Thomas Friedman Is Blaming Social Tools For Our Social Ills

Thomas Friedman is doing his ropa-dope again: blaming the victims — us — for the terrible political world we are subjected to. And all because of social networks:

Thomas Freidman, The Rise of Popularism via NYTimes.com

In 1965, Gordon Moore, the Intel co-founder, posited Moore’s Law, which stipulated that the processing power that could be placed on a single microchip would double every 18 to 24 months. It’s held up quite well since then. Watching European, Arab and U.S. leaders grappling with their respective crises, I’m wondering if there isn’t a political corollary to Moore’s Law: The quality of political leadership declines with every 100 million new users of Facebook and Twitter.

The wiring of the world through social media and Web-enabled cellphones is changing the nature of conversations between leaders and the led everywhere. We’re going from largely one-way conversations — top-down — to overwhelmingly two-way conversations — bottom-up and top-down. This has many upsides: more participation, more innovation and more transparency. But can there be such a thing as too much participation — leaders listening to so many voices all the time and tracking the trends that they become prisoners of them?

The answer, Mr Friedman, is no.

And, oh, by the way, when you talk about the participative nature of the social web, consider the term many-to-many instead of two-way. We, the people, are involved in a conversation among ourselves, and if curmudgeons like you or our self-obsessed political leaders want to get involved with that, fine.

Friedman springs a relatively interesting term on us:

Indeed, I heard a new word in London last week: “Popularism.” It’s the über-ideology of our day. Read the polls, track the blogs, tally the Twitter feeds and Facebook postings and go precisely where the people are, not where you think they need to go. If everyone is “following,” who is leading?

Leadership today is — as always — linked to having a following, Mr Friedman. And before you can lead the people somewhere you have to start where they are.

Friedman goes on with the craziness:

And then there is the exposure factor. Anyone with a cellphone today is paparazzi; anyone with a Twitter account is a reporter; anyone with YouTube access is a filmmaker. When everyone is a paparazzi, reporter and filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. And, if you’re truly a public figure — a politician — the scrutiny can become so unpleasant that public life becomes something to be avoided at all costs.

Wait a second: are we all public figures now? What’s with the shift to ‘real’ public figures? What point have you made? Did I miss something?

Alexander Downer, Australia’s former foreign minister, remarked to me recently: “A lot of leaders are coming under massively more scrutiny than ever before. It doesn’t discourage the best of them, but the ridicule and the constant interaction from the public is making it more difficult for them to make sensible, brave decisions.”

Oh, now I see. Because we are looking more closely at what our ‘leaders’ spassive ay and do they are having a hard time being brave. So we should go back to being a mass audience, watching TV, and not whispering among ourselves.

So it’s our fault that our fearless leaders are no longer fearless, and our fault that they can’t rein us in to work together to save the world, and our fault that we don’t have extraordinary leaders.

Yes, let’s blame social tools and the spin they have on human society. Let’s not talk about the precarious of a flattened down world that you championed, Mr Friedman, where offshoring is treated like a law of nature, and the externalization of true costs is a first order predicate in the economics that led to the econolypse we are still living in.

The problem we have isn’t that our leaders are afraid to tell the truth. Our problem is that our leaders have accepted inequity and injustice, and we, the people, can apparently find no way toward solidarity. But don’t blame social tools for our social ills: they are a lot older and deeper that Facebook and Twitter.

24 June 2012 15 underpaidgenius Permalink

Damned By Faint Praise

Thomas Friedman takes stock of the ‘revolution’ in Egypt and sees that the old powerful power blocs — Islam and the entrenched political system — still have the upper hand. So, he argues, those social tools that the protestors used — Twitter and Facebook — really aren’t that great for mobilizing:

Thomas Friedman,  Facebook Meets Brick-and-Mortar Politics

To be sure, Facebook, Twitter and blogging are truly revolutionary tools of communication and expression that have brought so many new and compelling voices to light. At their best, they’re changing the nature of political communication and news. But, at their worst, they can become addictive substitutes for real action. How often have you heard lately: “Oh, I tweeted about that.” Or “I posted that on my Facebook page.” Really? In most cases, that’s about as impactful as firing a mortar into the Milky Way galaxy. Unless you get out of Facebook and into someone’s face, you really have not acted. And, as Syria’s vicious regime is also reminding us: “bang-bang” beats “tweet-tweet” every day of the week.

Commenting on Egypt’s incredibly brave Facebook generation rebels, the political scientist Frank Fukuyama recently wrote: “They could organize protests and demonstrations, and act with often reckless courage to challenge the old regime. But they could not go on to rally around a single candidate, and then engage in the slow, dull, grinding work of organizing a political party that could contest an election, district by district. … Facebook, it seems, produces a sharp, blinding flash in the pan, but it does not generate enough heat over an extended period to warm the house.”

What both Friedman and Fukuyama seem to forget is that two years is not two decades, nor is two years two centuries. The implicit expectation is that Twitter and Facebook should be able to compress time, and to rapidly accelerate the creation of deep and strong networks of people allied around new democratic ideals that are basically unknown in Egypt.

There is no quick fix, no silver bullet, no magic wand. Let’s wait ten years before we assess how the social revolution plays out in Egypt, and elsewhere.

10 June 2012 3 underpaidgenius Permalink

Larry Prusak: The World Is Round

I had a chance to speak with Larry Prusak, well known business guru, executive director of IBM’s Institute of Knowledge Management, and the author of Working Knowledge and In Good Company. He is planning a presentation for the upcoming Collaborative Technology Conference 2006 called The World Is Round, which he intends as a direct challenge of Thomas Freidman’s The World Is Flat meme.

Prusak argues — not totally persuasively, in my view — that Friedman is a self-described technological determinist, and as a result has deluded himself — and us, I suppose — that work will flow outward from today’s more developed nations out to the less developed ones based on the frictionlessness of the Internet and other communication technologies. This, Prusak states, does not take into account the necessary societal elements necessary for the work to be performed, like stable institutions and social capital. He thinks that because we are such “technoutopians” in the US, we are likely to buy in on Freidman’s position, even though real knowledge is highly contextual, and therefore much of the work that going offshore cannot be done well, there. He granted that software can be built in India, for example, but he believes that other, more service-oriented work — like call centers — will just not be handled well enought in distant locales to make it cost effective.

I told him that I was unconvinced about his arguments, although I am sure that some people will embrace them eagerly: not necessarily because they are an accurate prediction of the future, but, sadly, because it will be what many people want to hear.

In Wednesday’s Washington Post, an editorial by Howard Myerson mentions a recent article by Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors and now an economist at Princeton, that tells a quite different story about the shape of the world and things to come.

[from Will Your Job Survive?]

In the new global order, Blinder writes, not just manufacturing jobs but a large number of service jobs will be performed in cheaper climes. Indeed, only hands-on or face-to-face services look safe. “Janitors and crane operators are probably immune to foreign competition,” Blinder writes, “accountants and computer programmers are not.”

There follow some back-of-the-envelope calculations as Blinder totes up the number of jobs in tradable and non-tradable sectors. Then comes his (necessarily imprecise) bottom line: “The total number of current U.S. service-sector jobs that will be susceptible to offshoring in the electronic future is two to three times the total number of current manufacturing jobs (which is about 14 million).” As Blinder believes that all those manufacturing jobs are offshorable, too, the grand total of American jobs that could be bound for Bangalore or Bangladesh is somewhere between 42 million and 56 million. That doesn’t mean all those jobs are going to be exported. It does mean that the Americans performing them will be in competition with people who will do the same work for a whole lot less.

It is a strange turn of events that those with the most education may find their middle class existence threatened, as accounting and software work moves to Estonia or India. Those with specialized skills, epscially those that involve face-to-face and personal relationships — like divorce lawyers or software sales staff — are more likely to hold onto to their jobs. In this we may be hearing a distant echo of Prusak’s contextual knowledge argument, but in reality its not about having some specific sort of knowledge, it’s really about the nature of the work.

So, in the final analysis, I fall in with Friedman and Blinder: absent some unforseen new development, that giant sucking sound is the movement of white collar work out of the developed countries — like the US — out to the less developed countries. The fact that call center operators don’t have a perfect understanding of North American vocal nuances is certainly relevant, but will not be enough to stem the tide. And, yes, it is the proliferation of low-cost communication technologies that are making this not only possible, but inevitable. So, I guess I am a determinist, too.

What are we going to do to find important work for 40 or 50 million Americans whose programming and accounting jobs will be gone? I can’t forsee that programmers will willingly become crane operators or taxi drivers, or that all those accountants will become nurses working in old age homes caring for the baby boomers. But if the flat worlders are right — and I think we are — that is exactly what will be happening. Of course, the old age homes may be located in the developing world, soon, as well.

22 March 2006 Permalink