Back in December I announced my intention to take a sabbatical from Facebook and see what would happen. There were a number of factors in that decision, and I’ll share what I learned and what I’m doing now.
I had a few reasons for wanting to take a break:
- Facebook was a huge time waster, and earlier last year I deleted the app from my phone (it and Messenger and Instagram track your life your life and serve you ads based on what you’ve been doing). As a result, I have spent a lot less time there, although I do spend a lot of time on twitter.
- Facebook in engaged in undermining democracy and articles I was reading in 2018 pointed to their intentional and unintentional aiding and abetting behaviour with respect to undermining elections and eroding democratic engagement. Here is a good Atlantic article on that.
- Facebook creates a deep gravity well for conversation. It tailors your news feed using algorithms to only serve you a very small slice of your friends’ activity. Much of what you see confirms what you know and it is designed to activate your brain in a way that causes you to share information and pass it on, deepening confirmation bias, and spreading rumours and lies.
- People communicate on Facebook in shallow and brief ways, meaning large and important conversations for local communities become pile ons, where people that have never made the effort to introduce themselves to others in real life nevertheless feel free to be mean spirited and even borderline libellous while hiding behind their virtual identities. This has major implications in a small community like mine, where big local issues result in people starting rumours, passing judgements and ostracizing and slandering others in a way they would never do if they had to write to the newspaper, or see these people at the General Store. Discussions of complex ideas have devolved into the equivalent of drive-by shootings, often deeply personal.
These were the reasons I took a break and these are the reasons I am not coming back in a meaningful way.
When I started blogging in 2001, the promise of the Web 2.0 was that it would usher in the era of the creator. Any one could now create work on line. Recording studios, radio stations, television and film productions, newspaper, and magazines and book publishing all used to be inaccessible for the common person or the beginner artist. Now anyone could use whatever form of medium they wanted to say what is important to them. Before social media, Web 2.0 was about content creation media. It took time and effort to do it, but you could build a life, connect with others, find community in far flung corners of the globe, and make a contribution.
When social media came about into widespread use, around 2007 in my case with Facebook, the blogging world almost completely disappeared. People whose blogs I followed moved into facebook where I followed them for a while until their well crafted posts were lost in the endless stream of mindless diarizing, half-baked opinions and, later, the endless copypasta of shared memes and viral content. I had a hard time finding my people, but I was enjoying wishing friends a happy birthday and connecting with people from school, 30 years ago.
Over the past ten or so years what has happened is that my time has disappeared into the suck hole of scrolling through useless content instead of producing some of my own. Yesterday, talking with my friend Julien Thomas, I remembered that somewhere I said that democracy depends on us being active participants and not consumers.
Social media has made us consumers of other people’s content. In the 2001-2007 era of blogging, someone would write a post and if it was meaningful to you, you would quote it with an annotation about why it mattered and what your take was on it. Conversation was more considered and content was savoured and appreciated and hardly ever simply passed on. We were all content creators, hyperlinked to other content creators. When commenting began, discussion started to remain in a limited number of places but it was all open in the public and available to anyone. Comment spam really killed open discussion on blogs and maintaining spam-free comments sections became time-consuming. (Luckily there are better tools now, which is why you need to wait for me to approve comments on my blog).
With the dawn of Facebook however, content creation became highly concentrated in only a relatively and proportionally small number of places. Most people on Facebook simply pass it on other people’s stuff, often without any credit or link back to the original creator, and discussion happens behind closed doors and isn’t archived or very easy to access.
These days we are consumers of other people’s content, and we generally pass on what we like and agree with, amplifying it’s impact without adding to it. A few people have complained that they miss me on facebook, that they miss my voice and the things I say. But what I notice is that they like those things mostly because they can pass them on, or because what I have to say validates their views. It makes me I wonder where THEIR voice is, why they haven’t been thinking about things and sharing original opinions. And I wonder half-heartedly why I never get stuff from in my news feed that challenges my biases and my ideas anymore.
I have recently created a sock puppet twitter account to engage with conservatives in Canada, including those who are nationalist, populist and extreme right-wing. I am curious and concerned about the rise of populism and nationalism in Canada and the global connections between far right leaders who are promoting anti-immigrant, anti-globalist politics and messages. Through my “fake” twitter account, I am meeting conservatives that are also opposed to these far right echo chambers, and I am having my own ideas challenged. I am getting into debates and conversations with people I vehemently disagree with. I am posing on twitter as a real person, but not as “Chris Corrigan.”
I’m not going to reveal the identity of that twitter account. It says something to me about the nature of the social media landscape that I feel deeply uncomfortable showing up as my own self in those conversations. Debating with Nazis is not a safe thing to do, especially when one is debating with people hiding behind anonymous identities. And so I show up as a real person but with a fake name. Interesting.
Social media has become a place where relationships have become commercialized transactions and where democratic engagement has devolved into a fact free festival of insulting the other and patting your friends and allies on the back while being served highly specific advertising messages from corporations and political influencers. All the while, someone other than you is getting rich every time you connect to a friend. While it is nice to “stay in touch” I have to say that most of what passes across my screens on facebook is of very little value to me.
I would encourage people to go back to, or start blogging, and I’d encourage you to do it in the spirit of 2001 blogging, not in the spirit of “blog as PR tool” that we see today: share things, speculate, use it as a platform for what I call “Open Source Learning.” Use it as a gift exchange, not as a digital business card. Embed links to other people and add to the gifts of knowledge you receive before passing them on. You can start with WordPress as a powerful, free and easy-to-get-started-with tool.
For me I’ll be using facebook in these ways going forward:
- I’ll be continuing to promote workshops and events there, and for limited times, participating in facebook groups where that is chosen by the group as a way of keeping in touch.
- I will occasionally scan my feed and if I see that you have a birthday, or have experienced a death in the family, and you are a person with whom I have a personal relationship, you may well get an email or a phone call from me.
- I will share blog posts on facebook, but encourage discussion to happen here on the blog, where the world can see it and anyone can participate.
I’ll be going off Instagram and What’s App entirely (both owned by Facebook) and continuing to use twitter (@chriscorrigan) as a place for spontaneous conversation and meeting new voices. You can find my photos on Flickr, which has recently become revitalized and awesome again. If you have a blog, let me know and I’ll add you to my RSS feed (I use Inoreader for that)
Since October 2011, when I first lay on the floor and listened to Tuesday Ryan-Hart teach at the Art of Social Justice in New York held thirty-five blocks from where Occupy Wall Street was just getting started, I have been intrigued, challenged and enamoured by her work on these issues.
She has been working hard for the past 8 years to articulate a model of power, justice and relations that can deeply inform the Art of Hosting community of practitioners, certainly in the North American context if not elsewhere in the world. Tuesday’s work has made me a better person. She took the challenge of entering into the Art of Hosting word because it was worthy on its own merits as a place full of promise with respect to social justice and she added stuff to make it better. I was gifted with the chance to witness the development of her work since the very moment she encountered our community and I want to speak to it now to name that it has influenced my own ideas about power, relationship, grace and multiplicity.
Here it is in its current form, The Shared Work Model, a gift of one Black woman’s lived experience, thoughtfully condensed and rolled into an offering specifically for our community of practice. It is both a map and plan. But mostly it is a treasure buried in this field.
I have met so many people and voices in our community around the world who aren’t afraid to speak to power in our midst. It seems unfair just to name Tuesday in this, but I want to lift her up specifically for the work she has offered as an invitation to make us all better.
My work has been at the intersection of culture, history and power for nearly thirty years, largely moving in-between indigenous and settler communities in Canada as a facilitator and host of strategic dialogue practice. I have made many more mistakes than most people I know, in this respect. I have stumbled and used my power and privilege badly. I like to say I have had the gift of being scolded by more aunties and grandmas than I can count. And occasionally I have got some things right too.
If I’ve been right it’s because I have listened to people deeply and honestly, I have seen far beyond their initial impressions and I have seen and been seen in my work. I make the right moves when I listen to and remember Tuesday’s teachings, and the teachings of the Elders, youth, kids, mums and community members I get to work with.
So I offer this reflection this morning to remind us that the practice of “calling out” has it’s place, to shake the foundations and remind us of the important truths of difference. And to remind us that we have a unique opportunity this community because we are also gracefully and beautifully “called in” by our friends and mates to notice how the bigger systems of which we are a part guide our own behaviours and patterns and address them.
Most of my work lies with the organizations of what Henry Mintzberg calls “The plural sector.” These are the organizations tasked with picking up the work that governments and corporations refuse to do. As we have sunk further and further into the 40 year experiment of neo-liberalism, governments have abandoned the space of care for communities and citizens especially if that care clashes with an ideology of reducing taxes to favour the wealthy and the largely global corporate sector. Likewise on the corporate side a singular focus on shareholder return and the pursuit of capital friendly jurisdictions with low tax rates and low wages means that corporations can reap economic benefits without any responsibility for the social effects of their policy influence.
Here’s how Mintzberg puts it, in a passionate defence of the role of these organizations:
“We can hardly expect governments—even ostensibly democratic ones—that have been coopted by their private sectors or overwhelmed by the forces of corporate globalization to take the lead in initiating radical renewal. A sequence of failed conferences on global warming has made this quite clear.
Nor can private sector businesses be expected to take the lead. Why should they promote changes to redress an imbalance that favors so many of them, especially the most powerful? And although corporate social responsibility is certainly to be welcomed, anyone who believes that it will compensate for corporate social irresponsibility is not reading today’s newspapers.”
What constantly surprises me in this work is how much accountability is placed on the plural sector for achieving outcomes around issues that they have so little role in creating.
While corporations are able to simply externalize effects of their operations that are relevant to their KPIs and balance sheets, governments are increasingly held to account by citizens for failing to make significant change with ever reduced resources and regulatory influence. Strident anti-government governments are elected and they immediately set out to dismantle what is left of the government’s role, peddling platitudes such as “taxation is theft” and associated libertarian nonsense. They generally, and irresponsibly, claim that the market is the better mechanism to solve social problems even though the market has been shown to be a psychotic beast hell bent on destroying local communities, families and the climate in pursuit of it’s narrowly focused agenda. In the forty years since Regan, Thatcher and Mulroney went to war against government, the market has failed on nearly every score to create secure economic and environmental futures for all peoples. And it has utterly stripped entire nations of wealth and resources causing their people to flee the ensuing wars, depressions, and environmental destruction. Migrants run headlong into the very countries that displaced them in the first place and meet there a hostile resistance to the newcomers. Xenophobia and racism gets channeled into policy and simply increases the rate of exploitation and wealth concentration.
And yet, the people I know who struggle under the most pressure to prove their worth are the organizations of the plural sector who are subject to onerous and ontologically incorrect evaluation criteria aimed at, presumably, assuring their founders that the rabble are not only responsibly spending money (which is totally understsndsble) but also making a powerful impact on issues which are driven by forces well outside their control.
I’m increasingly understanding the role of a great deal of superficial evaluation in actually restricting the effectiveness of the plural sector so that they may be relegated to harm reduction for capitalism, rather than pursuing the radical reforms to our global economic system that will lead to sustainability. It’s fristrating for so many on the frontlines and it has led for calls for much more unrestricted granting in order to allow organizations to effectively allocate their resources, respond to emerging patterns, and learn from their work.
There are some fabulous people working in the field of evaluation to try to disrupt this dynamic by developing robust methods of complexity informed research in support of what the front line of the plural sector is tasked with. The battle now, especially now that science itself is under attack, is to make these research methods widely understood and effective in not simply evaluating the work of the plural sector but also shunting a light on the clear patterns at play in our economic system.
I’ll be running an online course in the winter with Beehive Productions where we look at evaluation from the perspective of facilitators and leaders of social change. We won’t shy away from this conversation as we look at where evaluation practice has extended beyond the narrow confines of program improvement and into larger social conversation. We will look at history and power and how evaluation is weaponized against radical reform in favour of, at best, sustaining good programs and at worst shutting down effective work.
Two links in the feed this morning had me thinking about democracy, participation and local governance.
Duncan Green provides a review of the new book How to Rig an Election, by Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. There are many ways to hack a democracy, including gerrymandering electoral districts, influencing or straight out hacking of polls, manipulating voter registration and making it difficult to vote. The authors in this new book point out an important truth:
Leaders are most likely to try and stay in power when they believe that their presence is essential to maintain political stability; in cases when they are less committed to plural politics; when they have engaged in high-level corruption and/or human rights abuses; when they lack trust in rival leaders and political institutions; when they have been in power for a longer period of time; and when they control geostrategically important states with natural resources, effective security forces, weak institutions and high levels of distrust.
Threats to the voting system are global, affecting every country and every level of government. Many of the characteristics of these governments and leaders are present and increasing in Canada and we have already seen election irregularities over the past decade in Canada, including, targeted misinformation campaigns, allegations of identity theft, and cyber security threats.
But democracy is not simply about voting. While the voting process is important, it is what happens in-between elections that shows the mark of a mature democracy. How are you involved in your local governments? Do you have the ability to participate in decisions beyond sending in petitions, protesting or writing to your representatives? Do your governments conduct “sell and tell” sessions disguised as consultation? Does your participation have a meaningful impact?
Most of us simply move from election to election without much participation at all in governance and citizen participation. This lack of involvement leads to apathy and makes it easier for elections to be manipulated and for government policy making to be overtaken by other interests. Witness last week’s agreement between Nestle and Kinder Morgan to move the proposed path of the TransMountain pipeline so that it wouldn’t pose a risk to an aquifer that Nestle uses to produce bottled water. Kinder Morgan was accommodating of the request, but the Coldwater First Nation, who had the same request with the same concerns that its community water system would be imperilled by the pipeline received the cold shoulder. Who is making policy? Where are the levels of government that are supposed to be protecting the rights of citizens? The decision making process is too opaque, and not enough people know or care, so decisions get made every single day that affect citizens’ rights in favour of commercial interests. In this case, neither company is even Canadian and yet they are divvying up local aquifers, while actual local governments can’t get any attention at all, on exactly the same issue.
The essence of democracy is not voting, it is participation. To leave you with hope, take some time to read about the work being done in Cali, Colombia, and Bologna, Italy with respect to inclusion of citizens in urban planning, deliberation and experimentation as they work to build civic culture, belonging and identity. These projects are easy to design and implement but they require effort and they require local councils to take an interest in what citizens have to say and to provide them with the tools to build the communities they want to live in. Such participation in the long term increases voter participation, knowledge of governance processes and collective responsibility for the health of democracies.
Spent an hour in conversation with a friend in the US last night discussing the role of dialogue in connecting communities together. My friend has extensive experience working with immigrant, refugee communities and in working with inner city agencies. He’s been personally affected by Trump’s travel edict as his family members are directly targetted by the current travel ban. He’s a man I respect very much.
We were talking about ways to connect and understand the “other side.” After our conversation I stumbled over this podcast on the “deep story” of what is motivating Trump supporters, and probably both Brexit supporters and other Europeans struggling with how the world is changing and how they perceive their privileges coming apart. We talked about how there is always a thin slice of people that will never sit down with “the other.” We also spoke about the many main street Republicans who feel abandoned by their party and have done since the Tea Party took it over. It comes down to the fact that arguments on economics and policy cannot overrule the emotional aspects of identity, especially when people feel those identities are under assualt through no fault of their own.
In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they’re actually voting to serve their emotional needs
The image of standing in line to get your rewards and watch people stream past you is compelling. It’s one thing to deconstruct this image with data and facts, but first it’s important to understand it and how people deeply FEEL it.
Deep story is fascinating to me. Here in my home community of Bowen Island, we experience tensions from time to time over our deep story. We all have ideas about what we think this place is and who we think we are. To some extent that story is an illusion born in our world views and our desires. In a place like Bowen Island, where most of us moved here from somewhere else, our own deep story includes the deep motivation that brought us here.
And deeper beneath the personal deep story we bring is the emergent and slowly changing story of the island’s identity. Over the last couple of years, as a member of our local Economic Development Committee, I have worked with friends and colleagues to understand our deep story. Once you can see it, it reveals the deep yes’ and deep no’s that make things happen or hold things back. People are often surprised by things that go on in our little community, but understanding the deep story helps to explain where these things come from.
When you understand the deep story, you can find deep places to connect together and important places of engagement and curiosity. Dialogue gets more interesting as we set out to learn about each other, what we care about, what we assume is true, and what is essential to our identity. Strategy that does not take the power of identity into consideration creates implementation plans that will inevitably endure oblique assaults on its efficacy. Understanding the deep story and identity of a place or a person is essential to resilience, collaboration and peacemaking across difference. A healthy community can hold different stories in all their complexity, even when those stories conflict with each other. An unhealthy community pits one story against another, and cynical leaders do the same.
We have a choice as citizens. This podcast helps us become resourceful in making that choice.