“You Can’t Tweet That!” Personal Branding and Public Intellectuals

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Lewis Gordon at Truthout argues that the market model of academia has killed the public intellectual.  He argues that market pressures, including heavy competition for limited jobs, and the focus on professional academics as masters of technical and textual knowledge has forced public intellectuals into creating the equivalent of academic literature reviews every time they want to talk about major issues of public interest.  He contrasts this market-driven logic with some of the public intellectuals of the past, who rejected the spoils of faculty positions and prestigious prizes.  He writes:

For many, it’s impossible to imagine intellectuals like Fanon and Sartre as anything short of holier than thou, even though neither of them argued that academics should not have academic pursuits and seek academic rewards. They simply asked for the rest of us not to pretend that the world is somehow better off by our being rewarded for such pursuits and especially so in the most prestigious representations of establishment.

A key pillar of this argument is a critique of fame – or, at the very least, the commoditization of academic fame.  In my office today there was much discussion of how we young academics are expected to maintain a personal brand.  Every tweet, every blog post could be read by future employers or future students, and all must be kept consistent, in content and style, with what we are expected to produce as knowledge workers.  And as social media is time-sensitive, the brand must be maintained at all times.  The reward for maintaining this image is an academic job, as Gordon points out, but it is also fame within the social media sphere.

This is a double-edged sword for anyone who (like me) has aspirations as a public intellectual.  On the one hand, as the Chronicle of Higher Education has pointed out, many factors combine to limit the number of academic posts.  With more competition, productivity becomes important.  So turn off Twitter and stop reading blogs.  Write that article, and ignore the Party on the Internet. But leaving aside the perilous labour conditions and the market-driven environment that might await once one gets the academic post, there’s also the immediate question of how much to engage with the flow of debate rushing through the social media sphere.  To catch the stream, one must maintain a different sort of personal brand – one that depends on constant and high quality participation.

I disagree with Gordon’s claim that it’s essentially impossible to be a true public intellectual under current market conditions.  I think it is possible, but it comes with a heavy pressure of time and participation that doesn’t seem to be well understood or supported by the academy.  How do others negotiate the different demands of academic and advocacy social media worlds?  What goes on the Twitter stream, and what stays off?

Broadband Adoption in Low-Income Communities

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The Social Science Research Council has just released a major report:  Broadband Adoption in Low-Income Communities.  Based on a unique qualitative study of the people traditionally on the margins of the policy-making process (low-income, minority, non-English speaking) it provides a unique view of the barriers to broadband adoption and effective use that remain in the United States.  Some of the core findings:

  • Broadband access is increasingly a requirement of socio-economic inclusion, not an outcome of it—and residents of low-income communities know this.
  • Price is only one factor shaping the fragile equilibrium of home broadband adoption, and price pressures go beyond the obvious challenge of high monthly fees. Hardware costs, hidden fees, billing transparency, quality of service, and availability are major issues for low-income communities.
  • Libraries and other community organizations fill the gap between low home adoption and high community demand, and provide a number of other critical services, such as training and support. These support organizations are under severe pressure to meet community connectivity needs, leading to widespread perceptions of a crisis in the provider community.

A major challenge for public policy makers is understanding how to make decisions about people who are unlike themselves.  In the past, this has meant creating “evidence-based policy” based on polling or survey data.  But now policy-makers are beginning to understand how qualitative research can provide the detail and context they need.  This study shows how this research can contribute to evidence-based policy:  it complements a phone survey commissioned by the FCC.

The Social Media Echo Chamber

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The Pew Internet and American Life project released their findings on young people’s use of social media yesterday. Apparently young people are less likely to use Twitter than adults aged 25-40 (although teenage girls are an exception). They are also less likely to blog. I don’t think that this survey data indicates that young people aren’t engaged in meaningful social life online or elsewhere – youth do lots of socializing online. This finding should remind us that participating in social media is not a unified experience. The relationships that committed Twitterers of a certain age construct (your author included) may be more representative of our age and demographic than indicative of social media itself.

No, what I’m thinking about is along the lines of what Christian Sandvig is working on: these applications are now becoming infrastructures for participation. To understand them, we need to know more about how they are built, how they work, and who controls them. Yes, we want to make things together, and we want to make relationships with people. It’s easier to do this using applications like Facebook Twitter, and YouTube. But this also means creating a relationship with the platform itself. The algorithms to which we’ve delegated the work of connecting and communicating also have agency. We don’t know much about them, in the main. Sometimes, we get a small view into the algorithms of certain systems – this week, I learned more about the School of Everything and how its search and matching

The question of social media use and agency is not just a question of knowing or being able to understand the design process. If different generations or social groups want to relate to each other in different ways, then there’s social interest in understanding how different infrastructures shape and are shaped by those relationships.

I feel that sometimes, the social media world that I’m part of acts like an echo chamber, with the kinds of relationships that “people like me” form getting reproduced by our practices – and perhaps even by our media infrastructures.  We start thinking that social media works a certain way because that’s the way it works for us.  I think it’s critical that research understand both ends of this process – the way systems are designed, and the potentially very different kinds of things that designs make possible, among different kinds of people.  Otherwise we’ll all simply be shouting into our own social media echo chambers.

Evolution, Innovation, and Ethics

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I took my sweetie to London’s best holiday nerdfest last night – Robin Ince’s 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People.  It was a three-hour celebration of the wonders and beauties that science can reveal – along with lots of hilarious British standup comedy.  Throughout, there was lots of emphasis on the role of evolution in creating fantastically complex organisms – and societies.  But there was something bittersweet, to me, about celebrating how much our society has evolved, especially in the wake of the disastrous lack of results from Copenhagen.

Yes, our society has evolved and created astonishing innovations like the computer I’m using to write this, and the network that ensures all of you can read it.  The internal combustion engine, in particular, has facilitated extraordinary developments in transportation, commerce, health and well-being.

But such development comes with consequences, as we now know.  Our evolved intelligence has got us into this mess, and now must get us out of it.  Unfortunately, much of society is now in thrall to a particularly well-evolved form of self-interested greed.  The policy debates about how to respond to climate change illustrate this well:  everyone agrees that something must be done, the conclusive data is building up, but there is hesitation.  Why?  In many cases, because agreeing to collectively solve a problem interferes with the pursuit of individual gains – a pursuit so well supported by today’s capitalism.

Luckily, we have also evolved an ethics of collective action.  Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning work explains that societies have also evolved innovative ways of sharing resources to avoid the “tragedy of the commons.”  As the pressure to define ourselves as self-interested consumers mounts in this holiday shopping week, it’s important to remember what else our society has evolved:  ethics, compassion, and a sense of the collective good.

Happy holidays – I’m off to slow down and enjoy the snow.

Open ecologies – can open hardware be like open software?

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The growth of the open source software development movement is held up as one of the great successes of a networked world – leaving source code open is associated with global-scale participation in software development and open-source products that are now central to the technology industry.  This has in turn inspired calls for opening up other “closed” processes – government, education, knowledge (like Wikipedia).   There’s now talk of a global “open everything” movement.

But as Steven Weber explains, there are some specific elements to open-source development.  First, that open code is a way of providing easily modifiable basic tools that can be customized to solve a whole set of different problems.  This is one key to the success of open source – it’s the utility of the source code that’s available, and ability to modify it.  So my friend who is working on a totally bespoke database can draw elements of source code from other databases built by others, even if those other products have little to do with what he’s making.  Weber’s second element is that open-source is based on principles and values rather than efficiency.

Given these key elements, can we expect to produce “open everything’?  Under what circumstances does an open-source model translate outside of software?  To investigate this I’ve started watching the nascent movement towards open hardware development.  Of course, hardware is a physical product with manufacturing costs.  But if we think the design and production process, there are some clear opportunities to create an open source production ecology.

First, hardware designs are not material objects.  They are, like software, intellectual products.  Currently, most hardware production is based on patented designs.  But hardware hackers (or hobbyists) can upload, view and download designs at OpenCores, which also allows would-be manufacturers to produce prototypes of their chip designs.  Second, the realms of software and hardware are converging.  The cost of developing software-controlled chipsets is dropping, with the major cost now being the software development itself.

The larger issue is how to grow an open source development and production ecology.  In software development, one aspect of this ecology is the licensing framework, which identifies free software and makes using source code conditional on releasing any subsequent source code.  How could this happen in the hardware world?  How would a prospective hardware (re)designer know that the amazing mobile widget she/he was holding had an open design?
The solution, according to a nascent coalition called the Open Hardware and Design Alliance (OHANDA – watch this space) would be to develop a trademark sticker, to identify a piece of open hardware. The sticker would include a registration key, pointing to a design held in a repository somewhere.  Then that design could be reused.

This potential intervention raises some interesting questions about “open everything.”  How do open ecosystems grow?  How modular do the “open” elements have to be?  (it would be obviously more valuable to have a few, easy-to-use open hardware models than one design that’s difficult to reuse).  And finally, what are the defining values of openness?  OHANDA may provide some important lessons.

Internet Governance Forum: Freedom and openness (UPDATED)

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In the desert, the mountains hover in the distance.  Sun glances and taxis arrive at the gates of the conference center.  Getting from outside to inside means going through security cordons, police checks, metal detectors.

Inside, discussions balance freedom and openness.  There is no necessary consensus:  freedom and openness can mean different things to different people.  We want to secure human rights on the internet – we want to make the media that happens there as independent as possible.  We have the same conversation as we did before, we talk about technology having values, and attempt to make those values as universal as possible.  It’s not easy, and not everyone agrees.

Internet governance is a process, and unlike the IETF or ICANN, we use the time to disagree, to discuss.  This is a great opportunity to talk about the process that we followed at Oxford bringing together free speech and child protection advocates.  The same process applied, and the results were very positive.

Except sometimes the perspective of multi-stakeholder process is rattled by misunderstanding.  I had dinner the other night with a group of folks from the Open Net Initiative who were troubled by their book promotion poster being tossed to the ground by UN security.  This is another issue of balance:  although the book poster mentioned Chinese firewalls the dialogue at these meetings happens in UN space.  No one is allowed to hang posters, no matter what the subject.

This is a delicate process, and it means crossing the cordon at the gate.  Not always easy.

UPDATE:  I’ve talked to more people at the IGF about the poster incident – since I wasn’t there I can’t comment on exactly what occurred.  A few people who were there noted that the disagreement was NOT about commercial posters but about references to China – even though the existence of China’s Great Firewall is not disputed.  Why such a strong response to a statement of fact?   Especially since one of the features I observed at the Forum was healthy disagreement.  It would be deeply problematic for the internet as a global resource if this tolerance were limited.

Research Design The Fun Way

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Last month I had the most amazing experience:  with some superstar colleagues, I designed a qualitative study aimed at understanding why people don’t adopt broadband.  The goal of the study was to understand barriers to broadband adoption, and we thought the best way would be to talk to people about how they communicate and why they choose to use some technologies and not others.

I’ll write more specifics about the study later, but I wanted to reflect on how exciting the research design process was for me, and share some of the reasons I felt it worked well.

Trust

First of all, my colleagues/friends/partners in crime were people I’d known for many years, fellow-travellers in the community wireless world.  But we hadn’t seen each other much since I’d moved to England.  One friend lived close to where we’d be having our full team meetings, and so all of us stayed there.  I’ve heard this called the “couch-surfing theory of participatory research.”  I don’t necessarily think you HAVE to sleep on the couch (or on the floor as we did) to do good research, but it is an excellent way of building trust, which is essential for designing and enacting good social research.

Doing your homework

Our timelines on the project were short.  Before I arrived to sleep on the couch, we had about a week to prepare.  Everyone did their homework.  We called people who had done similar studies, talked to various members of the wider team to see what they wanted to know about, and researched the funding stream that was supporting the study so we could understand what values were at play.

Trust (again) and the Efficiency of In-person Meetings

After a week of telephone calls and brainstorming, we met for a head-to-head with the entire research team.  Like sleeping on the couch, it made a big difference to be in the same room as the people we were working with – especially since some of them we hadn’t met before.  Yes, we could have done the work by video-conference, but in cases when there are big ideas at stake, and a big team of different types of personalities, meeting in person saves more time and builds more trust.  The meeting also contained what I think of as exemplary research design practices, including:

  • careful listening for requirements and for philosophical perspectives: “I believe this is important, so can we make sure that we think about it?”
  • flexibility, and core commitments:  “This is what we are really interested in, but we know that we might not find it if we ask directly”
  • productive disagreement “this could work, but it won’t fit our requirements”
  • iteration “if we ask something more like this, will that help to answer our questions?”
  • triangulation, or looking at things sideways “How about if we turn the question around”

Living-room floor categorization (The Big Picture)

The day after the full meeting, our smaller team spent the day rearranging the flipchart sheets we’d produced in the meeting, overlapping them in various ways on my colleague’s living room floor.  Photographic evidence exists of me doing “research yoga” – adding a sheet of paper to the arrangement that later became our main analytical framework.  My own living room isn’t big enough for this kind of research practice, but a big table and index cards will do; so that you can see the entire schema in one shot.

Take a Break

After all this intense work of brainstorming, finding field sites and establishing analytical categories, we all needed a break.  We took a day off.  The next day our brains were much sharper and clearer.

Tea and Peer Review

The next day, before I flew home, we met another colleague for tea and ran some of our field strategies and analytical categories by her.  Since she hadn’t been consumed with moving around our sheets-of-paper categories, she had some excellent suggestions on where there were gaps in the questions we planned on asking, as well as some creative research strategies.  We integrated what seemed to make sense, and then

Have a Beer

We relaxed!

Sadly, I couldn’t help with conducting the fieldwork.  My colleagues are out in the field now, and I’m sure they are accumulating lots of other great insights on doing high quality social science research – the fun way.

Working mothers – healthy or dangerous?

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The Institute of Child Health at University College London has released a study that indicates that single children whose mothers work outside the home don’t eat as many fruits and vegetables, watch more TV, and are more likely to be driven to school than to walk.  The media has pounced – stories about the terrible difficulty of being a “working mum,” especially when the consequences are so dire.

It’s interesting to take this study in the context of another ICH study that the BBC reported in 2006 – that the same women who work outside the home are healthier than those who stay at home. What’s happening here?  Are women taking better care of themselves while (shock) letting their children drink fizzy drinks?  Or is something more complicated happening?  The 2006 study suggested that a balanced life of parenthood, work, and partnership is healthy for women.  Maybe a similar balance is healthy for children?  The conclusion of the 2009 study, which the BBC didn’t seem to report in as much detail, was that public child care needs – which is still difficult to find in the UK, and often of poor quality – should be improved, and include better food and exercise opportunities.

Of course, both of these studies are based on what seems to me to be an especially British (and pretty old-fashioned) assumption that mothers are the de facto child carers.  Wake up, UK parents – dads can stay home – and kids taken care of by neighbours, friends, and day care workers can grow up healthy and happy too.

Uses of Twitter – how to go to a conference when you’re home sick

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I was toying with the idea of going to the Oxford Social Media Convention when the dreaded Autumn Headcold struck.   I succeeded in slinking back to London and collapsing on the couch, and this morning staying upright during a Skype conference.  So how to participate in the conference without being there?

Thank you, Twitter and hashtag #oxsmc09 – I’ve had questions asked and answered, and started conversations with attendees and generally got the snarky backchannel on the panel discussions (which is the real fun at conferences).

All without any of you having to hear me cough.

Hacking the City – redux

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I was delighted to read that the Personal Democracy Forum’s 2009 Conference (twitter slurp here) includes a Birds of a Feather meetup on the topic of “Hacking the City.”  I first heard community technologists use this phrase in 2005, when Mike wrote a post about how community Wi-Fi is a way of hacking the social space of cities.  What he was referring to was the way that community interventions in provision of communications infrastructure could change how people socialized – since so much of our interactions are mediated by various types of networks.

But “hacking the city” like so many good ideas, has taken on another life.  It’s now used to describe how networked technologies can be harnessed so that citizens can take action in their own cities. There’s DIYCity.org, where volunteers in cities around the world build open source tools and advocate for open data , New York City’s The Open Planning Project (who advocate for open source software in government, and run several citizen-participation blogs) and MySociety’s  FixMyStreet, which features maps where my neighours have flagged two instances of fly-tipping and two piles of dog poo within 1 km of my house.

After doing some work this year about other types of digital activism, I’m returning this summer to thinking about the politics of local networks – it’s time, and furthermore it matters!  Can anyone think of other good examples of hacking the city?

UPDATE:  Exciting!  Personal Democracy Forum Europe in Barcelona in November.