Today — as I write this — the California Supreme Court is hearing arguments on Proposition 8. The outcome is very important to me, and even moreso to the thousands of people in California whose marriages may be invalidated as a result.
We won’t know that for a while. Not so long ago, we wouldn’t even have known what arguments were being made until it was reported in general in a newspaper, followed perhaps weeks or months later by more detailed reportage/analysis in a magazine.
Ah, but today… today we have the internet, webcams, blogging, instant messaging, twitter, digital cameras that fit in the palm of a hand, video cameras in mobile phones, PDAs… and we have the social media networks to use them. And so, you and I can be at the hearings through live blogging. Here’s a blogger providing a detailed picture of the argument as it proceeds, one post at a time. Here’s another blogger (friend and author Malinda Lo) giving us minute-by-minute reportage on which any of us may comment at any time — thereby turning the Court hearing into an international conversation.
These things are amazing. Amazing. We can be present in our world in ways we never have before. We can be connected. We can observe or participate. And, of course, we can be observed, we can be the object of participation whether we want it or not. Connection is never a clean issue. It’s rarely exactly the way we want it to be. But I believe in social and political and business transparency, and I am grateful to the inventors, the technology producers, and the people on the benches and in the trenches who share what they are seeing and hearing with the rest of us.
I’ve been thinking about these issues for a little while; and screenwriter John August wrote a thoughtful post recently that made me think more. Today, I am struck anew by the power — the occasional ferocity — of the human desire to know and to participate. Millions of us took ourselves to Washington D.C. to see Barack Obama inaugurated. Millions of us can, if we choose, take ourselves to court today. What next?
That was pretty amazing.
How will this kind of connection change us/the world? Enjoyed the John August post as well. Food for thought.
My impression of the court thing is that it is not going to go our way. Probably have to wait for the next ballot initiative.
Kelley, thanks for this post. I sat in my empty classroom and watched the proceedings from coastal Maine, and I’m so happy that I was able to do so. Technology is so amazing.
I recently heard the term “swarming” around the topic of communication between people in the 21st Century. We can know immediately what is happening and where, as well as who is there and what is being said. With that knowledge, humans have the ability to swarm the place or person within minutes. There’s a good book about this, but I’ll have to re-post the title when I can find it at home. Are we forming a hive mentality? Is that a good or bad thing?
All I know is that it’s fantastic that we can all know what is happening immediately about such pivotal evens as this.
And Kelley, congrats on being a finalist for the Nebula Award. Woo hoo!
I’m thinking about these issues too. At least a little. I was pretty active as a Wikipedia editor a couple years back, & had to learn how Wikipedia governs itself thanks to a loooong dispute with a problem editor who we had to rein in. Very frustrating (the problem editor), but very fascinating: how a more-or-less consensus process, built on a set of principles (in this case, Wikipedia’s Five Pillars, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:5), with lots of discussion & argument, is used to govern a project of this size, with the instant communication of information that’s built into Wikipedia. This is the stuff that goes on in the background of the pages that the public normally looks at when they view Wikipedia — but any article’s “Discussion” tab will give you at window to it. (A window that you can climb through, too.)
Around the same time, I finally got around to reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). In those books, as the Martian settlers work to throw off the tyranny of Earth-based corporations, they form their own government, with a constitution that’s written collaboratively by way, yes, of face-to-face discussion, but also through interactive collaboration on computers… very similar to my eyes to how, say, an article gets reworked on Wikipedia, or how a wide-reaching policy is changed.
So… now I’ve got a piece of fiction in the works (the very sloooooow works) called “Cold” set on an extrasolar planet in the late stages of terraformation (main characters are lesbians, of course) with a form of government that is very much this direct “we all participate in creating the rules we live by” way of doing things. Thanks to the influence of my experience on Wikipedia, Consensus government (what the people my story universe call their government) is by its nature is not identical to the kind of representative democracy that still inheres in Robinson’s world, though aspects of it remain.
One of the really confusing things about Wikipedia was finding “the authority” — the cop, the judge, the head honcho — who could kick somebody’s butt for you, or make quick decisions. Obviously in a full-fledged society, you need to have people like that. But Wikipedia does have “consensus” methods of vetting for & designating administrators & “bureaucrats”; my society’s methods of investing people with authority is influenced by that.
With the kind of stuff going on as you describe in your post, its apparent that my fictional society’s government will also have descended from these present-day social media ways of “interfering” with the processes of representative government. I say “interfering” because that seems to be the way a lot of our representatives view it. (As an Alaskan, I am subjected weekly if not daily to Sarah Palin whining — in official Office of the Governor press releases, no less!) about how mean the media & “anonymous bloggers in pajamas” are to her.)
But it’s not interference: it’s us finally having the chance to know what our representatives are really doing, & possibly being able to influence them as they make decisions about our lives. But it strikes me how these new forms of social media are about wresting back the clout we supposedly already had under our form of representative government. The thought experiment of my would-be novel “Cold” is to see if that clout can’t be bred into the fabric of my character’s lives as simply day-to-day fact.
Here’s hoping that Prop 8 gets struck down.
I remembered the name of the book that I wrote about earlier. It’s called “Radical Evolution” and it discusses our human need to have greater connection with each other and how we’re moving that way.
For example, a protest can begin within minutes because people will text and call each other on their cell phones and hundreds can descend upon specific blocks at the drop of a hat (compared to years ago). The book claims that we’re always part of a “swarm” these days, wanting to know what our friends and others are doing at any moment during the day–technology that supports that is Facebook and now Twitter.
Fascinating read.
I only watched the last half hour or so, but I can say that
Therese Stewart (who is on our side) is really fun and interesting to
listen to. She was the only one there who had that special rapid-fire-yet-comprehensible way of speaking.
Janine, thanks for the title, I will check it out.
Mel, wow. I’ll look forward to reading that novel one day. Consensus is a very difficult thing to manage, in part because some people misunderstand it as “everyone agrees 100% with the decision.” But when everyone’s on the same page, treating consensus as the same thing, it’s amazingly powerful.
And yes, more voices make life messier (poor old Sarah Palin, it turns out that leading is hard!…) But the “clean” alternative that some seem to prefer is way too close to anesthetized for my taste. Humans are messy. That’s how it goes. Social media fascinates me by making space for both the mess that is inevitable, and the organization that is necessary if anything is to actually move forward.