I was intrigued by the process adopted by the Occupy movement from the get-go: I was not familiar with formal consensus processes, though I knew that the concept of consensus itself was of great relevance to my overall curiosities. Thus, when it came time to determine a semester project, I sought to gain a greater understanding of the role of the individual within the consensus process: specifically, how someone resolves what they believe to be the best course of action with what is eventually agreed upon by the larger group as a whole. As I began to perform interviews at Occupy Boston, I realized this was a significantly more complex question than originally considered.

Further writing on this, plus a link to my final paper, can be found here.

Did you use it last year? Do you have any comments or ideas? Drop me a line if so.

This week’s readings were particularly relevant to my project research, so it was exciting to read these having just returned from the [extremely chilly pre-snow] OccupyBoston site. I only got two interviews in before I had to head out (I’ll be returning for more soon), but I think I gained some important insight into the relationship between the “I” and the “We” at Occupy. Mostly, though, the interviews I conducted at Dewey Square got me thinking about the role professionalism and locality play in the success of an anti-establishment movement, and also what a move from fringe to mainstream does to that movement.

Read more at civic.mit.edu.

If you’re interested in the topic, these were the readings we did:

Related: now you know when to rob my house.

I feel as though it’s easy to want to present a definition of civic media that calls to mind images of change, influence, and nobleness. I hesitate, however, to go beyond a very boring and un-romantic assertion that civic media is any channel (be it vetted or otherwise) that informs an individual about her community—from town to global village—and vice versa. As part of this definition, I outline the following principles:

1. Civic Media need not require action on the part of the consumer

In this week’s readings I noted the repeated mention of “engagement.” Jenkins, for instance, argues that civic media itself is defined by that which “fosters civic engagement.” I’m not comfortable with this connection, however. Engagement with one’s community implies action, or at least a link that goes beyond simple information sharing. I don’t believe Jenkins means to exclude local newspapers or blogs, but I want to make sure my definition is inclusive. Be it Boston.com’s Your Town section or BBC’s World News, teaching media consumers about the community of which they are part is the most basic of principles for civic media.

2. Civic Media can be a one- or two-way communication

User generated content and social network activity are often tied to civic media, mostly because both phenomena are based on the individual and her being in a certain place at a certain time. CNN provides this type of content, albeit highly curated, via its iReport product. But to be considered civic media, information channels do not necessarily need to include content from the consumer. The New York Times does not allow comments on its news articles, for instance, only content from its blogs.

If a news organization does wish to encourage a dialogue amongst channel constituents, there are third party products which can help keep that dialogue relevant and focused (unlike the White House’s Open For Questions/NORML fiasco). For instance, the team at Localocracy (a Boston based startup) facilitates discussion and debate while restricting the discussion to only those to whom the topic is relevant (based on location).

Additionally, tools allowing individuals to inform their communities are becoming more available with applications being developed by groups like Code for America’s fellowship program. Locally in Boston, we’ve also seen applications like Citizens Connect that let you call out the needs of your community directly to civic government.

3. Civic Media may relate to a community defined by something different than physical proximity

I think that Henry Jenkins makes a good point when he notes that communities need not be defined by traditional means. Excuse me, however, as I go off on a brief tangent: Reading the summary of Jenkins’ (and others’) talk at the forum brought to question how one should be approaching this source of material. That is, the virtual community landscape—as well as so much more of what digital media looked like—in September 2007 was vastly different than today. Facebook was still tiny (relatively speaking) and Twitter was in its absolute infancy as a mainstream service. So I began to question whether we should read these sorts of pieces with historical context in mind, or as absolutisms.

All of that said, thinking about virtual communities did bring to mind an organization in the commercial realm called Communispace. They provide “white label” communities for companies looking to “engage and intimately understand their customers.” This example ultimately undermines my fourth principle, below, but I struggle to find a similar product (white label virtual communities) with purely non-commercial motives. Perhaps I haven’t been looking long enough, however.

4. Civic Media channels may have commercial interests, but the information being shared must not be relevant only to those interests.

I admit that I struggle a bit with the wording here. What I hope to assert is that it’s okay for a private organization to present news—it doesn’t have to be not-for-profit like NPR or user generated like CNN iReport. At the same time, learning about a sale at your local Sears is not civic media. The information shared should not have the sole purpose of promoting a commercial cause.

According to the speakers at the SXSW 2011 Panel entitled “Changing News Rooms and News Consumers” (audio available here), between 1992 and 2002, the sizes of editorial staffs at news organizations was reduced by a third (a trend continuing today, according to The Economist) while the number of public relation specialist positions across the country doubled. The panel spoke of “churnalism,” or the efforts by news organizations to make their process more efficient by simply spitting out what they are given by PR representatives. In response to this, churnalism.com was built to compare bodies of text with press releases from its database.

This trend encompasses the overall mood of the readings from this week: overtly pessimistic when it comes to the outlook for our current media options. I can’t say this is surprising at all, however. As an MFA candidate at the Dynamic Media Institute at MassArt, my work has been focused on the way that dynamic media can elevate the level of public discourse in the country. By studying the participants, rituals, influencers, and representatives all involved with our national dialogue, I am trying to find or create tools that help us move beyond the extremely polarized nature of discourse today.

Understanding how we arrived at this place is important, so the report from The Economist and the FCC’s “The Information Needs of Communities” present a strong contextual background for my thesis. And it’s this context which I hope to build throughout the semester. On the other hand, my undergraduate education is in business and I’ve spent the past five years in the advertising industry, so the commercial perspectives presented in this week’s readings are certainly familiar. I’m looking forward (albeit cautiously) to gaining more exposure to the theoretical and philosophical elements of the topic.

The novel presents a dystopian view of America, set in a time in the future where everyone’s data is public, accessed via a single device. The impotent government is simultaneously oppressive of its constituents while under the control of corporations. And society is illiterate, referring to good old fashioned books as ‘written artifacts.’ Sound familiar? It’s no surprise that when presenting his work at a public reading at the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square, Shteyngart pinpointed the book’s timeframe as ‘Next Tuesday.’

It’s interesting to me how confused some get when they hear me praise a work like this as accurate or, at the very least, a prophecy behind which I can get (sometimes I describe it as the pharmacist who, shockingly, does not self-prescribe Prozac). One friend was even dismissive. “No,” they declared upon my refusal to read books on any material but paper, “that is complete nonsense.” After all, what right does a ‘tech guy’ like me have to be so skeptical of the very systems in which I work every day?

I recently saw two ads on TV that I think illustrate the nuance in this dichotomy. The first, for Amazon’s Kindle, tries to prove that reading on an e-reader is just like reading a real book:

Frankly, a disappointing showing from an otherwise admirable brand (at least, from my interactions with it). Why try to make me feel like a jerk simply because I appreciate the experience of an actual book over a piece of plastic?

The next is one of Apple’s iPad 2 spots:

What a contrast in tone. “When technology gets out of the way” provides a significantly more human take on how we interact with our devices than, “Well, my Kindle folds down the page, too.”

I try to think of myself as a technologist with the Apple approach: I work to understand technology, to be skeptical of it, cynical of it, to make sure it gets out of the way. And it’s that cynicism that helps me get better at what I do. The original Cynics, after all, were purists. Taking a step back and questioning is what allows us to come at problems with a stronger approach, one with (hopefully, possibly, miraculously) fewer implications in the long run (queue the photos of people wearing tin-foil hats here).

Of course, in Shteyngart’s world, we don’t read books anymore—we simply scan them electronically for specific points of data, something the Kindle and iPad already help us do quite well. I suppose this may be an inevitability. The author himself noted during the event last month that he is no Luddite (he regularly posts photos of his dog to his Facebook page).

But if we don’t allow ourselves to question the systems and processes that are being developed at an alarming rate around us, aren’t we all that pharmacist snorting Flonase to the point of brain damage?

I realize passwords can be stolen. Maybe I’m a sucker and was phished. Maybe one of the various public Wi-Fi networks I’ve been on in the past few months of traveling was compromised. It doesn’t matter. I should be changing my password more often.

But it also got me thinking. How was it so easy for these guys to send out a few hundred emails from my Gmail account? If Gmail is so good at filtering incoming spam (and it definitely is), how are its outgoing spam filters so poor? There are things Gmail could do to help this problem.

For instance:

The “Wait, What Are You Doing?” Filter

By my count, 47 emails were sent from my account between 3:14am and 3:17am, each without a subject line, each containing just a link, each to alphabetically sequential addresses from my address book. Maybe Gmail should raise a red flag at some point? Maybe after the first five are sent? How about a “hey, we love you and all, but maybe you can send the next five after a few hours” alert? I woke up at 6:19am to an email from a friend alerting me to the spamming. I could have shut it down at that point.

The “You’ve Let Go Of Your Ex-Girlfriend…I Guess We Can, Too” Feature

Gmail is to email addresses as cell phones are to phone numbers: no one has to remember them any more. Just type in a couple of letters from an address, hit tab, and move on. That’s awesome. What’s not awesome is that clients, co-workers, and random people I happened to email five years ago got a link from me this morning asking them to buy Viagra. To top it off, each note had my signature, so they were reminded which idiot from their past lives was being hacked. So I’m asking Gmail to be dumber: after six months or a year, if I haven’t emailed my junior year accounting professor, do me a favor and forget his email address. If I need it that badly, I can do a search for his name within my mail.

The “We Know You Hate Taking Your Medicine, But It’s That Time Again” Lab

The previous two features I mentioned could not be part of Gmail Labs; it would be too easy for outgoing spammers to turn them off. But what if Gmail had an optional feature that reminded you to change your password everythree months? Too few people would use it. And it’s something we can remember to do on our own (I just added it as a recurring event on my calendar). But if “Go Back To Gmail Beta” is a Lab feature…surely we can add this one, too.

Maybe these are tougher features to implement than they seem. The product managers and developers at Google who work on Gmail are significantly smarter than I. But I woke up this morning and found that a few hundred of my closest random acquaintances got an email from me with a link to buy pills online. And that’s frustrating. My wife pointed out that most online users understand that spam happens. But each one of those emails had my website in them (which is how I know the hackers were using the Gmail web interface), and who knows what the readers of those emails will now think about me and my work.

Here’s to hoping Gmail’s outgoing spam catches become just as smart as the incoming.

Have you been hacked? Got any tips or tricks to keep it from happening? Any more outgoing spam features you’d like to see in Gmail? Hit those comments.