Advice from a brownbag luncheon today at UW as part of her book tour.  Damn, this woman is inspiring!

• Know your artifact at a technical level (MySpace was built on Cold Fusion – a horrible platform!).
• Take as many methods (and theory) classes as you can so you can know how to approach problems from different perspectives.
• Collaborate.
• When doing ethnographic fieldwork, do your first-thought voice notes into your recorder, immerse in the environment (eat at McDonalds), listen to people’s stories even if they are off-topic, prepare to become part of people’s lives on an emotional level.
• Find a community of people interested in what you’re interested in and find your place in it, bring people together to do it.
• Take care of yourself:  yearly email sabbaticals, go trekking, make your own massage parlor map, time with family and friends
• Self-present mindfully: What will your research subjects think of your mohawk?
• If you want to make an impact, be public.  Be honest about the limitations of your data/work.  Force people to care.
• Understand that you are part of a much bigger system.  Know power as theory (Foucault!), engage with it as practice (start a think/tank like this).
• When dealing with journalists, be strategic, work on background, not just for the quote or to promote your work.  Help them understand.

An argument from self-described internet poet Steve Roggenbuck for why social media need not be shallow, trivial, and dehumanizing, but immediate, compassionate, beautiful, and vital: “as a poet, it’s your job to text people pictures of the sunset.”

HT Gawker

Can I just say that this made my day?  Dr. Sharp is an inspiration to me and many other scholars of digital activism.  Wow.

Evgeny Morozov is perhaps the most skilled contemporary practitioner of the rhetoric of contempt.  He seeks to win arguments (and attention) by treating ideas he dislikes with scorn and ridicule and by treating their proponents with mockery and cruelty.  He encourages this behavior in others.  The exchange below, which happened earlier today, is a good example.

When I first met Evgeny in 2008 he was a journalist, working for The Economist.  He was smart and entertaining. The mean-spirited  persona only came later.  He honed it on his (now abandoned) Foreign Policy blog, Net Effect, and then parlayed that persona and style of argument in a very successful and misleading book, The Net Delusion.  That book was published just as the Arab Spring was getting started.  It soon became clear that his argument – that those who are optimistic about the liberating power of the Internet are deluded – was simply untrue.

So he has turned his gaze to Silicon Valley and has started attacking Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales instead of the State Department. Yet he has maintained the rhetoric of contempt, inserting vitriol into important discussions, misleading the unsophisticated, and muddying the waters of real intellectual inquiry with ad hominem attack and straw man arguments.

I have not asked Evgeny about his rhetorical strategy, but I would bet that it is strategic.  I think Evgeny enjoys being contemptuous, but he is also smart enough to realize that it works.  The tweet at left, from Max Bulger, a student at Tufts University, is illuminating.  Evgeny won’t talk to a student about his ideas, but he will bait the big fish like Jimmy Wales and Tim O’Reilly on Twitter to increase his own name recognition.  Evgeny has 36 thousand followers.  Jimmy Wales has nearly 82 thousand.  Tim O’Reilly has 1.7 million.  You do the math.  I bet Evgeny has.

So, this post is not a plea to Evgeny to stop using the rhetoric of contempt.  It works well for him, so he has no reason to stop.  It is rather a suggestion to others not to fall into his trap by responding or (worse yet) responding in kind, as Jimmy Wales did.  Don’t feed the (intellectual) troll.

Dana Skallman: “creating networks of trust is at the core”

How did you first get involved in Occupy?

I got on the OWS Tech list to see what was going on and how I could help. I quickly realized they were so unorganized, so I thought maybe I can help organize tech in some way.

What role do you currently play in Occupy?

I am helping setup and coordinate technology infrastructure for the Occupy Movement using Free/Libre/Open technology. The bulk of the platforms can be seen atOccupy.net& we are coordinating the usage throughInterOccupy.net.

What are your challenges as an Occupy technologist?

Trying to bridge the needs of activist users and technologists. There are many tools available that provide alternatives to widely used proprietary or commercial tools, however they need to be setup and easy to use for anyone, much like the alternatives. The other aspect is being able to provide tools & ongoing support on a purely volunteer basis. We are searching for ways to make it sustainable. One way we are looking to do this is through cooperatives, which is a part of the conversation in the work we are doing on a daily basis.

How do these challenges relate to the greater challenges of the Occupy movement?

It’s hard to say from an activist on the ground, as I am more behind the scenes. However, much of the communication across the movement involves technology, so creating networks of trust is at the core. This involves more human interaction, through technology. So it’s more about how we connect person to person across the movement using technology, and not so much what technology is being used. That being said, the technology used is important in regards to data privacy and control, which is why using the tools onoccupy.netmakes a difference.

Occupy is currently out of the mass media spotlight. What are you all up to that the world should know about?

The next few months will focus on campaigns around theAnniversary on September 17thand the election. The best place to keep up-to-date would be through theInteroccupy Newswire. All campaigns and actions havecreated Hubsto help coordinate more effectively across the movement. TheInterOccupy Calendaralso provides a ton of information for ways for folks to get involved.