The #140conf Blog

Social Media, Self-Identity and “Rightsizing” Social Responsibility


Before the rise of social media, fashionable radical individualism in the 1970s led to “the culture of narcissism” and the loss of the notion of transcendence, the certitude in the immutable respect and timeless importance of other people’s lives. It removed us from those nagging societal concerns exterior to ourselves, replaced art with confused examples of self-expression, and disavowed eternal moral absolutes, replacing the meaningfulness of life with postmodern nihilism and in general resulting in some bad cases of self-absorption that dissolved interpersonal connectivity. Ironically, since our identity is influenced by how others view us, radical individualism eroded our sense of self, not so much resulting in classic egomania as a lack of Ego and a failed integrated self in the Freudian sense.

And now, with Twitter, Facebook and foursquare firmly ensconced in our daily routine, some pundits fear that the ad absurdum extrapolation of all this is upon us, that “The Individual” has gone so far as to trade privacy for sheer public performance. Others believe that the technology simultaneously promotes just the opposite condition: that an “electronic mob” of 18th century sensibility has formed, and any random kerfuffle can be magnified by social media into a tsunami of millions of petitions and protests demanding resignations, indictments, revolutions, immediate governmental action, or what-not.

On the brighter side, as the philosophers Hegel and Dewey would say, we are only individuals insofar as we are social beings. And to be social we must work in collaboration with others. One person’s idea to build a classroom in the jungle or feed the homeless won’t get very far if he or she is a crazed, selfish creature callously attempting to use others as a means to an end, no matter how benevolent the end. No, other people are our partners and collaborators in life, and that only happens when we all assume similar values backed up by personal responsibility. Only then can a merry band of altruists break the psychological, familial, institutional and governmental shackles of the status quo. It’s how individualism escapes the prison of meaninglessness.

And so perhaps social media is not just the wild, excessive sharing of self claimed by its detractors. By using social media to place all of our cards on the table, so to speak, we are not narcissistically beating our own drum for attention, but rather are exploring each other’s revealed self to better understand ourselves and thus clarify our self-identity.

Of course, social media networks encompass hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. A voice for activism and advocacy can get lost in the crowd. When asked about the “sheer noise” found in social media, Deanna Zandt, author of, Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, said, “This is something people who have done advocacy work and social justice work have faced for years. They call it cause fatigue. People become immune to certain messages after a certain period of time. What we see evolving in advocacy work and what is clearly becoming more effective is not trying to reach millions of people so 200 will take action, but seeking out and targeting the 200 people already interested and engaging them directly. I’m sincerely hoping the spectacle model of getting the word out will go away soon because it’s not doing anybody much good, and people become immune to spectacle pretty quickly… One of the examples in my book that talks about this is a group of parents that were very outraged at the implementation of standardized testing in Palm Beach County, Florida. They started a Facebook group and ultimately ended up getting 8,000 parents in this group, negotiated with the school administrators and were able to change different parts of the policy. They didn’t have to get on 60 Minutes [to resolve it].”

Thus, “rightsizing” a social media group can be as important as finding the shared values and interests for activism and altruism.

One fly in this ointment is that technology is always a two-edged sword, and simply trusting people to use communications technology virtuously—or at least innocuously—in a free and open manner doesn’t quite work. The same social media platforms that promote the spontaneous generosity of hordes of users can also be used by criminals. There is a fear, for example, that terrorists are using online games to 1) figure out the layout of cities and the targets within them (e.g. their transportation systems) and 2) they are using the “back channel” built into these online games as a discussion forum to make their nefarious plans.

As psychologists say, sometimes one’s sense of identity can cause more harm than good.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

More on Social Media Gangbusters


After we posted our blog entry, “Can Terrorist and other Criminal Acts be Predicted Using Social Media?” one of our eagle-eyed readers alerted us to the existence of Cynthia Hetherington, MLS, MSM, CFE, the President at the Hetherington Group and publisher of Data2know.com, an Internet and online intelligence newsletter that’s a source for investigators, analysts and security practitioners.

Hetherington spent over 20 years in research, investigations and corporate intelligence. Her Hetherington Group is a consulting, publishing and training firm focusing on intelligence, security and investigations. During her career, Hetherington has brought to bear her deep knowledge of library science, information systems and the Internet to assist clients with investigations involving employee theft and intellectual property loss. She knows her way around databases and is adept at uncovering secreted relations between fraudulent associates and their assets, and foreseeing probable threats. She’s handled international investigations for Fortune 500 companies and other organizations in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

As it happens, Hetherington is a big believer in predicting events such as major public protests and individual criminal acts (and their impact on a particular company’s personnel and assets) using data derived not just from obvious social media realms as Facebook and Twitter, but also from such open sources as blogs, forums and social media profiles. In her seminars, Hetherington calls some of these “Web 2.0 Investigations.” They can be done with customized software or simply by performing searches at sites such as www.icerocket.com for certain common phrases. After all, people tend to blog, tweet and post with informal language and use popular expressions.

Hetherington’s approach sounds like a simplified version of what “behavioral investors” do. The whole relatively new field of behavioral finance is a fascinating one, as it explains how our psychological quirks can influence our investing and trading behavior in the financial marketplace, and therefore affect the markets themselves. The field has its origins in such works as Gustave le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896), George Selden’s Psychology of the Stock Market (1912), as well as research by Leon Festinger (the theory of cognitive dissonance), and Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who discovered rules of thumb we use when making judgments under uncertainty.

For example, economists Aaron Gerow of Trinity College, Dublin, and Mark Keane of University College Dublin tabulated the frequency of English words appearing in four years’ worth of articles (17,713 articles, or 10 million+ words) from the BBC, Financial Times and The New York Times, that could be used in identifying stock market bubbles, thus supplementing traditional volatility analyses. They found that when markets conditions were on an upswing, certain common nouns and verbs like rise, fall, close and gain become more common. “Verb convergence” occurs, where commentaries become uniformly positive (i.e., increasingly frequent use of a smaller set of verbs, such as “stocks rose again ”, “scaled new heights”, or “soared”). Conversely, depressed and/or down-trending markets result in a loss of this commonality and homogeneity of nouns and verbs. As the authors wrote (paraphrasing Leo Tolstoy): “Maybe it’s a bit like happy families are all happy in the same way, but unhappy families are unhappy in many different ways.”

In any case, the authors found that, “even relatively small corpora can yield answers to specific questions about group behavior in the stock market.”

Similarly, in a 2009 experiment, Google was first able to predict car sales from analyses of search queries.

Perhaps the same analytical principles can be applied to predicting terrorist and criminal acts. As recounted in a story by Carlton Purvis posted on securitymanagment.com, “During a Hetherington Group training session in California last year, she pulled up the Rants and Raves section [of a Craigslist page] and found fans not-so-secretly trying to organize retaliation against Dodgers fans for a beating that left Giants fan Brian Stow in the hospital with brain damage… ‘Before people walk into a place with a gun, they’re going to talk about it on social networks first. This is the trend. Our experience is that these people are kind of looking for someone to pull them back, and when they don’t get that that’s when they start raging and coming out and that’s happening in the workplace,’ she said.”

Of course, to successfully make reasonably accurate predictions about domestic crime and/or terrorist events in order to redeploy law enforcement to discourage their occurrence, a Big Brother scenario would be necessary. For maximum accuracy, everyone’s social media output would have to be analyzed, and not everyone allows full public exposure of their verbiage, photos, videos, etc.

However, the FBI, NSA and similar organizations have for years wanted a “backdoor” not just to encryption algorithms and the communications systems of online service providers, but to actual software applications as well. Allegedly, the legendary “Raptor” program of the FBI, CIA, NSA (or whoever) was designed after 9/11 to sneak into all systems, break all known forms of encryption, and look for keywords in all files and communications. Conspiracy theorists tell us that some version of it is at work right now, sifting through everything from cell phone messages, to email, to instant messaging, to social media, to (for all we know) 140 Character Conference videos—in which case it will definitely encounter quite a few “non-standard” words and phrases. :)

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

More Encyclopaedia Britannica Nostalgia


Strange but true: The biggest reader response we’ve ever received from a single blog entry was our previous posting regarding the demise of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s print edition.

To answer why, I’ll begin by quoting an aged Groucho Marx reminiscing about vaudeville: “My fellow performers always say how they miss the great old days of vaudeville. Well, that’s nonsense. Romanticized fantasy. Life was tough in vaudeville. Cutthroat theater bosses were stingy. The decrepit dressing rooms were unheated and often didn’t have running water. Acts had to perform long hours in front of tough crowds. If the audience booed you, a hook pulled you off the stage. Racism was taken for granted. No, when people say they miss vaudeville, what they really mean is that they miss their youth.”

Likewise, my blog posting on the Britannica’s own last curtain call struck a nostalgic chord that resonated in the hearts of older folk. As high school students of long ago, they had poured over and extracted facts from their library’s set of those leather-bound tomes as they labored to complete homework assignments with Ye Ole pen and paper. Whatever the factual failings embedded in the seven million sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica printed and sold over the past 244 years, they all melted away with that blog post. Instead of profound ponderings on the demise of print, we were inundated with a tsunami of wistful recollections of no real consequence, other than that they were the thinly-disguised poignant longings of lost youth.

There was the fellow whose mother made a decent living selling a rival, The World Book Encyclopedia; the woman who recalled long ago sitting with a kindly librarian as she was first introduced to the Junior Britannica’s pages about animals and exotic places; the once-strapping youth who wanted to pay for a $1,750 set of the Britannica with his newspaper route money (fat chance of that) but whose father heroically stepped in and purchased it for him in the belief—as proclaimed by encyclopedia salesmen—that those 32 volumes could be the key not just to a successful academic future, but to a productive life as an American citizen.

Bittersweet memories, all. It’s amazing what reveries can be inspired by some otherwise forgotten volumes now buried in a landfill, or perhaps recycled into raw paper or, more fashionably, repurposed as handcrafted book furniture or amusing bonsai tree planters, like those sold by the Italian company Gardenkultur. (They drill a big hole in each of the books, seal them with waterproof insulation, fill them with seeds, then sell the resulting creations through—bookstores!)

Then again, perhaps we could assemble all of the remaining Britannicas into a literal tower of babble, as was done with 15,000 unique titles about Abraham Lincoln, glued into a 34-foot-tall pillar (book sculpture?) that graces the main spiral staircase of the newly-constructed Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership in Washington, D.C. It’s the ultimate architectural “fashion accessory.”

The whole presentation gives one the feeling that we’re dealing with a mausoleum of dead books, rather than a vibrant library or, to use a 1960s euphemism, “a learning resource center.” My friend the scientist and author Ivan T. Sanderson (1911–1973) used to joke about how “public libraries” were only open during daylight hours when working members of the public couldn’t possibly visit them, aside from housewives and retirees. Still, given just the right impetus—such as “closing the book” (literally) on the printed Britannica—we develop a sudden homesickness for those great repositories of knowledge to which many of us had to be dragged kicking and screaming to finish our school assignments, so long ago.

Yes, taking off our rose-colored glasses for a moment, the “good old days” was really an intellectual wasteland of simple moral certainty and naivety in a time of racism, clueless parents, political assassinations and social upheaval (not to mention playground bullies and a bad case of acne) but it was also the only time one could be carefree, ridiculously optimistic and mindlessly happy; when future responsibilities, trials and tribulations were, well, somewhere off in the distant, forgettable future. We can, I think, forgive ourselves for taking an occasional journey of the heart to that youthful sanctuary of the past where paper books, gas-guzzling muscle cars, little plastic transistor radios and politically incorrect humor are not drab and ordinary but strangely comforting. Ironically, it is the very technology that the older among us find so disturbing in today’s world that makes it possible to fulfill our yearnings for the glorious past, to experience its images, texts and sounds with just some clicks of a mouse.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica vs. Social Knowledge


For those of you who haven’t heard, the Encyclopaedia Britannica folks are discontinuing their print edition. The 32-volume 2010 edition, weighing 129 pounds, will be the last.

The Britannica had a jolly good run: 244 years (from 1768, the oldest continuously published encyclopedia in English), with sales peaking in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold in the United States. Of the 12,000 sets printed for the 2010 edition, 8,000 sold and the other 4,000 are now languishing in a warehouse until they are sold—at the rather eye-opening price of $1,395 per set. For all the hullabaloo over the end of the print edition, less than 1 percent of the Britannica’s revenue comes from sales of the printed volumes; 85 percent is derived from selling educational curriculum materials for various topics, and 15 percent comes from the $70 annual subscription paid by a half million households for online access the website, which is where one can find the full database of articles, multimedia materials, and mobile applications.

Although Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., was primarily a print publisher right up until the early 1980s, the company was no slouch when it came to adapting to technological innovation, such as the personal computer, Internet, CD-ROMs and DVDs, smartphones, and tablets. The Britannica speedily embraced digital publishing. In 1981, they unveiled the first digital encyclopedia (for LexisNexis) and, in 1989, the first multimedia CD; in 1994 came their first encyclopedia to appear on the Internet.

One shouldn’t fret over the decline of printed encyclopedias. First of all, they’re too small to capture the information explosion of the modern world. Moreover, although the articles in, say, the Britannica are written by 4,000 expert contributors, those experts can be biased. They can even be flat out wrong. One amusing early example concerns George Gleig, the chief editor of the Britannica’s 3rd edition (1788–1797), who rejected Newton’s description of gravity—he thought gravity was actually somehow caused by the classical element of fire.

In 1964, Grove Press published a book by the American physicist Harvey Einbinder entitled The Myth of the Britannica, which detailed failings of the Britannica’s 14th edition. As the Australian newspaper, The Age, noted two years later, Einbinder’s book “showed beyond argument that the Britannica was not a completely impartial and absolutely infallible work of general reference; that 666 articles in the 1963 edition were reprinted from editions dating back to 1875 in some cases; that American influence on its editorial policy had become dominant.”

Years later, a study published in 2005 by Nature challenged the common presumption that the $1,000+ Britannica was more accurate than that enormous online freebie, Wikipedia. The study indicated that out of 42 competing entries, Wikipedia made an average of four errors in each article, and Britannica three. (After all, Wikipedia does have a peer reviewing feature, in which experts can comment on each article and approve its content, though admittedly there is always the danger of clever “content vandals” changing any given article.) The Britannica responded, noting that the study was limited to 100 articles—50 articles from each entity—an infinitesimal fraction of Britannica’s 120,000 articles online, and Wikipedia’s 4 million. Britannica also complained about Nature‘s investigative methods, which it alleged involved sending “misleading” article fragments and extracting material from its other publications, such as its children’s encyclopedia.

“Almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading,” wrote Britannica at the time. “Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.”

Wikipedia, by the way, does have smaller competitors in the encyclopedia business, such as Citizendium (http://en.citizendium.org).

In any case, it appears that we now live in an age where the old “gatekeeper” concept of communications and media has been thrown out the window in favor of social efforts such as Wikipedia.

The workings and vagaries of social knowledge of various sorts is well-known to scholars and scientists. Scientists attending learned symposia often meet up at night in restaurants and bars and discuss ongoing research, and blabber about off-beat information not yet appearing in any publication—perhaps never to appear, in fact. The intellectual experience is not just a matter of reading scholarly papers or attending smaller poster sessions at a symposium. Ironically, the origin of the word symposium is the ancient Greek expression “to drink together”—a drinking party.

Nevertheless, social knowledge, in an informal setting, free from the fact-checking afforded by gatekeepers of any sort, can be a more intellectually dangerous affair. An example of such plebian “barroom knowledge” are rather preposterous whoppers that have been rattling around for decades, such as, “The Titantic was half a mile long and had an 18-hole golf course.”

In the world of social media, rumors and half-truths can race around the world, becoming facts. Determining truth in such an environment, as I’ve always said, is like trying to perform a statistical analysis of all the verbiage out there, and then finding the top of the bell curve. We now have instant access to knowledge, but that knowledge is suspect. Perhaps this is good, as it forces us all (particularly students) into critical thinking mode. For the rest of us intellectual loafers, however, we need to find a way to assign a probability to the veracity of the great morass of information turned up by our Google and Bing searches.

Perhaps one day someone will devise a new kind of fact-checker for the Internet, or perhaps we will all one day simply believe what artificial intelligence programs like IBM’s Watson tell us. Or perhaps we’ll all simply make do with some acceptable degree of “uncertain knowledge.” We shall see.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Can Terrorist and other Criminal Acts be Predicted Using Social Media?


Back in the days when Howard Hughes was just a student with a keen mathematical ability, he walked up to a casino’s roulette table and studied its wheel for several hours. He started betting and won $9,990.

Now, did Howard Hughes have the mysterious psychic power of precognition? Or did he, like the rest of us, simply have an “odds maker” in his subconscious mind, the foundation of our conditioned reflexes, where we are always computing the odds that given event A, event B is likely to follow? Our odds maker, always working below conscious awareness, pops up every now and then to give us a “hunch.” Since Hughes was adept at mathematics, he had an excellent mental odds maker, and so his hunches would be very good indeed.

Mathematicians would tell us that our internal “odds maker” is based on nothing more than “Bayesian inference,” named after Thomas Bayes (1702–1761), whose theorem made possible such things as pattern recognition by computers and has been used in many applications, such as identifying email spam by software like SpamAssassin, SpamBayes and Mozilla. Armed with the rule of Bayes, anyone can update the probability of an event as additional evidence is learned.

Some people can make their “odds maker” explicit and use it spectacularly well. For example, the British cotton mill engineer Joseph Hobson Jagger (1830–1892), more popularly known as “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,” was a distant cousin of Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. In 1873, Jagger hired six clerks to visit the Casino Beaux-Arts in Monte Carlo, Monaco, where they spent the entire 12-hour day the casino was open to record the winning numbers. Jagger’s analysis of the data indicated that one of the casino’s six roulette wheels was seriously flawed, with a bias that led the ball to land on nine of the numbers (7, 8, 9, 17, 18, 19, 22, 28 and 29) more often than on others. On July 7, 1875, Jagger began placing bets and, despite the casino messing with the wheels, managed to take home three days later about two million francs in winnings, then about £65,000 (around £3,250,000 in 2005 valuation).

But is the “odds maker” really just a subliminal calculating area deep in the brain? Or is something far stranger occurring? Things become more complicated when we consider the bizarre experiments on “presentiment” by such scientists as Dean Radin and Dick Bierman, which involve emotional response in human subjects. The subjects view a computer screen upon which appear—at random time intervals—images that can be emotionally neutral or highly emotional (violent, sexual, etc.). Radin and Bierman originally measured the subjects’ physiological response to these images in the form of testing a finger’s skin conductance.

Not surprisingly, Radin and Bierman found that subjects responded strongly to emotional images rather than the neutral images. What is surprising, however, was that the emotional response occurred between a fraction of a second to several seconds before the image appeared! Professor Bierman at the University of Amsterdam later repeated these experiments, but he placed his subjects in a Siemens functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain imager. Sure enough, Bierman found emotional responses in brain activity up to four seconds before the stimuli, even though great care was taken to randomize the stimulus conditions with “replacement” so that each trial was completely independent of the previous ones and the subjects had no way to “foresee” what the future stimulus would be.

Now if we extrapolate this ad absurdum, we end up with a scenario resembling the one in the movie Minority Report, based on the short story “The Minority Report” by the inimitable Philip K. Dick. Professor Bierman might as well start calling his subjects “precogs,” those characters in the story who supply details of their foreknowledge to a “PreCrime” police department, enabling them to apprehend criminals before they commit their crimes.

Amazingly, something vaguely similar to Minority Report may be possible, and could involve social media.

First, let’s take a look at The Global Consciousness Project, which is truly one of the more fascinating giant, worldwide parapsychology experiments of modern times. The Global Consciousness Project asks the question, are we connected? Are we all connected in some way not yet fully understood by science but that is measurable in some way?

An international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists and engineers, the GCP has stationed quantum event-based random number generators (RNGs) at 70 locations around the world. Data from these devices are transmitted over a network to a central archive containing 12 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second.

Now, here’s the wild part, as the organization describes it: “When human consciousness becomes coherent and synchronized, the behavior of random systems may change. Quantum event based random number generators (RNGs) produce completely unpredictable sequences of zeroes and ones. But when a great event synchronizes the feelings of millions of people, our network of RNGs becomes subtly structured. [Demonstrating that human consciousness interacts with random event generators, apparently “causing” them to produce non-random patterns.] The probability is less than one in a billion that the effect is due to chance… Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We predict structure in what should be random data, associated with major global events. The data overall show a highly significant departure from expectation, confirming our prediction.”

The biggest “success” of the Global Consciousness Project came after 9/11, when an analysis of data indicated a huge spike in the correlations. It was greater than any measured in any of the previous years. Compared with any day, 9/11 stood out. (Note that the GCP publishes all their data on the web so anyone can download and analyze it.)

Now, keeping all this in mind, also note that Yours Truly is attempting to run down two urban legends concerning this kind of research. One, dating from the 1970s, is that audio recordings of aircraft cockpits reveal that, long before a plane gets into trouble and/or crashes, someone in the cockpit puckers his or her lips and starts to idly whistle. It may even be a person who normally doesn’t whistle. Interestingly, among actors, whistling in a theater is frowned upon because it is said to bring bad luck to the whistler.

The other, more impressive (and perhaps apocryphal) story is a recent one—that somebody did a statistical analysis of police activities prior to 9/11 and found that, just prior to the attack, police all over the U.S. were inexplicably engaged in investigations and were generally “checking things out” more often than usual. It was as if this police segment of society, trained to be on the lookout for crime, had a feeling or hunch that something “big” was about to happen.

Ironically, in the landmark legal case Terry v. Ohio, Chief Justice Earl Warren held that police officers could temporarily detain a suspect only if they could articulate the “reasonable inferences” for their suspicion, and not merely allude to a “hunch.” Since Terry, the American jurisprudence has increasingly discounted the “mere” hunches of police officers, requiring them to articulate “specific” and “objective” observations of fact to support their decision to conduct a stop and frisk a suspect. An officer’s intuitions, gut feelings and general “sixth sense” regarding the detainment of individuals are all disallowed. (Despite their skepticism when it comes to the hunches of police officers, U.S. judges appear to be quite free to vocalize and act upon their hunches, however.)

In any case, if any of these “urban myths” turn out to be true, then it might very well be possible to detect upcoming 9/11 type terrorist attacks via a word/phrase analysis of the tweets, Facebook streams, emails, and other output from social media. If it works, the next question would be: What level of granularity is possible? Can we only predict major events like 911 and natural catastrophes? Or, like Minority Report, can we zero in on crimes about to occur in specific neighborhoods, or even in individual buildings?

It wouldn’t cost a whole lot of money to test this theory. If successful, it could signal a major change, not just in the war on terror, but in the detection of crime in general and perhaps even the occurrence of natural disasters.

Anybody up for it?

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Getting Mobile, Social (and Healthy) at South by Southwest Interactive 2012


Our own Jeff Pulver is giving South by Southwest (SXSW) attendees a “group hug” with his State of NOW (#140conf) cocktail party (held March 9, 2012) and by holding “The 140 Characters Conference: @ SXSW 2012” on March 12, 2012 at SXSW at the Hilton Austin Downtown, in Salon FG in Austin, Texas. Here’s the schedule: http://sxsw2012.140conf.com/schedule

Just what is South by Southwest (SXSW), you ask? Some call it an Austin, Texas-based “Woodstock for geeks.” Others think of it as a watering hole for 30,000 entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Whatever it is, for the past 20 years it has managed to somehow both read the pulse of the markets for technology, and to anticipate Next Big Things.

After all, Twitter really didn’t achieve prominence until it appeared at South by Southwest Interactive in 2007. Now President Barack Obama is on Twitter (his tweets are signed BO), and even Pope Benedict XVI has joined the stream. (The first papal tweet occurred on June 28, 2011—can the bear in the woods be far behind?) And after Google spent four years wondering what to do with the Dodgeball mobile social networking service they had acquired in 2005, they shut it down; however, Dodgeball co-founder Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai had already by then launched an improved version called Foursquare which had its coming out party at the 2009 SXSW  and then rocketed to fame as “the next Twitter” at the 2010 SXSW. This spurred Twitter into entering the world of geolocation via Twitter Places, which, ironically could be integrated with Foursquare (and the Foursquare competitor, Gowalla, now part of Facebook).

This year, “ambient location-sharing”—or what I like to call “pico-cell” mobile social apps—are on everyone’s lips, which use your aggregated contact and social-networking data to place you in touch with people physically near you who share friends and interests with you (such as Glancee), automatically push users’ basic information to other users nearby when they have something in common and keep a log of when users run into each other (like Highlight). One of these apps, called Sonar, relies on social network location data rather than directly on GPS, which means that the app can include people on your “relevant” list that don’t also have to be Sonar users.

This year, SXSW Interactive once again has a health track with sessions on health-related technologies and bringing health into the social media setting (e.g. wired hospitals, social media leveraged by pharmaceutical companies, “Can Social Media Benefit the Health Experience?”), for interested folk such as healthcare IT professionals, physicians, or members of U.S. hospitals, 786 of which, by the way, have Twitter accounts. Given all of the different voices and visions that contribute to the world of health—not to mention all of the money that gets funneled there—a look at how technology is revolutionizing the health vertical, in the form of the SXSW Health Track, is a brilliant idea.

Be sure to check out the Interactive Accelerator showcase on Monday March 12, 2012 and Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at the Hilton in downtown Austin. More than 670 companies applied, and 66 were chosen for the coveted opportunity to present. Startup finalists will be there in the areas of News Related Technologies, Social Media and Social Networking Technologies, Mobile Technologies and Innovative Web Technologies.

Dean Kamen, the man who unfortunately is best known for bringing forth the two-wheeled Segway (his many remarkable medical technology inventions should be better known, from drug pumps and water purifiers to revolutionary wheelchairs and robotic arms), will give an IEEE Standards Association-sponsored presentation at the Austin Convention Center Exhibit Hall on Chavez Street, on March 12, 2012 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (Pacific Time): “Invention & Inspiration: Building a Better World.” Kamen will be talking about “the responsibilities and opportunities that exist for innovators in all fields (developers, designers, engineers, technologists, inventors and business leaders) to use their gifts to benefit mankind.

And if you see Jeff Pulver there, give him a hug and everybody around him (he’ll probably be surrounded by his uncle Jerry, Alan Weinkrantz, Kory Kessel and Geo Geller)…

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Be an Amicus Humanii Generis Today!


The end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries was the heyday of strongmen and “strongmanism,” those circus and vaudeville performers who used their tremendous strength to entertain an audience, lifting hundreds (or thousands) of pounds, bending railroad spikes, tearing telephone books and card decks in half, breaking chains, and so forth. Canadian Louis Cyr (1863–1912) for example, dubbed “The Strongest Man in the World” by various experts and historians, routinely backlifted 3635 pounds at expositions and once carried a platform on his back holding 18 men, weighing 4337 pounds (1967 kg), at an 1895 exhibition in Boston.

Long before the appearance of the neighborhood gym and chains of Vitamin Shoppes and General Nutrition Centers, these Mighty Men of Old were among the founders and promoters of the “physical culture movement” which gave men and women the hope that they were not stuck with the flabby, underperforming bodies with which they were born. They could reshape and strengthen themselves with the proper bodybuilding exercises and diet. (Of course, many of the famous strongmen failed to mention that they had great genetics to begin with. Cyr, for example, at the age of 18 lifted a ¾ of a ton horse off of the ground, the horse having been placed on a platform with two iron bars attached enabling Cyr to get a better grip.)

Needless to say, a good many physical culture strongmen made fortunes selling exercise apparatus, books, magazines, and lending their celebrity name to myriad products, just like today’s celebrities.

Despite their success, perhaps the most curious and little-known aspect of the strongmen was a kind of noblesse oblige these great and wealthy physical specimens showed their less fortunate brothers and sisters. Like those monarchs of noble ancestry anointed by God and constrained not to indulge in idle pursuits but responsible, honorable behavior, so too the strongmen, whose physical prowess ultimately derived from luck or Providence, became the most generous members of society.

Foremost among these was the charismatic Prussian, Eugen Sandow (1867–1925), known as the “father of modern bodybuilding,” who regularly performed feats of strength for American Presidents and foreign potentates, and was the Ziegfield Follies first major star. For all Sandow’s business acumen, he was a philanthropic fellow who contributed greatly to charity and spent time helping many unfit and underprivileged men and women, declaring himself “Amicus Humanii Generis,” a friend of the human race.

The philanthropic sensibilities of the strongmen of old have been carried down to the powerlifters and bodybuilders of today. One can easily add to the list people such as the famous Arnold Schwarzenegger, Anthony Clark (1966–2005) who  gave motivational speeches, seminars and one-on-one counseling to motivate children and prison inmates to improve their lives, and Bob Hoffman (1898–1985) the “Father of World Weightlifting” and founder of the York Barbell Company. Hoffman was an athlete, nutritionist, weightlifter, coach and philanthropist, whose York Barbell Museum and USA Weightlifting Hall of Fame still exists in York, Pennsylvania.

Lee Haney, who won eight consecutive Mr. Olympia titles, besting Arnold Schwarzenneger’s seven-win record, in 1994 purchased a 40-acre farm near their home and created the Haney Harvest House, a non-profit retreat facility for children of all races, creeds, and nationalities. Harvest House features nature tours, a petting zoo, and an eight-week summer camp for 12-15 year olds. Haney, who eventually  received a degree in youth counseling from Spartanburg Methodist College, said: “I wanted to be able to give something back.  I’ve been so fortunate to have a lot of good things come my way, and it all comes from values I learned from growing up.  If we don’t take time now to give some of that back to this generation then when will we?”

Paul Edward “The Mightiest Minister” Anderson (1932–1994), who surpassed Louis Cyr’s lifting feats by hoisting a total of 6270 pounds in a backlift on June 12, 1957 (for which he was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records), was a devoted Christian who dedicated his life to helping delinquent youth via his Paul Anderson Youth Home. Anderson’s further involvement with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and other evangelical groups harks back to, and appears to be a continuation of the 19th century’s “Muscular Christianity tradition,” which was a rebellion against the “feminization” of Christianity that was believed by some to be occurring, and used sport to foster moral values such as manliness and discipline in a Christian context.

Muscular Christianity’s origins can be traced to the 1857 publication of British author Thomas Hughes’ novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In it, the high-spirited student Tom Brown discovers fair play and moral uprightness through manly sports. Interestingly, the novel was read in 1875 by a 12-year-old French boy named Pierre de Frédy (Baron de Coubertin), the future father of the modern Olympic Games, who believed that “organized sport can create moral and social strength” and, after reading the tale of Tom Brown, began formulating the ideals he would later infuse into the Olympic movement.

Even the strongest Native American who has ever walked the earth, Chief Harold “Iron Bear” Collins, a full-blooded Lumbee Native American from North Carolina, Chief of the Lumbee-Cheraw, is not just a legendary powerlifter and strongman, but a well-known philanthropist too. (Not bad for a fellow who grew up in a home crowded with five sisters, one brother, and two half-sisters.)

We social media mavens and would-be activists can learn a lot from the strongmen of yesteryear. Many sociologists and psychologists would have us focus on the more complex behavioral aspects and environmentally or outwardly induced variables of altruism. They would like to explain behavior in terms of “rational” self-interest, exchange theory and evolutionary models of reciprocal altruism. They forget that even Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that, although humans may be selfish, they are also capable of generosity.

No, the insight we gain from examining the strongmen’s altruism appears to center more on fundamental motivation. No matter how many people we connect with over social media, no matter how much peer pressure can be brought to bear on a problem, to achieve anything at all, each and every one of us must have somewhere buried within us a spark of true philanthropic motivation, the mysterious altruistic impulse that has as its ultimate goal the benefiting of someone other than oneself. The origins of this are far more personal than societal or institutional: in empathy-instilling parental nurturing, compassionate role models of childhood and adolescence, and the positive feedback gained by our very first pro-social acts done without any external coercion. A youth experiencing enough of such positive feedback will come to think of himself or herself as “good;” repeated performances of such voluntary good acts, over time, increases the level of moral obligation, and the need for external motivations for pro-social behavior lessens and eventually disappears.

As the sociologist and Holocaust survivor Samuel P. Oliner wrote, “This self-perception… leaves them with no choice in their behavior toward others.” And so, in this way does the altruist become strongly linked to others through a shared humanity.

Can social media be used to help change us fundamentally for the better, rather than just magnify human nature? Who knows. We’ll just have to wait and see…

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

 

Sometimes Happiness is Two Kinds of Agitation


Ever notice how doctors, psychologists and sociologists can describe and measure what’s wrong with people, but not what’s right about us? “Mental health,” “wellness” and “well-being” to psychiatrists and psychologists are simply the absence of “bad stuff” such as disease, distress, and disorder. Insurance companies reimburse us for the treatment of disorders but not the promotion of happiness and fulfillment. (Hey, have you seen the cost of insurance premiums these days?) Indeed, all of medicine is based on being reactive to bad things (maladies) happening to people, even if people bring the bad things upon themselves (e.g., obesity, lack of exercise, etc.).

America’s Founding Fathers wrote of our inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, even if we never actually manage to find it.

In the case of religious folk, happiness is, at least theoretically, a lot easier to come by, since many of the world’s great religions are based on a “Divine command theory” of happiness: happiness and rewards follow from following the commands of the divine. Thus, sentences in scripture such as “charity is good” mean the same thing as sentences such as “God commands charity.” Judaism and Christianity are both based on the Divine command theory of happiness. To Christians, true happiness can only be found in the afterlife; in the meantime we can at least avoid sin and zero-in on salvation via the Four Cardinal Virtues (Prudence, Justice, Restraint/Temperance and Courage/Fortitude) and Three Theological Virtues (Faith, Hope and Charity). All of this presumes, of course, that scriptures are in fact stating the will of God. “Revealed” literature ranges in quality from the admirable to the completely crazy, and is open to interpretation by scholars and holy men anyway. I’m reminded of the late Arthur Koestler, who would joke about “…theologians who start from the premise that the mind of God is beyond human understanding and then proceed to explain how the mind of God works…”

In any case, the theories of humanistic psychologists such as Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers touched upon the nature of human happiness, but it wasn’t until 1998 that Martin Seligman really brought forth and crystallized the “positive psychology movement,” starting a few months after he was elected president of the American Psychological Association. The Great Moment took place in Seligman’s garden while he was weeding with his 5-year-old daughter, Nikki, who was throwing weeds into the air and dancing around. Seligman yelled at her. She walked away, came back, and said, “Daddy, I want to talk to you… Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From the time I was three to the time I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. When I turned five, I decided not to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.”

As Seligman later wrote, “This was for me an epiphany, nothing less. I learned something about Nikki, something about raising kids, something about myself, and a great deal about my profession. First, I realized that raising Nikki was not about correcting whining. Nikki did that herself. Rather, I realized that raising Nikki was about taking this marvelous skill—I call it ‘seeing into the soul’—and amplifying it, nurturing it, helping her to lead her life around it to buffer against her weaknesses and the storms of life. Raising children, I realized, is more than fixing what is wrong with them. It is about identifying and nurturing their strongest qualities, what they own and are best at, and helping them find niches in which they can best live out these positive qualities… As for my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch… But the broadest implication of Nikki’s lesson was about the science and practice of psychology…. The message of the positive psychology movement is to remind our field that it has been deformed. Psychology is not just the study of disease, weakness, and damage; it also is the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is wrong; it also is building what is right. Psychology is not just about illness or health; it also is about work, education, insight, love, growth, and play.”

Seligman when on to write Authentic Happiness in 2002 and Character Strengths and Virtues in 2004, establishing himself as the founder and leader of the positive psychology movement. Seligman and his colleagues think that there are three broad areas of research: 1) The Pleasant Life or “life of enjoyment” of normal and healthy living (e.g. relationships, hobbies, interests, entertainment, etc.). 2) The Good Life, or “life of engagement,” which is the immersion and “flow” that happens when a person feels confident that they can accomplish tasks. 3) The Meaningful Life, or “life of affiliation,” which is how individuals derive a positive sense of well-being at the group level: belonging, meaning, and purpose from being part of and contributing back to something larger and more permanent than themselves (e.g. nature, social groups, organizations, movement traditions, belief systems).

What concerns both the aficionados and students of social media is #3–the group level civic virtues that encourage better citizenship, such as altruism, civility, nurturance, moderation, tolerance, responsibility, and attaining a general sense of “elevation,” the desire to act morally and do “good.” However, for many of us, as society becomes bigger, more complex and perhaps more menacing, individuals feel less significant and are less inclined to act to solve problems or “do good.” They become subject to “learned helplessness.” In an intimidating environment, they often shy away from working toward social-based happiness.

To counter this, the Canadian author and journalist J.B. MacKinnon devised a cognitive tool he calls “vertical agitation,” which involves focusing on only one trivial (small), doable portion of the problem at a time, and holding oneself accountable for solving the problem—all the way to the highest level of government, business and society. (A common example given is the purchase of energy efficient light bulbs.) Viewers of our #140conf videos and their social media savvy “characters” will recognize the idea of vertical agitation writ large across the Internet. People find each other and interact  in whatever way they can over the network.

Once enough people are connecting through the network and the problem or goal is externalized, “horizontal agitation” (a concept coined by Jennifer Jacquet) then kicks in, which she describes as simply “peer pressure combined with a pejorative element of what is socially or environmentally unacceptable. One friend lambasts me if she sees me with a disposable coffee cup. Another one does when I drive instead of walk. Researchers in Norway found that people certain about their peers’ recycling behavior were more likely to recycle themselves. In another study on towel reuse in hotel rooms, researchers from the University of Chicago found that a sign indicating how often towels were reused in that specific hotel room made guests more likely to return towels to the rack — more so than with cards that only said to reuse towels to ‘save the environment.’ Peer pressure and knowing what our peers do can be good.”

But as Jacquet acknowledges, today’s problems are too urgent to wait for horizontal agitation. Because vertical agitation can work higher in the demand chain, it can be more effective, since, in Jacquet’s words, “Rather than consumers hassling consumers, vertical agitation implies consumers hassle mega-consumers (chefs, managers, retailers, universities) or government. This is nothing new. Slavery did not end because abolitionists peer pressured slave owners to free their slaves. The destruction of the ozone layer did not slow because consumers convinced other consumers to stop buying products that contained hazardous CFCs. Inherently, we know vertical agitation is best. But very few people seem to feel empowered to try it.”

That’s where we think social media comes in, as a sort of “persuasion multiplier.” As with any form of public relations-type persuasion, however, there are different “publics” and different layers of social media subnetworks working toward the same overall goal. People seeking happiness via good works nevertheless follow the path of least resistance and tend to deal with what they find familiar and comforting (or at least offering less cognitive dissonance).

The trick, as Jacquet says, is that “We each need the perfectly sized problem—not too big and not too small—and then we need to direct it toward the appropriate person or institution. For some people, this will mean continuing to pester their friends. For others it means aiming upward.”

Aside from their use in social media, both vertical and horizontal agitation give the shopworn phrase “movers and shakers” a whole new meaning. :)

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

The Rise of Digital Altruism and the Birth of the Cyberhero


Altruism, a term coined by the proto-sociologist and philosopher of science, Auguste Comte, from the Latin alter (“other”) is the opposite of selfishness and egoism. The fact that it exists at all has disturbed and mystified everybody from evolutionary psychologists to followers of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy (nicknamed “rational selfishness”).

Founder and Executive Director of Evolutionary Guidance Media Research & Design, Inc., Dr. Dana Klisanin, one day decided to do some research in the area of altruism and the Internet, conducting an Internet-based search for websites that encourage digital actions that result in benefit to other people, animals, or the environment. (To distinguish these from pure e-philanthropy, the websites scrutinized were ones that didn’t demand any monetary donations from visitors.)

Klisanin’s 2011 paper, “Is the Internet Giving Rise to New Forms of Altruism?” (Media Psychology Review [Online]. 3, 1.) reveals not only that humanity has integrated moral concerns with digital technologies to create a new kind of altruism—digital altruism—but that this new altruism takes three forms:

1. “Everyday digital altruism,” involving expedience, ease, moral engagement, and conformity. These are Internet based initiatives that rely upon user-generated content and/or sharing of expertise created for the public good, e.g., Linux, Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia.

2. “Creative digital altruism,” involving creativity, heightened moral engagement, and cooperation. Creative altruism works against conformity. An American psychologist who pioneered the study of creativity, Howard E. Gruber, wrote of it: “[It is] about how to be of some use in relation to difficult, deep, and seemingly intractable human problems…. [It] expresses the highest development of the individual and at the same time depends on cooperation and mutual understanding…. [It] probably depends above all on a sense of the self expanding−expanding in our era toward world-consciousness.”  Ironically and paradoxically, the very creative yet cooperative act of correcting the inequalities that give rise to the need for altruism obliges us to put an end to the situation that makes altruism possible. In the realm of the Internet, such initiatives are designed to help other people, animals, or the environment, using a click-to-donate format, e.g., Care2.com, or as an integral facet of social networking, searching, shopping, or gaming, e.g., Causes, Goodsearch, Goodshop, ServiceSpace (formerly, CharityFocus); The Rainforest Site, Ripple.org, TheBigTest.org, FreePoverty, etc.

3. “Co-creative digital altruism” involving creativity, moral engagement, and meta-cooperative efforts. Meta-cooperative efforts to solve truly large-scale problems, linked by the Internet, or the grid. Instead being commenced by one or two people, these ambitious initiatives begin at a corporate level or something on that scale, involve transdisciplinary creativity, entail sustained moral engagement, and require cooperation that is transnational, transcorporate, transNGO, and transpersonal (in short, “meta-cooperation”). Examples include the philanthropic efforts of Google.org in this category, such as Google Crisis Response, which has mapped territories struck by natural disasters. Of course, outside of the Internet and in the “real” world, natural disasters are among the few phenomena that can bring corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals to work together across continents to accomplish humanitarian goals. Even Ayn Rand, that eccentric and troublesome incarnation of ethical egoism, thought it appropriate to assist strangers in an emergency—though only a “metaphysical emergency,” which she defined in her essay “The Ethics of Emergency” as an “unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible,” such as a fire, flood or earthquake. (Not concerning the survival of an individual mind you, but general, human survival.)

As Klisanin, writes, “By recognizing co-creative digital altruism as a new mode of collaborative social action, we create a language capable of referencing ideal forms of global cooperation.” Another example of “co-creative digital altruism” is the World Community Grid consisting of hundreds of global partners (businesses, associations, foundations, government agencies, and universities) and over a half-million members who donate their idle computer time to solve complex problems via a grid computing scenario wherein their many individual computers are joined to create a large virtual system possessing computational power far exceeding that of even the world’s top supercomputers.

Interestingly, one layer of altruism depends upon another. In what Klisanin calls the “altruistic domino effect,” the individual PC owners at the bottom engaging in the “everyday digital altruism” of being willing to simply click-to-donate or donate their unused computer time to the grid are indispensable in making possible the conditions upon which other altruists are able bring about the greater “creative digital altruism” and “co-creative digital altruism” of Care2.com and the World Community Grid in the phenomenal or “real” world. A million mere mouse clicks can lead to the purchase, delivery and distribution of food, medicine, etc., to people worldwide, or can help solve one of the mysteries of the universe, or perhaps just do something amusing like calculate the value of Pi to a gazillion decimal places.

One thing that technology teaches us is that cost and “ease of use” are the two most important factors in the adoption of anything new. For digital altruism, note that small payments can be sent by a smartphone to something like Kickstarter, or that volunteers can easily offer services in ServiceSpace’s charity ecosystem (which evolved from focusing just on technically helping charities, to encouraging everyday people to contribute in meaningful ways to the world around them). This indicates that the up-and-coming generation will find the world of digital altruism a far friendlier landscape to negotiate than the jungle of bureaucratic altruist organizations faced by their parents. Klisanin even speculates that “engaging in this form of creativity may one day become a classroom activity.”

How many people actually participate in this new digital altruism? In 2010 Klisanin estimated there to be 187 million of them. She even thinks that such individuals represent the appearance of a new kind of hero archetype: the “cyberhero.”

Okay all of you cyberheroes out there. You know who you are. Don’t waste money on a distinctive superhero outfit. You won’t need shoulder pads, kevlar vests, titanium-plated armor, oversized belts or ammunition pouches, just a PC and a bank account. That’ll do for starters.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Social Media and the Boundaries of Utopia


Humankind has always harbored the utopian impulse, the expression of desire for a better way of living, often one radically different from the ever-inequitable status quo.

To some early colonists of the New World, the wilds of North America were a perfect realm to set up utopian societies, the kind that first appeared as literary fantasies, wishful thinking or speculations, as in the case of Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. The rest of the populace feared the great dark woods to the west, as any reader of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels can recognize the archetypes of savages, sex and the Devil lurking there.

According to the historian Marcus Bach (writing in 1961), “One hundred and twenty-nine times in our history, people have banded together, determined to create a world within a world in which they would have friends to trust, work to enjoy, a faith to follow, and a chance to live their lives without conflict or fear.” In 1980, Robert Fogarty’s Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History included 147 leaders, 59 major colonies, and descriptions of 270 such social experiments between 1787 and 1919, many situated in (perhaps not surprisingly) California, followed by Kansas, Washington and Missouri. The rather amazingly long list of these groups include familiar names such as the Mormons and Shakers, and other, more obscure ones with enchanting names such as The Harmony Society, Separatists, Fourierists, Owenists, Perfectionists, Icarians, Transcendentalists, the Aurora-Bethal Communities, the Oneida Community of upstate New York, the vegan Societas Fraternia of Anaheim, the secular anarchist Llano del Rio Colony, Bishop Hill, the Doukhobors, Amanas, Hutterites, etc.

Despite their impressive number, as the historian Laurence Veysey noted in The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter Cultures in America (1973), none of these groups ever made a major impact on American culture. As Robert V. Hine remarked in California’s Utopian Colonies (1953), “Cultural radicals tend to seek self-development rather than political power. In their individuality and self-indulgence (ironically contrasting with the stance against prevailing individualism), they are destined to remain impotent in the realm of social change.” Indeed, they are often societal victims, as their pacifism or predilection for home schooling generally brought them into conflict with existing laws of the outsiders, as in the case of the Amish of Pennsylvania.

The German Jewish intellectual Ernst Bloch, in his 1200-page book, The Principle of Hope, found the utopian impulse in everything from fairy tales to the alchemical quest for the Philosopher’s Stone and St. Brendan’s search for the Promised Isles. To the great Hungarian-born sociologist Karl Mannheim, ideology is that which preserves the status quo, but the utopian impulse is what can transform it. “Real” historical utopias become frozen, stifling examples of ideologies, generally turning out to be dystopias gleefully abandoned by its members (there are also literary echoes here, as in Huxley’s Brave New World and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451).

As the sociologist Ruth Levitas has written, “Contemporary utopianism is different. It has retreated into the private sphere. One might cite the exercise and diet regimes in pursuit of the perfect body that are so prevalent in contemporary western culture as utopian in [Ernst] Bloch’s sense… Equally, the attempt to create a private utopian space is expressed in the emphasis on house and garden design… Public and private gardens can be seen as little utopias squeezed into the interstices of space… Holidays of course, always advertised as paradisical, are squeezed into the interstices of time… These fleeting utopias function more as escape and compensation, rather than having transformative or even critical power. They are expressive rather than instrumental… Bloch himself makes a distinction between ‘abstract utopia,’ which is essentially expressive and wishful, and ‘concrete utopia,’ which is instrumental and transformative.”

And now, in the new world of social media, we have traded the utopias of old for pure utopianism, but this utopianism is much more than the private meditations of a person sitting at a PC; it is an impulse that can lead to concrete results. Our social reveries in cyberspace are expressed not just in an abstract sense, but with a desired impact on society, or to remedy an injustice, everywhere, not just in a community walled off from the rest of the world. A single person can mobilize thousands of similar-minded people across the globe. They can contribute money to build a school in Tanzania, or fund the coffers of a favored political candidate. They can champion the homeless or bring attention to a deserving though obscure segment of society.

In short, with the onset of social media, the boundaries of utopia have collapsed in terms of both space and time. “Utopia” is potentially anywhere and everywhere, of any size, and fleeting or long-lived. What was once wishful thinking among small groups of people is now is a precursor of willful action by the multitudes, all thanks to the vast electronic connectivity of the networked masses.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.