The Internet is a powerful tool. But most attention seems to focus on its use as a means of vertical communications: from one to many. Even when we talk about how it allows individuals to compete on an even basis with Big Media organizations, we’re usually talking about its ability to facilitate a kind of communication that’s akin to what Big Media has always done.
But as important as this is—and it’s very important indeed— it’s probably dwarfed by the much more numerous horizontal communications that the Internet, and related technologies like cell phones, text messaging, and the like permit. They allow a kind of horizontal knowledge that is often less obvious, but in many ways at least as powerful, as the vertical kind.
Horizontal knowledge is communication among individuals, who may or may not know each other, but who are loosely coordinated by their involvement with something, or someone, of mutual interest. And it’s extremely powerful, because it makes people much smarter.
People used to be ignorant. It was hard to learn things. You had to go to libraries, look things up, perhaps sit and wait while a book was fetched from storage, or recalled from another user, or borrowed from a different library. What knowledge there was spent most of its time on a shelf. And if knowledge was going to be organized and dispersed, it took a big organization to do it.
TINY BUBBLES
Guinness became a publishing sensation by cashing in on that ignorance. Bar patrons got into so many hard-to-settle arguments about what was biggest, or fastest, or oldest that Guinness responded with The Guinness Book of World Records, bringing a small quantity of authoritative knowledge to bear in a handy form.
Things are different today. I’m writing this in a bar right now, and I have most of human knowledge at my fingertips. Okay, it’s not really a bar. It’s a campus pizza place, albeit one with twenty-seven kinds of beer on tap, a nice patio, and, most importantly, a free wireless Internet hookup. With that, and Google, there’s not much that I can’t find out.
If I’m curious about the Hephthalite Huns1 or the rocket equation2 or how much money Joe Biden3 has gotten from the entertainment industry, I can have it in less time than it takes the barmaid to draw me a beer.4
What’s more, I can coordinate that sort of information (well, it might be kind of hard to tie those particular three facts together, but you take my meaning) with other people with enormous speed. With email, blogs, and bulletin boards, I could, if the topic interested enough people, put together an overnight coalition—a flash constituency—without leaving the restaurant. (And in fact, some folks did pretty much just that recently, and succeeded in killing the “super-DMCA” bill before the Tennessee legislature. Alarmed at a proposed law that would have made it a felony to connect a Tivo without permission from a cable company, they organized, set up a website, and shot down a bill that the cable companies had put a lot of time and money into.)
So what? Everybody knows this stuff, right? It has been the subject of countless hand-waving speeches about the revolutionary potential of the Internet, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. Well, sort of. Everybody knows it. But they don’t know it, yet, down deep where it counts. And even those who kind of get it at that level tend to forget—as even I sometimes do—just how revolutionary it is. And yes, it really is revolutionary, in ways that would have defied prediction not long ago.
Just try this thought experiment: Imagine that it’s 1993. The Web is just appearing. And imagine that you—an unusually prescient type—were to explain to people what they could expect by, say, the summer of 2003. Universal access to practically all information. From all over the place—even in bars. And all for free!
I can imagine the questions the skeptics would have asked: How will this be implemented? How will all of this information be digitized and made available? (Lots of examples along the line of “a thousand librarians with scanners would take fifty years to put even a part of the Library of Congress online, and who would pay for that?”) Lots of questions about how people would agree on standards for wireless data transmission—“It usually takes ten years just to develop a standard, much less put it into the market-place!”— and so on, and so on. “Who will make this stuff available for free? People want to be paid to do things!” “Why, even if we start planning now, there’s no way we’ll have this in ten years!”
Actually, that final statement is true. If we had started planning in 1993, we probably wouldn’t have gotten there by 2033, much less before 2003. The Web, Wi-Fi, and Google didn’t develop and spread because somebody at the Bureau of Central Knowledge Planning planned them. They developed, in large part, from the uncoordinated activities of individuals.
Why can you find all sorts of stuff, from information about the Hephthalite Huns to instructions for brewing beer (yes, it always comes back to beer), and even recipes for cooking squirrel, on the Web? Because people thought it was cool enough (to them) to be worth the effort (on their part) of putting it online. We didn’t need a thousand librarians with scanners because we had a billion non-librarians with computers and divergent interests. Wi-Fi sprang up the same way: not as part of a national plan by the Responsible Authorities, but as part of a ground-up movement composed of millions of people who just wanted it and companies happy to sell them the gear they needed to pull it off.
There are two lessons here. One is that the skeptics, despite all their reasonable-sounding objections, would have been utterly wrong about the future of the Web, a mere ten years after it first appeared. And the second is why they would have been wrong: because they didn’t appreciate what lots of smart people, loosely coordinating their actions with each other, are capable of accomplishing. It’s the power of horizontal, as opposed to vertical, knowledge.
As the world grows more interconnected, more and more people have access to knowledge and coordination. Yet we continue to underestimate the revolutionary potential of this simple fact. Heck, forget potential—we regularly underestimate the revolutionary reality of it, in the form of things we already take for granted, like Wi-Fi and Google.
But I’m not a wild-eyed visionary. As a result, I’m going to make a very conservative prediction: that the next ten years will see revolutions that make Wi-Fi and Google look tame, and that in short order we’ll take those for granted too. It’s a safe bet.
Of course, not everyone is happy. The spread of horizontal knowledge is discomfiting big organizations that have depended on vertical organization. Not surprisingly, some of the first to be affected are those in the media.
In the old days, if you didn’t like what you read in the newspaper, you could either complain to your neighbors, or send a letter to the editor that—maybe—would be published days or weeks later, when everyone had forgotten the story you were complaining about. And if you worked at a newspaper, you couldn’t even do that. Newspapers aren’t very enthusiastic about publishing letters from unhappy employees.
INSIDE, OUTSIDE, UPSIDE DOWN
For the New York Times, though, it became painfully obvious how that old system has broken down as the career of editor-in-chief Howell Raines came to an end. From the outside, bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus, along with specialty sites like TimesWatch, kept up constant pressure. Every distortion and misrepresentation (and there were plenty, of course) was picked up and noted. The result was a steady diminution of the Times’s prestige among the opinion-making classes, something that opened it up for criticism in a way that it once didn’t have to face because of the quasi-mystical awe in which many journalists have traditionally held it.
Meanwhile, the Internet also opened things up from the inside. Unhappy Times staffers in previous years could have grumbled to their colleagues at other papers, but such grumbling would have been largely futile. Now, on the other hand, thanks to email and websites such as Jim Romenesko’s (and quite a few blogs that got leaked information), they could grumble to a major audience. They could also engage in that most devastating of insider activities, the leaking of sanctimonious and dumb internal memos from the bosses. (Note to bosses: If you distribute your dumb and sanctimonious memos on paper instead of via email, you’ll face less of that because people can’t just hit “forward” and send them on. Of course, another approach might be to write memos that aren’t dumb and sanctimonious.)
Nick Denton, however, warned shortly after Raines’s departure that there’s a downside to this, what he calls “organizational terrorism” via Internet, a sort of asymmetrical warfare that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Raines, sometimes crassly, was trying to institute change; the organizational reactionaries didn’t like it. In a previous era, a manager would have been able to execute the ringleaders, and ride out the discontent. But Raines was up against a powerful combination of old labor unionism, and the new industrial action: a leak to a weblog, tittle-tattle over the IM, whispered conversations to Howard Kurtz. . . . [M]anagers may sometimes have the power to hire and fire, but the peas-ants have the Internet now.
Is that a good thing? I’m not sure. I can imagine large organizations—all large organizations—becoming more conservative, so concerned to maintain a happy workplace that they avoid change. For smaller organizations, in the media and other sectors, this may be an opportunity.5
Nick was right to warn about this possibility. Things will be different, and already are. Even in the military, email and chat rooms are flattening hierarchies and changing power dynamics. On the other hand, what the Internet peasantry hates most is not just power, but bogosity. Raines was disliked as much because he played favorites (and it was seen as a favoritism not based on performance) as because he was dictatorial: tough, but unfair. And— just as students resent a professor who won’t shut up their over-talkative peers more than they resent one who will—employees don’t necessarily resent managers who run a taut ship, so long as they feel that merit is being rewarded over sucking up.
So it may be that managers who do a good job have less to fear, and that it will be in the interest of the people who ultimately run many large organizations, like boards of directors, to pay closer attention to the performance of managers, and to what the employee samizdat is saying about them. That’s one way in which horizontal knowledge could work to improve organizations, not sabotage them as Nick suggests, so long as the board members apply some good sense.
On a smaller scale, the new Times editors may want to look at putting horizontal knowledge to work for them in another way. It would be child’s play to take RSS feeds from a number of blogs (say, via Technorati), filter them to extract the references to stories in the Times, and then have an ombudsman look at those references to see if correction, amplification, or investigation is called for. A newspaper that did that (and it could just as easily be done by any major paper, not just the Times) would be enlisting a huge (and unpaid!) army of fact-checkers, and could fix mistakes within hours of their appearing, thus turning inside its competition and enhancing its reputation, all at very low cost. I first suggested this three or four years ago, but it hasn’t happened yet (though Times rival the Washington Post is making links to blogs mentioning its stories available to readers, which is a first step).
Will it happen? That depends on whether Big Media folks want to ride the wave of horizontal knowledge, or just try to keep their heads above water.
So far the signs aren’t entirely promising. A lot of folks around the blogosphere got angry at the New York Times’s John Markoff for comments he made to the Online Journalism Review, in which he likened blogs to CB Radio in the 1970s. But although Markoff meant to be dismissive, he was actually onto something, because CB radio was an early enabler of horizontal knowledge, with some pretty significant social and political consequences.
BIG BROTHER VS. THE CONVOY
Citizens’ Band radio gets a bum rap nowadays—in most people’s minds, it’s associated with images of Homer Simpson (in the flashback scenes where he had hair) shouting, “Breaker 1–9” and singing C. W. McCall’s “Convoy!” loudly and off-key. In other words, something out of date and vaguely risible, like leisure suits or Tony Orlando.
But, in fact, CB was a revolution in its time, whose effects are still felt today. Before Citizens’ Band was created, you needed a license to be on the air, with almost no exceptions. Radio was seen as Serious Technology for Serious People, nothing for normal folks to fool around with, at least not without government approval. Citizens’ Band put an end to that, not by regulatory design but by popular fiat. Originally, a license was required for Citizens’ Band too, but masses of people simply broke the law and operated without a license until the FCC was forced to bow to reality. It was a form of mass civil disobedience that accomplished in its sphere what drug-legalization activists have never been able to accomplish in theirs. No small thing.
And it didn’t stop there. Citizens’ Band radio became popular because of widespread resistance to another example of regulatory overreach: the unpopular fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. Actually passed in 1974, but reenacted on Jimmy Carter’s watch and popularly identified with Carter’s “moral equivalent of war,” speed limits were for the first time set not for reasons of highway safety, but for reasons of politics and social engineering. Americans rejected that approach in massive numbers and entered into a state of more-or-less open rebellion. CB was valuable— as songs like “Convoy!” and movies like Smokey and the Bandit illustrated—because it allowed citizens to spontaneously organize against what they saw as illegitimate authority. Before CB, the police—with all their expensive infrastructure of radio networks, dispatchers, and patrol cars—had the communications and observational advantage, but with CB each user had the benefit of hundreds or thousands of eyeballs warning about speed traps in advance. This made breaking the speed laws much easier and enforcing them much harder.
And it worked: the fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit was repealed. That (plus the gradual introduction of cheap and effective radar detectors, which allowed citizens to watch for speed traps while still listening to their car stereos) gradually ended the Citizens’ Band revolution. Sort of, because like many fads, Citizens’ Band didn’t really go away. It just faded from view and turned into something else.
CB radio primed a generation that was used to top-down communication on the network-news model for peer-to-peer communication, getting people in the right frame of mind for the Internet, cell phones, and text messaging. It also served as a vehicle for spreading countercultural resistance to authority beyond the confines of hippiedom, taking it deep into the heart of middle America.
In fact, it’s probably not too much of a stretch to say that this combination of resentment over Big Brother intrusiveness, coupled with the means of resisting those intrusions, laid the groundwork for the antigovernment explosions of the 1980s. A lot of people used CB radio to evade the unpopular speed limit, and Carter wound up losing to Ronald Reagan, who preached individual freedom and deregulation. It’s hard to know which way the causality runs here—did CB make Reagan’s election more likely, by fanning the flames of antibureaucratic sentiment? Or was it just an early indicator of that sentiment? Who knows?
But either way, it was something important. And so it is with more modern technologies, like blogs and text messaging and Internet video. Like CB, they may well vanish from public attention, if not from the actual world (plenty of CB radios still get sold, after all—in fact, after being stuck in an endless traffic jam on I-40 a couple of weeks back, I just ordered one myself ). And they’ll probably be replaced, or absorbed, by new technology within a few years. But they’re popular right now because people want to get around Big Media’s stranglehold on news and information, just as CBs were popular with people who wanted to get around speed limits. And, like Jimmy Carter, Big Media folks seem largely clueless about what’s going on.
Of course, it’s not just the media who face threats from insiders. Governments, too, face new kinds of pressure from horizontal knowledge in a way that the CB revolution didn’t foreshadow.
That seems to be the case for the United States government, the ultimate large organization. According to a report by Bill Broad in the New York Times, employee-bloggers have been giving the Los Alamos National Lab and the Department of Energy fits:
A blog rebellion among scientists and engineers at Los Alamos, the federal government’s premier nuclear weapons laboratory, is threatening to end the tenure of its director, G. Peter Nanos.
Four months of jeers, denunciations and defenses of Dr. Nanos’s management recently culminated in dozens of signed and anonymous messages concluding that his days were numbered. The postings to a public weblog conveyed a mood of self-congratulation tempered with sober discussion of what comes next.6
And that’s perhaps an appropriate mood for the blogosphere as a whole. On the one hand, we’ve started to see a switch: where an earlier generation of articles on employee blogging warned employees about the danger of retribution from employers, a newer version of the story warns employers about the power of bloggers in their midst.
On the other hand, it’s hard for organizations to operate when dissent becomes easier, and more popular, than actually running things or doing work. Whistle-blowing is all very nice, but no organization made up largely of whistle-blowers is likely to thrive. While “organizational terrorism” may be a bit strong, Nick was certainly right to note that one of management’s major advantages was informational—it could know more, and communicate more to more people, than dissident employees hanging around the water cooler could.
That’s changed now, and there’s no doubt that it makes managers nervous. Still, I think the Los Alamos case also underscores what I wrote above in response to Nick Denton: The flattening of hierarchies that easier communication produces is a bigger threat to bad managers than to good ones, and in fact it’s a useful tool for managers who want to know what’s really going on.
Say what you will about the Los Alamos scandals, but no one has accused the lab of being a taut ship, or of rewarding merit above all else. While Internet samizdat may pose a threat to managers, it still seems to me that the threat is biggest where the management is the worst, and that exposing bad management and unhappy employees isn’t necessarily such a bad thing.
The biggest danger, at any rate, won’t come from the internal blogging. It will come from management’s overreaction to internal blogging. If managers are afraid of internal bloggers and respond either with witch hunts and efforts to shut them down, or—perhaps worse, from a standpoint of organizational health— try too hard to appease dissidents by trying to run their companies or organizations in ways that won’t offend anyone, the damage will be far greater than the damage done by bloggers.
With or without bloggers in the mix, management requires a backbone. The smarter managers will read blogs, looking for real problems that need to be fixed, and they’ll respond (perhaps on their own blogs?) to the critics. The smartest ones will even realize that employees know the difference between the chronic bellyachers and the people who have serious complaints and will respond accordingly. Easier communication is actually a useful asset to managers who wonder whether the folks below them are reporting the truth or presenting a rosy scenario designed to cover their asses. Some have figured this out already, and a Wall Street Journal study in October of 2005 found that many CEOs encourage open email communication with staff precisely for these reasons.7 Extending that to reading blogs is a logical next step for the smart managers.
How many managers are this smart? I guess, thanks to the Internet, we’ll find out.
THE INSIDE-OUT PANOPTICON
But of course—as the CB era demonstrated—there’s more to horizontal knowledge than workplace carping. Dictators, and even democratic governments not terribly enthused about opposition, have traditionally discouraged communication among the citizenry. Vertical communication is just, well, safer for those in power.
That’s certainly what happened when Philippine President Joseph Estrada was ousted in a “people power” revolution organized by cell phones and text messages: Over 150,000 protesters appeared on short notice, thanks to technologies that allowed a flash mob to appear without the kind of big, central organization it would have taken in the past. Other technologies are doing the same kind of thing. Musician Peter Gabriel founded a human rights group called Witness that distributes video cameras to human rights groups. Activists say that government and private thugs who might have taken violent action against them have often been deterred by the fear that video of their actions might become public.8
Combining video cameras and cell phones, as technology is in the process of doing, only intensifies the effect. An ordinary video camera can be confiscated and its tape destroyed, but a video camera that can transmit video wirelessly can be relaying the information to hundreds, thousands, or millions of people—who may react angrily and spontaneously if anything happens to the person doing the shooting.
This represents the political future, for good and ill. I’m inclined to think that it’s mostly good, but there are two sides to what Howard Rheingold calls “smart mobs.” If the toppling of dictators via people power is one side, then riots by mobs of the ignorant are the other. As Rheingold observes:
On the political level, you’re seeing peaceful democratic demonstrations like the ones [that brought down President Joseph Estrada] in the Philippines. You’re also seeing riots, like the Miss World riots in Nigeria. Not all forms of human cooperation are prosocial. Some of them are antisocial.9
Absolutely. As Clive Thompson noted, the Miss World riots in Nigeria were organized by Muslim fundamentalists who took umbrage at a newspaper story they regarded as insufficiently respectful of Islam (it said that one of the contestants was pretty enough to have been chosen by Mohammed). Word spread by cell phone and text message, and the result was a mob attack on the newspaper offices. Mobs can take down dictatorial governments, Thompson pointed out, but they can also engage in lynchings.10
Well, yes. Communications can make it easy for democrats and human-rights activists to coordinate via cell phone and the Internet—as they did in the Philippines, in the Ukraine, and in Lebanon—but it can also make it easy for mobs of the ignorant or vicious to coalesce in response to bogus rumors. (These might be called “dumb mobs,” I suppose.) The tools empower the individuals and make them “smarter” in terms of coordination and access to information. But they’re smart mobs, not wise mobs. Wisdom comes from other sources, when it comes at all.
Still, we’ve certainly managed to hold riots and organize dumb mobs in the absence of technology since, well, the beginning of human history. What is new isn’t the potential for mob action (Hitler used a mass medium, radio, to put together the ultimate dumb mob), but the potential for constructive and spontaneous group action. Nonetheless, like most technological changes that promise good, it won’t happen all on its own. We need to be looking for ways to maximize the upside, and minimize the down-side, as these things spread.
That may not be as hard as it sounds. Riots are sometimes spontaneous, but they’re usually more organized than they look. Somebody—gangs hoping for loot, religious zealots trying to raise a mob to smite unbelievers, government officials wanting to crush dissent—gives things a push, usually figuring that their responsibility for doing so will be lost in the fog created by the riot and its aftermath. Then the mob forms, and the individuals who make it up do things, secure in the anonymity of the mob, that they would never do on their own.
Pervasive cameras and reporting make both aspects harder, and riskier. (And readily available information means that potential victims can avoid riots, and law enforcement authorities will have a better idea of what’s going on, if they make proper use of what is available.) Like everything, it’s a mixed bag, but I think it’s unlikely that technology will do as much to empower dumb mobs as it does to promote smart ones.
And, as it happens, I have a few thoughts on how to help maintain that imbalance. Wherever possible, we should look for opportunities to inject truth and moderation into the web of horizontal communications. Rumor-debunking sites like Snopes.com are a good example—in a Web-based world, Snopes serves as a sort of anti-Guinness Book, helping to neutralize false claims of the outrageous or upsetting.
It’s also the case that, as with management in companies, government and antihate organizations can take advantage of what mass horizontal communications have to offer in the way of transparency. What bubbles up through blogs, chat boards, and email lists may be wrong, but it’s a useful guide to what people are thinking, offering opportunities to counter rumors, incitements, and falsehoods before they reach critical mass. (I also suspect that emergency authorities could get a lot of useful information—and not only in terms of pending riots—just by watching for a sudden spike in text-messaging.)
What’s more, to the extent that people can organize for constructive things as they’ve done with matters ranging from tsunami relief, to hurricane relief, to such collaborative research projects as SETI@home (where number-crunching is parceled out to members’ computers, creating a massively parallel computing project on the cheap), to political efforts like FreeRepublic or DailyKos, the result is to discourage destructive efforts in favor of constructive ones. Not perfectly, of course, but more often than not.
At any rate, we’d best be thinking of ways to capitalize on horizontal knowledge, because it’s likely here to stay. Turning back the clock on the communications revolution would probably be impossible and would certainly be vastly expensive. I don’t expect that it will happen, which means we’d better figure out how to live with the change.