As a graduate student, particularly at an institution like Harvard, I struggle to untangle the theory vs. practice debate. Before returning to school, I remember pondering anxiously over the idea of having to give up two years of my career in ‘doing things and getting things done’ for studying a bunch of frameworks, developed by white-haired men thirty and forty years ago, that would turn out to have no relevance today. In short, I didn’t want to learn theory. I just wanted to know how to do shit.

I often feel like we force our square-shaped public health interventions into these well rounded theories, in order to be awarded that grant money or journal submission. However, after a year and a half of learning some basic health behavior models and observing how they do at times apply to the progress being made in the health care arena these days, I am starting to come around to the idea. Taking Marshall Ganz’s class in community organizing at the Harvard Kennedy School, however, has changed my entire perspective. Here is an example of how a detailed framework is being applied out in the world, and how adhering to that framework can change the lives of individuals and the future of a country, completely.

Ganz is one of the masterminds behind the Obama national field campaign — a groundbreaking demonstration of community and online organizing that has the potential to go down in history as the most successful and inspiring Presidential campaign of all time. As Zack Exley writes, “Barack Obama—through the most incredible, random, beautiful, twists of history—has brought good organizing back.” What Ganz teaches us in class and what Obama was able to do, is how to give people agency and motivate people to action. Instead of just asking people to ‘make the check payable to….and you just sit back and let us do the work”, the campaign provided a platform for people’s voices to be heard and people’s skills to be utilized. Rather than scream to the masses, soap-box style, the campaign leaders very patiently and strategically spoke to a few key people. And those regular, ordinary, not-necessarily-politically-active people, were the megaphone through which Obama’s voice could be heard. By organizing leaders to then go out and organize leadership teams, to then go out and organize communities, a seamless and unparalleled operation was formed! The model — based on building trust through one-on-one meetings; building leadership through constant training and feedback; building a community through a shared purpose and collective efficacy to achieve that purpose — showed people that they indeed do matter, that their votes matter and that they can play a role in the outcome of a campaign. Despite a substantial online presence, Clinton was not able to organize to the magintude that Obama did. Her campaign relied on the old traditions of fundraising through big donors and bundlers — she had a lot of money coming in but no agency in the public. Like her failed attempts at revamping the healthcare system in the ’90s, she kept power in the hands of the few and closed herself off from innovation and progress.

My roommate, bless her little heart, is a bit of a technophobe. A social worker from Maine, she prefers the consumption and dissemination of information in the most traditional of forms — talking, listening, journal-writing, reading books and magazines. When I told her that I was going to start a blog, she frowned on the concept and launched into a near-rant about how the Internet is ruining relationships and human connectivity. The Internet, she reckons, is emotionless and fosters solitude. It is symbolic of our failure to truly connect on personal levels. I too believed this for a long time and was slow to join the groundswell. Ironically, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff seem to espouse the very concepts that my roomie cherishes, in advising companies on how to embrace the online community for better business: listening, talking, energizing, supporting and embracing. Wait! These aren’t tech terms! They’re hippie terms! They are what I am constantly asking my boyfriend to do more of, not what I thought I would ever read in a book about computer technology.

What Li and Bernoff are talking about is the inherent difference between talking with your customers and shouting at them. Mainstream advertising occurs on a soap box — it is all about mass. How many times can we repeat our message and to how large an audience? The blogosphere on the other hand, provides a platform to target your message to a relevant audience, and allow the audience to be part of the conversation. When CEOs join social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are showing an interest in their consumers/client/members, and demonstrating the ‘gold standard’ business practices of transparency, accountability and efficiency. Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta write on Forbes.com that “In the current stormy economy, as companies look for new ways to market their products and engage their customers, chief executive officers are finally looking more and more at how social networking tools can extend their brands, create corporate cultures based on listening and learning, and establish their own leadership profiles.” Most CEOs are cut off from their consumers and often, from most of their staff. Blogs and social networking platforms provide a space for discussion and putting a human face on an otherwise faceless hierarchy of authority.

One word of caution, however. CEOs who choose to take on the new media world are most likely walking into a great unknown and can easily get swept up in the groundswell as so many of us have. They must, however, be careful not to substitute quantity for quality, as traditional advertising continues to do. Debbie Weil warns us well on her blog — it is not about how many friends you have on Facebook, how many contacts on LinkdIn or how many followers on Twitter. What you are putting out into the world is the most important thing.

In Groundswell, Li and Bernoff highlight a number of case studies where companies have embraced new media, not only to advance their product line, but to enter into conversations with their consumers. I am particularly impressed with beinggirl.com, developed by Proctor and Gamble. The website reminds me of the magazines I read as an adolescent — like Teen and Teen Beat. Reading through it brought me right back — to the advice columns, the embarrassing stories, the tales of crushes, sprouting boobs and growing up. The amazing thing about beinggirl, however, is that these girls can interact with professionals and peers immediately! The site draws close to 300,000 viewers every month, a majority of whom are teenagers between 12 and 17, who are asking questions about periods, boys and babies. Proctor and Gamble has taken a major step forward, meeting its consumers where they are, challenging the status quo by destigmatizing conversation about puberty, and fostering listening, emotion and growth. If these are characteristics that the Internet is reinforcing, it is time that people like my roomate speak up and jump in.

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I am so glad to have been assigned Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0, because it is a question I have been secretly asking myself for the last few months, ashamed that I couldn’t define it by now and oddly avoiding just looking it up. The very first website that appeared when I finally did is its Wikipedia definition, which is incredibly fitting given that Web 2.0 represents the movement from ‘web as a product’ delivered by some to the many, to ‘web as a service’ produced, monitored and improved by the many. O’Reilly thankfully reminds his audience that Web 2.0 is a complex term that is often misused, and lacks a clear definition. He begins his essay with a description of the bursting of the dotcom bubble and a real Darwinian approach to analyzing those that survived and those that did not. When the Internet market crashes, O’Reilly describes how “The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other” (page 1). On his zeromillion.com blog, Ryan Allis writes that the bubble burst because Internet companies were greedy and thoughtless as they grew to power. Here is what they screwed up:

1. Their business plan. While often “inspiring” or “revolutionary”, they were never profitable.

2. They spent other people’s money unchecked in an effort to gain market share as soon as possible

3. They had inexperienced teams whose only goal was the fastest possible growth of their company, not long term success.

4. Their company may have made it in the end, but because of the failure of so many others their investor capital was pulled.

This sounds surprisingly like what happened in November 2008 when, practically overnight, the U.S. economy followed by those of every industrialized and now non-industrialized nation in the world, came crashing down from near-utopian heights. Poor business planning, zero accountability, blurred transparency and the failure of those people who were doing well while everyone else wasn’t, to simply ask “What is wrong here?” Perhaps if banks were run on an open source model, rather than in secret rooms in the basements of society’s consciousness, a global monitoring system would have emerged to ensure the checks and balances of fiscal responsibility.

The most appealing aspect that distinguishes Web 2.0 from Web 1.0 is its reliance on collective intelligence — on its users. Like Gillmor, Raymond and other proponents of the open source model, Web 2.0 represents the move from the cathedral to the bazaar — the decentralization process that grows up and out instead of down and where the more users there are, the better the service will be. It is O’Reilly’s implicit “architecture of participation” and ethic of cooperation whereby value is correlated to users, not to producers. Dion Hinchcliffe provides a useful visual representation of the ‘architecture of participation‘, highlighting the emergence of YouTube and MySpace as case-in-point examples of the rapid dissemination and effectiveness of harnessing collective intelligence.

The question we have to ask ourselves now is what is Web 3.0 and when will it emerge? Will we be able to witness the transition, through a wide-scale press release or high-profile event? Or, more likely, will Web 3.0 slowly creep into our lives, delicately changing the way information is supplied and how we demand it? I suppose it will be when Google perfects its search engine to the point that we can type in: “I want to see a funny movie and then eat at a good Mexican restaurant. What are my options?”Using a database of information on your previous searches, bookmarked pages, favorite sites and product buying history, Google will be able to give you a response that meets your every need. It will be when anyone and everyone can create, publish and disseminate their ideas under the same infrastructure as the super-awesome-omnipotent-amazing nerds at Google (forgive me, I have been reading far too much about Google). I like the way Marc Benioff puts it on Techcrunchit: “For developers, Web 3.0 means that all they need to create their dream app is an idea, a browser, some Red Bull, and a few Hot Pockets”.

Two dear friends have launched a unique NGO called Level Playing Field, that will provide North American, female college soccer players the opportunity to train female soccer coaches in Bolivia. It is a beautiful concept that builds on the idea of using sport as a tool for economic and social development and reducing gender inequalities in a country plagued by sexism. I have joined the team as a member of the board of directors and as the head of marketing and communications. As a trial run, I purchased Google AdWords using a mere $10 budget (my first of what I assume will be many donations to the organization) to see what type of exposure we can get using Google’s lucrative service. In the last week, the ad has had over 22,000 impressions but only 7 click throughs. They have been under the key words, ’soccer’ (3), ‘Bolivia’ (2) and ‘volunteer’ (1).

I remember the first time that I Googled myself. I felt so weird about it, like it was a really vain thing to do. Little did I know at the time that the action is referred to as ‘vanity searching’, or even by some, as egosurfing. No wonder I felt so strange. I remember the mix of emotions — the fear of seeing information about myself online, mixed with the greater fear of seeing nothing. These were then confused by a third feeling of total self-consciousness — I think I literally glanced over my shoulder to make sure that nobody was watching me commit such a self-indulgent act. I know I am not the only one. A 2007 Pew poll found that nearly 50% of Americans vanity search. As I become more knowledgeable about how ’search’ works, thanks to John Battelle’s enlightening book, I now have a better understanding of why the first website listed when searching for my name is Zoominfo, which in fact I do not even have a profile set up for! I find this infuriating but realize that there is not much I can do to change it until I start putting in the effort to boost the more preferable sites about me, organically. Despite being a young person quite new to the online publishing world, I have a small list of things on the web that people may want to know about me (rather than solely my existence on social networking sites). For instance, that I wrote for the Michigan Daily and that there are very funny pictures of me as a college freshman. Or perhaps that I work with young people living with HIV or that I have run two marathons.

So now I am starting to feel better. At least from what I can see, there is enough about me on the web for someone to learn some basic facts, and there is nothing overly incriminating or embarrassing. Then I discover Egosurf, a website dedicated to giving you an ego ranking, based on a search of your name and blogspot. Guess what mine is…a big fat zero! Really, that is how they coin it! Then it called me a loser.

Like Dan Gillmor in We The Media, Battelle launches into a detailed debate about privacy, or lack there of, when it comes to search. Let me get this straight. The Do No Evil mantra that Google espouses is supposed to help us feel rest assured that they will never give out our private information to anyone, particularly to Government. However, even if they do, they would never be able to tell us. I see. Now I’m glancing over my shoulder again. I work in sexual health and I also work with refugees. I search terms like ‘Joseph Kony‘ and ‘sex offender‘ all day long. If all the Government really needs is some inckling that I am up to no good, “how does one tell the difference between [my] First Amendment right to do searches about terrrorists, for example, and the searches of a real terrorist?” (Battelle, page 200). Today, Congress voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act without reforms to ensure that anti-terrorism resources are being used to investigate potential terrorists, rather than everyday Americans who are utilizing search. At what point will our freedom of and right to information create a global paranoia that stops us altogether from accessing the Internet and returning to a state of simplicity and ignorance? Or am I just being paranoid?

“As surfers moved from a stance of exploration (‘What is out there?’) to expectation (‘I want to find something that I know is out there’), search as a navigational metaphor began to make more sense” — John Battelle in The Search.

In Chapter 1 of John Battelle’s The Search, we learn about the “database of intentions” — an aggregated network of every Internet search ever taken, the results of those searches, and the paths taken within those searches.  Used for beneficial purposes, this means having an entree into what people think about, how they think about those things, and then how we can formulate information more succinctly and coherently so that consumers get what they need and want. On the other hand, having access to the clickstream of users from the point of inception, poses a major threat to privacy. We become prisoners of our own thoughts, living in a world that can implicate us anytime for our curiosity. The ‘Googles’ of the world ensure that the “database” will never be used for such purposes, but how can we be so sure? On his February 6th blog post, John Battelle introduces Google’s new application, Latitude. By signing up with your phone number, Google can track your location and let your friends know where you are at all times. The comments on this post range between utter disgust at the idea of putting one’s very personal information (phone number) on the web, coupled with people’s access to knowledge of one’s whereabouts. Others think it is a brilliant idea for both marketing and social networking, likening it to the innovations brought about by YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

I want to digress for just a moment to acknowledge a line in this book that troubled me deeply. In his discussion of the implications of search and the possibilities involved with having access to individuals’ clickstreams, Battelle says, “Etched into the silicon of Google’s more than 150,000 servers, more likely than not, are the agonized clickstreams of a gay man with AIDS, the silent intentions of a would-be bomb maker, the digital bread crumbs of a serial killer” (page 13). As an HIV and human rights activist, I find it deeply stigmatizing to associate people living with HIV, particularly gay men, with murderers. This is a stigma that is now far too outdated, ignorant and prejudice, for a book published in 2005.

Now back to my commentary. I love this idea of recovery vs. discovery. There is search to uncover what we know exists and then search to discover what we think may exist, but know very little about. It is like the philosophical tension between the way the world is and the way we would like it to be. As search becomes more ubiquitous and comprehensive, it feels as though we will continue to move in the direction of ‘knowing’ to ‘presuming’, in both our search for information as well as our search for listings. One Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist, Mary Bowling, highlights on her blog how small businesses can optimize their marketing via search.

In Chapter 2, Battelle poses a question that constantly plagues me. “Why do so many folks click on paid ads?” He then discusses the popularity of online shopping, and users propensity to click on paid ads to find out about products. However, I still struggle with this idea. I know that I never look at the paid ads on websites, opting always for natural search to guide my buying behavior. Why would I buy a product simply because its manufacturer can afford expensive advertising, when I have the opportunity to see how that product is ranked by other users and Internet consumers. On the other hand, I tend to fall into the usual trap of assuming that those companies who can afford expensive advertising are clearly doing well and therefore have good products to sell. It is a constant argument in behavioral economics that I hope the Internet and the power of search can help us resolve.

“A culture of cut and paste is made to order for the Net, where an almost anything goes attitude prevails” — Dan Gillmor, We the Media.

Throughout the final chapters of his book, Dan Gillmor illustrates the increasingly intricate world of copyright laws on the Net. It is enough to make anyone’s head spin and by the time you come out of your dizzy spell, the laws will have changed, one hundred more blog posts will have been written and you will have to learn it all over again. Still, I want to focus on this idea of cybersquatting for just a moment. From my understanding, these are the people that buy web addresses that sound similar to popular trademark names in order to drive traffic toward the website, or sell back the name for profit. U.S. law bans ‘bad faith intent to profit’, however cybersquatting does not sound all that different from investment banking. In the most basic sense of the term, people are constantly investing in companies and real estate. They do not do so with intent to utilize those companies’ services or live on that property, but rather to sell them back and turn them into profit. So how is buying a domain name, with the intent to sell it, any different?

The problem here, of course, is the inability to control what happens when domain names are bought and then used to supply incorrect or even malicious information. For instance, if a middle-schooler is writing a paper on Martin Luther King Jr. and Googles the preacher’s name, he or she will find a long list of websites with biographical and historical information from a poignant time in recent history. Upon closer inspection, we see that the third website listed on the Google page is www.martinlutherking.org. Sounds perfect right? WRONG. The website is one radical bigot’s rant against every historical fact about Martin Luther King’s character, accomplishments and values. The first ’suggested reading’ on the site is My Awakening, by David Duke, America’s most famous racist, white-supremacist, Holocaust-denying anti-Semite. I am all for freedom of speech, but where do we draw the line when incoherent and often dangerous information is being splashed all over the web?

Gillmor offers almost juxtaposing positions on how to view the Internet and the daily emergence of new media technologies. On the one hand, the Internet and more importantly the advent of citizen journalism, is a hallmark of freedom, transparency and access to information that is unprecedented in history. It provides a platform where passive readers can become active collaborators, informants and opinionites. On the other hand, centralization and authority are slowly creeping in, threatening our ability to ‘freely’ surf the web without surveillance and documentation. Anyone with a decent grip on cyberspeak would be able to trace a long history of websites that an individual has visited, with the proverbial ‘click of a button’. Furthermore, countries like Brazil are now implementing laws mandating that people must fully disclose their identity before using the Internet, or face up to four years in jail. Blogger Meme de Carbono writes on Daniel Duende’s Global Voices Online blog that “the Internet is a great menace to the power established by media, governments and corporations. These established powers are used to speaking to, but not interacting with, their subjects”. With the new laws in place, the threat of ‘cybercrimes’ could silence an entire public.

Fears of piracy and plagiarism haunt the online publishing industry to a far higher degree than its printed predecessor. Wherease we commonly think that information and innovatin foster creative freedom, it can be argued that they actually limit it.  This reminds me of a paper I wrote in college for an English class. I wonder if Dan Gillmor ever imagined he would be compared to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a student’s blogpost.  In A Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau examines the debilitation of society as it progresses from the original state of nature. He argues that the acquisition of knowledge leads to technology and commoditization, which in turn produce desire and greed. Desire and greed lead to possession and possession leads to weakness. Gillmor implies that every blogger is a plagiarist because he or she is constantly linking to the words of others. He or she is submitting to the language of others, in order to foster progress. Rousseau would then say that the individual is actually submissive to a set of ideas previously established, and bound to those ideas because attempting to alter them is impossible.  In this way, language oppresses rather than liberates. Plagiarism Today author Jonathan Baily writes on the Blog Herald that most of the viewings of website content do not take place on websites or RSS feeds, but on other sites. A report released by Attributor found that online publishers have an off-site audience of about 1.5 times the size of the audience that visits their websites. So the question is, if we are chained to the prescribed laws of dispensing language (word formation, sentence structure, etc) and use the language of others to drive our own interpretations of the world, are we in fact allowing innovation and technology to repress rather than liberate us?

“Maybe the masses don’t care about all of the issues, but individuals care about some of them” — Dan Gillmor, We the Media.

We the Media by Dan Gillmor is the first book that I have read about new media and the digital age, and I feel like I have been launched into reality. Coming from an academic background shrouded in ‘old-school’ publishing — step 1. submit research to peer review journal, step 2. wait six weeks for submission to be reviewed, step 3. make all adjustments recommended by editorial review board, step 4. re-submit research, step 5. wait six weeks for re-review and acceptance, step 6. wait six months to one year for research to be published, step 7. send press release out to newspapers, step 8. add yourself to a group of distinguished scholars whose work is praised and rewarded within a very narrow field and live in fear that your hard work and patience will never reach the ears of the people most in need — blogging feels like the antidote to the chronic anxiety that my voice will never be heard.

I am not dissing on academic research, nor am I assuming that anyone will read my blog just because I have one. Public health’s most influential innovations are documented in the libraries of print and online journals, and I use those every day in my own research and practice. However, I am constantly plagued by the disconnect between the writer and reader, publisher and consumer, doctor and patient, that is almost facilitated rather than mitigated, by publishing in this field.

In his book, Gillmor demonstrates that old news-making, though maintaining a stronghold through newspapers and television, is losing exposure and influence. With the advent of the Internet, and more importantly the “blog”, citizen journalism has become the norm. As Gillmor puts it, we are getting “news and commentary from the edge of the networks”, from everyday people who care about issues and often know more about them than the journalists who report them.

What blogging has done is reinforced the idea of citizenship. Where community activism used to be characterized by dreadlocked hippies carrying placards and beating drums for an audience of student news TV cameras, civic engagement in media, business, and politics has now become the norm. In addition to blogging, we find entire websites, like Ground Report, (started by my high school basketball teammate no less) dedicated to new stories written by everyday people.This is true efficiency in journalism — zero overhead because reporters are already on the ground, all over the world. With a new administration promising to listen to its public, Gillmor has hit the nail on the head: blogging has brought the governed back into government, the voice back to the consumer, and the watchdog into the big house.

I study public health, and more specifically the intersection between media and public health. Therefore, what Gillmor is saying resonates deeply. Websites such as WebMD and Google Health have allowed people to become patient advocates and informed consumers — investigating their conditions, their treatments, their options, before even stepping foot into a doctor’s office. This not only gives people the keys to information about their health and their health care options, but holds medical professionals accountable for providing up to date information and adequate care. Though some doctors still aggressively resist MD rating sites, their existence alone has helped put patient voice back into the measurement of and demand for decent health care. Ruth Given writes on the Health Care Blog that the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the federal government, is collecting patient opinion data from these sites and collating it into annual reports that can be accessed by the public.

In Chapter 5, Gillmor writes that the issues of our times are too complex to be covered by mainstream, corporate journalism. Big Media, just like Big Government and Big Medicine, needs to put its trust in citizens — or the term I prefer, netizens. In a decentralized system that holds its people accountable for the integrity of one another, a genuine community of active consumers, mavens and watchdogs is formed.