Throwing Sheep: The Blog

Note: this is a slightly revised version of a talk titled “Geopolitics 2.0″ that I gave in Madrid in 2009, shortly after the mass protests in Iran. It is published here on this blog given recent events in Tunisia and Egypt. - MF

In the aftermath of Iran’s massive street protests in June 2009, that country’s authoritarian regime blamed the unrest on Western intelligence agencies and big media organisations. This time, however, the ruling mullahs lashed out at a new list of Western enemies: Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Web-based social networks indeed played a powerful role during the uprising – not only as tools for mobilising action inside Iran, but also for influencing global opinion. The global media described the turbulent events in Iran as a “Twitter Revolution” due to the widespread use of tweets to organise spontaneous protests and disseminate information about what was happening in the country. The viral power of the Web came into poignant focus when a young Iranian woman called Neda became a tragic martyr for the Iranian protest: seconds after she was shot during the bloody repression, smartphone video images of her bleeding to death in the streets of Tehran were posted on YouTube, provoking horror and outrage throughout the world.

While the Iranian regime was not toppled, the “Twitter Revolution” marked a turning point in global politics that – as recent events in Tunisia and Egypt demonstrate — no government can afford to ignore.

The sudden explosion of Web-based networks has brought a new lexicon to the emerging geopolitical realities of digital diplomacy. Just as Wikipedia has toppled the authority of established intellectual elites, online social networks have diffused the power of mobilisation to the periphery. This diffusion of power is reshaping geopolitics as the vertical logic of states is challenged by the viral dynamics of online social networks.

Broadly speaking, what we call Geopolitics 2.0 is characterised by three significant power shifts: (1) from states to individuals; (2) from hard power to cyber power; and (3) from old media to new media.

1. States towards Individuals

The first power shift is from states towards individuals. Or expressed more formally, from a state-centric approach in international relations towards a new dynamic involving a widely disparate number of non-state actors, even individuals, who can instrumentalise the Web to exert influence by mobilising protest or inflicting violence.

This shift has been occurring for some time, as states lose their monopoly as exclusive actors in global politics, but is now rapidly accelerating due to the elimination of entry barriers via Web-based social networks. It should be underscored that this shift by no means signifies that states are no longer the main actors in international affairs. States however are today confronted with radically new challenges as power shifts not only towards non-state actors, but towards individuals. Online social networks can empower individuals with virtually no resources to act and exert influence on the same playing field as powerful states that control massive political, economic and military resources. Today a lone hacker can play cyber David against Goliath states.

This was dramatically demonstrated in 2009 when the Russian government allegedly inflicted a denial-of-service attack on Twitter in order to neutralise a single blogger in the neighbouring state of Georgia. Twitter users worldwide faced a paralysing brownout because the Kremlin had launched a cyber attack against one individual. More recently, the destabilising impact of WikiLeaks, and its diplomatic fallout, demonstrated how a single Web-based source of information can exert influence on global politics.

The Web-based empowerment of individuals marks a major shift from previous models of geopolitics, where the main actors have been either states or other easily identifiable non-state actors, including terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. Today, the identity of individual actors in the global system is frequently not apparent, and sometimes a baffling mystery. When hackers and cyber-spies strike, governments may accuse China or Russia, but the origins of these attacks and their perpetrators are never verified with total certainty. In short, it’s possible to be a significant actor in the global system, and inflict major damage on states, without ever becoming known, let alone getting apprehended and punished.

This shift has powerful implications — as we have seen in North Africa and the Middle East — for network-based political mobilization. Individuals with access to the Web can easily instrumentise online networks to organise and mobilise action – notably against states. In Iran, the authoritarian regime, perplexed by the origins of the organized protest, was completely taken by surprise when the “Twitter Revolution” erupted. Only physical repression – as the death of Neda poignantly demonstrated – saved the Iranian regime from overthrow. In Tunisia, circumstances – notably the attitude of the army — favoured the protest movement and the regime fell.

It’s possible, to be sure, to exaggerate the role of the Web in overthrowing authoritarian regimes, for in the final analysis protest movements inevitably must physically confront state instruments of coercion. There can be no doubt, however, that social media have played a powerful role in organising and mobilising action. In liberal democracies, social networks like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have become indispensible tools of electoral mobilisation and civic organisation. Governments are now acutely aware that their citizens can use these tools to voice their views and organise action. And as we have seen in Tunisia and Egypt, these tools can potentially be used to challenge authority and overthrow regimes.

2. Hard Power towards Cyber Power

Online mobilization is effective precisely because the nature of power is being transformed. We are witnessing a shift from military “hard power” towards virtual “cyber power”. Again, this shift does not signify that traditional forms of hard power are irrelevant or unnecessary, but that new forms of virtual power are emerging and can produce serious consequences for states.

Much has been written about “soft power” in international affairs. Cyber power is different from “soft power” in one important aspect: whereas the latter conveys values through culture, consumer behaviour and lifestyle (from Mickey Mouse to McDonald’s), cyber power is located in cyberspace.

States now have no choice but to master, and instrumentalise, Web-based forms of coercion. Make no mistake, states are using the Web to in cyber attacks against other states. North Korea, for example, is widely suspected of being at the origin of cyber attacks against neighbouring South Korea and other countries. Another example occurred in April 2007, when the normally tranquil nation of Estonia came under a cyber attack – targeting government, banks and media – following the relocation in that country of a Soviet war memorial. The Estonian government blamed the Kremlin for the sudden and unexpected cyber attack. While the Kremlin denied any direct involvement, the incident prompted the NATO military alliance to step up its readiness for cyber warfare.

America is a soft-power superpower, but is more vulnerable in the sphere of cyber power. This explains why the American government has invested massively in programmes that strengthen the U.S. arsenal of cyber weaponry –- both offensively and defensively. Lt.-Gen. William Shelton, the US Air Force’s chief of warfighting integration, has said that in the past the Pentagon relied too heavily on industry efforts to respond to cyber threats. This industry-led approach, he added, failed to keep pace with the threat from cyber space.

“Threats in cyberspace move at the speed of light, and we are literally under attack every day as our networks are constantly probed and our adversaries seek to exploit vulnerabilities”, General Shelton told the House Armed Services Committee in May 2009. A US National Security Council report concluded meanwhile that the American government’s policies on waging cyber warfare have been ill-informed. While these statements may be motivated by a desire to obtain more substantial budget allocations, it cannot be doubted that they reveal how states –- with their traditional institutional bias in favour of hard power -– have been slow to understand the velocity and significance of the cyber war threat.

Today the military-industrial complex may need to rely less on giant arms manufacturers and four-star generals and more on computer geeks with formidable skills on videogames like World of Warcraft. That assertion may seem outlandish, but it is actually a fact. The US Army is using Web networks like Facebook and YouTube as recruitment tools and, what’s more, is looking specifically for certain skills sets that include familiarity with virtual worlds and online videogames. As the new generation of so-called ‘millennials’ move into positions of responsibility in government and the military, they will bring with them powerful cyber skills that will be instrumentally useful in espionage and warfare.

The threat of cyber warfare is not new. In fact, the Internet itself – a product of the Cold War – was built in the 1960s by US military scientists to protect American communications infrastructure against a Soviet nuclear strike. A half-century later, those threats remain. But with one major difference: cyber weapons are not only in hands of enemy and rogue states, but can be deployed by isolated individuals ranging from bored teenagers to wild-eyed terrorists. Or, as recent events in Tunisia and Egypt demonstrate, they can also be deployed by organizers of mass protest. It should be no surprise that regimes in this region have responded to mass protest by shutting down Internet access.

3. Old Media towards New Media

The third shift is from old media towards new media like as effective platforms of global diplomacy, communication and opinion shaping – or a shift form the “CNN Effect” to the “YouTube Effect”.

In the past, governments have used mass media to conduct diplomacy and wage information warfare. Prominent statesmen, including Presidents and Prime Ministers, have been willing to appear on CNN and the BBC to convey their positions and policies to other states and world opinion. Non-state actors, too, have exploited the global media to stage events –- and sometimes to pull off publicity stunts -– to attract attention to their causes. Old media have been the privileged forum of global diplomacy and opinion shaping.

Once again, this shift does not signify that old media such as television news networks are irrelevant, but that media power has shifted towards the Web. Today the era of old media dominance, while not over, is coming to an end with the rapid emergence of Web-based forms of journalism, information and propaganda. The explosion of online networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has also challenged the traditional function of established media by diffusing media power towards individuals. These networked Web platforms are powerfully effective tools for “digital activism” by non-state actors, including individuals; but are also being deployed by states to exert influence in the theatre of global diplomacy.

The Gaza crisis in 2008 provided an excellent example of this shift towards new media. Shortly after Israel launched its military operation, a pro-Israel individual created a Facebook page called “I Support the Israel Defense Forces in Preventing Terror Attacks from Gaza”. At the same time, a pro-Palestinian individual created a Facebook page called “Let’s Collect 500,000 Signatures to Support the Palestinians in Gaza”. Intrigued by the leveraging of social media on both sides of the crisis, Time magazine published a story under the headline “Facebook users go to war over Gaza”.

Most of these Facebook initiatives were the work of individuals. But states joined the Web-based propaganda campaign to get out their message. The Israeli Army, for example, launched its own YouTube video channel in an effort to win the global PR battle by uploading videos showing carefully pinpointed strikes against terrorist targets.

As more recent events in Tunisia and Egypt have dramatically demonstrated, people turn to the Web for “live” information and commentary about what is happening on the ground. Indeed, traditional media outlets, including global news networks, frequently broadcast Web-based information and video captured by individuals, instead of relying on their own correspondents. Old media journalists once scorned the Web as “amateur”; today, they source many of their sources via the Web.

Conclusion

These three shifts have forced states to radically rethink their approach to global diplomacy. States are alternately censoring the Internet or deploying Web platforms to achieve their goals and assert influence. In many cases, they are doing both.

It would be simplistic to argue that authoritarian regimes are hostile to the Web while states in Western liberal democracies are embracing these technological ruptures. The United States, for example, denounced WikiLeaks and arrested alleged perpetrators. Authoritarian states, resorting to more repressive forms of coercion, routinely imprison so-called “cyber-dissidents”.

In the Middle East, Syria has jailed bloggers and blocks websites (including Facebook and YouTube) deemed a security threat. In Egypt, an Arab country that enjoys open diplomatic relations with the West, the government has punished online criticism of the state. Beyond the Middle East, the Chinese regime has imprisoned cyber-dissidents and shut down websites including YouTube, particularly over sensitive issues such as Tibet. Indonesia has banned both YouTube and MySpace. Other states that have banned websites or imprisoned cyber-dissidents include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Belarus, Burma, North Korea, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

Liberal democracies, while doubtless developing their cyber war capabilities, have been focused on the potential danger of Web-based forms of terrorism. It is believed that terrorists are using Web platforms like Google Earth to locate potential targets, especially in countries like Israel. This may explain why Google has pixillated sensitive zones in Israel and elsewhere in the world that could come under a terrorist attack. The findings of a “Dark Web” research project at the University of Arizona tracked Jihadist extremist groups using Web 2.0 media. The study, published in 2008, came across an alarming number of Jihadist blogs and YouTube uploads.

In the aftermath of events in Tunisia and Egypt, it is critical for experts in international affairs to understand how Web-based social networks are impacting the new dynamics of global politics. We have outlined here three important power shifts that are reshaping geopolitics – from states to individuals, from hard power to cyber power, and from old media to new media.

One of the most persistent criticisms of Enterprise 2.0 is that collaborative tools like wikis and social networks are needless distractions that undermine productivity. Or put simply, they’re a time sink.

I explore this issue in my latest blog on “Social Networks & Productivity”, which can be found at Internet Evolution.

Is Web 2.0, despite all the hype, really just a crock?  

It’s a question that, ironically, is the subject of heated debate at the moment. The irony is that Web 2.0 is a lucrative “sweet spot” in an otherwise traumatized global economy and battered business environment.

Web 2.0 is undeniably hot. Just Google “Web 2.0” or check Amazon for the plethora of books on the subject (including one by me, and another forthcoming). Walk into any luxury hotel lobby these days and you’ll likely bump into a self-proclaimed Web 2.0 guru.

Maybe that’s the problem. Critics claim that Web 2.0 is an over-hyped flavor-of-the-month techno trend that has flung open the gates to a stampede of management evangelists and marketing hucksters flogging their Kool-Aid. Web 2.0 recipes, say critics, are big on marketing nostrums but short on measureable results. In short, where’s the beef?

I was left reflecting on that troubling question after reading a blog post by Oliver Marks, a respected Web 2.0 evangelist who tirelessly travels the world spreading the gospel. After the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, however, Marks was unmistakably dispirited by both the coherence of the Web 2.0 message and its ambivalent reception.

 “It’s still hard to deliver an understandable and memorable Enterprise 2.0 elevator pitch proposition between the 40th floor bar and the hotel lobby,” he noted. Marks expressed the same dismay in a video chat after the San Francisco conference with fellow evangelist Andrew McAfee, who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” in 2006. They both left the vague impression that, despite some signs of progress, the conference had been a letdown due to lack of C-suite buy-in.

My God, I thought, when the apostles themselves are rending their garments perhaps there’s good reason to question the religion’s main articles of faith.

To stay with the Biblical analogy, there is a Saint Thomas in this story. The doubting Thomas is Dennis Howlett, a highly regarded enterprise software expert who committed heresy in a widely-discussed blog post titled, “Enterprise 2.0: what a crock”.

 “Regardless of what you’re told by the Enterprise 2.0 mavens, business has far more pressing problems,” growled Howlett. “The world is NOT made up of knowledge driven businesses. It’s made up of a myriad of design, make and buy people who — quite frankly — don’t give a damn about the ‘emergent nature’ of enterprise…Like it or not, large enterprises — the big name brands — have to work in structures and hierarchies that most Enterprise 2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense. Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all.”

Howlett’s curmudgeonly, but well-informed, opinions caused quite a stir among Web 2.0 evangelist – that’s putting it mildly. Howlett even revealed that, invited to attend the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, he flatly spurned the offer: “Why would I waste my time listening to a bunch of talking heads trot out the same claptrap I’ve been hearing for the last several years?”

Among those talking heads were the sharpest Web 2.0 evangelists in the business. And some of them, predictably – notably Marks, McAfee, Sameer Patel, and Stowe Boyd – were quick to fire off rebuttals to Howlett’s stinging criticism.

But the damage was done. Howlett clearly had destabilized these apostles. In their counter-arguments, they were watering their wine. At the San Francisco conference, a view emerged that the word “social” (as in social media) was not helping the Enterprise 2.0 cause. Howlett acknowledged this concession with satisfaction in a follow-up blog post, noting: “I’ve argued for years that the notion of anything that has ‘social’ attached to its moniker is about as welcome as breaking wind in a spacesuit”.

What’s happening to the loudly-trumpetted “social media” revolution when its leading evangelists are expurgating its true semantic meaning? Is Web 2.0 a business revolution that dare not speak its name?

It might be tempting to believe that this friendly feud is restricted mainly to geeky Enterprise 2.0 precincts where IT experts, software vendors, management consultants, and MBA academics debate impenetrable subjects like system architectures. Let the IT geeks gnash their teeth. Over in the marketing & PR world, Web 2.0 experts are happily swimming in the sweet spot — rocking, kicking butt, and enthusiastically using the adjective “awesome” to describe just about anything.

Not so fast. Web 2.0 marketers are sinking into their own quagmire. They are, for example, facing criticism about ethical lapses regarding advertising-sponsored blogs and tweets. U.S. regulators are now threatening to impose rules to protect consumers.

Meanwhile, claims by Web 2.0 marketing consultants that social media tools produce bottom-line results have been contradicted by other doubting Thomases. Larry Dignan published a blog post that challenged Web 2.0 consultant Charlene Li’s robust “ROI” claims for big brands employing social media techniques. Dignan’s blog post was titled: “Does social media really correlate with the bottom line? Color me skeptical”. If that’s not enough, after the recent Defrag conference in Denver, which was attended by many Web 2.0 marketers, Louis Gray penned a blog post titled: “Skepticism Over Current State of Social Web”.

So what’s going on? Why all this self-doubting, curmudgeonly sniping, teeth-gnashing, hand-wringing, soul-searching and flagging faith?

There is, of course, nothing wrong with healthy debate – in fact, it should be encouraged. But perhaps there is something deeper at work in these challenges to Web 2.0 evangelism.

It occurred to me that in this debate about Web 2.0, as with most things in this world, where you stand depends largely on where you sit. To put it more grandly, the differences between evangelists and doubters are not only about pragmatic “where’s the beef?” questions, but reflect fundamentally opposing philosophies about human nature.

Before addressing Web 2.0’s philosophical underpinnings, let’s first establish some precise definitions. Most would agree that all Web 2.0 evangelists cannot be placed squarely in the same socio-professional group.

At risk of oversimplification, I would argue that there are three broad spheres of Web 2.0 evangelism: Marketing, Enterprise, and Government.

Marketing 2.0

This group was early to rush into the Web 2.0 space, mainly due to the Web’s powerful impact on advertising industry dynamics. Marketing & PR professional had to get their heads around Web 2.0 – and fast. The stakes were too high for inaction.

In the United States, the Social Media Clubs network emerged from the marketing & PR profession, many of whom have tossed away their old business cards and now call themselves “social media strategists”.

The word “social” is not a problem for Web 2.0 marketers, mainly because it’s a natural outgrowth of previous notions of “mass” – i.e. mass media and mass marketing. Social isn’t a threat, it’s cool.

The big challenge for Marketing 2.0 professionals, apart from completely reinventing their business to accommodate the power shift from suppliers to consumers, has been redesigning tactics to meet the demands of Web 2.0 metrics. Moving away from “broadcast” advertising models, they have mastered “viral” Web dynamics and integrated social capital factors like “influence” (which, in fact, is old wine in new bottles with origins stretching back more than a half century to the empirical work of Paul Lazarsfeld and others on personal influence and opinion-shaping).

The Marketing 2.0 sphere is crowded with consultants, authors, and gurus selling concepts and approaches with catchy slogans and formulas. This feverish activity is demand-driven because many companies are eager to learn about Web 2.0 tactics if they promise to boost sales. Among respected thought leaders in this school are Brian Solis, Shel Israel, Chris Brogan, and Steve Rubel. A maverick, and high-profile, voice in this school is Robert Scoble.

Key words in Marketing 2.0 are branding, sales, reputation management, customer relations, and so on. This is the sexy area of Web 2.0, which boasts an active and well-attended conference circuit.

In sum, we can say that Marketing 2.0 is largely focused on the tactics of externally orientated approaches (branding, sales, customer relations) whose goals are mainly short-term.

Enterprise 2.0

This school can claim loftier origins going back not only to Cluetrain Manifesto a decade ago but also to management theories over the past forty years advocating flat structures and open collaboration.

Unlike sales-oriented Marketing 2.0 evangelists, the Enterprise 2.0 movement has encountered institutionalized resistance inside corporations. The reason for this is not difficult to discover: Enterprise 2.0 evangelists are confronted with the daunting task of transforming rigid organizational structures and hierarchies. They are essentially in the business of “change management”. That’s a lot harder than concocting videos for viral branding campaigns on YouTube.

In Enterprise 2.0, the word “social” is, as noted, more an obstacle than an advantage. Inside companies, departments like Legal, HR, and IT operate within strict rules and compliance procedures that are fundamentally hostile to “social” behavior, which has connotations of chaos (not to mention “time wasting”).

The key words in the Enterprise 2.0 school are collaboration, innovation, information and a host of alphabet soup anagrams like ERP, BPM, ECM, and KM.

Geeks are passionate about Enterprise 2.0, but for the uninitiated it’s a highly technical, software-driven field with comparatively less sex appeal. Enterprise 2.0 experts, to their credit, tend to be highly specialized and technically focused (unlike marketing & PR which is a more inexact science). Respected Enterprise 2.0 thought leaders include Dion Hinchcliffe, Andrew McAfee, Oliver Marks, and others mentioned above.

In sum, we can say that Enterprise 2.0 is largely focused on strategies for internally oriented approaches towards managing employees inside organizations and communicating with business partners. The goals of these strategies are essentially medium-term — on the five-year horizon.

Government 2.0

This Web 2.0 school, often overlooked, is focused not on engaging with customers or managing knowledge inside companies, but on the connection between governments and their citizens. In short, replace the words “consumers” and “customers” with “citizens”.

A variety of different buzzwords are used in this school: e-democracy, e-government, Government 2.0, and so on. Certain specialists in this school are focused on how governments can deploy Web 2.0 tools to deliver services to citizens, while others are more focused on bottom-up e-democracy where citizens self-organize.

A third sub-sphere in this school has received the most media attention: electoral politics. Politicians have borrowed heavily from Marketing 2.0 as they search — after the success of Barack Obama — for effective Web 2.0 tools and tactics to appeal to voters. In fact, this electoral component of e-democracy probably belongs in the Marketing 2.0 school due to its preoccupation with tactics and short-term results.

Web 2.0 evangelists inside government machinery face many of the same organizational challenges as Enterprise 2.0 specialists – namely, obstacles erected by bureaucratic silos and entrenched corporate cultures. There is also a strong IT focus on what software solutions can be deployed to achieve goals.

A conference circuit has emerged in the Government 2.0 sphere – in the United States, the Gov 2.0 summit and Personal Democracy Forum, and in Europe events like e-Democracy and the inaugural PDF Europe conference in Barcelona in late November 2009. Thought leadership has come from Tim O’Reilly and his conferences in the United States, while in Europe thinkers like Charles Leadbeater have become articulate spokesmen for bottom-up forms of social organization. In the corporate world, Google’s Vint Cerf is engaged in Gov 2.0 issues. And Cisco’s brain trust published a report called the Connected Republic, inspired in part by thinkers like Cluetrain co-author David Weinberger.

In sum, we can say that Government 2.0 is largely focused on the use of Web-based platforms to transform the relationship between state and citizens, and the achievement of those goals is essentially long term.

These three schools are interconnected, of course, but largely as circles peripherally overlapping in a middle zone. Some Web 2.0 specialists move in all three groups (I am one of them), but most stay largely focused on the issues related to their own particular sphere – with the exception, of course, of software vendors who have an interest in promoting their products in all three areas. What links all three spheres, of course, is the nature of their challenge: using different techniques and strategies to transform underlying values that shape behavior. 

Now let’s turn to the issue I set out to address: philosophy.

My thinking about Web 2.0 initially took this admittedly high-minded perspective when I read a tweet by evangelist Susan Scrupski, who is a driving force behind the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council. Her tweet quoted management guru Peter Drucker, who once stated that “the purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things”.

Drucker’s essentially optimistic view, I thought, can only be inspiring. It was shortly after reading this Drucker quote that I came across Dennis Howlett’s grumbles about Enterprise 2.0 being a “crock”. Howlett asserted that organizations can’t be “nurtured” into collaborative modes of behavior because human “nature” will always get in the way.

“Time and again, we see the instinctive, nature-driven flight to survival as departments defend turf,” he said.

Howlett’s remark reminded me of management thinker Tom Davenport’s equally skeptical view of Web 2.0: “Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won’t make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won’t make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO. Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – won’t be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone. For a set of technologies to bring about such changes, they would have to be truly magical, and Enterprise 2.0 tools fall short of magic.”                                     

That was a light-bulb moment for me – and reading Susan Scrupski’s tweet brought it into focus. I suddenly realized that — while we’re waiting for the “ROI” case to be made – the conflicting views about Web 2.0 find their origin in two fundamentally opposing philosophies about human nature.

Let’s examine that philosophical dichotomy:

Web 2.0 evangelists belong to the philosophical school of liberalism in the classic sense of that term. They are essentially optimistic and believe, above all, that human nature is good and individuals are rational – and thus can recognize the “truth”.

This tradition finds its modern origins, needless to say, in the works of Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and Rousseau and later John Stuart Mill. Their classic liberalism constituted a challenge to the prevailing authoritarian systems that later found philosophical justification in conservatism.

“No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible,” stated Mill, “until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.” That’s pure Enterprise 2.0 gospel, though these days less openly declared.

Web 2.0 naysayers, on the other hand, are philosophical conservatives who espouse an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. They believe that human nature is essentially bad and human beings are not rational – and thus can never recognize the “truth”.

This philosophical school traces its modern origins to Machiavelli. Its most obvious spokesman, however, is Thomas Hobbes, famous for  his “state of nature” theory and observation that life is “nasty, brutish and short”.

Dennis Howlett’s anti-Enterprise 2.0 arguments about “nature” over “nurture” are philosophical echoes of Hobbes. Hobbes undoubtedly would agree with both Howlett and Tom Davenport that complex organizations are not idealized paradises where the lion lies down with the lamb, but rather a dense jungle of relentless belligerence where human motives are driven by power, turf, and domination.

We can conclude, therefore, that Web 2.0 evangelists are philosophical optimists who believe in the human capacity to act rationally and collaborate to achieve common goals. Web 2.0 doubters, by contrast, are philosophical pessimists who believe that man’s selfish nature and unblinking pursuit of his own interests at the expense of others will always thwart any effort inside organizations to foster a culture of sharing and collaboration.

There is also a cultural dimension to this dichotomy.

Generally speaking, Web 2.0 evangelism has made greater progress in Anglo-American countries whose history is steeped in traditions of liberalism and egalitarianism – especially the United States. Also, the Anglo-American intellectual tradition emphasizes pragmatism based on concrete results – a suitable cultural environment for experimentation and hard metrics.

In other cultures, including continental Europe, Web 2.0 has confronted major obstacles due to deeply entrenched cultures shaped by centuries of authoritarian institutions – Catholic Church, military, and centralized state. This is particularly the case in Latin countries like France, where a rigidly bureaucratic culture and abstracted notion of authority are fundamentally hostile to Web 2.0’s horizontal social architecture and collaborative values. Also, France’s intellectual tradition emphasizes abstract logic over pragmatic considerations – not a propitious environment for Web 2.0.

In short, Anglo-American organizational cultures are relatively open to horizontal structures and pragmatic approaches, and business managers feel comfortable with horizontal networking and information inputs. European organizational cultures in countries like France, by contrast, are vertically structured, rigidly hierarchical, turned inward, and regulated by absolute notions of authority that are inherently hostile to Web 2.0 values. See here for an academic analysis of this contrast between American and French business managers.

Oliver Marks, who is based in the United States, pointed to this issue with commendable diplomacy after recently attending an Enterprise 2.0 summit in Europe. “Although English is the lingua franca of international business online,” he noted, “providing compelling reasons to persuade participation in European online collaboration can be culturally more challenging than in the English speaking US and UK.”

So where does this leave us? I confess that I don’t have any answers here – there is, in fact, no resolution to these opposing views of human nature. The entire march of civilization has been shaped by the tension between these two opposing philosophies.

One possible answer lies with future generations, starting with the “millennials” charging into the workforce now. True, the younger generation can’t escape the basic facts of human nature, but they have the power to opt for one, and not the other, view of human nature.

As management guru Gary Hamel predicted in the Wall Street Journal: “The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web…If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to understand these Internet-derived expectations, and then reinvent its management practices accordingly”.

But what if the pessimists are right? Maybe it’s impossible, despite the best intentions, to escape the hard reality that organizational behavior is fundamentally a “state of nature” contest about interests and power.

Even Tom Davenport, a Web 2.0 doubter, allowed for the following possibility on the horizon: “It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens when the young bucks and buckettes of today’s wired world hit the adult work force. Will they freely submit to such structured information environments as those provided by SAP and Oracle, content and knowledge management systems, and communication by email? Or will they overthrow the computational and communicational status quo with MySpace, MyBlog, and MyWiki?”

The debate about the pragmatics of Web 2.0 will continue – and so it should. As we move forward, looking for appropriate compromises and practical solutions to resolve common problems, we can at least know that differences of opinion about means and ends find their origins in deeply rooted philosophical notions about our most basic needs and motivations.

UPDATE: A day after I published this blog post, Michael Krigsman published an excellent and insightful post on his ZDNeT blog assessing many of the same themes. Titled “Resistance to Change: The Real Enterprise 2.0 Barrier”, Krigsman’s post implicitly concedes that human nature and the powerful instinct to preserve the status quo will remain an obstacle to Web 2.0 adoption in organizations. His essentially optimistic conclusion, however, is based on the conviction that Enterprise 2.0 success stories — i.e. pragmatic and measurable results — can prevail over deeply-entrenched hostility to change. “In general, fighting human nature is an uphill battle that eventually results in failure,” he counsels. “Instead, work gently with stakeholders to help them experience first-hand the benefits of Enterprise 2.0. Success is the most powerful form of organizational transformation and evolution.”

Below is a link to my most recent blog post for Internet Evolution, titled “HR’s Web 2.0 Paradox”.
The paradox is this: while HR policy in many companies and organizations bans social networking sites like Facebook, it’s an open secret that many HR managers actively mine the same sites to gather information on job candidates and current employees.
Some of the comments to my blog post are clearly negative about HR professionals. For clarity, I don’t believe HR managers are necessarily hypocrites; rather, it’s the institutionalized practice of actively using Web 2.0 networks that are banned in their own organizations that creates the appearance of hypocrisy.
I suggest some reasons that might be behind this inconsistency, and urge HR professionals to reflect seriously on their policies and practices in this area. While these policies continue to be elaborated and enforced on a company-specific basis, perhaps it’s time for HR professionals to convence and adopt professional codes that they can bring back into their organizations.
I hope my blog post can help trigger debate and discussion on this issue.
Here is the link:
httphttp://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=796&doc_id=183079&

I recently joined a Facebook group called The Urgency of NOW, Move it Up, HBP. The group was created around the following cause: “a show of social solidarity to move up the publishing release for Andrew McAfee’s upcoming book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.”
This cause isn’t likely to attract a million strong on Facebook. In fact, when I just checked, it had 149 members and counting – mostly people who, like me, are interested in issues concerning Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.
Andrew McAfee, a Harvard business professor, is an acknowledged expert in this field — in fact, he is credited with coining the term “Enterprise 2.0“.
Having written a book that touches on the same issues, I know McAfee’s work and follow his blog. I don’t know him personally, however; in fact, I have never met him. We both spoke at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, and he sent me an email invitation to a party at his house during the conference; but I was unable to attend because I left Boston earlier that day for Washington DC. So I’m not rallying behind a pal.
It would be inelegant of me to stir things up between McAfee and his publisher, and that is not my purpose here. I presume, however, that McAfee is not happy that Harvard Business Press has pushed back the release of the book till the fall. The Facebook page, though not created by McAfee, appears to have his tacit consent. A blogged pre-review of the book meanwhile has taken up the cause to get McAfee’s book into the market. It ends with this sentence: “I am looking forward to reading Enterprise 2.0 when it is finally published.”
On Amazon, the book’s release date is given as November 16 2009. HBP has however put the book’s short introductory chapter on the Web for free download (in fact, it’s just a preface outlining the contents of the book, not a sample chapter). Offering a free downloadable chapter five months before a book’s release seems like a long lead time to me. Something clearly did not go as planned. Which presumably explains the launch of the Facebook group.
The Facebook group behind Enterprise 2.0 is interesting for two reasons.
First, it demonstrates that authors can — even if indirectly — use social networking sites like Facebook to, in effect, negotiate with their publishers (or, expressed less diplomatically, to put the squeeze on them).
Second, McAfee’s understandable frustration as his book hangs in limbo while the debate about Enterprise 2.0 zooms forward underscores the all-too-familiar structural, cultural and operational sclerosis that has long plagued the book publishing business.
On the first point, it should be said straight away that authors like to whinge about publishers. Put a group of authors around a table and, before long, they’ll be swapping stories about the incompetence of publishers, cataloguing all manner of cockups and oversights. These tensions are not unusual in a business where – like pop music — creative people are obliged to go through vertical, corporately-structured gatekeepers to get their work produced, distributed and promoted. Just as pop musicians (even the most rich and famous) invariably loathe their labels, writers (even bestselling authors) usually find some reason to feel profoundly betrayed by their publishers.
The Urgency of Now group on Facebook is the first time I’ve seen a group mobilize on the Web and put direct pressure on a publisher. This is usually the job of literary agents. They negotiate fees and terms with publishers and act as intermediaries between the highly structured, slow-moving book publishing culture and the thin-skinned, ego-centric crankiness of authors. Now authors have Facebook, blogs, YouTube and other Web 2.0 platforms to negotiate tacitly with their publishers — even through shame and embarrassment if necessary. 
These tactics are fascinating because they provide further evidence that power is shifting away from vertical structures to horizontal networks — in this case, from publishers towards authors and their readers. It’s not unlike the power shift, a decade ago, from the big music labels and retail chains (most now out of business) towards musicians and their fans.
On the second point about the corporate culture of the book business, maybe it’s time to ask: when is Book Publishing 2.0 coming?
Everybody knows the numbers: the book industry is in deep crisis. Online retailers like Amazon are squeezing their margins, bricks-and-mortar retailers are on the verge of bankruptcy, and the advent of portable devices like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader is threatening to do to book publishing what the iPod did to the music business. Indeed, the disruptive iPod/iTunes/iPhone techno-triumvirate provides the book industry with a powerful case study of the same forces of creative destruction that are sweeping through their business and are about to knock everybody on their ass.
It might be tempting to believe that the crisis has inspired the book industry to innovate, try new things, and think outside the box. When you’re in a crisis, after all, it’s time to think differently — and think fast.
Publishing executives are not dumb, they understand the challenges facing their industry. Down the ranks, not surprisingly, there is widespread anxiety about the impact of expense cutting — or as one writer in the New York Times lamented, “The Party is Over“. When you get past surface anxieties about cost cutting, however, you don’t have to have a PhD in organizational behaviour to notice that publishers are doing very little to change the way they think and operate.
At most big houses, it’s the same old business model: battalions of editors prospecting upstream for talent and titles; a laborious production process to work on manuscripts and package hardcover products; tight-fisted allocation of marketing budgets to a small number of selected titles (authors whose books are not chosen are cheerfully neglected); indecipherable negotiations, lubricated by financial inducements, with retailers to get selected books into stores; and finally, downstream, standard PR and promotional efforts to get media attention for the lucky authors chosen for the publisher’s marketing push.
There are undoubtedly many sharp publishing executives who realise the writing is on the wall. The problem isn’t the individual people in the book business, or even proprietors like Rupert Murdoch. The problem is an institutionalized conservatism that finds its origins in a complacent corporate culture, monopolistic professional values, and outdated operational methods that, when taken together, are fatally ill-adapted to current market realities.
That explains why publishers, instead of reinventing their business by rewarding innovative approaches, are retrenching into familiar risk-reduction strategies — keeping inventories low, going with bankable authors with track records, putting out low-risk flavour-of-the month books, and so on. As in the music business a decade ago, the innovation is going elsewhere.
True, publishers are now, like authors, using Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as marketing vehicles for their titles. Why not, these platforms don’t cost much. Getting someone to tweet about your forthcoming catalogue is much more cost-effective than hiring PR firms to spend countless hours on the telephone with newspaper and magazine journalists.
For the most part, however, publishing houses are stubbornly faithful to their familiar business model of releasing over-priced hardcover books on the expectation of higher margins on initial print runs. Their supply-chain strategies are stuck in the old vertical model of mass production/mass marketing/mass media. By stubbornly printing hardcover books priced at $29.95, large-scale publishing houses are where the Big Four music labels were circa 1999, churning out over-priced CDs while their entire business model was collapsing. For publishers, the easy margins on institutional sales and low-hanging fruit are just too attractive. The result: business as usual.
Web 2.0 evangelists doubtless would tell me that my points here are irrelevant because the book is moribund so why bother even discussing different models to produce and monetize a product that is soon toast. Jeff Jarvis argues that books are static and hence outmoded. Or as he puts it: “Print is where the word goes to die.” That reminds me of Steve Jobs’ even more radical comment when asked about the impact of the Kindle: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.” I don’t believe that is ture, but it should be enough scare the publishing industry into rethinking their business model.
There are undoubtedly, to be fair, some encouraging examples of publishing houses adopting innovative business strategies, and I’d like to hear about them as I fine-tune my thinking on this subject. A quick Google scan revealed that the issue is the subject of some serious and articulate thinking in the blogosphere. I found one blog that, interestingly, is called Publishing 2.0. The brainstorming is happening, but is it permeating publisher boardrooms yet?
If asked by a publishing house for some big-bullet advice, I would say straight off: get out of hardcover books entirely (with very few exceptions); put out e-books as a first-window as soon as manuscripts are completed, then go to lower-pricepoint paperbacks on a quick-turnaround basis. No more two-year delays between signing an author and book release; no more six-month periods between manuscript delivery and printing; no more two-month delays between release date and commercial retail availability. And most importantly, remove all obstacles that obstruct your new quick-turnaround timetables. The only way to bring change to operations is to transform the corporate culture.
There are already some positive signs that this message is getting through, as some publishers speed up their turnaround cycles for just-in-time releases. But they are the exceptions.
Which brings me back to Andrew McAfee’s still-unreleased book. The Facebook group pushing for an earlier release throws down the gauntlet. It’s a message to publishers that, in the fast-paced, innovative world of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and Markets 2.0, the old way of doing things isn’t good enough. And if you don’t believe it, look what happened to the music business.

Footnote: These issues are clearly being debated inside the publishing industry. Two days after my blog post, the New York Times published this story about the dilemmas publishers face regarding the timing of e-book releases:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/books/15ebooks.html?hpw

UPDATE: Publishers often argue, defensively, that the music/book comparison is not valid because ebooks won’t be as disruptive as iPod/iTunes. In short, their business-as-usual culture is not under the same threat. Yet the CEO of Harper Collins doesn’t appear to agree. Quoted in this article, she predicts that 50% of all books will be read electronically within a decade.

I am often asked how Web 2.0 strategies can be successfully implemented in corporations and bureaucracies when there is so much instiutionalized resistance to change.
One of my answers is that it needs not only buy-in at the top, but also needs CEOs and leaders who are committed, engaged and determined to make Web 2.0 implementation happen. That’s only part of the answer, but it’s an important part.
That appears to be the case at the Pentagon. In this fascinating videoclip, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen talk frankly, during a Defense Dept briefing, about the importance of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. And, what’s more, Admiral Mullen reveals that he actually tweets himself. He wasn’t joking. Indeed, you can follow him on http://twitter.com/thejointstaff 
If the Pentagon and the  U.S. Army can embrace Web 2.0, big corporations and government bureaucracies - many of which still ban Facebook and other online networks — no longer have any excuses.

Footnote: you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/frasermatthew.
Also, Throwing Sheep book contest details can be found here:
http://www.throwingsheep.com/contest.php

It almost seems indecent, at this point, to catalogue the death rattle of newspapers. Not a week goes by without the obituary of yet another once-esteemed daily newspaper, especially in the United States. Interest in this subject is becoming morbid.
There can be little doubt that the Jacobins of journalism have the upper hand. The blog posts of Jeff Jarvis are becoming increasingly strident, even triumphant, as newspapers collapse under the weight of their own arrogance. Jarvis, whose analysis is already post-newspaper, has on his side billionaire Warren Buffet, who said he wouldn’t buy newspapers “at any price”.
Added to these voices of doom we now have Howard Kurtz, a respected media critic who writes for the Washington Post and is perhaps better-known for his CNN show on the media, “Reliable Sources”. In his column today, Kurtz confesses, more out of sorrow than anger, that he’s come to the conclusion that newspapers are toast. As once-proud newspapers like the Boston Globe teeter on the brink of extinction, says Kurtz, he has reluctantly joined the ranks of the pessimists.
“The last few weeks have shaken my belief,” he writes, “suggesting that what I find indispensable — a daily compendium delivered to your doorstep — may be left behind by history and public indifference.”
Kurtz adds: “Newspapers are probably dying as a mass medium, except perhaps for elite or specialized audiences. Cutting down forests, printing the product and trucking it across the region no longer make economic sense. What is lost is the sense of community when everyone read the daily rag.”
I once hosted a television show on the media, and later ran a national daily newspaper which was then, as now, hemorrhaging red ink. I’ve never indulged in excessive nostalgia about the media business since moving on, but this indeed would be a fascinating time to host a television show on the media. I’ll be tuning into CNN International (from home in Paris) in coming weeks and months to follow the debate on “Reliable Sources”.
Meanwhile, another voice has jumped into the fray. Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher of MIT’s Technology Review, has published a counter-thesis argument under the ambitious title, “How to Save Media”. Pontin takes gentle swipes at some of the articulate voices among the Jacobins, notably Clay Shirky, whose “fashionable wisdom” about the death of newspapers Pontin rejects. On the oft-posed issue of what can replace newspapers, Shirky has asserted: “People committed to saving newspapers [are] demanding to know, ‘If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?’ To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke.”
Pontin has less time for Dave Winer, whom he dismisses as a “grumpy California software programmer”. Winer, known for developing the RSS Web-feed format, once wrote: “Fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practised in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists. … Everyone is now a journalist.”
Shirky and Winer, argues Pontin, know nothing about the media business as practitioners, and consequently their radical visions are little more than “folly and ignorance”.
It would be inaccurate, indeed churlish, to characterize Pontin’s views as the voice of reaction. But he certainly belongs to what can be described as the cautiously conservative camp – let’s call them Girondins — that opposes what it sees as the vices of revolutionary excess.
Pontin makes some valid points that reveal his own disenchantment with how journalism organizations have been managed in the past. I am in a position to confirm his assertion that journalists traditionally have been “encouraged to cultivate a mild contempt for readers”. I also agree with his prescription that newspaper organizations must get smaller – and fast.
Pontin, as his title boldly announces, has a plan. Readers should consult his article for details. I had the impression that he’s less optimistic about the future than he claims. He concludes, for example, with the following prediction: “Things change or die, including once-cherished organizations. Today’s newspapers and magazines will be transformed or replaced by other publications, which will have new forms and modes of business. There will be a great and terrible clearing: scores of newspapers and magazines will vanish; those that survive will be much reduced; and most people employed as journalists or media professionals today will have different jobs in five years.”
I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, because the Jacobins and Girondins were, in the final analysis, simply different movements within the same revolutionary cause. And if one thing is certain, these are revolutionary times in the business of journalism.

As the agonizing newspaper death watch continues, it’s easy to forget that magazines too are going through a slump that will see many titles close.
Newsmagazines in particular are struggling to retain readers by frantically attempting new formats and approaches. As Newsweek’s editor John Meacham told the Financial Times last week, “You can keep doing what you have been doing all the time and march nobly off a cliff or you can adapt and change.” He’s right about that, but there is reason to believe that newsmagazines, burdened by their own proud and stale legacies, won’t reinvent themselves fast enough to avoid extinction.
Against this gloomy backdrop, new online magazines are being launched, presumably in the belief that they can offer readers a fresh approach to news, opinion and analysis.
Slate and Salon were first-movers in this space. A British online magazine that has caught my eye is The First Post, a smart, crisply written product underwritten by ex-Carnaby Street hippy-turned-billionaire Felix Dennis, who in the early 1970s was convicted on obscenity charges when running his counter-culture magazine called Oz. Dennis also owns the printed mag called The Week, whose subscribers are mainly ex-pat Brits looking for a witty and entertaining digest of news and opinion from the UK. I am among its readers who enjoy the clever way it is assembled.
The First Post describes itself as “a free and independent daily online news magazine – a place to find out what the news means, a place to read about the issues of the day in short, sharp, informative articles. Most articles are presented on single pages which eliminate the need to scroll. And, as you will discover, it is a very easy site to find your way around.”
Note the word “free”. The First Post website does feature contact information for advertisers, but it would be interesting to have a close look at the magazine’s P&L. In journalism, nothing beats having an eccentric moneybags as your proprietor.
I quite like The First Post, which describes its politics as “all over the place”. The magazine insists moreover that it’s not just a collection of links: “Many news-based sites are merely the by-product of newspapers or broadcasting organisations; some are nothing more than a series of links to articles on other sites. The First Post is independent and exclusively online; we commission all our articles.”
Another online magazine that hopes to differentiate on quality is Smart People. Launched only last week, Smart People, produced in the United States, is available in three online formats: HTML, PDF, and flip-reader.
Here is how the magazine describes itself: “Smart People was developed in collaboration with 60 some volunteers –- many coming from the leading social networks –- whose contributions shaped the content and direction of the magazine. It’s an interactive, new media approach to publishing, learning and communication that has just begun and you will participate in the development of something much bigger than a magazine.”
My colleague Soumitra Dutta and I contributed a piece called “Politics 2.0″ — on Barack Obama as America’s first digital president — to Smart People’s inaugural edition. We have no personal or business links with Smart People’s editors, who requested the article from us. I have no particular knowledge about the magazine’s business model, though it appears to have a clearly defined differentiation strategy.
I wish Smart People well, especially given the tough economic climate into which it is launching. Journalism today offers us a real-time case study of the laws of creative destruction. And so as I follow online magazines like The First Post and Smart People to see whether they grow and prosper, I’ll be keeping an eye on printed magazines like Newsweek to see if they manage to survive.

British teachers don’t get it. Or at least their unions don’t get it. Schools and universities are supposed to be open environments that promote free speech, debate and learning. And yet UK teachers are quick to censor ideas that they find threatening.
Let me explain. Some months ago, the editors of the magazine SecEd approached the publicists for my book, Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom, to ask if I could contribute an article. SecEd is a trade magazine, published in London, for UK teachers and headteachers.
This is how the magazine describes itself: “Published each Thursday during the academic year, SecEd is a colour, glossy tabloid-sized newspaper that contains a mixture of thought-provoking news academic and best practice features, regular columns and an invaluable classified recruitment section. It is written by its own team of writers and education journalists, supported by contributions from leading figures in UK education and, more importantly, practising and experienced headteachers, senior leaders and teachers.”

The magazine’s Editor requested an article from me on the “potentially damaging effects of sites such as RateMyTeachers.com”. My book publicist, who was in direct contact with the magazine, clarified the Editor’s request in an email to me: “The editor was keen to point out that as a trade journal for teachers and headteachers, the magazine takes an editorial stance against such sites. While he would of course expect an expert feature to take a balanced view, and would not presume to dictate that we tie his editorial line, he feels that wouldn’t be able to run a piece which ultimately comes out in favour of such sites.”
As a veteran journalist myself, I immediately grasped that SecEd magazine is, in effect, the house organ for UK teacher unions and their diverse lobbies. I was however intrigued that they’d requested an article from me and my co-author Soumitra Dutta on this subject. And why not, it’s a timely and interesting issue.
We were also obvious candidates. In our book, we examine in some detail the emergence of teacher “rating” sites like RateMyProfessors.com and RateMyTeachers.com. In particular, we look at how these sites have become immensely popular in the United States, where teachers and professors now reply to their ratings on videos posted right on the site (which incidentally has been purchased by MTV).
In France, by contrast, powerful teachers unions took a similar site to court and had it shut down with a ruling that the site could not post teachers’ names. The UK experience is somewhere between the American and French examples. UK teachers unions are resolutely opposed to sites like RateMyTeachers.com, but these sites operate with little fear of being closed down by a court order.
Our point in the book is that Web 2.0 platforms have facilitated a bottom-up culture of rating, ranking and reviewing that is challenging vertical professions and institutions whose authority is based on credentials and “expertise”. Customer book reviewing on Amazon is a good example. So is RateMyProfessors.com. Nobody likes a negative review, but the emerging rating & ranking culture is already pervasive. Teachers and university professors, along with doctors and lawyers, are now being reviewed, rated and ranked by their own customers. In education systems, they are called students.
SecEd magazine was obviously intrigued enough by this phenemonon to ask me to write an article on the subject — though with the proviso that I must examine the “potentially damaging effects” of RateMyTeachers.com. I don’t write articles to comfort the biases of any publication, so I told our publicist that I’d be happy to contribute a balanced article on the condition that it be published holus bolus. No editing or expurgating. I also insisted that I wanted a commitment from SedEc that they would publish it, for I didn’t want to spend time drafting an article that they would later refuse.
Our publicist communicated my conditions to SedEd, and the magazine agreed. My article would be published holus bolus, they said. With that reassurance, I took pains to ensure that the article was scrupulously fair and balanced, comparing different reactions to teacher rating sites in the United States, France and Britain. Nowhere did I express an opinion.
After I submitted the article, many weeks went by without a word from SecEd. Our publicist finally checked with the editors, who reassured us that the article would indeed be published shortly. Then a few weeks later, after we checked again, they told us that sorry, the article would not be published. Someone higher up at the magazine had apparently ruled against publishing it. Presumably, they had come to the view that the article didn’t follow the official UK teacher unions’ party line against RateMyTeachers.com.
It is ironic, to put it diplomatically, that teachers are quick to censor points of view — even when balanced — that challenge established assumptions, not to mention corporatist interests. One would have hoped that teachers, of all professions, would be open to discussion and debate.
There is even more irony. This comes at a time when others, like Jeff Jarvis, are reflecting and writing about how the Web 2.0 revolution (and in particular Google) might, and should, totally transform teaching and higher learning. And there are videos like this one that point out how out-of-touch teachers are with the generation of Web-savvy “digital native” pupils who are sitting in their classrooms but learning little.
While that necessary discussion continues, I will post below the article, word for word, that SecEd magazine refused to publish. Perhaps you can explain why a magazine for UK teachers found this article too threatening.
One quick footnote: the reference to “Bebo” in the first paragraph is familiar mainly to readers in Britain where SedEd is published. Bebo (now owned by AOL) is a popular social networking site among British youths, similar to MySpace in America.

Here is the article, which I originally titled “Rate My Teachers: Pupil Empowerment or Virtual Cyberbulling?”

You be the judge:

If the Bebo generation can be defined by any single behaviour trait, it’s a cultural obsession with ratings and rankings.

The same kids who, a decade ago, were rating Pokémon players are now teenagers logged onto social networking sites like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook where they feverishly rate, rank, and review their favourite songs, movies, television shows, photos, comic books, celebrities, you name it.

In Britain, popular talent shows like “The X Factor” reinforce this culture of instantaneous ratings. Videos on YouTube similarly are compulsively rated and ranked by hundreds of millions of teenagers worldwide. Online social interacting is a round-the-clock ritual of mass democracy, constantly self-updating, rendering verdicts on just about everything.

This Web-empowered reflex to rate, rank, and review can be controversial. The emergence of websites like RateMyTeachers, in particular, and RateMyProfessors has focused intense public debate on issues such as “cyberbulling” of teachers by their own pupils. Some teachers associations –in the UK and other countries — have called for these sites to be shut down. Yet the cyber curtain on the virtual Gong Show never comes down.

Our purpose here is not to cast moral judgements or take a position on what governments should, or should not, do about the emergence of websites like RateMyTeachers. Our goal is twofold: first, to provide teachers with a conceptual understanding of the underlying dynamics driving Web 2.0 social networking sites; and second, to provide a comparative perspective of reactions in other countries to sites like RateMyTeachers.

It is important to grasp that the basic social architecture of networking sites like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook is open, horizontal, and democratic. Online social interaction, especially amongst young people, is transparent, candid, and informal. The finer points of Debrett’s etiquette are not generally top-of-mind among the millions of teenagers logged onto Bebo and MySpace.

Not surprisingly, when these sites penetrate organisations, their horizontal dynamics frequently clash with the logic and values of vertical hierarchies. Most bureaucracies and institutions are characterised by status hierarchies based on rank, protections, tenure, and other entrenched entitlements that are, by definition, hostile to bottom-up evaluations.

Professions especially are resolutely opposed to any form of non-authorised rating of their members. The reason for this is not difficult to discover. Most professions, including teaching, can be defined according to certain formal characteristics: barriers to entry based on credentials, monopoly entitlements, restrictive arrangements, self-disciplinary powers, and regulation by states. Professions are closed, vertical structures. Social networking sites are open and horizontal.

When John Swapceinski, a Silicon Valley software engineer who founded RateMyProfessor.com, stated that his website was inspired by the laws of the marketplace, it was hard to disagree with him from a purely theoretical point of view.  “Students are demanding more information because they see themselves as customers who want the most value for their dollar,” he said.  Most professions, however, are not subject to the laws of the marketplace. They are regulated by states in return for monopoly entitlements based on professional credentials.

Still, RateMyProfessor.com is massively successful. Launched in 1999, it’s the most heavily trafficked college website boasting some 7 million users who have generated opinions of roughly 1 million professors teaching at roughly 6,000 collegiate institutions in Anglo-American countries (RateMyTeachers is devoted to primary and secondary schools). Professors are rated on a five-point scale according to straightforward criteria: easiness, helpfulness, clarity, and the student’s interest in the class before taking it. Also, “smiley” icons are assigned as general ratings — grinning brightly for high-satisfaction evaluations, frowning glumly for low scores.

Many of the website’s critics sidestep its original purpose – to rate professors on a graded scale – and focus instead on issues like “cyberbullying” which in some cases are a justifiable concern. In Britain, one teacher claimed to feel dehumanised when a student described her as a “disinfected cat”. There can be little doubt that, in some cases, disgruntled pupils are taking out their anger at teachers via sites like RateMyTeachers and Bebo.

“Cyber-bullying takes an age-old issue to new levels,” said Mary Bousted, head of Britain’s Association of Teachers and Lecturers. “It’s an insidious and growing problem in our schools and colleges that goes beyond the school gate. For all its benefits, information technology is allowing pupils and parents to bully teachers and lecturers from afar by phone, email and the internet, exposing them to public humiliation, damaging their good reputation and taking away their professional pride and confidence.”

Critics argue moreover that sites like RateMyProfessors are trivialised by student obsession with the physical appearance of their instructors. Students assign “chili pepper” icons to professors they find “hot”. The “hotness” ranking indeed appears to be RateMyProfessors’ most popular attraction. The “hotness” factor has become so popular that RateMyProfessors now features a Top 50 for the “hottest” profs.

One study of RateMyProfessors found that students tend to like courses taught by professors that they find “hot”. Other studies of RateMyProfessors — despite obvious questions about margin-of-error implications when only 50 or 60 students assess a teacher – give top marks to the site’s utilitarian function. A study published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, for example, concluded that “while issues such as personality and appearance did enter into the postings, these were secondary motivators compared to more salient issues such as competence, knowledge, clarity and helpfulness.”

Now let’s look at the experience with teacher-rating sites in three countries: the United States, France, and Britain.   

In the United States, while many teachers initially complained about sites like RateMyProfessors, the attitude towards these sites has become generally relaxed and accepting. This may be a reflexion of deeply-embedded – and constitutionally protected – American values in a favour of free speech. In the United States the educational system has pragmatically integrated sites like RateMyProfessors into a value system that puts individual liberty and free speech before corporatist interests or collective rights.

RateMyProfessors has now made common cause with another well-entrenched aspect of American culture: show business. In early 2007, the pop video site MTV bought RateMyProfessors and merged it with its 24-hour college channel, MtvU, which is broadcast on 750 college campuses throughout the United States.  Since the MTV takeover, RateMyProfessors has been enhanced with a Facebook application and jazzy features like “Professors Strike Back”. Professors have been given their own voice on the site. Some professors, meanwhile, have started their own site, RateYourStudents.blogspot.com, which feature opinions about students.

In France, the outcome has been precisely the opposite. When two Parisian entrepreneurs launched a French teacher-rating site called Note2be.com, France’s powerful teacher unions denounced the website as an “incitement to public disorder”.  The site’s founders, for their part, pointed out that similar sites in the Anglo-American world are highly successful platforms for information and exchange. But in France, a country where teachers’ unions are willing to paralyse the country’s educational system if their interests are at stake, the government’s dread of a teachers’ strike outweighed its indulgence towards online free expression. 

Xavier Ducros, France’s education minister, took a tough stance against the site. “The evaluation of teachers is the exclusive domain of the Ministry of Education and the civil servants who are appointed to carry it out,” asserted Ducros. With implicit direction from the government, French courts effectively shut down the site by prohibiting any teacher’s name to be posted. After the court ruling, Note2be went out of business.

The British experience has been somewhere between the American and French examples. UK teacher unions, like their counterparts in France, have denounced sites like RateMyTeachers. Unlike in France, however, this outcry has not been followed up by firm government action and judicial decisions. In that respect, the British experience is similar to the American situation, where a general culture of tolerance towards free speech outweighs specific professional interests – except, of course, when laws are broken.

In a Web 2.0 world where power is shifting from vertical institutions to horizontal networks, it should not be expected, meanwhile, that these ratings websites will go away. Similar sites are now providing open rating systems of other professions and services: RateMDs.com, LawyerRatingz, MechanicRatingz.com, RealtorRatingz.com, to name only a few.

What is the best way to react to these sites? It is generally advised that over-reacting in a negative manner is not the best course of action. Engaging a dialogue and becoming a part of the conversation, while being vigilant about outright abuses that violate laws, is generally considered to be a more productive approach to ratings sites.