Last night, walking through a restaurant, as I passed by about ten tables I noticed six where the diners had their smartphones sitting on the table as they ate. Some were deep in texting someone, others just had them out there, at the ready. Outside, there was a pair of people standing next to one another, clearly together, yet each busy texting someone else.
Skating over the holidays at New York’s Rockefeller Center, America’s skating rink, one can’t help noticing in the crowd of tourists and locals that everywhere someone is peering into a little screen in a gloved hand. A boy waiting in line one switchback ahead plays a Game Boy, pumping his fist after each tiny victory. Fellow tourists, armed with digital cameras, ask my group to take pictures of them with the gigantic New York City Christmas tree and the statue of Prometheus in the background.
Down on the ice, there is a dangerous clot of people obstructing traffic. Skating abandoned, they, too, are after shots of the tree. They stand shakily, arms outstretched, tiny viewscreens glowing. Skaters notice the hazard at the last moment. Some duck. Many slip, fall, or collide with other skaters. Everybody has a tiny helper, a gadget to enhance or capture the experience.
Does it help? Are people having more fun?
"Texting" by Flickr user kiwanja
Since that time, the ubiquity of our tiny helpers, these screens, has increased. Everywhere we go, we have them by our side, at the ready. They used to be poised to capture the moment. Now they are ready for us to communicate with people we are not now with. It’s like every dinner party is really two conversations – the one I have with you, in front of me, and the one I am having, or ready to have, with my “peeps,” who are scattered far and wide.
I am as much a culprit of this as anyone else. And, it is important to note the upsides of this ubiquitous connection-to-elsewhere. At any given time, there can be a wide-ranging conversation going on, no matter where I am.
But, as with ubiquitous photo-taking, it’s easy to use our online connections to take us away from our present situation — to get out. There’s no bright line when it comes to that. At what point does a quick text at the table become ignoring your dinner date?
I try to have rules for myself. Not at the table. Not if I am in a one-on-one conversation. Not unless I ask first. These help, but still, sometimes they don’t seem like enough.
However, like most, I am not prepared to completely give up these constant connections. Modern social norms will simply have to catch up, which they have not yet done.
Over the next five years or so, I am certain we will see social norms and etiquette catch up. We’ll know when it is OK and when it is not. For now, though, it’s like the Wild West.
If you listen to the people who are at the cutting edge of online popular culture, the future of the Web is being written in tiny micropayments, some amounting to fractions of a cent.
At Second Life's Hair Fair, a brand new hairstyle.
This is the world of “virtual goods,” items that are purchased and used in online social games, such as Zynga’s Farmville on the Facebook social platform. Indeed, Zynga’s CEO and founder, Mark Pincus, recently said, “with the popularity of virtual goods today, we are in the early stages of a new economy that could grow and shape the future of the Web.”
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Public leaders should take note for two reasons.
First, this is a tangible demonstration of the fact that, more and more, the borders between physical life and online life are crumbling. People spend real money to improve online-only experiences. They see their interactions in this space as just as real as their interactions face-to-face. Yet, public institutions and community benefit organizations too often discount what happens online as ephemeral. At a recent speech about innovating online that I gave to a national gathering of city officials, one big theme running through the comments was a skepticism that online sites were good for anything beyond message-delivery. Public leaders simply must get over this attitude.
Second, the power of the virtual goods market shows the potency of the shift our society has undergone. We live in a citizen-centric world in which the ability to customize is taken for granted. It is so fundamental to people’s expectations, that whole markets emerge and thrive based on the idea.
The public leaders and community benefit organizations who can harness these forces will survive and thrive. Look, for example at the Hair Fair, which takes place in the online virtual world Second Life. It’s like an online festival where users can purchase and compare new hairstyles. The most recent one earned its organizers over $8,000, and included a “bandana day” where all users removed their hair and instead wore bandanas in support of the charity Locks of Love.
As more charities and public leaders begin to understand this new space, we will see more of these kinds of partnerships. It may feel cutting edge, but it is already here.
According to the Wall Street Journal, at least for those who pay to subscribe, the number of volunteer contributors to the massive Wikipedia has plummeted. 49,000 editors dropped out in Q1 2009, compared to just one tenth that in Q1 2008. . . .
[But] Wikipedia is [still] the fifth most popular web site in the world. It gets something like 325 million visitors per month. In the last twelve months, the traffic has grown 20%. It’s not about to collapse.
But it is changing. It is a different animal than it was when it was founded in 2001. It used to be freewheeling, dependent on consensus. Now it is dependent on hierarchy and swift corrections.
It’s become an institution. It now has institutional concerns (perpetual survival, reputation) that it did not used to have.
Many public leaders who establish initiatives find themselves facing the same inflection point.
Continue reading to see what to keep in mind when faced with such things!
In the new Citizen-Centric World, the relationships and roles of institutions and citizens are changing. People are demanding that public institutions cater to them, rather than fitting their behavior to the needs of the institution. There are examples of this in education, in politics, in nonprofits and philanthropy, and elsewhere.
One big change is that accountability is becoming something completely different than it used to be. Time was when “accountability” for public institutions was to institution-defined metrics. But people are now bringing their own metrics and judging institutions on their own criteria. Transparency is the new accountability.
Some institutions are trying to be responsive to the new accountability. They are trying to be transparent. Because this is a new area, they are having mixed results. Case in point: the “jobs created or saved” numbers as they relate to the stimulus package. . . .
Mobile professionals are not the only ones who have discovered the usefulness of the smartphone. More and more public leaders are busting out Blackberrys and iPhones when they are out and about. At my recent talk at the National League of Cities conference, there were throngs of mayors and other elected officials staying connected at the back of every room.
After about a year of getting the wheels turning slowly with their new operating system for mobile telephones, it looks like Google’s Android system is about to hit it big, big time. More phones than you can shake a stick at are set to drop over the next few weeks and months. I’ve been using the new flagship, the Motorola Droid on Verizon, since the day it emerged. I really put it through its paces.
Overall, Google, Verizon, and Motorola have hit it out of the park with this phone. My only downchecks are the D-pad (I want a little trackball) and battery life (better than the G1, but still could be improved).
In a workshop last week on new technology for engagement at the National League of Cities conference in San Antonio, we had a room full of more than a hundred mayors, city council members, and other municipal officials from across the nation. We thought it would be a good idea to start the session out by asking them to tell us the one question they were hoping would be answered when it comes to new technologies. We passed out index cards and asked them to write it down. We got sixty back, about two thirds of the audience.
What we got in return was a snapshot of public leaders’ anxieties when it comes to integrating new technologies into existing operations. They shook out into four basic areas: Finance; Reach; Implemenation and Use; and Legal and Security.
In the bribery case against embattled Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon, the allegations revolve around gift cards. The prosecution says she misused “dozens” of gift cards originally meant for needy families. She says she thought the cards were meant for her all along.
A shadow economy
Gift cards are becoming a shadow economy, not quite credit but not as liquid as cash, where the anonymity provided by the arm’s-length nature of the deal makes it easy to create deniability. Gift cards are a popular method to pay for illicit transactions ranging from prostitution to drugs to graft.
It’s unlikely that gift cards – which are really just hyper-convenient gift certificates or traveler’s checks – will go away. Indeed, as the recession-lengthened holiday gift giving season begins and retailers are pinning some of their hopes on the continued popularity of the plastic ducats. Consumers spent $24.9 billion with them last year.
This is an example of new technologies outstripping society’s rules. In public life, we too often watch idly as this happens. Instead of playing catch-up, public leaders need to be thinking around the next corner and imagining what kinds of new rules we will need to deal with the new ideas bombarding society’s fabric. New ways of banking, new ways of communication, new meanings for the word “community” – we know all these things are happening. Yet there are few serious efforts to predict, understand, or take into account what these changes will mean for the way public life ought to look.
In the first-ever study of its kind, a new report released today by the public policy research firm Civic Enterprises shows that the new generation of veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan are eager to serve their communities and offer their leadership to the home front.
Photo by U.S. Army via Flickr
However, according to the report, the nation’s returning veterans face a number of obstacles including a lack of information about how to connect to such service, and a majority says no local organization has reached out to them to seek their involvement upon their return. The report was underwritten by Target and by the Case Foundation.
“Our young troops and their families have done everything their country has asked of them,” writes Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen in a foreword to the report, which is the first representative survey of this generation of veterans. “Their lives have been changed forever by war, but their dreams haven’t changed at all. They want to raise their children, own a home, go to school, find work and even find new ways to contribute. Most of all, they want to be good citizens. They want to reconnect and renew their relationship to their local communities.”
In fact, according to the survey, almost 9 in 10 veterans said Americans could learn something from their example of service. And 92 percent of Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq) veterans say that serving their community is important to them. But just half considered themselves leaders in their communities as a result of their military service. And almost seven in ten say they have not been contacted by any community institution.
At an online community I co-manage, there’s a conflict.
The community in question is a forum for people to discuss local issues, and we’ve set it up intentionally so there are a few hoops people need to jump through before we allow comments. It’s supposed to be an antidote to some of the uglier things that go on in the public square these days — the kind of place where you don’t say what you wouldn’t say to someone’s face.
Recently we discovered sock-puppetry among some of the commenters. That’s when you create an alter-ego and post as both yourself and the fake person. The sock puppets were, as you would imagine, fairly uncivil customers. But, by and large, they stayed just on this side of the line, so we allowed some of their comments even though we wished they would not have been made.
Things were a little more heated than usual because there were municipal elections going on and one of the races was hotly contested, with a bitter division between candidates.
Once we discovered the deception going on, we put a stop to it by banning those individuals from any commenting, and we tightened up our comment policy. But there are those who are now curious as to who these sock-puppet trolls might be. They want us to out them so they can be known. . . .
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