Tag Archives: internet

Web 2.0 and the Business of Family

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"…[because he doesn't have a computer] there is so much of my life that he misses out on that the rest of my family gets to see…it's very hard for him to visualize what it is I even do in my day-to-day world."

In the above interview from PBS Frontline's Digital Nation series, producer and blogger Daniela Capistrano laments how her father's refusal to live digitally has disconnected him from her increasingly digital life. Her frustration resonates with me as I'm sure it does with so many people who have friends and loved ones still living in the analog.

We got my father a laptop back in '07 (I flew to Miami to set it up for him, seriously) and he's gotten pretty good at the basics like email (although I still have to remind him about email etiquette like thread hijacking and ALL-CAPS). My mother on the other hand, is somewhat of a tech whiz.

Family, the most important business
Capistrano's story reminded me of my own musings around the internet and the family dynamic. There has been a lot of talk lately about how web 2.0 tools allow businesses and governments to more effectively engage employees, customers and constituents. Blogs, wikis and social media tools like twitter and Facebook allow stakeholders to inform the decisions that impact them and collaboratively create knowledge.

Families are using some of these same tools to conduct the enormously important business of family. Web 2.0 tools allow for the active collaboration and decision making, and passive awareness and sharing. In my family for instance, we use a Google group frequently to discuss family matters and share information of common interest, particularly around health, personal finance and politics. 

Business conversations are increasingly media rich and take place across many platforms; in my digital household, our threads are rich with links, calendars, maps, images and video as we go about the hard work of family.

As governments and other institutions struggle to regain the public trust in this age of turmoil, web 2.0 tools, and the ethos of openness that has grown up along side them, have become central to transparency efforts. I've seen a similar dynamic play out in my family in terms of what and how we share.

Now more than ever, I'm clued in to many of the challenges my parents and siblings face and involved in plans for facing them. And it's not just because I'm "old enough" to participate in family decision making - new tools make inclusiveness practical and normal.

A few stories from my Family 2.0
Facebook helps me keep up with six of my siblings; they always have some passive awareness of what is going on in my life and I can check up on my little sister's FB suitors and figure out a little about what's on my moody teenage brother's mind, leaving him notes to publicly remind him I love him even if he doesn't feel like talking to me. 

This past Friday, my siblings and I organized a birthday surprise for my mother and I got to see the look on her face as she opened the fruit sculpture, from 1500 miles away. 

As I write this piece, my big sisterbear is taking the lead in organizing travel for three generations of my family plus significant others to my graduation in June; her strategy doc, shared with the fams via Google Docs, would make her old boss at Deloitte proud. 

One of the best laugh's we've ever had together as a family was over an email: A friend of mine emailed my father about interviewing him for her thesis research. My father replied saying, among other things, "The best way to get in touch with me is generally to just Hollaaaaaaaaa! Peace, El-Tehuti".

(My father recently changed his name from "Emory" to "El-Tehuti" which means something like "sage" in Ancient Kemetan. More on this in a future post.)

There is a lot that has and should be said about how digital technologies can tear at the fabric of family life. Yet these same technologies have brought my family together, and not just digitally.

What does it mean to be a netizen?

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Back in December in a post on the Open Government Directive, social media expert Steve Radick wrote, "The rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship are changing, and we [government practitioners] need to be educated—at every level—on how and why to engage through open government channels." This resonated with me: What does citizenship look like in the age of the internet? What new citizen "duties" are emerging on the social web?

When I think of citizenship on the web, it is not in the conventional "national citizen" sense. Rather, citizenship takes on a broader, and perhaps equally important, meaning: internet citizens ("netizens" as Michael Hauben dubbed us) are people who have a stake in the evolving content and character of the web.

In this sense, internet users are citizens in a world of ideas, participants in an ongoing knowledge and value (in the "societal values" sense) creation experiment. Although language, technology access and literacy, and censorship still represent barriers for some, the conversation is increasingly global.

The on-line world is a democratic space. People "vote" in this space by consuming, responding to (e.g. by commenting on blogs), sharing, promoting (e.g. within ranking systems like Digg) and creating content. Like more traditional democratic spaces, the web favors those who engage, those who say and do things, over those who do not; people who engage have a say in shaping the online world. It's worth noting that, like other democratic spaces, some have more influence, "more of a vote", than others because of structural and other factors (e.g. what sites a search engine ranking algorithm favors).

The Internet is saturated with information (too much for any one individual to sort through) and crowded with competing narratives; the information and narratives that bubble up to the top become public "knowledge". The content that surfaces (e.g. the first page of Google results on a given topic) might be taken to represent a sort of consensus on what is "valuable", maybe even what's "true".

With this in mind, I posit that engagement on the internet is perhaps, like civic engagement in the off-line world, a "duty" of citizenship. If we want our values to be reflected in the presiding culture, if we want the best information to rise to the top, we have to assert ourselves through all of the mechanisms available to us.

While many consume content, fewer share it and fewer yet, actively promote or create it. This worries me. Why? Because many quarters of the internet are effectively "dictatorships of the loud" – people who create content often and are good at promoting it, disproportionately impact the conversation regardless of how sound their ideas are. The inane or fluffy often wins out over the useful or profound.

I started writing not because I'm the most expert person on many of the subjects I write on, but because I'm having my say, I'm "voting". And I'm not just blogging; I'm scouring the internet for ideas that represent our best values and promoting them; I'm seeking out bull and blasphemy and calling it out for what it is. I figure It's the least I can do to help shape the Internet, and the World.

What do you think, what does it mean to be a 'netizen'?

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