wrythings

This was David Cay Johnston’s closing statement when interviewed on Bill Moyers’ Journal in January, 2008. David Cay Johnston is an investigative reporter for the New York Times and author of Free Lunch. Listening to this interview segment for the second time, I reflected upon the discipline of community informatics and the practice of civic entrepreneurship (as well as new modes of philanthropy).

If social justice is the scale with which we are to measure our effectiveness and our national character, we must not blind nor bind ourselves in a hyper-localism amounting to a head-in-the-sand response to the many policy shenanigans now written out as the law-of-the-land, or passed over - de facto - in the exercise in neglect by those who are entrusted with enforcement of the law.

The extent to which Washington has been the party of money, irrespective of the party nominally in charge, has led to a long-standing regime of laws (and enforcement) at odds with principles of sound governance. This scenario has given many a strong motivation to dismantle government. We have long been distracted by conflicts over the legitimacy of entitlement programs, while we have overlooked the institutionalization of rampant profiteering at the expense of the people and our long term interests.

As citizens, community informaticists, civic and social entrepreneurs and philanthropists, what is our response to the challenge of restoring justice and good governance to the nation?

I composed a short list of some essential readings that reflect a world-view appropriate to the Internet Era, I shared it with friends studying Community Informatics and Civic Entrepreurship, two domains seeking a better world. Since I recently catalogued (part of) my personal library using LibraryThing, it makes sense to share these here as well (as they are part of my virtual library).

These writings provide a conceptual matrix for an interesting breed of Civic Entrepreneur- (it’s a partial list) … really a new model of Citizenship and Society/Polity. They aren’t new to a lot of you - and if you have other works that you think really need to be on the list, please let me know.

Movement as Network, by Gideon Rosenblatt, also: The three pillars of social source

David Isenberg’s Rise of the Stupid Network

Pushing Power to the Edges (pdf) by Jillaine Smith, Martin Kearns, Allison Fine

The Cluetrain Manifesto (Doc Searles, et al.)

Cory Doctorow’s Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom

Coase’s Penguin: (by Yochai Benkler … his book The Wealth of Networks is also recommended. There’s a wiki inviting discussion of his ideas.)

The list doesn’t represent any hierarchic ordering.

A cool site/tool I was recently made aware of… LibraryThing.

I like that it uses an open standard for managing my book collection: Z39.50.

I also like that I can export my data.

You can see a more extensive listing of my library here.

I’m taking a course on storytelling. Although I have been involved in community informatics for several years as an activist and organizer on digital divide/digital excellence and community networking, I found this work to involve the telling of stories and general reframing community and what we are about, or what is possible for us.

I was watching a video from the TED conference where Isabel Allende offered the old adage: What is truer than truth? The story. (Variants on this answer may be a matter of translation: Legend, Myth, Story, Narrative.)

I grew up on Grimm, and many mythologies… great preparation for an early encounter with Joseph Campbell via the Power of Myth (where Bill Moyers, another hero, interviewed him). I later made extensive study of semiotics and have an enduring interest in narrative, and the importance of story and discourse.

In recent years Italo Calvino brought me back to the play of stories/storytelling in the work of the OuLiPo — where art is craft that you work at each day, and good art or literature arises from finding the right combination of signs through experiment and experienced judgment.

Campbell’s work on myth and ritual, the idea of the story opening a path to greater truth than mere facts, or perhaps a greater truth in discourse around a story than in any particular telling or offering of an account, and the idea in Calvino that folktale is not myth degenerated but that myth arises out of folktale when the right combination his hit upon, these are all connected.

Storytelling is part of the natural and necessary repertoire of human behavior… it helps us cope and adapt as well as honor and remember. Though stories can be used to divide, their healing potential is critical in this moment. Our creative play can reconfigure our individuality and our collective life.

Next up on my reading list is (Gore’s latest book) The Assault on Reason.

Gore has taken on the most important issues of the day: the environment, the politics of media, public life. These are grounded in the big questions of living together on this planet. His tone is measured. Had the Supreme Court handled the 2000 elections other than they did, would Gore be the Statesman he is now?

Lars found this excellent statement by Marvin Minsky (The Society of Mind).

Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.

From Our Unfree Press, 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism, resolution adopted in convention, St. Paul, June 1934:

WHEREAS, freedom of the press is a right of the readers of news and a responsibility upon the producers of news; and is not a privilege for owners of news channels to exploit; and

WHEREAS, reporting is a high calling which has fallen into disrepute because news writers have been too often degraded as hirelings compelled by their employers to serve the purposes of politicians, monopolists, speculators in the necessaries of life, exploiters of labor, and fomentors of war; therefore be it

RESOLVED, that the American Newspaper Guild strive tirelessly for integrity of news columns and opportunity for its members to discharge their social responsibility; not stopping until the men and women who write, graphically portray, or edit news have achieved freedom of conscience to report faithfully, when they occur, and refuse by distortion and suppression, to create political, economic, industrial and military wars.