Hindsight is 20/20

I just want to clarify that when I talk about increasing participation, I mean both ways: the government gives/shares information or asks for input from the public, and the public shares ideas, comments, or complaints with the government.

Continuing with the question, how do we increase participation in open government, I decided to take a look back at history.  The fist thing that came to mind was FDR's fireside chats.  I found out these actually started when Roosevelt was governor of New York, and he often used them to ask for help to get his proposed measures passed.  The public then wrote letters to the legislation in support of these measures.  As President, he gave a regular address over the radio to reassure the public during the Great Depression and WWII.  I didn't realize that since then there has been a regular address by the president.  Obama has moved from a weekly radio broadcast to an audio and video form available online on YouTube and whitehouse.gov.  In this case, Roosevelt increased the federal output of information and reached a wide audience.

I think another example is the civil rights movement.  African Americans wanted to have their voting rights restored and to have a more equal society.  Through non-violent protests they added their voices to the conversation.  Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech was televised and had a huge effect on the nation.  Civilians don't always have to share their ideas through technological advancements, however.  The Montgomery bus boycotts sent a message to the government just as much as the televised march on Washington.  When the public are unable to give their voice (such as when there is discrimination or limited suffrage), they will find a way to be heard.

So, it seems that the government must use a medium that the public uses (President Roosevelt used the radio, which was a common means of communication in his day, while President Obama has moved to the internet), and the public must get their message across in a way that is noticeable.  One example of this is the recent Kony 2012 video.  Although controversial, it is certainly getting a lot of attention.  If the government is to reach the entire nation, it must communicate through a medium that everyone uses.  That means it can't limit itself to only google+ or only Facebook.  And the public needs an easy way to share ideas with the government or they will have to resort to more drastic means. 

All in all, we need something universal: something everyone can access to receive and share information.  The only trick is to maintain individualism at the same time.

Of the people, by the people, for the people.

I am almost hesitant to quote Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address because it is to beautiful it feels irreverent to use it in a blog about digital communication, but the other part of me loves it so much that I can't resist quoting it.  So, for a moment forget the subject of this blog and just think of the significance of these words.  Lincoln said in this address that the men that had fought and died at Gettysburg had already dedicated that ground, and all that he and the rest of America could do was increase their "devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Lincoln, more than anything, was dedicated to the American cause: "A new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."  He could not allow that nation, that experiment in democracy, to fall.

Here's where I shift to digital civilization and feel irreverent.  If indeed our government is of the people, by the people, for the people, we need to ensure that the people are involved in the government.  We need all of our citizens to be well-informed and to participate.  We may not be engaged in a great civil war, but if our civilians are not involved in the government, our nation isn't truly democratic, and the American experiment fails.

Open government means citizens have the right to have access to the governmental process, including documents and proceedings.  Furthermore, in my opinion, it means the citizens should be able to comment and participate in government processes with ease.  whitehouse.gov/open is the White House's official website, and it has a blog on open government, and also a link where citizens can create and sign petitions.  There's also a link to challenge.gov, which calls itself, "The central platform for crowdsourcing US government challenges, contests, competitions and open innovation prizes."  Basically, government agencies can ask for submissions/solutions to challenges/problems and the public can give their ideas.  Unfortunately, as far as I have seen very few people actually use the site.

This is a general problem.  Although government officials are taking steps towards openness, the public is not participating.  Another example is President Obama's hangout on google+ and weekly reports, akin to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats.  Although this is a great example of openness and connecting with the nation, you need to have access to these hangouts and reports.  I didn't even know how to find these and I have a google+ account.  Once again it goes back to the digital divide.  Even those who have internet access may not have all the resources they need to truly participate in open government.

So, if we're to have a government of the people, by the people, for the people we need to find a find a way to get the word out and help everyone in the nation get in on the online conversation.  Perhaps this means advertising on billboards, magazines or newspapers in order to get those who are not participating online to go online.  Or, maybe we should offer classes in public schools and in community programs to help those who don't know how to use internet resources to become familiar and comfortable with using them.

Whatever we do, we need to reach everyone, not just a few people.  Democracy includes everyone.

The Master Switch

I just started reading The Master Switch by Tim Wu and I'm already really excited about it.  Wu explains in the introduction his idea of "the Cycle."  Basically, throughout the 20th Century, new information technologies were created and a utopian, optimistic view of how the innovation could affect the future follows. 

After a while, the flaws and limitations of the invention are revealed, and consumers are disappointed.  A mogul then comes along and takes control, improving but also monopolizing the industry.  This happened with AT&T with the telephone industry, NBC and CBS with radio broadcasting, Hollywood studios with film, and others.  Often government organizations aided in this monopolization, like the Federal Communications Commission helped NBC and CBS shape the television industry.

Over time, however, these monopolies are broken up.  It can be caused by a new innovation coming along, or, ironically, by the federal government which had actually aided in centralizing the industry.  The internet is a huge example of an innovation that disrupted several industries, opening up communication lines that had been closed and controlled for so long.

When you control the mail, you control... INFORMATION!

Unfortunately, the Cycle inevitably restarts with whatever innovation it was that decentralized communication.  Wu points out AT&T's uncanny ability to come back again and again and monopolize new industries.  No matter how amazing or promising the invention, information technologies always get caught up in the Cycle and someone takes sole, or nearly sole charge of it.  And those who own the industries control information.  Wu quotes Fred Friendly of CBS and says, "Before any question of free speech comes the question of 'who controls the master switch.'"  Wu further explains, "We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard."

Wu's concern is that the internet as we know it, open and wild and full of free speech, will eventually fall into this same Cycle.  If one corporation has control of the internet, the information we consume will be filtered.  He states, "It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to."  By the way, I just want to point out that that totally goes along with my Tweethis.  Anyway, when there's a monopoly on a communication industry, the consumers will have their minds changed due to the information they are given.  We need a decentralized, open internet to allow people to get the truth.  Otherwise, the person who controls the master switch will also control our society because they will control our information and therefore what we think.

I'm a little more accepting of openness now.

The Cultural Control Gap

Let's step back in time 12 years.  It's the beginning of Web 2.0.  Blogs, wikis, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and other interactive webpages started coming into existence.  How old were you?  It's actually a really important question.  The older you were, the less likely it is you have since taken advantage of such sites.

That statement of course doesn't apply to everyone.  There are many older people who use Web 2.0, and there are many younger people who don't.  But I believe if you were under a certain age when the internet became more open, you are probably more open now.  We see it very commonly in society.  The younger generation shares more online than earlier generations.  It's because they grew up in a world where openness was prevalent.  Those who didn't grow up with the ability to share information so easily would probably be more wary of so much of their private life being broadcast in the public sphere.

This goes back to my tweethis.  Culture is reflected in and created by the technology we use.  Web 2.0 increased connectivity, participation, and openness, and the young people who grew up with it are so used to it, it's part of their way of thinking.  It has created their culture.  On the other hand, those who didn't grow up with this technology may shrink away from it, or try to exert more control.  They wish to protect themselves online, and they may put up more safeguards to prevent their information from being accessed.  The younger generation enjoys the openness and often doesn't see the danger in it.

In the end, we can have two extremes: those who share too much, and those who don't participate due to fear.  We also, of course, have those in the middle who have learned to connect while still sensibly controlling the amount of information shared.  This moderate middle is what we have to shoot for.  Our culture is rapidly becoming more and more open, and we need to participate in order to keep up with it.  However, if we don't keep a check on that openness, we will have problems down the line, personally and perhaps as a nation.  Control doesn't have to mean the absolute power of SOPA.  It's using your common sense about the information you share online.

Understanding Modernism

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, there was a literary/social movement that still influences our culture today.  This was the Modernist movement.  Modernists were all about re-assessing the way we look at the world. 

To fully understand Modernism, we need to know what came beforehand.  I already talked a great deal about the Victorian Era in an earlier post.  In the United States, Realism was the literary style of the latter part of the 19^th Century.  It tried to represent life truthfully.  Mark Twain wrote Regional Realism, in which he spelled words differently to get across a variety of accents from the South.  Realists tried to include many details into their stories, even ones that didn’t really matter in the plot.  Real life has details that don’t mean much, like the design on the rug, how many birds are in the sky, but they are there nonetheless and Realists wanted to include them in stories that were supposed to represent reality.  Many will say Realism is depressing because, in order to be truthful, many Realists felt not every story should be happy, since life isn’t always happy.

Modernism, on the other hand, sought to be even more real than Realism.  The latter had included physical details, but what about the unseen?  What goes on in the human mind is just as real, and perhaps even more so, than the physical world.  Although I disagree with much of Freud’s theories, psychology had a huge effect on Modernism and on literature today.  Writers like William Faulkner represented reality by getting inside the protagonist’s mind.  All five senses were written of, and thought process made its way into literature.  And that means thoughts the way we actually think them.  Thought is not linear or chronological.  One second we can be thinking about dinner and then we’ll remember something we have to do beforehand.  And different people think differently. 

Faulkner wrote a book my dad and I love called As I Lay Dying.  It’s about a family whose mother has just died and they are on their way to bury her body; however, it’s told completely in internal dialogue.  Each chapter is a different family member’s point of view.  Every now and then the characters speak to each other, but the rest of it is only what the character is thinking about.  The youngest son, Vardaman, tries to come to grips with his mother’s death by associating her with a dead fish.  One chapter of his internal dialogue has only one line, “My mother is a fish.”  We might think this Modernist book is a little confusing, but in actuality it is more realistic than many literary works that came before.

While trying to characterize life in a more realistic, psychological way, Modernists also accepted the fact that we can never really represent truth correctly.  A famous painting by a Surrealist/Post-Modern artist, René Magritte, shows a picture of a pipe and underneath in French it reads, “This is not a pipe.”  It’s true.  It is only a painting of one.  And moreover, the word “pipe” itself is just a bunch of letters, which are only scribbles on a page assigned certain values.  Who is to say that this object should be called a “pipe”?  Modernists are often ridiculed for being confusing and meaningless or doesn’t look like anything.  The point isn’t that it’s impressive or even that it looks just like the real thing.  The point is to make you think about the fact that everything we call reality is only how we perceive it.

Many of my friends dislike Modernism all the same, but I think, “If you enjoy contemporary literature, you have to at least appreciate the Modernists, because their influence is still rampant in our culture.”  We would not have the society or literature we have today if it weren’t for the Modernists.  Give me any book told in first-person or third-person omniscient, and I’ll tell you that the author is getting inside the human mind, which the Modernists did more than anyone, and therefore the author is relying on a tradition started by the Modernists.  You may not understand them, but you think just the way the Modernists did.

My Tweethis

As I reach mid-semester, it's time to figure out what my tweethis is for my blog.  Let's look at what each post's main idea has been.

How digitally civilized am I? -- I'm a little behind on the times.
The Renaissance -- Humanism and social networks are studies of who we are as people.
The 17th Century: A Power Struggle -- When there is change (in religion, government, crime, or technology), there is an assertion of control, which must be balanced with openness.
18th Century: The Enlightenment -- The spirit of freedom predominated in the 18th Century due to an open exchange of ideas.
The 19th Century -- The gap between the castes grew larger in this century, just as the digital divide continues to grow today.
20th Century: Change and Decay -- Humans adapted and flourished despite the ravages of one of the worst centuries of mankind.
Redbox: My Epic Journey -- Digital innovations might eventually do away with the need for cash.
Ode to Gutenberg -- Gutenberg's press changed civilization forever.
Open Access: I don't get it -- Open access would certainly increase production and discovery, but it may not be financially possible.
Why do we create? -- The internet increases our ability to create and share more than ever, though the difficulty of getting our work seen remains.
Occupy Wall Street and Peaceful Revolution -- The Occupy Wall Street movement is primarily internet-driven and is similar to the French Revolution in that it is decentralized and unorganized.
Marx's (and Engles') Communist Manifesto -- Marx's and Engles' dream of a class-less system isn't possible in our imperfect world.
Internet Memes: Who we are -- Internet memes have the potential to change society for the better.

I can see several themes running through my posts.  1) Culture is reflected in and created by the technology we use.  2) No matter what disruptive innovations come, humans will adapt.  3) Change is inevitable.  4) Technology is amoral, but the people using it can create moral or immoral products.
 
There are a few other themes, but those are the ones that I think of when I look at the posts as a whole.  I think I like the first one the most.  The Gutenberg press changed civilization forever because it made mass production of information possible, creating a culture of openness and participation.  Eventually this culture led to the production of Web 2.0 which further encourages that culture.  If Americans are lazy (we'll concede that they are for my purposes) is it caused by the many technological advances that allow us to do less and get more, or does our laziness cause us to create these advances so we can get more for less work?  Our culture is reflected in our social networks and internet memes (what we say and do online), but those social networks and internet memes also contribute to our culture (what we do because of the things we see online).

So that's my Tweethis.  Culture is reflected in and created by the technology we use.  I'm excited to keep going with it.