Comments

Two quick notes:
1. I don’t know how I feel about having to post things like these comments on my blog if I’m supposed to also put it out there – makes me feel like I’m putting out a class assignment rather than my own actual blog.
2. On the first blog my comment is queued, so we’ll see if they ever wind up posted.

Regardlss, here are the comments and links to the original articles:

AU Center for Social Media – Universal Broadband

When I first saw this post, I was really excited at the issues I thought it might address given that I felt like the call for universal broadband access was one of the most central, but least developed portions of the Knight Commission’s previous white paper. Ultimately, however, I’m not sure I feel significantly better after reading this proposal than I did after reading the initial one.

One thing I do find important is pointing out digital literacy and relevance as being factors in addition to cost of why people don’t already have access, which I think correctly hints that access is not the only important factor in preventing the existence of a second class citizenry. At the same time, however, I think there are a lot of issues this still skirts over. Primarily, it re-entrenches the privileging of certain uses of technology over others (in this case, broadband versus phone) which seems to re-entrench the prejudice that the speaking/analyzing groups are the tool-users while the others lag behind, even though it may be more a different set of tools being used (I think this is clearest in the discussion of television).

I still feel like the lack of attention to how technical access relates to other issues is problematic, but I don’t feel like that criticism applies as much to this article given its much narrower focus, but I’m definitely still worried about what emphasizing access may lead to a celebration when/if universal access comes to be. Access doesn’t strike me as actually an issue of alleviating hierarchical forces so much as not instituting new segregated spaces of privilege, and I worry that working primarily against the latter will divert attention from the former. In short, focusing on access will ensure that unequal access won’t be the cause of a second class citizenry, but it doesn’t do anything to correct the already disadvantaged situation of people with less time, smaller vocabularies, etc and if anything just covers up that situation and may present it as solved for the digital age.




The second post is... Perhaps a Revolution is Not What We Need

I think the point about Twitter’s flexibility and that its “norms emerge, mutate, collide, and fade away” fluidly is a really important point and adds another layer in which Gladwell’s false distinction between online and traditional activism seems cracked. By using the example of SNCC at Woolworth’s, Gladwell is isolating an effective sit-in some 50 years after its occurrence when its impact can be fairly well understood (though I think Ron Burnett makes a good point about other sit-ins not lasting in our cultural memories). In this context, of course Twitter and other social media platforms aren’t going to compare – they’re in their nascent stages and are surrounded by rapidly shifting norms (to say nothing of the lack of parallel between sit-ins and Twitter – a better comparison would be the conversations that made people beyond those in Greensboro aware of the sit-ins and Twitter).

More than anything else, this serves to make the parallel between “Frown Power” and “It Gets Better” more interesting because it draws a parallel between two different network-based solutions – but I think it ultimately runs into a similar problem as what I mentioned with Twitter. Savage’s YouTube campaign could create social change and make teens feel like it gets better, but it may not ultimately have a large impact (though certainly there has been a lot of buzz around it, I think most of that is due to its timeliness and potential, not effectiveness).

I guess this leads to me to my ultimate question and reason for posting this – how do we focus on outcomes when the development of these tools and campaigns is still occurring? I feel like emphasizing outcomes sometimes begets sometimes premature historicizing where we write about technology as if it has created the sort of change we dream it will.

More, I wonder about the focus on outcomes in non-hierarchical, grassroots change because I feel like it encourages inappropriate application of metrics, and I wonder if that’s part of where Gladwell’s problem lies. He seems to value concrete progress above anything else, and while we can see laws change, it’s almost impossible to see perspectives change except retroactively. So I guess while I agree about the importance of outcomes, I wonder how we can actually employ that in contemporary analyses of social media.