Annals of Innovation (http://www.newyorker.

com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell)

Small Change
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
by Malcolm Gladwell October 4, 2010 Social media cant provide what social change has always required. At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworths in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. Id like a cup of coffee, please, one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. We dont serve Negroes here, she replied. The Woolworths lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. Youre acting stupid, ignorant! she said. They didnt move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didnt move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. Ill be back tomorrow with A. & T. College, one of the students said. By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboros Negro secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. Here comes the wrecking crew, one of the white students shouted. By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustines College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus, the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. The answer was

always the same: It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go. Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decadeand it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter. The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, cordinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their countrys Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didnt want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy, Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. You are the best hope for us all, James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was eating our lunch on the Internet. That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation. These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldovas so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelisms critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protestsas Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Postmay well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. It is time to get Twitters role in the events in Iran right, Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran. The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. Western journalists who couldnt reachor didnt bother reaching?people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection, she wrote. Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell#ixzz1ii17M 1XR

Empowering Change Through Collaboration

http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2011/10/26/empowering-change-throughcollaboration/?utm_source=Master+Contacts&utm_campaign=b1f021f4ccGlobal_email_from_Toby12_9_2011&utm_medium=email&ct=tGlobal_email_from_T oby12_9_2011_2 October 26th, 2011 by Don Tapscott Im enthusiastic about taking on the role of Curator for Social Media Week. Between now and my kickoff speech Feb 13 to cities around the world, Ill be writing a series of articles to stimulate thinking and discussion in our global community. The debate on the role of social media and change is over. Over the last year, many have questioned just how important social media are in helping activists achieve social change. Writer Malcolm Gladwell wrote a thoughtful essay in The New Yorker entitled Small Change: Why the Revolution Wont be Tweeted. He argued that social networks only create weak ties between people, but that its strong ties and close relationships that bring about real social change. It was a good debate and then reality stepped in Tunisia. It turns out that the revolution was tweeted. The Tunisian revolution wasnt caused by social media; it was caused by injustice. It wasnt created by social media; it was created by a new generation of young people who didnt want to be treated as subjects anymore. But the media dropped the costs of transactions and collaboration and it empowered change. The movement for change has like a prairie fire across the Arab world and has now extended around the world from the demonstrations of millions in Spain against unemployment, to Wall Street to the global #Occupy movement. Leonard Cohen was looking prophetic when he wrote First well take Manhattan and then well take Berlin. The Social Media Week theme of Empowering Change Through Collaboration is an apt one. But evidence is mounting that the current global slump is not just cyclical, but rather symptomatic of a deeper secular change. There is growing evidence that we need to rethink and rebuild many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, but now have come to the end of their life cycle. The global economic crisis should be a wakeup call to the world. We are at a turning point in history. Lets face it. The world is broken and the industrial economy and many of its industries and organizations have finally run out of gas, from newspapers and old models of financial services to our energy grid, transportation systems and institutions for global cooperation and problem solving. At the same time the contours of a new kind of civilization are becoming clear as millions of connected citizens begin to forge alternative institutions using the Web as a platform for innovation and value creation. Social media is enabling social business. From education and science and to new approaches to citizen engagement and democracy, powerful new initiatives are underway, embracing a new set of principles for the 21st century collaboration, openness, sharing, interdependence and integrity.

Indeed, with the proliferation of social media and social networks, society has at its disposal the most powerful platform ever for bringing together the people, skills and knowledge we need to ensure growth, prosperity, social development and a just and sustainable world. But dont count on governments or most of our current business and institutional leaders to be the architects of change. Leaders of old paradigms have the greatest difficulty embracing the new. And vested interests will fight against change. Its up to us. The stakes are very high. As Anthony D. Williams and I describe in Macrowikinomics, people everywhere have nothing less than an historic choice: empower ourselves to achieve change and collaborate to find new solutions for our connected planet; or risk economic and social paralysis or even collapse. Its a question of stagnation versus renewal. Atrophy versus renaissance. Peril versus promise. Fortunately, for the first time in history, people everywhere can participate fully in creating a sustainable future. We are now building the collective intelligence to rethink many industries and sectors of society around the principles of collaboration. This is not just a theory its happening. What do you think? What is to be done? Over the next three months Ill be introducing bi-weekly discussions on a number of topics where we can empower change through collaboration: Education & Learning, Health & Wellness, Energy & Environment, Politics & Government, Media & Entertainment, Science & Technology, Banking & Finance, Transportation & Mobility, Art & Culture and Marketing & Advertising. Please join in the discussion!

Collaborating for Change in Healthcare

http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2011/11/10/collaborating-for-change-inhealthcare/?utm_source=Master+Contacts&utm_campaign=b1f021f4ccGlobal_email_from_Toby12_9_2011&utm_medium=email&ct=tGlobal_email_from_T oby12_9_2011_2 November 10th, 2011 by Don Tapscott Im enthusiastic about taking on the role of Curator for Social Media Week. In the run-up to my kickoff speech on Feb 13 to cities around the world, Im writing a series of articles to stimulate thinking and discussion in our global community. The topic of this post is healthcare. Despite the advancements of modern medicine, our basic approach to healthcare has remained unchanged for centuries. It assumes that physicians are smart and patients arent. Doctors wait in their office or hospital for sick people to come to them in order to be told what to do. Traditionally, patients have been passive and ill-informed, playing little or no role in deciding their own treatment. As one physician puts it: Todays healthcare institutions are like the old media: centralized, one-way, immutable and controlled by the people who created and delivered it. Patients are passive recipients. In other words, the health system is broken. Now, courtesy of the Internet, there are tools that allow us to take more responsibility for our own health, and for patients to collaborate with their doctors and, equally important, other patients. All of us, including newborns, should have our own online Personal Health Page. Just as Facebook keeps you updated on your friends activities, your Health Page would keep you up to date on issues affecting your health. You could have links to organizations such as Weight Watchers or a local diabetes support group. You could create a community or join medical causes. And low-cost or free applications could help you measure your own health, prediagnose a sick child or test for possible drug interactions. By moving the heart of our healthcare system online, and making each of us more informed and involved in our health, we would get a lot more bang for our healthcare buck. Knowing whats happening in your body motivates you to change your behavior. If you weigh yourself daily, for instance, youll be more successful at shedding pounds and keeping them off than if you weigh in weekly. When we are better informed about our health, we make fewer trips to the emergency department, we dont make unnecessary doctors appointments and we require fewer costly home-nurse visits. Some early examples of this kind of thinking can already be seen online. Users of MedHelp.com, a popular online health community, are able to track more than 1,500 symptoms and treatments on a daily basis using iPhone apps that cover both general health conditions, such as weight loss and allergies, and very specific disorders, such as

infertility and diabetes. If they want, patients can share this information on a continuing basis with their doctors or caregivers. Doctors should do much more to encourage patients to take advantage of the resources available in online health care communities. A good example is PatientsLikeMe.com, a vibrant health care community whose members suffer from debilitating chronic conditions such as ALS, Parkinsons and bipolar disorder. Members use the site to track the evolution and management of their diseases. But rather than keep all their data private, many members share it with the patient community and the medical research community. This openness ultimately benefits everyone. Patients can learn whats working and, in consultation with their doctors, adjust their own treatment plans. Drug companies can use anonymous patient data to evaluate new treatments and thus bring them to market more quickly. People think we are a social networking site, says PatientsLikeMe cofounder Ben Heywood. But were an open medical framework. This is a large-scale research project. Earlier this week (Nov. 5, 2011), PatientsLikeMe and R.A.R.E Project, a non-profit advocacy and support group for patients with all rare diseases, announced a new partnership to find and connect 1 million rare disease patients to share and learn everything possible about their conditions. The organizations are launching an international rare disease awareness campaign in 2012. There are 35 million patients in the U.S. with 7,000+ rare diseases and we want to find them, connect them and support them in sharing and learning by their specific disease and across all rare diseases, says Dean Suhr, Chief Innovation and Community Development Officer at R.A.R.E. Were excited to work with PatientsLikeMe because their open patient registry allows patients to contribute to research, while getting immediate benefits, like improved quality of life, from sharing this information with others. Of course, we need the buy-in of the biggest players namely government and insurers to help maximize these opportunities and help people from becoming needlessly sick. I encourage readers to join the discussion on how healthcare can be more collaborative and effective.

A New Energy Revolution

http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2011/11/29/a-new-energyrevolution/?utm_source=Master+Contacts&utm_campaign=b1f021f4ccGlobal_email_from_Toby12_9_2011&utm_medium=email&ct=tGlobal_email_from_Toby12_9 _2011_2

November 29th, 2011 by Don Tapscott Humanitys ability to transform raw materials into energy powered the rise of modern civilization and shaped the fortunes of nations throughout history. James Watts steam engine triggered the industrial revolution in Britain and ushered in a period of enormous technological, social and economic transformation. Roughly a century later, the invention of electricity and the eventual electrification of factories brought large-scale business enterprises and double-digit increases in productivity that transformed the United States into the modern economic powerhouse. Today, the world stands at the brink of a new energy revolution one that will fundamentally transform the ubiquitous but largely invisible infrastructure that powers every home appliance, every medical device, every light source, and virtually every industrial process, from agriculture to construction. The fossil-fuel-based economy is coming to an end, and a new green-energy economy is emerging in its place. Like past energy revolutions, there will be great payoffs for the countries and companies that master the new technologies early. The opportunity for new product and service innovation is huge, as is the potential for smart firms to create hundreds of thousands of new high-skill jobs in fields ranging from solar engineering to software. But are we positioned to take advantage? To really tip the scale in favor of green energy, we need an infusion of Wikinomics principles. The need for cross-sector collaboration in developing and scaling new technologies is paramount. But we canand should- go further. Truly opening up our energy infrastructure could catalyze new sources of supply, provide a platform for new energy services, and help foster a culture of energy prosumption whereby household and business users become active producers and managers of energy, not just passive consumers and ratepayers. Its not as far-fetched as it sounds. There is already increasingly broad agreement that our electrical systems should do more than carry electricity. They should carry information. And once the grid carries information, it stands to benefit from the same kinds of innovation, collaboration, and wealth creation that the Internet has enabled in other sectors of the economy. In many ways, the argument for a smart grid based on open standards parallels the argument for an open Internet. The old power grid is analogous to broadcast media with its bias towards centralized, one-way, one-to-many, one-size-fits-all communication. A smart grid, if it can be built, will leverage the Internet to weave millions, and eventually billions, of household appliances, substations and power generators around the planet into an intelligent and programmable network. And, just as open standards and edge intelligence brought forth creativity on the Internet, openness in the new energy grid

will ensure it goes beyond being just a computerized pipeline for delivering cleaner electricity, and becomes a platform for a vast array of new energy services. Building a smart grid on open standards would, for example, allow software developers to build applications just as developers build apps for the iPhone. The most straightforward application might analyze a households electricity usage data, identify inefficient appliances or practices in the home, offer tips on how to reduce energy, and provide special discounts on efficient appliances or electronics. Armed with more information about tariffs, for example, the dishwasher would wait for the price to fall below a certain level before switching on, and the air-conditioner would turn itself down when the price goes up. Innovations like these are especially exciting for the behavior changes they will bring about. Studies have found that when people are made aware of how much power they are using, they reduce their use by about 7%. With added incentives, people curtail their electricity use during peaks in demand by 15% or more. The Climate Group estimates that the application of digital technologies to enable smart grids and smart buildings has the potential to avert 3.71 gigatons of CO2 equivalent global emissions by 2020, delivering some $464 billion in global energy cost savings to businesses, taxpayers and consumers. These savings pale, moreover, in comparison to the impact we could have on future generations by transforming the way we produce and consume energy. In the face of climate change and diminishing stocks of fossil fuels, we can take one of two routes. One path leads to escalating prices, energy shortages, and economic backwardness in a world facing environmental catastrophe and increasing geopolitical conflict. The other path leads to growth, global cooperation, and an abundant supply of clean power delivered through a smart energy grid that enables consumers to become active and informed managers of their energy consumption. The choice is ours to make, but how can we accelerate the process? How can the Social Media Week community cultivate new ideas to help this process? Can we innovate ideas that encourage a reduction in energy consumption or generate energy alternatives?