community organizers and netroots people to work on strategies for integrating online and offline organizing. A fun time was had by all! Here's the video (thank you, Sum of Change!), and below are my notes from the talk.
As I mentioned on Twitter, it's just getting too hard for many of us to keep track of all the awesome conferences that happen every year. I've missed so many this fall, even ones happening in NYC, just because I hadn't done any curation. Conferences can be a drag, but as a freelancer/consultant/author without a formal organizational structure, they're often where I make the best connections and have the most fun with my colleagues.
So! An early New Year's resolution: I'm gonna try to get on the ball for next year. Already thinking of SXSW, Allied Media Conference, US Social Forum, Personal Democracy Forum, Women Who Tech, America's Future Now, NonProfit 2.0, NTEN and more; what do you recommend in the social tech, media, politics, activism, and social justice fields? Conferences & unconferences, big 'n' small. Leave 'em in the comments (links to conferences would be helpful), and I'll publish a big list in the next few days.
In case you were looking for the lighter side of the State of the Union, you've come to the right place. Sonal and Deanna, while eating pie and playing this drinking game, are here for your entertainment. We'll kick things off around 8pm or so… maybe closer to 8:30 once we figure out the pie situation.
