There is change afoot at Change.org. This is a blogging site / portal that I’ve watched with great interest since I first decided to research the health of Community in this digital era. Change.org has a bold name and a mission to match. That’s a lot of pressure. So a few weeks ago, the organization announced the hiring of a new associate editor, Joshua Levy.
Levy will lead — for lack of a better word — dozens of bloggers who can pool their knowledge and opinions to inspire and facilitate change. Says a Wired piece on the hire (the link is immediately above), “The project [asks] a large number of busy people to contribute small chunks of time to volunteer — just as Wikipedia does.” I found the announcement heartening because it implied a new type of leadership.
That announcement coincided with Barack Obama achieving presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee status, a development that some say signals the death of top-down leadership in national political campaigns. Senator Obama’s campaign followed a horizontal, networked organization, while Senator Clinton’s used a more traditional hierarchical leadership style.
Both developments — as signs of a greater tend — give me hope.
Networked Leadership
Call me an optimist. When I was in my 20s, one of my favorite magazines was Utne Reader. Often called the Reader’s Digest of the alternative press, the Utne not only reported on positive social change but devoted precious resources to encouraging it. Significantly, it reported on the digital revolution, but also took a leadership position in exploring how networks can be used to revolutionize both print and activism. The publication’s prized, four-character (UTNE.com) domain name length is evidence of their early and enthusiastic arrival to the web.
The Utne also recognized the problems that Robert Putnam wrote about in Bowling Alone (the title comes from his observation that nearly every form of civic organization has fallen in membership and participation — whereas more people are bowling than 40 years ago, fewer are bowling in leagues).
The magazine’s response was to encourage neighborhood salons, constructed around the then-burgeoning communitarian movement. Utne realized that our nation’s social capital was shrinking, and attempted a crude (and alas, unsustainable) mail-and-fax infrastructure to support these grassroots salons.
I’m an optimist, but experience has taught me to temper it with realism.
Take the experience of watching the Utne-driven salon movement wither and die. Of course, this was before everyone and his brother seems to have clamored online. Perhaps a “real” network will provide the instant connections (not hindered by the U.S. Postal Mail) that were lacking two decades ago. Evidence of this is the vitality of sites like Change.org, and other online social networks that strive to do more with its membership than exchange banalities and wage Mob Warfare.
Exploring The Social Power of Networks
Earlier this month The Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) held its annual conference. Speakers debated, described and otherwise explored an aspect of a community voice that the PDF’s manifesto asserts is growing. Here is an excerpt of that manifesto (emphasis is at the end is mine):
Democracy in America is changing.
A new force, rooted in new tools and practices built on and around the Internet, is rising alongside the old system of capital-intensive broadcast politics.
Today, for almost no money, anyone can be a reporter, a community organizer, an ad-maker, a publisher, a money-raiser, or a leader.
If what they have to say is compelling, it will spread.
The cost of finding like-minded souls, banding together, and speaking to the powerful has dropped to almost zero.
Networked voices are reviving the civic conversation.
By some measures PDF is correct. New York Times editorial writer Nicholas Kristof, in his opinion piece Saving the World in Study Hall, provides some impressive anecdotal evidence that there is hope for us in the Millennial generation (those who were born in the 1980s and ’90s). And I do not doubt that there are individuals and small groups doing amazing things to make this world a better place.
But can this be “scaled?”
There’s a lot of work to be done, and my concern is online efforts are too little and too late.
Also, can this work be quantified, in the same, nearly irrefutable way that Bowling Alone quantified social capital’s depressing decline?
I’d welcome your thoughts.
In the meantime, I do think I have an answer for Bernard Sifry, father of PDF conference co-chair Micah Sifry. His parting question at the event: “How do we build leadership on the internet?” You find leaders who follow Lao Tzu’s advice in his famous Tao Te Ching:
The greatest leaders are never seen, their presence is never felt
Lesser rulers are loved and praised
Lesser still are hated, and obeyed through fear
And the least are despised and ignoredIf you would lead people, trust them to do the right thing
When a leader accomplishes something using the tao
He steps back, moves on to something else
And lets the people praise themselves
Jeff, great piece on the nature of networked leadership…a couple of thoughts…
I agree with the general sense of hope that you feel that is reflected on a larger scale by Obama’s success or the rise of Change.org. While I don’t necessarily agree that it signals the “death of top down leadership,” I do believe it signals the birth of “campaign 2.0” as a viable alternative to traditional campaigning.
I also agree with your sense of skepticism with respect to whether social media and the increased connectivity facilitated by the WWW will, ultimately, make a real difference in society – one that benefits the common good, as I interpret your piece. When efforts in social media that are directed toward the common good seem to be as fleet as a Tweet that gets buried beneath the “banalities” you refer to, it is easy to feel as if it’s all a big game for the participants – jockeying for “social position,” so to speak, with “I have more facebook friends” or “i have more photo albums showing how much fun I have at the bars” being the signs of great accomplishments in this world.
But I think one place where we diverge is with respect to the notion that the efforts that are directed toward the common good are “too little too late.” Whether someone wants to show off their night at the bar with photos, Tweet their way to freedom from an Egyptian jail cell, or wax intellectual on a friend’s blog comments (!!??), the fact that we have the choice to engage in banalities or take part in social movements, on top of the choice of whether to do so with others or alone, is what really counts.
Those who emerge as networked leaders are those who look past the irrational exuberance of the social graph and realize that for every “line” connecting one person to another, that same line is a reminder of the real space between us when it comes to socializing on the web. How real can our relationships be if we continually rely on computers to validate, or in the parlance of FB “confirm,” their meaning/role in our lives? Networked leaders, such as Obama, realize that a campaign, ironically a word that comes from the military lexicon, is required if real benefit to the common good is to be made through the movement of populations. Networked leaders are not content to have more friends, wall posts, or photo albums then the people they are connected to – they are most content when they are “fighting” to bridge the connection between one side of the social graph to the other. They accept and embrace the choice of those who would rather “bowl alone,” and they are exceptional in their ability to overcome the urge to do so with their own lives on the web for the sake of spurring real outcomes from their activities in world of electronic symbols on a computer screen.
Once again, great piece here, Jeff. Kudos for calling attention to an oft-overlooked issue such as this one.