4 Trust Everyone

WHO DO YOU TRUST?

Why?

Maybe you just said to yourself, “Wait, who do I trust for what? I trust different people for different things.” That’s right, you do—and our sharing on social networks is changing how we assign trust, or authority, to different people and organizations. In this transitional moment, as we’re not just sharing what’s important to us and what’s on our agendas but also looking at how we measure the success of our work and our expertise, we can radically redefine what authority means to us and who becomes influential.

When we think about “authority,” we generally conjure up images of cops, teachers, bosses, legislators. They are the People In Charge. In traditional power systems, those with more influence or power (a relatively small number, given how many of us are on the planet altogether) are dependent on our being passive consumers of information. We’re freed significantly from that dependency when we’re given easy tools with which to share our stories.

When people have access to low-cost, user-friendly tools for self-expression, everyone becomes an expert at something.¹ Thanks to social network technologies, how we determine authority—whom we trust for what—is rapidly changing the face of culture and politics. When we share our own and others’ experiences and opinions, we can begin to overhaul traditional power dynamics and relationships. We start to determine for ourselves what’s relevant and important, and subvert the institutions that seek to keep the status quo.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t challenges to the flood-gates opening—information overload threatens the sanity of many, and we’re not well equipped (yet) to process everything that’s coming at us in productive, responsible ways. Nonetheless, the release of information from hierarchical constraints creates the opportunity to redistribute the centers of power and authority that have long controlled our cultural information sources.

The Anatomy of Organic Authority

We have, of course, been sharing opinions with each other since the beginning of time. What makes this moment so unique? The speed by which we share information, the number of people we share it with, and our potential—individually and collectively—to wield as much influence as established experts and institutions.

We’re used to having institutions tell us what’s interesting, important, and relevant. Take movie reviews, for example: How often do you look up reviews before you get to the theater? We do this because we want to know more about the film, and reviewers and critics have titles and status. Baratunde Thurston,² comedian and web editor for the Onion and host of Popular Science’s Future Of television show, calls that status we assign “institutional authority”—we can point to specific reasons why we trust the authority of those prominent sources.

Another kind of authority is at work, and that’s the trust we have in our social connections—our friends, colleagues, and family members, for example—to pass on information that’s relevant and interesting. (And we ourselves have authority on a variety of subjects; as we discussed in chapter 3, we use our social capital to build and share this authority in social networks, both online and off.) Relying on our social networks for information creates what Thurston calls “organic authority.” It grows over time and is dependent on more idiosyncratic variables.

If a friend with whom you’ve seen movies for the last 10 years said, “You should see When Harry Met Sally. You’d love it,” you would consider her previous recommendations and whether you trust her advice on movies. If a work colleague recommended a movie, you’d go through a similar process, but maybe you’d weigh his opinion differently from the opinion of your 10-year movie partner. Now think about that movie review in the newspaper: Is the reviewer’s opinion more valuable than the friend’s or colleague’s? Probably not. Chances are, it just has a different value.

Institutional Authority on the Hot Seat

Traditionally, folks higher up in the food chain have advised us on what we should eat and drink (and where to do it if dining out), which celebrity we should pay the most attention to, who’s the smartest politician in the room,³ and which laws are bad and which are good. All of this advice comes from, as Jim Hightower says, the Powers That Be, instead of the Powers That Ought To Be.⁴

Social networks threaten the order of things in the scheme of institutional authority. Online, our connections and relationships are mapped for all to see, which makes sharing authority easy, and what we share is generally visible to all. Instead of relying solely on what these institutions define for the world around us and being asked to trust that they know what’s best, we can now turn to social networking tools to establish and verify our own and others’ authority. Instead of trusting a select few, we’re using our own measurements and value systems to determine what’s relevant and important to us.

When we make up our own minds about what’s important and what’s not important is maddening to most of the institutions around us, which depend on our reliance on their institutional authority. It’s turning a whole lot of institutions—businesses, legislative bodies, traditional media—upside down. And they’re not taking it well. In late 2009, for example, Rupert Murdoch threatened to remove all of News Corporation’s content from being indexed by Google, which would effectively block people’s ability to organically discover news and content from the media colossus. Over in the land of music sharing, for years the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)⁵ has been notorious for chasing down people who share files online, instead of embracing the idea that sharing promotes sales rather than discouraging them.⁶ Knowing they’re facing this kind of resistance is a hard pill for many organizations to swallow. But in this emerging world order, the more that organizations of any kind continue to insist they know best, the worse off they’ll be. People are embracing the idea that they have a certain amount of control and influence over what they do with the information that comes their way, and they will increasingly resist and reject organizations that don’t embrace this ethos with them.

Institutional authority won’t disappear altogether, at least not anytime soon. Social networks, however, with their basis in relationships, have a hard time tolerating the old demands of one-to-many messaging—“This is what’s good for you, and you’ll just have to trust us.”

Actually, we don’t just have to trust you anymore. We’ve got a network of complementary, organic authorities to verify or discredit what you’re putting out there, and the more you try to hold on to that old model, the less we’re going to listen to you.

Size Doesn’t Matter—Relationships Do

Institutional authority—an attribute resulting from our belief that organizations and businesses have more expertise on certain subjects than ordinary people—has long been tied to size. The larger the institution, the more credibility it was thought to have—and thus more influence in swaying our decision making. Today, it no longer matters how many sheer numbers we have behind us in the world of social networks; much more critical are the ways in which we are engaging with smaller numbers of people who care about, and take action on, the things we care about.

For mass media, bigger always has meant better. You needed capital to own a printing press, and the more papers you sold, the bigger your empire became. Quantifiable metrics, such as the number of subscribers or viewers, were key, because that’s how ad dollars were determined.

If you think about it, though, those numbers were padded in a big way—in terms of television viewership numbers, for example, not every cable subscriber is watching every channel. Even the Nielsen ratings, which seek to pinpoint these numbers for the benefit of advertisers, aren’t accurate—they can’t accurately determine that every single person watched every minute of that half-hour program on that one channel.

Measuring authority based on sheer numbers is also an imperfect approach when it comes to digital media and social networks. There’s no easy way to rank relevance in the online space (yet); the sheer number of friends or followers you have on any given social network service doesn’t tell you that much about your authority or influence.

No one can guarantee that each and every one of those people is genuinely invested in the material you’re posting. You can’t count on people to be committed to any kind of action you ask for, simply because large numbers of people are consuming the material. People are far more likely to be moved by information when it’s been shared by someone they trust; the ways in which we measure influence, then, must also change. Less important are sheer numbers, and more important are measurements of relationships, analysis of what makes particular pieces of content more prone to sharing, and how a person’s place in the social network ecosystem affects the sharing that does take place. In a blog post that discusses the role of authority, from traditional media to Twitter, Jeff Jarvis, academic and author of What Would Google Do? (HarperBusiness, 2009), articulates this phenomenon nicely:

I think there is no easy measure, but if it exists it will be found instead in relationships: seeing how an idea spreads (because it is relevant and resonates) and what role people have in that (creating the idea, finding it, spreading it, analyzing it) and what one thinks of those people.⁷

If we keep obsessing about social network numbers the way we have over numbers of visitors to our websites, or numbers of subscribers to our newsletters, we’re going to fail at being effective when reaching out to the people who might want or need the most to hear the stories we have to share. In fact, sometimes smaller numbers of followers and fans who have been culled and cultivated have a much greater ultimate impact than a large audience you don’t know that much about. Michelle Greer, a web marketing strategist, explains the situation deftly using some simple math and Twitter:

1. A person who blogs about foreign films starts following people who tweet about movies like “Dinner with Andre” or are tweeting about the Cannes Film Festival while it is occurring. By tweeting back and forth and engaging people, tweeting unique links, this person gets 2,000 followers. Many of these followers have over 1,000 film obsessed followers themselves.

2. Another person buys followers, follows people just so they follow back, etc. The whole mentality of “I’ll follow you only if you follow back” is just childish. Tim O’Reilly offers useful info all the time and will probably never follow me in my lifetime. So what? Anyway, by playing this numbers game, this person gets a whopping 25,000 followers who are more concerned about reciprocal followers than actually getting useful information.

Say I’m marketing a foreign film. If I have these people tweet something with the intention of it getting as much exposure as possible, the person with 2,000 followers will probably be of more use to me. Why? Because this person will get retweeted by people who actually care what I have to say, who would have a lot to offer their own followers by retweeting my stuff. Do the math:

2000 people exposed initially
50 retweets
× 6000 unique followers among these retweeters
600,000,000 possible impressions

vs. 25,000 possible impressions for person #2⁸

This mode of outreach turns the traditional concept of an influential communicator on its head. Bigger used to be better, but now, effective is better.⁹ And there’s no easy ranking system for effectiveness; it’s so dependent on individual goals that no one can possibly say, “These are the top 10 most effective people in the entire world of social networking.”¹⁰

The shift in how we measure influence also enables us to build authority on the basis of the quality of our ideas, rather than on a stacked deck of influence based on social structures like gender, race, and class. To get into the old-school top 10 lists, we likely had to have a lot of things going for us, including how we looked or where we came from. In the social network sphere, we are the ones determining what and who is relevant and influential to the work we’re doing and the lives we’re living. When we share our experiences and opinions, we create the opportunities to establish ourselves as authorities in places that were previously the domain of only an elite few. With many more voices, and many more diverse sources of authority and information, we can begin to change how we operate culturally.

Avoiding the Newest Numbers Trap

The growing number of available sources and—in particular—sources that are becoming authoritative on a variety of subjects means that it’s getting harder to sift through all the information that’s shared and to find people we consider relevant and useful. Traditionally, the sifting and filtering was done for us by institutional authorities, using top-down structured directories that informed us of who the most popular people or organizations were—think of all the magazine and newspaper articles that come out every year listing the top movies, restaurants, books, etc. The dizzying number of participants in social networks make that process much more challenging and much less productive.

We have to fight the urge, however, to simplify our social networking lives by adding ourselves to social media directories that quantify our numbers, rather than qualifying our experiences. In 2009, social networking folks were all abuzz with the launch of several Twitter-related services—such as weFollow, Twittorati, and a few others—that rank Twitter users according to their “popularity,” which is defined by the person’s number of followers or popularity in the blogosphere.

So-called popularity does not make these folks automatically interesting or relevant.

Using these directories and recommending relationships based on the number of followers can be confusing and misleading. When you’re just getting started, it’s easy to fall into the trap of, “Oh, I should follow celebrity-name-here because a million other people do, so that person must be interesting.” Afraid not.

Moreover, following and friending based on pure numbers also reinforces traditional hierarchies that historically have kept diverse voices out of mainstream conversations. Numbers hide the mostly invisible, marginalizing social structures that we discussed in chapter 2. When we follow people blindly based on how popular we perceive them to be or how popular the culture perceives them to be, we’re excluding the depth of content from numerous other sources on the edges (versus the cool kids in the center, or top), who are often more relevant, interesting, and worth sharing.

A much more effective strategy for establishing your authority is to choose a few people you know and look at who they’re communicating with. Study those people’s profiles and what they’ve written recently, and see if they intrigue you or if you have something in common. You’ll find some specific tips on how to do this in the resource guides at the end of the book.

Someday, maybe even while this book is being printed, my dream of having an application that shows me “interestingness” in the social network sphere will come true. Flickr has this for photographs: There is an algorithm based on “[w]here the click-throughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.”¹¹ The best part? Interestingness itself, then, is constantly changing, based on these shifting variables, so there’s a good chance of finding both something new and something surprising when one goes spelunking through Flickr’s massive collection of interesting photos.

How “interestingness” might work.

I’m not going to lie to you: This great shift in authority isn’t the easiest part of social networking’s brave new world to navigate. The tools give us tremendous power to change the culture around us, but they’re new, and our behavior and impressions are still based on operating within a hyper-capitalist-focused, hierarchical mindset. We have a lot of work to do on freeing our minds before the rest of our bits will follow.

Surprisingly, though, the uncertainty of the future of social networking tools is also the good news: Things are still shaking out, and we’re in a position to determine whether the reordering of authority will benefit people who previously did not have the access or the means to make their voices heard. Armed with a fundamental understanding of what’s taking place (by, ahem, reading good books on the subject), you’re primed to make the most of change.¹²

An Abundance of Attention

Just as we need to develop new skills to think about the volume of information we’re receiving, so too do we need new skills for managing our attention span. Because of the market structure of mass communications, we often think of our attention in terms of economics; in recent years, there’s been lots of talk in media and technology circles about the attention economy. If you’re new to the term, here’s the basic idea: Attention is scarce, meaning it’s a finite commodity that can be gathered and exhausted. Using economics as a model, we have to choose where we “spend” our attention, and those seeking to gain our attention have to use market-based tactics—aka “marketing”! aha!—to win the privilege of our spending our attention on them.

As we enter a more social, and perhaps more holistic, way of interacting with the world around us, squeezing our attention span in this kind of transaction-based, market model is turning out to be fraught with problems. Our attention span, as it turns out, is not in the limited supply that marketers would have us believe.

Market models and economies are attractive to us as a culture because we’re so familiar with transaction-based economies. As discussed in chapter 3, it’s hard for us to think about commodities in any other way, because we’re so focused on a tit-for-tat system as a measuring stick for fairness in labor, time, and services.

When we apply transactions to how traditional media work (think: one-directional, few-to-many broadcast messages), it’s easy to see how we ended up with today’s dismal state of affairs: reality TV, infotainment news, etc. If, as a producer of content in a market-based system, I need to get the most bang for my buck out of each “transaction,” I’m going to create something that will gain the most attention. I’ll have to yell the loudest, create the most spectacle. It’s not worth my time or money to create niche content that will draw in specific kinds of audiences; partly because this is one-directional and I have all the control, I can blast people with content and hope for the best out of that transactional moment, when I print an article or air a show. The more outrageous that content is, the better chance I have of at least catching people’s eye for a moment—take advantage of humanity’s rubbernecking instinct.

How the transactional moment works is changing rapidly, thanks to social networks. First, the moment is more bidirectional (or even multidirectional) than ever. We’re having conversations with one another, so the transaction is not just about my producing content and your consuming it. It’s about how we interact with what gets put out there and how that content changes once we start interacting with it.

This moment in social and technological development is also different because it’s not a few-to-many model; it’s a many-to-many model. Applying an economic analysis to attention now becomes messy.

We have to reframe our interactions with one another—we shouldn’t be thinking about trying to “pay attention” to everything that comes our way and then running out of attention to pay. We need to make the world around us a stream or flow of information, and dip in and out of that flow as necessary or desired. Attention, in this model, isn’t a scarce commodity; it’s an unending stream that weaves in and out of other streams. (Suddenly I’m having a Ghostbusters moment.) As web visionary Stowe Boyd argues,

The answer is not becoming obsessed with attention as a limited resource to be husbanded, or thinking of our cognition as a laser beam to be pointed at only at what is important.

We need to unfocus, to rely more on the network or tribe to surface things of importance, and remain open to new opportunities: these are potentially more important than the work on the desk. Don’t sharpen the knife too much.¹³

Since attention isn’t composed of chunks that accumulate and are doled out in this way of thinking, it’s fairly useless to consider the system a finite economy. Those who yell the loudest and make the biggest fools of themselves will become less important as our notions of celebrity also change—having higher numbers of viewers or followers or fans doesn’t equal influence and fame. Or, at least it doesn’t have to. If we can turn around our thinking, away from the style of mass media that has only served to alienate us from one another and has produced lowest-common-denominator content, and toward a more holistic, ecosystem-like view in which relationships to and relevancy of content matter, then attention’s scarcity also begins to disappear.

Once scarcity is removed from the model, market economics doesn’t apply to it. You’re not competing for others’ attention; you’re creating sustainable relationships across which content flows, many ways. What happens as a result of those relationships might be quantifiable in some way, but how we choose to measure them absolutely must become more nuanced than units of product sold, page views/uniques, or number of followers/fans gained. This is another key point missing from many of the conversations about social media’s impact: We are at a critical cultural juncture where it is up to us to experiment and ultimately define how things work in the ecosystem.

Information Wildfires

As social networks shift our perceptions of authority, we also have to guard against the pitfalls that can happen when large numbers of people have access to information without the context that they’re used to. Institutional authorities provided this context in the past; now that organic authority plays more of a role in how we receive information and how quickly we receive it, we have a new responsibility to ensure the accuracy of reporting of external events that we share.

Social networks can spread information like wildfire. Marketers know this, and some spend oodles of time and money trying to figure out how to make something “go viral.”

News, on the other hand, doesn’t need a marketing genius. Regardless of whether the subject is celebrity gossip or the latest economic statistics, news headlines can reach viral proportions that would make any marketer proud. Never before have so many people had instantaneous access to so much unfiltered information. We’re quick to act on that information—and to share it with everyone we know.

While sharing news is generally a good thing (hey, you’re reading Share This!), we’re not necessarily equipped to process and react responsibly when we’re hit with surprising or salacious news—or information that provokes a strong emotional response. We tend to share first and ask questions later, and, as we’ll see below, doing so can cause serious damage and distrust.

Part of this shortcoming is biological: The section of our brain that reacts to emotional content, the amygdala, isn’t the most sophisticated piece of machinery. It interprets and paints events and emotions in broad strokes, most simply as positive or negative. Not a lot of nuance there.

The rest of our brain is supposed to help by engaging and filtering information based on context. We’re supposed to take into account physical actions, such as a person’s body language and the tone of conversation, as well as our surroundings. Digital media doesn’t provide these cues, so the other parts of our brain aren’t activated. In fact, research shows that e-mail flaming (inappropriate negative reactions expressed publicly online) is a result of these missing cues.¹⁴

It could be said, then, that without adequate understanding and even training around using social networks during times of crisis, we’re doomed to a mob mentality. Holding back the mob can be the challenging side of sharing our stories; we’ll talk later in this section about how to apply some common media literacy skills to our own networks.

I’m Not Dead Yet: Stopping Info Misflow

It used to be that we heard about major news events from sources with institutional authority—a news company with investigative journalists and fact checkers, for instance. Think of breaking-news moments that we associate with well-known and highly respected authority figures: Walter Cronkite removing his glasses and announcing the death of President Kennedy, or Tom Brokaw broadcasting the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Now we collectively experience events in real time, and everyone is a potential newscaster. Our culture, with its recent hyperfocus on breaking news,¹⁵ hasn’t prepared us to deal with the impact of what we share with one another during those events and how we handle the information that bombards us. New media tools and social networks have given us new ways to spread information—and new questions to ask about our responsibility.

The events of June 25, 2009, provide an excellent illustration of how misinformation centered around breaking news can spread quickly across social networks. Both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died that day. Across many social networks, people expressed their surprise and grief at the loss of two pop-culture icons. Then came news on the same social networks that actor Jeff Goldblum had also died, on a movie set in New Zealand. A quick Google search turned up a hit for a news story on MoviesOnline.com, reporting the death.¹⁶ Many people began sharing the news (yours truly included). Tapping into cultural superstitions about deaths occurring in threes is an especially poignant way to make information go viral, apparently.

Alas, the much-beloved Mr. Goldblum was not dead. He wasn’t even in New Zealand at the time¹⁷—but the runaway nature of the story allowed it to charge into the social network sphere and stay there for a good 24 hours, even after it was officially debunked within an hour or two of its first mention (via an institutional authority: Goldblum’s agent).¹⁸ In a case like this, 24 hours of presuming a popular actor’s death isn’t likely to do any serious damage (except, perhaps, to the actor’s ego), but when the news is more critical, 24 hours is plenty of time to inflame passions and cause people to act, sometimes unwisely, on misinformation.

Before the Internet, we assessed the authority of our peers and relied on them to share trustworthy information, with some degree of success (and failure—I grew up thinking I’d die if I simultaneously ate Pop Rocks and drank a Coke¹⁹). The Internet hits the scene, and suddenly there’s an explosion of urban legends. Remember those e-mail chains where a little boy with cancer only wished to see his e-mail forwarded around?

Urban legends and hoaxes make emotional appeals that force us to address our common cultural fears (death, terror, freaky candy that pops in your mouth). If we trust the information source (often a friend or family member), we usually believe the information is true—we transfer a person’s general trustworthiness to individual bits of news without verifying whether the information is correct.

But if someone repeatedly shares enough false information, we naturally respond by lowering the authority that person has in the news-sharing department. Quick survey: How many people don’t read e-mails from Aunt Beatrice anymore because she sent the human organ theft hoax again?

We’re at roughly the same level with social networks right now as we were with e-mail in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The tools are new and snazzy, and we don’t yet have a sophisticated understanding of the role they play in our lives.

And it’s not just we or our family members who have become enamored with these new tools. Look at the mainstream media’s coverage of breaking news today. News anchors actually read tweets and Facebook posts on air as a method of sharing news. That’s not just silly; it’s also irresponsible.

When Twittering Goes Awry

The Iranian election protests of 2009 provided a more serious teachable moment concerning authority and information dissemination. The background: In June 2009, Iran held a presidential election in which the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed to win 62% of the vote.²⁰ Challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a marginally reformist candidate who supports more freedom and democracy in Iran, publicly questioned the results and asked his supporters to protest nonviolently.²¹

Protesters took to the streets on June 13, 2009, and the country’s sophisticated community of political (and personal) bloggers started sharing news about public assemblies—and subsequent police crackdowns. A few people posted first-person accounts on blogs and on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, as well as via SMS texting on mobile phones (before the government shut down the cell phone networks). People outside of the country picked up what was happening and shared it with their networks. News spread rapidly, especially as the police violence escalated.

In the United States, news junkies and politicos marveled at the fact that the major cable news outlets—CNN, MSNBC, Fox News—weren’t covering the election. Viewers started pressuring the networks to get on the story. On Twitter, a hashtag (a keyword to indicate what topic the tweet is covering) was created to convey unhappiness about the missing coverage, targeting CNN in particular: #CNNfail.²²

It seemed the pressure worked. By the following morning, CNN and other news networks were broadcasting information about the events as they unfolded. Where they tripped up was when they started calling the events in Iran the first “Twitter revolution” and started relying heavily on social networks as sources. Ditching the familiar resources that give news outlets institutional authority—such as trained journalists and analysts familiar with Iranian politics—journalists instead jumped on a hot, trendy bandwagon. Without verifying the accuracy of many of the reports, mainstream news organizations broadcast a host of misinformation about the events inside Iran, including how many people were protesting, who was firing on the crowds, and how many people had died.

Everyday people on social networks were susceptible to the same bandwagon mentality. The high emotional content of the information coming out of Iran drove people to share first and source later. The resulting confusion of reports being shared outside of Iran didn’t necessarily lead directly to the arrests or deaths of protesters, but the proliferation of misinformation did create a mythology about the impact that social networking tools had on life-changing events inside a repressive regime. To a large extent, Iranian protesters were not using Twitter, and the cell phone network had been shut down. By perpetuating the myth that protesters were subverting a dangerous, repressive, totalitarian regime purely with shiny new technology, mainstream media and participants who shared misinformation created a dangerous situation for the next conflict, in which dissenters could mistakenly believe that these tools alone would save their lives.²³ Technology of any kind, especially in countries run by despots, will not absolve us from responsibility for the difficult, and dangerous, work of organizing against power structures that threaten lives.

Lessons of Iran’s Aftermath

As the hierarchy of news and authority changes, we have to dismantle the “winner takes all” mentality of breaking news. There’s always a rush to be the first person or organization with the news, because being first is a near-surefire way to increase traffic, and more traffic often means more ad dollars. But as we learned previously, the model of information distribution that’s reliant on sheer numbers is changing rapidly, and when pursued single-mindedly, this strategy will ultimately fail (thank goodness).

As consumers, we have to help ensure that other factors—such as validity and relevancy—are taken into account. Professional journalists and media organizations also need to practice sustainability through the emerging “slow news”²⁴ movement—a recommitment to investigation and validation of information that is not dependent on the 24-hour news cycle.

Already, blogs and other independent news organizations are seeing the benefits of producing thoughtful analysis and content that ultimately garners high traffic. Our Bodies Our Blog, the blog for the Our Bodies, Ourselves (Touchstone, 2005) women’s health book, published an informative analysis on the new government mammogram guidelines in 2009, one day after the guidelines were released.²⁵ There was much hype and anger but little straightforward information floating around in the first 24 hours, and the post hit home for many. It was passed around extensively on social networks and linked to from a variety of popular blogs, like Daily Kos. “There was a thirst for thoughtful analysis,” said Christine Cupaiuolo, the post’s author and coeditor of the blog. “We weren’t the first ones out of the gate with a response, but we provided what people were looking for—perspective and research.”

We have to demand more accountability from our sources, regardless of who they might be. We may not have the benefit of the physical cues (voice and body language), but we have learned over time to be more savvy news consumers. And we’ve come to demand accountability—whether we get our news from large, well-funded companies or from small blogs. We need to apply skepticism and critical thinking skills to our networks as well. Finally, we have to learn a new kind of media literacy, one where we are not simply reacting. I’m reminded of the advice we were given as kids: If you’re on fire, “stop, drop, and roll.” Try this: If your news stream is on fire, stop, drop, and think. Take a moment to process the information you receive and verify it through authoritative sources.

It’s important that we choose wisely. As we’ve discussed before, all of us have a critical role to play in the changing nature of authority and in determining who becomes valued as a trusted news source. As we create new guidelines for coming generations, we have a responsibility to support spaces where diverse voices are heard, varied experiences are shared, and trustworthy information is spread.

Your Networks Save the Day

The trickiness of a world in which authority is up for grabs means that understanding and navigating organic authority is challenging. And having numerous sources sharing information with us means it can be tough to build organic authority in the cacophony. Now that anyone can publish anything, and all this technology has created maps and pathways for easy communication across our social networks, an amazing amount of information is hurtling toward us (duck!).

Because we’ve not yet figured out how to harness different aspects of these new technologies, we’re at a point of social technology where many, many influences are converging on us. And one of the biggest challenges we face is the beast of the digital age: information overload. Not managing your information can be the difference between making a difference in the world and giving up altogether.

The good news is that your relationships will save your sanity as the onslaught of information comes at you. Certainly the technologies will advance and change to deal with overload, but we’re collectively experiencing a shift in the culture where we trust and rely on one another to filter, curate, and point out the critical information. Returning to the DNA theory, where similarity of ideas and voices breeds staleness and limited progress, the fact that we have so many voices to choose from now works to our advantage: We have a fresh mix—ever more interesting as new people come on board—to work with when we’re all in there sharing our stories.

There are a couple of ways to approach the new TMI: (1) reframe what’s happening so that we all understand that we don’t have to deal with everything that comes at us,²⁶ and (2) get savvy on tools and tips that will help us manage our digital clutter. My approach is blended; in this section, we’ll do the reframing, and later in resource guides, we’ll go over some tips for managing information flow. The key is to understand that authority is the basis by which we can use our relationships to accomplish this.

One of the questions I get asked most about social networks is, “OK, I understand how it technically works now, but how do you handle that flood of information coming your way? It would drive me crazy to try to keep track of x number of people!”

Here’s the secret: You’re not “keeping track” of people on social networks. If I tried to read every message from the hundreds of people I follow in all the conversations on the social networks I participate in, I would (a) never get any work done, (b) go slightly bonkers, and thus (c) be rendered homeless quite quickly. The trick is to not pay precise attention to all those people all the time.

The culture of e-mail, our main form of digital communication for the past 10-plus years, creates the expectation that every message on our screens is important enough to demand our attention. We are asked to evaluate sometimes hundreds of messages a day: Do I ignore, delete, reply, archive, or forward? As the popularity of e-mail has grown, we’ve become more frustrated and overwhelmed.

Now, with social networks, we are connected to even more people, more of the time. The great shift in authority, spurred by new technologies, gives unprecedented numbers of people and organizations the ability to push information our way. But the tools and our culture are not yet in sync. We’re being flooded, and we’re not sure what to do with it all.

Prior to this giant shift, we relied on others to be the dams and gatekeepers—we didn’t really have a choice. Newspaper editors decided which stories were important enough to publish, advertisers told us which products were good to buy, advocacy organizations showed us where help was needed, politicians told us . . . something.

Now the dam is open. What do we do? We’re trained to look at each message and act on it (or file it until we’re guilt-ridden for not acting on it). If we’re disconnected from technology for any period of time, we’re taught to go back and catch up on what we missed. As the information flow increases, we feel like we’re spending more time catching up, and less time connecting and acting.

One problem with e-mail is that it’s fundamentally the same tool it started out as back in the 1970s. The technology of e-mail hasn’t evolved to help us manage serious amounts of information coming our way, and while we have folders and filters to shuffle messages around with,²⁷ we’re still completely at the mercy of everyone who has our e-mail address. What’s worse, a good chunk of those people who send us things expect some sort of response. It’s no wonder that people take drastic measures, like declaring “e-mail bankruptcy.”²⁸

The differences between e-mail and social networks are vast, and understanding the dissimilarities can prepare us to be more effective with our communication as we organize for change. We’ll go into some of the nitty-gritty tactics in the resource guides, but these key concepts should help you get started: First, when we choose to participate on social networks, we actively choose whom we share with and whom we want to hear from. On social networks like Twitter, where that choice doesn’t have to be reciprocal, we have a good deal of freedom to be very specific about whose sharing we want to read. Second, people sharing on social networks don’t expect a response to what they share. It’s a bonus if someone replies or comments, but not many people walk around thinking that all of their friends or followers have read everything they’ve shared.²⁹ Third, social networking software, while still very much in its infancy, is designed to make sense of the flow of information. Some features of various networks may replicate the dastardly conundrums of e-mail, but overall the movement in social software design is away from individual message interactions and toward an overview of your personal network ecosystem.

Your Networks’ Role in Building and Managing Your Authority—Sanely

This mantra will change your life and help you on your way to using these tools to change the world: You don’t have to pay attention to everything. Think of the flow of information that’s coming your way as a river—created from trusted, authoritative sources you’ve established—that you occasionally dip into to see what’s happening. When you’re not at the river, there’s no way to know what’s going by. And here’s the kicker, folks: You have to learn to be Okay With That.

The big secret of all those people you see with thousands of friends and followers in social networks? They’re fine with the fact that they are going to miss things, sometimes lots of things. They don’t let any one authority—institutional or organic—run their lives. Take a deep breath, say a few oms if that’s your thing, and move along.

Remember that those big numbers do not necessarily equal influence or authority. Rather than focusing on the broadcast model of “Bigger is better,” it’s more important for you, in your personal information management system, to be selective in what you choose to take in. Less is often more in social media.

Ditching the broadcast model also means relying on your network—as well as some nifty tools we’ll discuss later—to get you the really important stuff. Remember that game you played at camp, when you’d fall backward and have faith that your campmates were going to catch you? It’s kind of like that, only without the stomach-dropping-inducing nausea. You’re going to learn, over time, that you can trust your network to provide what you need. You’ll learn to ask for help and more information—and if you’re practicing the good social capitalist karma that we discussed in chapter 3, you’ll get it. Let’s say you’re interested in news and conversations on green jobs. You go into meetings that last all day, and when you return, you decide to browse through your social networks to see if anything happened. Rather than pore over every message that was posted since you last checked, you’ll instead glance through recent messages and see what’s been shared and reshared by your green jobs people, and you’ll quickly scan alerts and filters that you’ve set up (because you’ve read how to do so in the resource guides) to make sure that important bits squeeze through. It’s not a matter of digging into every last message; it’s more learning how to effectively browse for relevant information from a big-picture point of view.

Thus, the task at hand for each of us is twofold:

• Be choosy and intentioned about where your information is coming from. Realize that it’s up to you to find experts who are relevant to your life, and to explore unfamiliar territory in the search for new authorities. Include race, gender, class, and sexuality as factors to consider. Make your connections a mix of people you know and don’t know.

• Make sure you’re adding your voice to the conversations. So much of what we know or think is true about how information spreads, and how that relates to social change, is in flux right now. All of us have to be willing to take part in this exciting experiment.

Playing by New Rules

Armed with the power to subvert traditional power structures by establishing our own authority, as well as having the ability to assign authority to others, we are being released from the hierarchical dependencies that have kept our stories from reaching one another on a massive scale. We can change whom and what we consider influential in our culture, and as long as we develop the skills we need to act responsibly in the face of a flood of new information, we can tackle the societal structures that constrain us.

The free-for-all nature of this shift in authority offers opportunities for progress, but deep and lasting change won’t emerge unless we also recognize the biases we bring to the table, as well as the fears that might be holding us back.