When the news broke in December that Dan was going to be spending time here in Massachusetts, it occurred to me that it would be a great idea to invite him to get to know the members of the Commonwealth Civic Roundtable. Thanks to some timely assistance from David Weinberger, I received a gracious email from Dan within 15 minutes, agreeing to give a talk to the group. (Now all we have to do is find a date when we'll be convening and he'll be in town.)
Given this back story, I was delighted to have a chance to hear him speak to a small group on Tuesday. David has summarized Dan's remarks and the dialogue that followed, and of course (since this was an event at the Berkman Center) the entire conversation is available as a podcast,
so I won't attempt to transcribe it here. However, I
will take the liberty of quoting David's summary of a question I asked
and Dan's response:
Q: Not only is the web the second superpower, it's the second social welfare delivery mechanism. Any synergies with this and citizen journalism?
A: I'm working on a book outline on this topic, based on a hypothesis that I believe to be true, but I'm still gathering data: The more people become engaged with current events — starting at the most modest level, i.e., not being a couch potato but getting a report by assembling it from various sources...all the way to becoming journalists — my conjecture is that people on that trajectory are likely to become activists.
I'm thrilled that someone of Dan's stature and experience is thinking and writing about this! (If you want to get a sense of why I'm so thrilled, you can download his book, We the Media, for free from the web.)
Although I'm not holding out much hope that the web is going to be the magic bullet that puts an end to every problem, I do feel encouraged by the way it is breaking down the artificial distinctions between producers and consumers of journalism. Moreover, I have hopes that this is connected to the breakdown of problematic distinctions between providers and recipients of assistance. When we're all eligible to make news, report news, and hear news - and we're all eligible to give help and to be helped in our communities, then we're getting closer to a workable civil society.
DISCLAIMER: In saying that some distinctions are "artificial" or "problematic," I do not intend to imply that all boundaries are undesirable. In many cases, distinctions made on the basis of professional training and credentials are absolutely crucial.
I'm currently reading a novel by Bruce Sterling, Distraction, that has some fascinating speculations about the future of the networked economy and the web as the second social welfare delivery system. (Plus a lot of other things, including neuroscience, political intrigue, and things that go boom.) The novel hints that there's a lot that can go wrong with this scenario.
