Archive for the 'Society' Category

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Collaborative Consumption: Can Social Technology Grow Community and Lessen Humanity’s Carbon Footprint?

Published on December 21, 2010 in Society, Technology and Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The globalization of  the world economy and the increased ease of relating to people via social technology, both domestically and internationally, has made interpersonal ties with digital contacts as seamless as real world relationships for Gen Y, changing our notion of community.   Rachel Botsman, co-author of the newly published What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumerism, discussed some of the findings  of her research in a TED talk earlier this year.

Botsman found four core drivers in the shift to collaborative consumption:

  1. A renewed belief in the importance of community
  2. A torrent of peer to peer social networks and real time technologies
  3. Pressing unresolved environmental concerns
  4. A global recession that has fundamentally shocked human behaviors

These drivers are very interconnected.

The recession shifted many employed working and middle people from a life lived on credit to one of paying down debt and squirreling away discretionary income for a rainy day.  The long-term unemployed find inventive ways to stretch a dollar before turning to family and friends, when available, for assistance when their savings, and then government support, dries up.

In both cases community is elevated.  Interpersonal experience increasingly supplants excessive consumerism as  a way to spend one’s leisure time.  The status of stuff becomes less relevant in a world tat increasingly relies on friendship and family, however one defines the terms. Who you know takes on a greater import that what you own. Peer-to-peer networks allow you to expand the reach of your social web, which can mean increased opportunity, personally and professionally.

All of these relationships require an investment in building social capital, requiring some degree of trust as a foundation.  That growing trust allows for redistribution markets like SwapTree and BookMooch and product service systems like Rent the Runway, Zipcar or Bag, Borrow or Steal to gain  a foothold in a global economy otherwise focused on planned obsolescence.

A positive side effect of these changes, Gen Y is unconsciously taking a step towards addressing environmental issues by shifting to systems that allow for the rotation of ownership and use of goods and services  This shift means fewer critical natural resources plundered as the utility of extant goods is expanded over time.

As collaborative consumption moves from trendy to normative behavior, the user community will continue to expand as more people participate.  It could mean increased cross-cultural engagement and a lessening of the carbon footprint of humanity, which may open the doors to more directed action on environmental and social issues.

Could dissenting punditry (on the same network) have a mitigating effect on political polarization?

Published on October 31, 2010 in Politics. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

The filter bubble phenomena has been on my mind for the last few weeks as I’ve contemplated its reach beyond our individual web footprints and considered media production and consumption overall.

There’s a constant tug of war for media outlets, between making money by giving consumers what they want versus providing what we need at an acceptable cost. Amazon knows I’m apt to buy more books if it recommends reads similar (in content and in style) to ones I’ve already read, though I’d be more well-rounded if I read outside my comfort zone now and again. Print, online and television news sources develop their own framework for reporting based on the audience demographics being targeted: Fox News reports to the right of mainstream; MSNBC embraces the left. And their framework is typically meant to fire up their viewers to keep them coming back for more. As Jon Stewart pointed out this weekend at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear:

The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic.

Does ignorance of the full spectrum of information and interpretation available to the public, threaten our ability to exchange ideas and shake up the status quo to reach amenable compromises on urgent issues? Groupthink experiments point to the greater cost. Living in a media bubble, as conflict- free  and as comforting as it may seem to be, takes a toll on our ability to think as independent actors, which, may in turn, amp polarization in this country. It becomes increasingly difficult to express sentiment that falls outside the echo chamber that makes up our preferred media channels.

In The Element, Ken Robinson reviews the Solomon Asch conformity experiments of the 1950s. Subjects were placed with groups of fellow college students whose answers to a set of questions had been coached to be wrong the majority of the time; the experimental subject had no idea as to the preparation of fellow group members.  With planted group members repeatedly responding incorrectly to questions, the experimental subject answered incorrectly, as well, the majority of the time. Test respondents readily admitted that they responded contrary to  answers they believed to be true out of fear of being called out for straying from the majority opinion.  Subjects wanted to fit in and self-censored accordingly.

Our ability to voice opinions contrary to the majority, let alone consider alternatives to popular sentiment is limited in a media vacuum that constantly regurgitates the talking points we want or — worse — expect to hear.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Lately, the Daily Dish’s Andrew Sullivan has been posting reader comments about whether liberals should do interviews on FOX News. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Rachel Maddow regularly implores conservatives to be guests on her show for a fact-based discussion of trending issues.

There is tremendous value in even hearing varied opinions, whether or not they are your own. In Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, the Brafman brothers noted the power of dissent in another Asch study.  Repeating the same scenario, one of the control subjects in the group was directed to answer independently, while the others continued to respond with wrong answers.

The dissenting actor didn’t even need to give the right answer to inspire the real participant to speak up with the correct response; all it took to break the sway was for someone to give an answer that was different from the majority. (p.155)

If the mere presence of a differing opinion can change the participation choices of an experimental subject, what would hearty debate of the issues do for viewers at home? As it stands, we’re mostly standing in an echo chamber of reiterated talking points. Could it bring more voices into the fray?

And if we create space where we can be open to disagreement about the solutions, can we create space that allows us to more completely expose the range of options, including those in our worldview periphery, in such a manner that we could find the common ground we need to move forward on urgent issues?

Is there an echo in here? Living in the bubble.

Published on October 18, 2010 in Technology. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

photo by scion_cho

Over at Beyond the Times, Walter wrote about the inevitable echo chamber effect that would follow the introduction of a news aggregator into Facebook update streams.   Given all the “likes” assigned a variety of content on the site, it would be an easy feat to develop an algorithm to direct relevant news  that fits an individual user’s world view, eliminating any challenges to that perspective.

It’s not as though such formulas aren’t already pervasive on the intertubes.  Netflix regularly recommends a variety of films within subgenres that I frequently view, and Amazon.com is constantly tweaking its suggestions to me based on my purchases, viewing and rating of titles.

Eli Pariser recently discussed the filter bubble phenomena with Lynn Paramore of the Roosevelt Institute:

Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google “BP,” one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else’s. And that’s what I’m calling the “filter bubble”: that personal ecosystem of information that’s been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.

This technology-induced bubble is particularly problematic in that it is human nature to accept facts and opinions that align with  personal beliefs and disregard information that clashes.  A recent Yale Law School study published in the Journal of Risk Research found that regardless of political leanings,

Individuals systematically overestimate the degree of scientific support for positions they are culturally predisposed to accept.

Social technology is making it effortless find and follow preferred sentiment and these sites are increasingly becoming the go-to places for news.   Forty-two percent of respondents in a Retrevo Gadgetology study admit to checking and updating their Twitter and Facebook feeds first thing in the morning, with 23 percent of iPhone identifying these feeds as their morning news.  In a recent Oxygen Media study, more than one third of women 18-34 years old reported checking Facebook before getting out of bed in the morning.

What happens to society when people can no longer have informed discussions of reality and data because of a refusal to acknowledge the very existence, let alone the validity, of information that conflicts with our own world view?  Does it increasingly heighten the notion of an “Other” that could destroy a preferred way of living?  Should marginalized religions, races and cultures expect increased persecution for being an outlier of mainstream thought?

And most importantly, how do we find ways to be more receptive to ideas that challenge our own? New solutions to old problems could emerge from the discussion that follows.

Girl Powering the Economy

Published on October 12, 2010 in Education. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

In 1995 Hillary Clinton gave a speech at the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing, China that made clear that women’s rights are human rights.  In recent years, the folks at Nike have put substantial funds toward campaigning to improve the lot of the next generation of girls in the developing world.   Their nonprofit The Girl Effect recently released its latest video driving home the importance of education and health care for girls and the potential impact those resources have on the lives of a community.

Domestically, Step Up Women’s Network is one of many nonprofits that provide programming to at-risk teens to better their odds of success upon graduating high school.   They provide roughly 100 hours of programming to more than 250 girls each year across chapters in  New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.   As a result 90% of program participants wind up in college upon completion of the program, despite the majority of the girls living at or below the poverty level.

This month SUWN is hoping to meet 60% of its annual teen programs budget needs by winning a $250K grant from the Pepsi Refresh Project. Vote for Step Up daily.  And text 103315 to 73774 every day in October.

Random Friday: New Heart Rate Formula for Women

Published on July 16, 2010 in Health. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

pic by sunfrog1

As someone who exercises daily, I explored the use of heart rate monitors to get a better workout.  I always struggled to get my rate into the max range in interval training.

The standard formula was “220 – the person’s age.” I started playing with heart rate monitors right out of college. Though I did my damnedest to get my heart rate into the 190s, it was near impossible.  At 183 beats per minute, I couldn’t talk any more and I could barely breath; it felt like having asthma attack…on purpose.   So I gave up on heart rate monitors because the defeated me in every spinning class.

The American Heart Association journal Circulation recently published the findings of a heart rate study, using about 5500 women.  Surprise, surprise!  Women’s hearts beat to their own drummer, and our maximum heart rate is considerably lower than that of men.

That  new formula “206 – (.88*age) is spot on.   At 21, my maximum heart rate was 187.5, so it’s no wonder I was struggling so much.  I had moved into my real heart rate peak range, though science hadn’t yet acknowledged it.

Me thinks it is time to buy some new batteries for my heart rate monitor.

Driving sustainable values through the Re-Generation

Published on July 12, 2010 in Business and Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Author and columnist Thomas Friedman, and businessman Dov Seidman opened this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival with a discussion of situational versus sustainable values.   Friedman and Seidman argue that over the past decade our culture has lead the business world to relatively consistently [underprice risk, privatize gains, and socialize loss].

Friedman explains that, “if the situation allows me to issue a subprime mortgage to someone to buy a home even if all I’ve asked of them is can you <huff> fog up the knife then I will do it; sustainable values will tell me I shouldn’t. Situationally, I can buy 1000 acres of the Amazon and plant soy beans. Situationally, I can do that; sustainable values would tell me I shouldn’t. . .what we’ve had in the last decade is an explosion of situational thinking and situational values in both the market and mother nature.”  Sustainable values are more driven by the long term effects of decisionmaking and making choices that lead to the best possible outcome for ALL involved.

He’s concerned that our current generation of leadership will align with what Kurt Anderson refers to as the Grasshopper Generation.  “We ate through it like hungry locusts.”

Instead, he hopes that business, government and thought leaders can drive the “Re-generation.”  Accordingly, “the single most important task of the Re-generation is bringing the concept of sustainability, sustainable values, into both the market and mother nature…If we don’t bring sustainability to the market and mother nature, then I believe the next generation will be more unfree than had our parents lost the Cold War.  Because the market and mother nature will each impose on us constraints on how we live that will be worse than had the Communists won.”

Friedman breaks down the two key forces driving human trajectory.  On the one hand, “Mother nature is just chemistry, biology and physics,” as defined by environmental consultant Rob Watson. “She always bats last, and she always bats 1000. Do not mess with mother nature.”  On the flipside, “the market is just greed and fear. Greed and fear…It’s going to do whatever the balance of greed and fear dictate at any given moment. Do not mess with the market.  You can’t spin it. You can’t sweet talk it.”

Friedman argues that the only way to wrangle these ‘the two most autistic forces on the planet (autistic in the sense of feeling no emotion whatsoever)” is through sustainable values, which have grown increasingly important because globalization and interdependency of economy has more tightly linked us to the rest of the human race more than ever before.   Being aware of the social, environmental and fiscal costs of our decisions cannot be understated in world that experiences the pressure of crisis so often.

As Dov Siedman points out, “Used to be that we had a crisis every 20 years.  We’re now so interconnected that crisis every 20 weeks, certainly every 20 months.  Lehmen, Toyota, Greece, BP.”  The moral and ethical implications of the course corrections our leaders choose in the face of these crises need to be recognized.

“If we are connected, the nature of our connections is exposed.  Interconnection leads to moral and ethical interdependence.  For the first time, we have to understand what David Hume said.  ‘The moral imagination diminishes with distance.’ Where do we go when there’s no more distance?”

The BP oil spill created instant awareness for those hidden costs of being an oil dependent society.  Can this travesty provide the collective cognitive liberation needed to begin the transition from the Grasshopper Generation to the Re-generation?  At what point does personal consumer sacrifice become less of a cost than a continuation our insatiable razing of the planet we live on?

The Empathic Civilization

Published on June 8, 2010 in Books and Society. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

For those of you who aren’t inclined to read all 688 pages of Rifkin’s sweeping retelling of human history and the role empathy plays in our interpersonal and intercultural affairs, here’s a video providing a brief overview of The Empathic Civilization, which was published earlier this year.

Youth and Race: Not as colorblind as we’d like yet

Published on June 7, 2010 in Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

CNN recently worked with a University of Chicago psychologist to update a classic study.   They asked black and white children to use a cartoon graphic of children with varying skin tones to identify the smartest, dumbest, meanest, prettiest, etcetera child.

It tends to be assumed that Gen Y is a more colorblind subset of the population.  Certainly, for those growing up in areas with more diverse populations, they’re more likely to be exposed to a variety of cultures and races throughout our childhood schooling, which potentially has a mitigating effect on internally-processed race disparities.  But kids still pick up subtle cues from their family members and are watching a tremendous amount of television, both of which can mean the introduction of stereotypes and biases depending on the relatives and the programming.

Philippe Cousteau Jr on our polluted oceans

Published on June 2, 2010 in Environment. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Planet Green’s Chief Ocean correspondent Philippe Cousteau Jr. sat down with Bill Maher on Friday to discuss the seriousness of ocean pollution.

The Florida Keys, third longest barrier reef in the world, is a dead zone. Ninety percent of the big fish, the tuna, the sharks, and other things, are already gone in the oceans. There’s a dead zone in the Gulf Of Mexico every summer the size of New Jersey, where there’s not enough oxygen for things to live. So it’s not a question of ‘Can the oceans take any more?’ The oceans can’t take any more. They couldn’t take any more fifty years ago. The question is, when are we going to stop?

Watch the full interview here.

Hubris getting ahead of technology

Published on May 9, 2010 in Environment and Politics. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

You’d think that the felling of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf would be cause for rethinking off shore drilling.

Seafood is a $1.8 billion industry in Louisiana, with another $1 billion in retail sales  driven by recreational fishing.  If the estimates about possible environmental damage are proven conservative, Gulf Coast states are in for a world of financial pain, up to $4.3 billion in losses according to BBVA Compass Bank economist Nathaniel Karp:

Karp said Florida has the most at stake, facing potential losses of $3 billion alone, including $2.8 billion in tourism, $18 million in commercial fishing and $138 million in recreational fishing…

Louisiana could face economic losses of $948 million, including $880 million in tourism, according to Karp’s estimates. Louisiana’s commercial fishing business stands to lose $31 million, while its recreational fishing industry could lose $37 million, he projects.

And if the drip, drip, drip of information about this spill is anything to go by, the numbers may turn out to be much worse.  Christian Science Monitor reporting suggests upwards of 25,000 barrels of oil per day are spewing into the Gulf instead of the 5,000 barrel estimate being used in data crunching, a number which could skew upwards even further if the damaged piping is further compromised by the flow of gritty oil.   With that oil pocket rumored to be tens of millions of gallons full, an unplugged flow could spread for months.

Such projections take on more significance now that the first attempt to dome the spill failed this weekend.   It also still remains to be seen if the mushroom cloud of oil will reach the current that could pull the oil up the southeastern seaboard.

Our nation’s top experts are now suggesting “stuffing shredded tires, golf balls and other debris into the well’s failed blowout preventer,” while they work on a differently-shaped dome to repeat their attempts at sealing the leak.   Can we really justify offshore drilling if we aren’t truly capable of foreseeing and planning for the consequences that could cause permanent damage to delicate coastal ecosystems and our food chain? Can’t we admit that some technology is still beyond the scope of our knowledge?

Coastal citizens are realizing the stakes of such acts.   Support for offshore drilling in Florida (35%) has dropped precipitously (from 61% in 2008).

And yet politicians seem to be doubling down on their efforts to fill oil coffers, instead of promoting alternative energy sources that could yield new job sectors to partially replace the lost manufacturing jobs of this recession.  For instance, Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell, who seems to continue jerking further and further right since his election, is pushing to drill off the coast of his state as soon as possible.

Then there are the conservative talk heads like Bill Kristol, who suggests drilling CLOSER to shore would limit the danger of offshore drilling, and Sarah Palin who still considers drill, baby, drill to be prudent and necessary for energy independence.

Indeed, we need to create a platform for home grown energy, independent of the Middle East, but real leadership on energy would take us to the next generation of energy creation: one that demonstrates that those who grace the top of the food chain have the awareness that environmental stewardship is a necessary factor in moving society and the human race forward in a sustainable manner.

We’re not particularly good stewards of anything when we can’t even acknowledge the boundaries of what we know before aggressively drilling in the abyss.