Iran and the Twitter-Happy Classes

Went to the event ‘Social Media in the Middle East’ at Harvard last week, with Rob Faris from the Berkman Center, Ziad Al-Duaji (a.k.a. Zaydoun) of Kuwait Unplugged fame, Lily Mazahery, an Iranian-American lawyer and activist, and Evgeny Morozov, Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown and writer of the Net Effect blog.

The event quickly became a Mazahery vs. Morozov slinging match of sorts, debating whether social media in general and Twitter in particular boosted the effect of post-election demonstrations in Iran. (Seems like everybody and their mother are asking themselves this question these days?)

Mazahery argued that the viral effect of news, photos and videos from Tehran, distributed to international media via Twitter accounts like her own, had a ‘revolutionising’ effect on the resistance movement’s impact both in Iran and abroad. Rather than ‘the West’ or ‘the US’, Twitter became the regime’s enemy, argued Mazahery, illustrating her case with political cartoons mocking the mullahs, and the harrowing image of Neda, which undoubtedly played a role in galvanising support for the ‘green movement’ abroad.

Unfortunately, Mazahery glossed over the fact that digital technology also shifts a lot of power in favour of repressive regimes. Rest assured that Morozov didn’t hold himself back from reminding her that the Twitter-happy classes get ahead of themselves way too often, forgetting the ways in which tech-savvy regimes can wreak as much havoc on social movements as the other way around. He questioned whether the U.S. State Department has any business interfering with Twitter’s maintenance work schedule in order to provide a platform for social resistance movements around the world.

The tension between Mazahery and Morozov mirrors that of the two camps writing on the information revolution – those that argue that digital media will lead to more empowerment on part of repressive regimes than their citizens, and those that think the‘information revolution’, with its distributed communications and decentralised notion of power, can lead to a related change in distribution of influence, expanding the role of social activism online.

My fellow Fletcherite Patrick Meier points out that there is a real lack of evidence beyond the anecdotal here. Luckily for us, his dissertation addresses this exact ‘digital arms race’ – stay tuned.

Whatever view we subcribe to, recent movements in Iran certainly remind us to proceed with caution. The Ministry of Information’s tracking of digital activists is well-known, tapping SMS and mobile phone conversations with Nokia Siemens Network technology and filtering search words and websites. At the end of 2008, the charmers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps stated that they will launch 10.000 blogs for the paramilitary Basij forces ‘in order to control the internet and other digital devices, including SMS’. Progress is apparently patchy – from 10,000 to 40, nice – but the cat and mouse game of online and actual power is clearly not over.

Staying Aligned

I was one the many European subscribers to Obama’s campaign updates via e-mail, from early on in the Democratic primaries all the way to victory. Even being outside of the target audience, and thus outside the ‘movement’ constantly referred to in their updates, the e-mails really struck a chord with me – their sense of urgency, the immediacy, the personal touches. It mirrored the direct, activist-style language non-profits increasingly use, and felt refreshingly no-nonsense amidst an American election campaign that can look over-the-top glitzy and well-rehearsed viewed from a European political context.

It was obviously an amazingly well-executed campaign, especially in terms of new media. The Yammer account at the NGO I was working for at the time was full of people wondering how we might learn from it, and transfer its successes to our own challenges in advocacy, campaigns and fundraising. From graphic design to web analytics, there are tons of threads to explore here – perhaps most interestingly fundraising via web and e-mail, which I think carries particular challenges for European NGOs. One of the most alienating things about the e-mail updates for me were the constant direct questions for a fiver or more – it struck me as something that would be hard to pull off in countries where people pay 50% tax, where there’s less of a culture for philanthropy and where fundraising efforts are often dressed up as something else. But hey, that’s my gut instinct, and if there’s one take-away from the excellent M&R report on ‘Online Tactics & Success’ examining Obama’s new media campaign, it is: don’t go with intuition, TEST. The analytics team proved people’s instincts wrong repeatedly, and makes me think of the amount of truisms (‘donor fatigue’ anyone?) in the non-profit sector I’d love to debunk with data. I’ll deal with fundraising later, for now I wanted to write a note on two themes – alignment and political campaigning as a two-way street.

What possibly impressed me the most about the Obama campaign was what David Plouffe labeled a ‘belief in alignment’ – staying on message across all aspects of the campaign. ‘If his speech that day was about energy… we’d make sure our volunteers that day were talking to the voters (…) about energy and that we had advertising on that focused on energy and that our Internet advertising in that market was focused on energy’, says Plouffe. This emphasis on alignment contrasts greatly with my experience of international non-profit communications. Judging by conversations with friends at various agencies, particularly and not surprisingly the UN because of its sheer size and scope, I’d say what riles people the most is the sense that we often try to do too much at the same time, and arguably end up not doing anything properly.

Of course, staying ‘on message’ isn’t an option for us in the same way it is for a political campaign with one ultimate goal and time-frame – the work of humanitarian and development agencies is characterised by the complexity and interconnectedness of issues, and we need to talk about all of them. Yet I still think we can learn something from the Obama campaign’s philosophy of alignment, country by country, case by case, especially with the way the sector deals with cross-cutting issues like gender, education  or public health. For example, all agencies ‘mainstream’ gender or HIV/AIDS, meaning analysis of these issues should be integrated into the way projects and programmes are designed, managed and evaluated. If everybody’s concerned with these underlying issues, greater integration of messages and content is needed – across agency websites, conventional press outlets, marketing materials and so on. Thinking about the amount of staff in various countries producing different content for different media about the same underlying themes drives me nuts – we spread ourselves too thinly. Thinking about communications alignment between and within agencies is the only way we will ever get closer to One UN.

Also, more proactive planning and new media departments that can ensure that websites are aligned with most important topic of the day is needed. As it stands, the Chief Exec might be responding to press requests for an emergency in one place, while press coverage is driving up traffic to a website that focuses on an entirely different crisis. The respect for new media illustrated by the Obama campaign’s organisational chart, where it was on equal footing with other campaign departments and notably separate from Communications, implied an autonomy that led to much shorter lead times. At the moment, non-profit new media departments are generally small and often subsumed under a huge Communications umbrella. It often means a ridiculously bureaucratic sign-off procedure, hampering quick turnaround times and appropriate alignment of messaging across different media.

Alignment was a significant part of the team’s ability to build a movement and campaign that was very much a two-way street. I’ve beat on in previous posts about how some international organisations engage and energise their supporters while others have stayed away from social media entirely – this is of course a function of whether they have an ‘activist’ culture, and the extent to which their work relies on individual supporters. There is a lot to learn from the ‘inside information’ approach of the Obama campaign’s communications, perhaps especially because international organisations have three parts to the conversation, one of which is generally silent. We call them ‘beneficiaries’. So beyond trying to build a positive movement of agencies and supporters actively engaged in a conversation, there is the challenge of meaningfully incorporating a vulnerable third element which largely has organisations speaking on its behalf. The unequal distribution of power among the parties means that it’s a different and potentially uncomfortable kind of conversation.

To deal with this, some agencies emphasise ‘positive’ communication protocols that offer guidelines on language (‘people living in poverty’ rather than ‘the poor’, for example) and visuals (strong, powerful images of individuals rather than groups of destitute, emaciated children), while others will argue that accurate depictions of shocking and horrific realities are the only way to shake people into action, anything else amounts to sugarcoating. Ultimately, these are only discussions on how to present somebody else’s reality, and the most effective approach would of course be a world in which everybody could speak for themselves. Failing that, non-profits could take a few leaves out of the Obama campaign’s book – especially in terms of video, where the team chose prolific output over strict production and accepted that the most viewed videos weren’t even produced by themselves. As mobile phones with image-capture and video capability spread rapidly, this type of content could provide snapshots of a reality no in-house video team could ever portray. Yes, it’ll be messy, it’ll be uncomfortable, it’ll be risky. But with increasing convergence of content-producers and audience, an industry that relies on giving a voice to the voiceless will need to start rethinking its role as it stops having a monopoly on ‘ground truth’. Perhaps the future function of non-profits is less microphone, more amplifier?

Too Many Voices for One UN

Sitting with 700 other people in a massive open plan office at Oxfam’s headquarters in Oxford, I’d often dream of setting up my own company specialising in UN & NGO communications. A company that researched media environments all over the world, partnered with amazing content-producers – locally if possible, but never at the expense of quality – and monitored progress and results diligently. A company that used whatever medium fit their purpose in any given country – print, sms, viral video or feeding public health messages to soap opera stars – and ‘got’ the groundswell. A company that meant I could continue my nomadic existence without necessarily having to accept the diplomacy-style three-year rotations of international service. A company where I could combine my interest in big, global issues without having to work for big, global bureaucracies.

I’ve been fascinated with how the sector runs its awareness-raising and behaviour-change campaigns ever since I went to the UN Film Festival (no website, mmmhm) on the Southbank of London in 2006. Some of the short ads and videos were great – heartbreaking, soulshaking stuff. Others were simply cringe-worthy and badly produced. The discrepancy between what was out there and what was possible, seemed huge. It still does.

Seeing their business is fundamentally about some sort of change, international institutions spend a lot of money on various types of communications. Broadly speaking, for audiences in donor countries, this means campaigns to raise awareness in order to raise funds. For audiences in the countries where they run programmes, it means campaigns to raise awareness in order to change behaviour. Do we do it creatively and strategically enough? And do we capitalise on the social technologies available?

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, authors of ‘Groundswell – winning in a world transformed by social technologies’ would probably answer that with a resounding no. Defining groundswell as ‘a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions’, their book is a convincing argument for organisations to think long and hard about how they will engage customers that are louder, more prepared to praise and more prepared to criticise than ever before.

Most senior executives have accepted that their PR, Marketing, Research and Customer Service people need to think about social media. But how? What Li and Bernoff offer – refreshingly, and in contrast to many of the self-acclaimed social media gurus out there – are tools to understand what works best for any particular target market, starting from the point of view of people rather than technology. So rather than thinking ‘Twitter’s taking off, let’s get on it’ or ‘everybody’s blogging, so we should too’, the authors’ Social Technographies Profile looks more closely at how people participate online, and what the best way to engage your customers would be. It’s ultimately about changing relationships, and acknowledging that ‘your brand is whatever people say it is’. ‘To truly understand the groundswell, you need to dissect and quantify the dynamics that separate different participants’, say Li and Chernoff, ‘because a strategy that treats everyone alike will spell failure’. Hardly rocket science, but a few steps away from the numerous blogs that have tried to give yes or no answers to whether your company should use social media.

While they urge us to listen to, talk with, energise and embrace the groundswell, their approach doesn’t come without risks for brands that aren’t loved. Wal-Mart’s attempt at entering the world of social media quickly became a Facebook wall of hate, but to me that’s part of the point. Why do some brands get such little love? A lot of the time because of questionable business practices. I was never outside Marks & Spencer protesting their labeling of Palestinian olive oil labelled ‘Made in Israel’ despite thinking it was outrageous, I didn’t shout at NIKE because I think the issue of child labour is more difficult than an outright ban can solve, and I am not a fan of company boycotts because the background usually is more complex than what the ‘anti-corporate’ Converse-wearing, iPhone-sporting, hiding-pearl-earrings-beneath-middle-class-guilt brigade will have you believe. But if the groundswell can make StatoilHydro respond to why they are working with companies charged with corruption in Angola, or force Siemens to justify why they apparently sold the internet filtering system Webwasher to Iran, then I’m all for a bit of online ‘anarchy’. It furthers a new kind of accountability to consumers, well beyond glitzy Corporate Social Responsibility reports, and that’s a potentially powerful impact that shouldn’t be downplayed.

But is the UN loved? What risks will its agencies face as they grapple with the groundswell? UNICEF is probably the UN brand people can most easily rally around – they protect children, what’s not to love? It is no accident that the Barcelona football team chose the UNICEF logo for their shirts, and that the agency generally has an easier time than others raising funds. But what about agencies like UNHCR, securing refugee rights, or UNRWA, supporting Palestinian refugees? They are considered to be much more political and controversial, and the gap between the public perception of what they should do and the mandate they operate under is vast.

So what do we do when viral videos start coming in from refugee camps we are failing to manage properly? When text message campaigns lead to protests outside our offices because we are failing to deliver appropriate aid? When blogs start slagging us off, maybe because of misperceptions of what we can and can’t do? When people start sending us MMS with images from emergencies, expecting it will make us respond faster? I think we’re only beginning to imagine the implications for work in the frontline of development and humanitarianism here. And while I know there are lots of people thinking about this within these organisations, I wonder if senior leadership is ready and clocked on. According to Nicco, the success of Obama’s campaign was down to managing the interplay between bottom-up, flat-structure, groundswell style thinking, and strong, conventional top-down leadership. I would love to be proved wrong in my thinking that UN leadership isn’t exactly dancing on the cutting edge of this…

It’s time to step up. While global websites, campaigns and ads are generally sleekly produced, they still incorporate social technology approaches to a varying degree, often with a vaguely defined call for action. None of the UN websites, many of whom have been recently revamped to have a more visual-led front end, have blogging features (I don’t know anything about web design, but the umbrella site at un.org looks like html a’la 99 to me!?). Several UN agencies have jumped onto the bandwagon and joined MySpace, Twitter or Facebook, but evidently without a coherent strategy putting people first. The result is that instead of One UN, there is a multiplicity of country offices and regional groups tweeting away on their own, with varying degrees of seriousness and success. Even within the same agency, the design is messy, the tones of voices totally different and the number of spin-off campaign sites leave it up to the audience to navigate and make sense of it all. It just doesn’t fly.

Even more worryingly, in regions and ‘the field’ – where the impact of better communications could be massive in terms of mobilisation and behaviour change – it routinely gets left to interns to produce costly public information campaigns and flat, local webpages with country-specific URL’s draped in formal, diplomatic language that are a far cry away from, say, a ‘Talk to Frank’ for HIV/ AIDS messages. I’m all for local communications staff taking this stuff on – a global ‘corporate’ strategy would overlook a lot of the hyper-local ways of making an impact – but they need to have some steer from HQ, they need to be properly trained, they need to have decent budgets, and they need to have spectacular partners in research, production and evaluation. Most importantly, they need to have ways of engaging the local ‘audience’ in doing so, making them active participants.

As it stands, the fact that UN communications ultimately remains inward-looking reeks of arrogance in a changing world, and it is risky. Because without a proper conversation with people, the UN risks rendering itself irrelevant to the general public, and seemingly disinterested in innovation that could do a world of good.

I Need More Kids in My Life

I really do. My 9-year old sister is in a totally different time zone, I haven’t done any teaching or volunteering with kids for ages and while plenty of my friends are actively procreating, grad schools don’t tend to like pregnant women. So meanwhile, I’m gonna send some love to these Afghan and Iraqi refugee kids living in Iran, who I think of often.

Truth, Taste and Talent – Or Lack Thereof

A few weeks into blogging, and I’ve already committed my first blogosphere faux pas. In my post ‘Truth, Taste and Talent Online’ I managed to come across as untruthful, tasteless and talentless. Kudos to me.

My eagerness to critique the top-down approach to talent on part of big companies got the better of me, I tried to make my point come across with detached and dismissive language, and ended up sounding like I think my ex-boyfriend was an ‘arrogant twat who wrote lightweight pop songs, but at least kindly gave me a handy little anecdote with which to make my point’. To quote said ex-boyfriend. Who actually happens to be one of my absolutely best friends in the world, a supremely talented songwriter and musician, a comedy genius, and – lucky for me – a truly forgiving kinda guy. 

So here’s a big apology to him for my inelegance, for my inappropriate use of our inside jokey phrase ‘shameless pop’ (which was only meant as a loving reference to hooky melodies and addictive choruses, but doesn’t read that way) and for not distinguishing well between him and the industry he was a part of. Note to self: take more public diplomacy classes next semester.

Open Source Humanitarianism

Try to use the words ‘open’ and ‘source’ together in conversations with colleagues at a big international NGO, chances are their eyes glaze over. I know because I’ve tried. It’s about as successful as trying to get those reciting-emails-via-tape-recorders-to-secretary-diplomats to use MindManager (similarly painful).

That’s a shame, because beyond its techy connotation, the social shifts behind open source have a lot of parallels in the humanitarian and development world, certainly when it comes to big international organisations. Although it depends on the UN agency or NGO we talk about, it seems safe to say that these shifts haven’t manifested themselves into operations, programmes and projects in full effect yet. But I suspect that embracing open source culture, and really understanding the intersection between humanitarian action, communications and technology, will be what sets international organisations apart in the future. That might mean a challenge to these organisations from flat-structure social enterprises that have more of a digital vision, and the operational size to test new technologies without having to turn the whole ship around.

Using the ‘Cathedral and the Bazaar’ by Eric S. Raymond as a guide, I wanted to explore some of the core aspects of open source that have links to ongoing conversations in the world of humanitarianism, where big bureaucracies struggle to manage programmes that are innovative, well-designed and appropriate to the local context. Obviously big brush strokes here – it hardly makes sense to talk about ‘the humanitarian sector’ due to the amount of different agency cultures it is comprised of – but based on research and anecdotal evidence from my own background and that of my friends, a few things seem to hold across the board for big international NGOs and the UN.

‘Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s itch’. That sounds wonderfully obvious, doesn’t it? For the humanitarian sector, the ‘itch’ is somebody else’s, and often well beyond an ‘itch’ – a matter of life or death. The fact that it’s a few steps removed (it’s not your own pain, and it’s most likely the pain of somebody from a different culture to yours) certainly complicates things and has led to vastly inappropriate responses. Think of agencies trying to use the Somali supplementary feeding centre model in Ethiopia, where it meant that women walked for several kilometres (as opposed to a few hundred meters within a refugee camp in Somalia) in highly insecure areas and had an incentive to starve their own children so they would receive food they could distribute to their family. Think of those displaced by the gruesome events in Srebrenica and moved to Tuzla, where the UN distribution of clothing was seen as an affront by people who needed interpreters, information and psychosocial support. Think of the South Asian Tsunami, where aid was overflowing but agencies couldn’t figure out exactly who needed what, where. We still struggle to do proper needs assessments, and to balance the chaos of emergency and unpredictability with an understanding of the ‘customers’ of humanitarian assistance, so-called beneficiaries. Attempts to do this creatively? A development example is the Grameen Foundation project in Bangladesh, partnering with Danone to produce fortified yoghurt in an attempt to deal with child malnutrition. An emergency example would be the increasing focus on humanitarian supply chain management, where agencies are trying their best to understand the ‘demand’ side of the equation in a more rigorous way.

‘When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor’. The issue of hand-overs and lost institutional knowledge is big in organisations with high turnover of staff, sporadic use of knowledge management technologies and work that often relies heavily on perceptions and anecdotal evidence in a rapidly shifting local environment. Inductions for new staff routinely focus on security and lists of decent restaurants in the area, disregarding decent analysis of the local political context. Capturing and managing valuable information and contacts is often done in ad-hoc ways, on Excel spreadsheets if you’re lucky, and depends on whether you have a boss who really cares about creating a ‘learning organisation’ or one that is most eager to move on to the next adventure with a box of potentially useful business cards hidden at the bottom of a battered Louis Vuitton hold-all.

‘If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource’ and ‘the next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better’. Involving local beneficiaries in designing humanitarian and development projects isn’t new – increased localisation has been de rigeur since criticism of top-down developmentalism started taking off in the 70s. Yet incorporating beneficiaries in the design, monitoring, management and evaluation of local programmes often does not move beyond the symbolic – I remember with embarrassment some of the ‘community-based programming’ I’ve seen undertaken retrospectively in order to justify the second-guessing that already goes on at country offices and HQ’s. There are of course plenty of examples to the contrary as well – Oxfam’s village grain banks, the vast amount of local microfinance projects around and so on. But again, the most innovative work is probably done by social enterprises such as Kiva, facilitating direct connections between small businesses and individual lenders, or Ushahidi, crowd-sourcing crisis information. We can always get better at capturing good ideas from people who depend on them. Finding solutions through the severe effort of many converging wills seems to me the only rational way forward for a sector that ultimately measures its success not in terms of profit, but in terms of impact on people.

‘Great ones (programmers) know what to rewrite (and reuse)’ When do we replicate, when do we recreate? A difficulty for the sector has been attempting to transfer successful program sin a new context or, you know, trying to skip right ahead to democracy in places that really don’t seem up for it. Because country-offices are little businesses in their own right, often with a lot of autonomy from HQ, there is limited systematic sharing of good project design across different countries.

As Raymond points out, ‘the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude and more skilled time into a problem’. The world is full of people who have good ideas and want to make a difference. It’s time we sped up our efforts to get them involved, or accepted that smaller foundations and social enterprises will rush ahead with innovation while we lounge around like dinosaurs waiting for swimming pool incentives to get moving.

Free Hossein Derakhshan

My friend Hossein Derakhshan has been in prison in Tehran for a year now because of his blog. His detention order ran out on October 10th, but there have been no news of his release or a trial. Hossein was originally held in what we once, nonchalantly and insensitively, referred to as Hotel Evin, a notorious prison for Iranian political prisoners, but cell shortages after the election-related mass arrests apparently led to him being moved to a different prison managed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Devastating news of his mistreatment came out earlier this month, stating that he has been beaten repeatedly, forced to do squats in ice-cold showers and threatened with the arrest of his father or sister unless he confesses to charges of espionage for Israel. This persistent focus on espionage seems to contradict reports from last year that the charges against him had changed, and were now focused on allegedly ‘insulting religious authority’ on his blog. Part of the psychological pressure included promising him release during the holidays of Nowrooz and Fajr, and then withdrawing those promises. On October 21st, a letter from his father to the head of the Iranian judiciary, Ayatollah Larijani, was published on the website of the reformist newspaper Salaam, urging him to ensure that Hossein either gets a trial or is released.

Back in 2001, Hossein was a poster boy for digital technology and the ‘blogging revolution’ in Iran. He figured out a way to combine Unicode and Blogger.com’s free tools to handle Persian characters, and is widely credited with having initiated a snowballing effect when posting a step-by-step guide on the process to his readership. With his Canadian passport and video camera in hand, he went to Israel in 2006 on a much-publicised visit that aimed to collapse the distance between Iranian and Israeli civil society. I’d link to his blog, but it’s been taken down, so here’s what he said about the trip:

“This might mean that I won’t be able to go back to Iran for a long time, since Iran doesn’t recognize Israel, has no diplomatic relations with it, and apparently considers traveling there illegal. Too bad, but I don’t care. Fortunately, I’m a citizen of Canada and I have the right to visit any country I want. I’m going to Israel as a citizen journalist and a peace activist.”

The Iranian authorities of course took great issue with his trip to the country they only refer to as ‘the Zionist regime’.

Hossein later became critical of the reformist movement in Iran, and wrote several blogs backing Ahmadinejad’s underdog approach to the West, alienating the Iranian diaspora that used to love his defiant, digital-driven brand of change and prompting suspicion that he was acting as an agent of the Iranian regime. Last summer, this confusion around his real political stance led to him being kicked out of social media conferences in Europe, and allegations that his writings have complicated life for NGO activists in Iran are certainly part of the reason many bloggers have simply viewed his arrest as a footnote in a much more important chapter of ‘real’ human rights activists with what seems to be more noble agendas.

It’s true that Hossein’s writings often seemed dogmatic, occasionally slanderous. But human rights don’t just extend to those with the right, reformist views. At the very least he deserves due process, and he deserves it now. Even Ahmadinejad seems to agree, linking his case to that of Roxana Saberi, who was later released after pressure from the US government. Where is Canada? Staying absolutely silent behind the convenient alibi of Iran not recognising dual citizenship? Working diplomatic routes? Ignoring the case because they have more information than we do, or because they care less? Their Embassy in Tehran is evidently not able to answer e-mails.

Meanwhile the blogosphere swarms with speculations, suggesting Hossein is taking active part in helping the government with post-election trials or that the whole arrest is a PR-stunt from a media whore par excellence who wanted to reveal the partisan views of human rights actors that only campaign for people whose views match their own. (The way many people have dismissed his case as unimportant in the grand scheme of human rights violations in Iran would certainly prove his point.)

I don’t believe them. I believe Hossein was disillusioned with reformists who do not understand Ahmadinejad’s hard core of voters or Iran’s working class. He wanted to see and understand more about his country without the veil of exile, and the detachment of the diaspora. Yes, it seems counter-intuitive to return to the Islamic Republic when you’ve spent your career criticising religion and the regime, but I honestly think Hossein assumed he was immune from that because his views had shifted significantly, because he had backed Ahmadinejad publicly and because he was aligned with the Iranian authorities in their critique of Western influence in the region. He talked passionately about setting up a think tank in Tehran, and was excited about the potential impact he could have with media and online communities there. He was tired of his transient existence in London, and couldn’t wait to go home and serve his country in some way.

The last thing Hossein wrote to me was on Twitter, as he had just arrived home: ‘This city is the most exciting thing for me right now’. My heart breaks thinking of what Hossein-joon might call his city if he’d be able to write now.

Truth, Taste and Talent Online

In 2006, my ex-boyfriend was signed to a major record label. You know the kind, complete with spiky-haired A&R guys addicted to their expense accounts and Savile Row suit-clad executives who claimed to have their sticky fingers firmly placed on the mass-market music pulse. For a few months I was living on the periphery of a mad, mad world – recording our bar expenditure on the same sheet as Robbie Williams’s (no less unhealthy) whiskey consumption, smoking in the bath tub of Alicia Keys’s favourite pink bedroom in the 16th century Elizabethan recording studio where Pink Floyd recorded ‘A Momentary Lapse of Reason’ (a befitting title for the decades of decadence that ensued). It was a world of all possibilities, and of record execs with high ambitions to push the band into the very left margins of the long tail power curve, where a few big label names sell millions of records.

As I was spinning on the bar stool and no doubt inelegantly misbehaving in the VIP room of London’s O2 arena after a gig a few months into the madness, I was finally able to articulate why I couldn’t square my approach to life with that of the music industry. (Burberry discounts, free cocktails, skipping queues – what’s not to love?). Everything rested on the assumption that talent is a very finite resource that can be discovered, but rarely cultivated. This bleak world view bred a deeply held arrogance in those that were finally discovered and, more to the point, those with the power to decide who were worthy of discovery. It concentrated power in the hands of traditional institutions with a tyranny-of-the-masses definition of taste. It confirmed questionable truths about what people want to listen to. And it contrasted with everything I believed about human creativity.

I imagine my feeling would have been much the same had I, instead of enjoying a record industry-sponsored rendez vous with Jack Daniels, been sipping pinot grigio at a mixer sponsored by The Economist. Indeed, the notion that talent is the ‘new limited resource’ was voiced in an interview with that very publication by veteran TV executive Barry Diller in 2006, who argues that sufficient platforms to discover talent exists in the worlds of publishing and broadcasting – the world of blogs is merely one of superfluous noise. As Scott Rosenberg writes in ‘Say Everything’, Diller and a range of other media executives seems to view the Web ‘simply as a new distribution channel for the same old stuff, and human expression as a static commodity, uninfluenced by the medium that bears it or the social environment in which it emerges’.

In a description that could just as well be about the music industry, or indeed any vaguely creative industry, Rosenberg goes on: ‘Diller and his species of executive have always excelled at finding rare talents that can, at their best, enchant a mass market. But this very success have blinded them to the different, more diffuse sort of talent present among the Web’s millions of contributors. Of course talent isn’t universal, nor is it evenly distributed. But there is far more of it in the world than Diller’s blinkered vision allows. On the Web it can reveal itself in a far wider range of ways, and far more people will have a chance to cultivate it. It will never be perceived in a uniform way; you and I will recognize it in very different places and judge it in very different ways’.

Shifting that discovery of talent from big institutions with their own agendas, to the people who will ultimately confer authority, simply by reading your blog, buying your tracks or lending money to your microfinance project, is a powerful leveler. But what does it mean for the future of journalism? Perhaps most importantly that journalists will need to stop living in a silo, and start acting like hubs. Journalists will need to create communities around themselves and connect in a meaningful way with their audience, way beyond reluctantly opening up for online comments. They will need to take new media consumption patterns into account, accept that YouTube now deals with one billion requests (!) daily, and go where the audience is. And instead of fighting for the top-down recognition from a traditional institution that my ex-boyfriend worked his skinny indie jeans off for, they might want to look into the more direct ways of gaining influence. Because where his fans were adoring gay guys and girls who weren’t expected to engage with the band beyond buying music and merchandise (bar the few that were occasionally allowed backstage, though rarely to ask for their opinion on the legality of the Iraq war), journalists’ audience no longer see media consumption and production as a one way street.

One approach to a more direct relationship with your readers is finding your 1,000 True Fans. Cultivating a relationship with the hard core of your readership – the dedicated few, rather than the detached masses – might be as profitable, or indeed more so, as aiming for a day job with a dwindling news industry. Another approach will include accepting the wisdom of crowds and the flattening world of ‘expertise’, and crowdsource your information with the drive and dedication shown by the HuffPost’s OffTheBus project and their hyperactive ‘pro-am journalism’ for the 2008 US election, or taking inspiration from the Guardian’s swift move to get their audience to help them sift through the extensive amounts of documents related to the UK expenses scandal, which helped them review 170,000 documents in the first 80 hours, with a visitor participation rate of 56 percent!

 With trust in traditional institutions shriveling, the growth of a culture based on individual development and self-expression and the increased ability to participate online has clearly created a tremendous appetite to be involved in the creation of media. That’s not to say that hard journalistic skills aren’t valuable, even in a market where everybody’s seemingly entitled to an opinion and the world of publishing is no longer shrouded in machismo mystery. Hard reporting, editing and verification will arguably be even more important in an online sphere that could easily look like a free-for-all. And a lot of questions still remain over who will cover the really tricky stuff. Would Anna Politkovskaja have ventured into Chechnya without the tacit backing of her newspaper? Would Michael Yon’s community-funded reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq work in another market, like Europe, where people deplored his embedding himself with the UK and US troops, and where the fundraising culture is so different I personally could have shot David Axelrod & co when their 5-a-day approach to Obama campaign fundraising started clogging up my inbox? Who will cover human rights abuses and crimes against humanity when it isn’t profitable for news corporations, and too dangerous for citizens, to do so? Who is going to pursue the often fruitless, thankless task of investigative journalism – beyond the financial, like Sharesleuth’s shortselling the stock of the companies they take down online? If new journalism is all audience, audience, audience, how will new journalists find the time and incentive to dig their way to the stories that are buried deep underground?

These are very valid concerns, and we need to find ways of addressing them. Perhaps that means taking a step back from the conversation on rejigging old business models, and considering the societal needs at play here. As Clay Shirky points out, what society needs isn’t newspapers. It’s real journalism: ‘When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’

We do need ways to navigate territory online, to locate trusted sources and find ways of making good quality journalism profitable (bearing in mind that news itself has never really been profitable). Or, paraphrasing my lecturer Nicco Mele, our social institutions and cultural norms still need to find way of assigning more authority and importance to certain things, to prevent the narcissistic nudity of Justin Hall from gaining the same value online as life-or-death blogging from bedrooms in Iran or Burma. Significantly though, that authority is increasingly assigned bottom-up by an audience, rather than based on preconceived notions of where truth, taste and talent in the world resides. When that happens, a world infinitely more diverse, surprising and serendipitous than that envisaged by the traditionalist executives opens up.

 And my ex-boyfriend? A few more months into the wet dream of potential stardom, and the soap bubble of shameless pop burst: digital downloads properly f*cked the music industry, the label woke up, smelled the substandard scotch and realised it couldn’t really do marketing, and strings of stylist appointments turned into soul-searching and a messy break-up with the record company. The world needs music, but does it need major record labels? As I sift through the feeble beginnings of Spotify’s Amazon-style long tail in my own search for truth, taste and talent, I’m not so sure.

The Poetry and Power of Blogging

Moving around a lot has taught me plenty of things, perhaps most importantly how contextual power is. Transformed from a big fish in a small pond to a lost soul in an hugely unfamiliar bowl… The unsettling and exhilarating feeling of not being able to transfer social standing from one context to the next is perhaps the most formative and humbling part of traveling.

Reading Scott Rosenberg’s ‘Say Everything – How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, And Why It Matters‘ got me thinking that blogging went through a similar realisation about power as it traveled from the heart-warming egalitarianism of its past to the relatively hierarchical structure of its present. An online definition of power, totally set apart from traditional institutions, had opened up, and with it came an initial sense of a totally level playing field that assumed authority would simply be dished out in equal measure to those who wrote well and often enough. In retrospect, that assumption seems naively optimistic, to say the least. The nuances of search arithmetic and the mathematical reality of rankings can give and take away power almost instantly online.

Referring to 9/11 as the first time the US moved beyond one media focal point and toward a collection of voices online, Rosenberg writes “now, for the first time, the nation and the world could talk with itself doing what humans do when the innocent suffer: cry, comfort, inform, and, most important , tell the story together”. There’s something beautifully poetic about these feeble beginnings of an online community – underpinned by the assumption that the synthesis of all these unedited voices of persons could somehow move us beyond the conflictual media environment and toward a more collaborative reality on the web. The early dismay at people monetising or commecialising their blogs was equally charming. However, as Rosenberg points out, ‘whatever else the spread of blogging might accomplish, it was futile to think that it could somehow liberate us from pettiness and discord. Sometimes the unedited voices of people might harmonize; but they’re just as likely to holler’.

That’s perhaps not so strange, if the argument is that the immediacy of the medium also made it more human. Much in the way search had shortened the distance between thought and question, incremental blogging software developments, like text box publishing, had lowered the barrier between thought and expression. The intensely personal nature of it was in effect the logical companion of the need to search: the need to be found.

That is becoming increasingly hard in the myriad of overlapping blogospheres. As Clay Shirky points out, ‘the very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough creates a power law distribution’ – leading to a looooong tail of bloggers who are unlikely to be read by more than friends or family because they are part of a ranking system where the value of second place will be half that of first place, fifth place will be one-fifth of first place etc. Fun and games. Indeed, Shirky’s predictions that blogs would stratify into an elite literati (or, in this case, the Technorati Top 100), a middle rank and a long tail of blogs for close family/friends/foes was fairly accurate. Does it matter? A year is a long time in politics and love, but it’s a lifetime online. The Technorati Top 100 includes a lot of the usual suspects, but it also always contains surprises. And to the millions of people happily populating the long tail, their restricted take on a public life online is still a step up from what might have been a totally private existence offline.

Perhaps the most interesting question about the power of blogging has more to do with its impact on traditional institutions, who have had to adopt a different way of dealing with its partners and customers to reflect this culture of all things personal, and personalised. As Rosenberg points out, those who attempted to blog merely by publishing their press releases in reverse chronological order, realised that this simply wouldn’t fly in the blogosphere, and that the style of online interaction was reshaping how companies engage with their customers. It makes me wonder whether international institutions are using blogging effectively enough, with their strict corporate communications protocols, only partly valid confidentiality alibis and reluctance to free up editorial control. NGOs that pride themselves on being outspoken, like Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, use staff blogs well. The recently revamped United Nations website, while claiming that ‘it’s your world’, manages to look even more convoluted than the last one, and certainly doesn’t succeed in seeming any less top-down and impenetrable than before. It’s possible to blog without undermining the distanced mystery of the foreign service – even UK Foreign Office staff in Zimbabwe are allowed to!

All this talk about the personalised style of blogging, and its impact, makes me think of myself (surprise, surprise) at the age of 10, asking my Dad why the imposing and overtly serious letters from his bank couldn’t have more informal elements to them, like handwritten notes or smileys or something that didn’t seem quite so intimidating. ‘You wouldn’t want your bank to seem that informal’, was his response then. But 16 years later, Barclays PLC developed their brand in an attempt to re-humanise the bank that was more Innocent than respected financial institution. (Yes, seriously, ‘re-humanise’ is the word they used. That is probably the worst word I’ve ever heard with ‘human’ in it.) The re-branding naturally came at a point of increased online engagement with customers, and it seems fair to say that the flat-structure, bottom-up culture of blogging didn’t just affect advertising models – it affected the content and style of advertising too. Now isn’t that kind of poetic?

Not So Fast, Mr. Graff: On Citizen Journalism

The charmingly cocky Garrett Graff visited my Kennedy School class today – he’s the 28 year old (!) editor of the Washingtonian Magazine, which, beyond his age, is both impressive and significant seeing his background is mainly in new media. He was the first blogger accredited to cover the White House press briefings, is the author of ‘The First Campaign‘ and currently teaches at Georgetown University in D.C. It’s nice to know Georgetown now has a media course that moves beyond teaching about ‘Julius Caesar’s self-serving account of the Gaellic wars (…), the invention of moveable type and the translation of the Bible into English and German‘, which at the time of admissions decisions struck me as a tad old fashioned.

Graff gave us a very interesting overview of how magazines are better positioned than newspapers and will be able to weather the current media crisis because of their emphasis on long-story reporting and the strong brand affinity people have to magazines. What magazine you read says more about you than what newspapers you buy. Sure thing, back in the day at the LSE we clung to our copies of the Economist for sheer life, and my subscription to the magazine still carries with it a whiff of postpubertal London neurosis (SIR I need your magazine to tell me that I’m good).

Graff went on to say that citizen journalism is the first big failure of social media. From a Washington – centric point of view, and taking the near-evangelical expectations placed on citizen journalism by a range of commentators in the US, he certainly has a point. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that citizen journalism has failed and will always fail. Its ultimate success or failure depends on the country of which you are a citizen, and what kind of media environment you are operating in.

Yes, I beat on about Iran, but it’s a case in point. Citizen journalists there arguably move much further than ‘random acts of journalism’,  dedicate time to proper investigative work and are developing a critical mass of voices that can collapse the distance between the public and the private, and gain at least some political impact in the process. Friends of mine got bussed into the countryside, made to sign letters promising they’d never write anything bad about the government again, flogged to make sure they’d remove their websites and psychologically abused so they’d feel as though writing as protest is a totally futile activity. And what did they do when they returned to Iran? Changed their URL’s and kept writing.

The random acts argument holds true in countries where time is particularly scarce – ie where most people who stumble upon journalistic work have a job to go to and thus remain ultimately disinterested in journalism beyond the ad hoc.  But what about countries where there are high levels of unemployment and oppression paired with high technical literacy and education? Citizen journalism can’t be as easily dismissed there, and categorically doing so would be underestimating its impact. So hold it, Mr. Graff! Not so fast.