Freedom of Information Act(ion)
(pre-copyedit version)
Information, to some degree, has been released from hierarchical constraints.
The old way of doing things involved a fairly complex hierarchy, one that many of you are probably (painfully) familiar with. We can simplify that hierarchy into a pyramid shape for the purposes of this discussion:
At the bottom of the food chain, there were the everyday people. You and me. We've all got connections and relationships, but to get anything significant done in the world, it's helpful to be connected to people higher up in the hierarchy. But of course, very few people are.
In the middle, there is a conglomeration of folks with more influence and power — some journalists, mid-level politicians, sizeable business owners, as well as advocacy organizations and some labor unions. In the media subset, journalists are pressured and pitched by folks both above and below, and the stories that result (or don't) are not always fair or comprehensive.
Everyday folks can organize and push up onto bigger levels to get their stories told. Working on their own (less effective) or in groups (the more the merrier), people can petition, write letters to the editor, make calls and use online tools to make their voices heard. It's a constant struggle, this pushing up, and invariably some voices don't make the cut.
In the upper echelons, you'll find the bigger decision-makers and power brokers. High-level politicians, media moguls — pretty much anyone who can issue any kind of mandate. They're giving directives to the folks in the middle about what the folks at the bottom want to hear. It's like a giant pyramid with information traveling upwards, slowing to a trickle as it gets to the top. Then, because it's mostly a broadcast medium, it's released from the top, headed downwards, a constant, fast-moving flood.
Of course, information is also shared laterally — passed via word of mouth within and sometimes between levels. But for the most part, our mass communications have operated for centuries within a pretty rigid pyramid structure.
While it may still be desirable at times, it’s now no longer as necessary to play the pyramid game of top-down-bottom-up. To return to the soap bubble metaphor, it's much more about sharing within networks and connecting to new folks who share your interests. Social media tools make it wonderfully easy to do just that.
Already we've seen cases in which everyday people have used the relationships they've fostered on social networks to do good. In the summer of 2009, for example, Palm Beach County schools announced a controversial new academic program that centralized authority over teaching programs and increased the emphasis on standardized tests. Parents throughout the school system were upset with the changes. Soon after the announcement, a substitute teacher and parent named Lisa Goldman started a Facebook page called "Testing Is Not Teaching" for people in the community to come together and share information and action ideas.
After a critical school board meeting, the group ballooned to over a thousand members, and after just five weeks in existence, it had expanded to over six thousand members. Several months into the fight, school administrators agreed to meet with members of the group, and in October 2009, the superintendant of the school system agreed to let individual principals of schools decide which parts of the plan they would adopt. Goldman and a co-manager continue to press on for the reversal of the program.
Goldman and her group didn't have to rely solely on traditional modes of getting the word out about their issue, or spend as much time offline organizing their fellow parents. They were able to tap into existing relationships and social networks (Goldman cites the strength of the relationships between mothers in the community in particular) quickly and effectively through Facebook.
Advocacy and messaging in the social networking sphere is less about broadcasting to a billion people with the hope that a few care about the information they're receiving, and more about targeting a smaller yet more invested number of concerned individuals and letting them share the information they're concerned about with their own networks.
