It’s the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment today, where women voting in the US finally became legal. A tweet by the Women’s Media Center asked if anyone else got irritated by the phrase, “Women were given the right to vote.” And then a number of people responded yes, they were irritated, because it wasn’t given to them, women won the right to vote.
Both of these frames are problematic. It’s challenging to articulate exactly why, but I’m going to give it my best shot–because language has evolved within the same power structures we seek to tear down, we don’t always have the words to describe the problem.
Human rights within both frames are treated as a commodity that is traded. This is based on our market understanding of what we do with commodities: we accumulate, we spend, we give, we win, we lose. But if we really believe that certain rights are inalienable to humans, we can’t and shouldn’t commodify them. By doing so we support a power structure where rights are doled out and taken away at the whims of the dominant paradigm.
It also, in a deeper metaphorical sense, suggests that women aren’t necessarily fully human– they must be given the right to vote, or they must fight and win it for themselves. It’s not assumed that women would naturally vote in the grand scheme of things. We think so now (mostly), but if we continue to use this language, we support the antiquated structures that keep women from being recognized fully as humans.
If you’re into this kind of thing, by the way, and have the patience for heavy academic text, I highly recommend Women, Fire & Dangerous Things by George Lakoff. There’s a section called “Anger, Lust & Rape” that is truly disturbingly insightful as to how unraveling language can reveal our darkest cultural secrets. I’ll see if I can get in touch with George and post the piece here.
Based on the feedback I received on the fabulous panel I moderated at Netroots Nation 2010 (“So You Wanna Change the World: How to Rock on Social Networks“), I decided to share my process for putting together a panel that will knock participants’ socks off. I’ve been the victim of too many snoozy, self-aggrandizing panels to let that happen on anything I put together, and I’d love to see no one ever have that kind of conference experience ever again.
We’ve been together a long time. I still remember so clearly holding my shiny red Pearl in my hands for the first time. It glistened with promise, way back then. It was the summer of 2007.
I was a late adopter (to my fellow geeks, anyway) for a smartphone. For the longest time, I kept my Type-A-like behavior in the digital world in check by not having a device that I could get email on, or surf around on. Finally I caved, and I was thrilled with my little guy. It did everything I needed. A little over a year later, I decided it was time to move on to something bigger, and I bought a Blackberry Bold the day they came out in late 2008.
Conceptually, encouraging dominant cultures to divesify is fabulous –I subscribe to the DNA model of ecosystems and social spaces, so I support it wholeheartedly. As I’ve said in my book and recent talks:
Last night I was poking around the socnets before going to bed, and saw that Beth Kanter had posted a link to Fast Company’s “Influence Project.” I’m keenly interested in ways to measure influence as part of the research fellowship I have with the Center for Social Media at American University, so naturally I was intrigued and signed up. It took me a while to suss out what they’re actually doing. While they recognize that influence isn’t about numbers of followers or fans, this is how they measure:
The scale of your influence, and therefore the size of your photo, is based on two measures.
1. The number of people who directly click on your unique URL link. This is the primary measure of your influence, pure and simple.
2. You will receive partial “credit” for subsequent clicks generated by those who register as a result of your URL. In other words, anyone who comes to the site through your link and registers for their own account will be spreading your influence while they spread theirs. That way, you get some benefit from influencing people who are influential themselves. We will give a diminishing, fractional credit (1/2, ¼, 1/8 etc ) for clicks generated up to six degrees away from your original link.
Hmmmmm.
What I find problematic: It’s still in many ways a popularity contest. Someone with a lot of time on their hands could launch a campaign to focus on generating as many clicks as possible, which would certainly skew the measurements of that person’s true influence– if they’re not actively campaigning, how much are people actually clicking on their links?
Plus there’s the problem of the power law in this case–early popular adopters are going to rise to the top faster than later adopters and benefit the most from the Amway-like pyramid scheme of click benefits.
There’s no good measurement for influence right now. Part of that’s because there’s a Pandora’s box of factors to consider. I may be influential in recommending information about social networks or dog behavior, but completely ineffectual at recommending solid information on the cultures of Lower Slobbovia. Which measure of influence is important? Do we take a mean number of some kind to represent my overall influence in the world? If we did, how much weight should my recommendations on Lower Slobbovia play?
I know people are desperate to have quantitative metrics when it comes to social media, especially when thinking about ROI. I don’t want to see us falling back on paradigms that we’re used to, though, because they’re now becoming outdated and useless. Here’s a smidge of how I address this in Share This!, from the section “Avoiding the Newest Numbers Trap” in Chapter 4:
Someday, maybe even while this book is being printed, my dream of having an application that shows me “interestingness” in the social network sphere will come true. Flickr has this for photographs: There is an algorithm based on “[w]here the click-throughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.” The best part? Interestingness itself, then, is constantly changing, based on these shifting variables, so there’s a good chance of finding both something new and something surprising when one goes spelunking through Flickr’s massive collection of interesting photos.
I’m not going to lie to you: This great shift in authority isn’t the easiest part of social networking’s brave new world to navigate. The tools give us tremendous power to change the culture around us, but they’re new, and our behavior and impressions are still based on operating within a hyper-capitalist-focused, hierarchical mindset. We have a lot of work to do on freeing our minds before the rest of our bits will follow.
Surprisingly, though, the uncertainty of the future of social networking tools is also the good news: Things are still shaking out, and we’re in a position to determine whether the reordering of authority will benefit people who previously did not have the access or the means to make their voices heard. Armed with a fundamental understanding of what’s taking place (by, ahem, reading good books on the subject), you’re primed to make the most of change.
Thanks to Facebook’s latest round of privacy silliness, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to loads of media outlets on the topic, as well as the future of social networking. Here are a few:
June is a wild rollercoaster ride of talks and workshops that I’m giving, and I wanted to make sure folks know about the wonderful conferences I’m heading to — hopefully I’ll see you there!
June 3-4: Personal Democracy Forum, New York City. This is one of my favorite conferences all year because it’s one of the few that blend many worlds well together: Technology, electoral politics, advocacy politics and cultural analysis. I’m giving a 10-minute talk on Thursday, June 3, that will (definitively!) answer the question: “Can the Internet fix politics?” Muwahaha. Other luminaries on the speaking roster include Howard Rheingold, Clay Shirky, Cheryl Contee, Jane Hamsher, Arianna Huffington, Esther Dyson, Anil Dash and many, many more. Register today — I’ve got a code to give you $100 off the registration; just email me and ask for it.
June 7-9: America’s Future Now, Washington DC. A yearly pilgramage to DC for progressives, where we talk strategy and tactics for challenging the right-wing agenda. I’ll be moderating a workshop on Tuesday morning, June 8, on social networking with Toby Chaudhuri, and we’ve actually turned it into a gameshow format: Social Media Jeopardy! Contestants will be Lizz Winstead, Garlin Gilchrist II, Scott Goodstein and Heather Holdridge. Also, Monday night, June 7, will see the DC launch of my book, thanks to Toby and Scott of Revolution Messaging, who are throwing me a killer party. Wooooo! Register today for all the goods.
June 9-11: Making Media Connections, Chicago, IL. I’m thrilled to be keynoting this gathering of non-profit communicators, put together by the Community Media Workshop. This year’s theme is “Storytelling and Strategy in the Digital Age,” which hits home strong for me– it’s through our stories that we have always made change, and our shiny new digital tools give us unprecedented capabilities to tell them. Register today for this amazing conference. (PS — That Friday night, June 11, I’ll be reading at Women & Children First, and having a party afterwards nearby.)
We’ve been together a long time. I still remember so clearly holding my shiny red Pearl in my hands for the first time. It glistened with promise, way back then. It was the summer of 2007.
