Networks of Protest Block Bush at Stanford
April 22, 2006
The official story
U.S. President George W. Bush intended to visit the Stanford University campus yesterday to meet with members of the Hoover Institution, a neo-con think tank in Hoover Tower. But Mr. Bush never made it to Hoover Tower. Why? I was there and I’ll tell you why.
The mainstream press is reporting that Stanford protesters blocked the only road leading to Bush’s meeting so that it had to be re-located, and that three Stanford students were arrested. This is simply not true. Grassroots journalism by people who were actually there is giving a different and much more revealing account of what really happened. I’ll give you my own summary of what occurred based on being there myself, interviewing others who were there, knowing the protest organizers and being acquainted with the students who were arrested.
The “real” story
The presence of one thousand and more protesters, accompanied by the Stanford Band, caused Bush to relocate his private meeting at Hoover Tower to former Secretary of State Shultz’s house on Delores Street (about a block from where I live). However, contrary to what the press is reporting (see “How the secret was spread“, below), the road to Hoover Tower was not blocked by protesters. Law enforcement had set up barriers to ensure clear passage long before the protest began, and these barriers were respected by the crowd. However, around 4pm, police in riot gear appeared and attempted to move the crowd by force from its position on Serra Street, East of Hoover Tower. Strangely, they did not attempt to inform the crowd of the reason why.
Students resisted this move and sat down in the street. That’s when law enforcement pulled a very strange maneuver of questionable legality. They brought in a fire truck with sirens wailing and claimed (falsely) that there was a medical emergency at Hoover. After a lot of verbal abuse from police and firemen, only three protesters remained blocking the truck and these were dragged off (as shown prominently in the photo coverage), arrested, and taken away in a paddy wagon. They’ve since been released on misdemeanor charges. Absurdly, the fire truck then turned around and drove unhurriedly away, sirens off, and the protesters were allowed to fill the street again. Presumably, it had been during this confrontation that Bush’s meeting was re-located.
In summary: One of the top three universities in the United States spurned President Bush from coming on to campus; three Stanford students were arrested for disobeying a lie and obstructing a misappropriation of emergency services personnel. That part of the story has yet to ripple out to the mainstream press. You read it hear first.
Now let’s back up to see how this all unfolded and how the news is now being spread by mass media and digitally-mediated grassroots journalists.
How the secret was spilled
Until a few days ago, Bush’s visit was totally unexpected here at Stanford. That’s true even for the University administration, who had scheduled many important events for next-year’s freshmen visiting for Stanford Admit weekend. The single biggest event was scheduled to happen on the same day as Bush’s visit, in Memorial Auditorium across the street from Hoover Tower, but this was suddenly scrapped due to Bush’s sudden imposition.
In the couple of days leading up to Bush’s arrival, it was fascinating to witness how rapidly this potent local news meme spread through the student population over social and digital networks. On a college campus, these networks are so closely intermingled that a meme moves seamlessly through and between each. Someone reads an email who tells a friend who tells another friend who emails a group list, etc. I received five emails in three hours from different sources. All were forwards that already had a long lineage.
The earliest signs I heard of came over the Stanford Band’s email list two days before the visit. The Band immediately started preparing a musical protest, choosing tunes that reflected political sentiments, like “American Idiot” by Greenday and “Hey, Big Brother” by Rare Earth. I overheard the news in class the next day (one day before the visit). That night, campus email lists were abuzz with info about the president’s schedule and plans for a large-scale protest: meet in White Plaza at 1:30 to rally and make signs; march to Hoover Tower at 2:00. The campus newspaper didn’t carry the story till the day of Bush’s visit, but had some interesting details about snipers being posted in Hoover Tower.
On the big day, I just happened to be tabling in White Plaza from 12 - 1:30, promoting the campus Cooperative Community with flyers and musical instruments. I also set up a sound system there to be used by student groups for a sustainability event from 12 -1. After that, I “accidentally” left the equipment set up so that when the protest rally started at 1:30, there happened to be a sound system turned on and turned up, with a microphone plugged in and ready to go. I’m no activist, but I do understand the power of technology to shape collective action.
How the secret was spread
Also interesting, now that the momentous event has now passed, is to witness the ripple of news about it propagate outward to media outlets of varying proximity (Stanford Daily, Palo Alto Weekly, San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press, New York Times), and grassroots journalism sources like videos on YouTube, photos on Flickr, and coverage on blogs. The chart below shows the number of posts that contain ‘Bush + Stanford + Protest’ in recent history.
Rachelle Marshall, a senior citizen member of the Raging Grannies protest group, said “It’s the greatest thing since I’ve been at Stanford. I’ve been here 50 years.” Perhaps with the rise of densely connected online communities at college campuses everywhere, digital tools for communication and coordination are going to be figuring more and more prominently in student activism efforts. Similarly, while the power of protest has seemed to dwindle in recent times due to lack of mass media attention, the rise into legitimacy of grassroots online journalism may be giving the punch back to protest. Interesting times, indeed.
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Social software and the collapse of identity
April 20, 2006
With an explosion of social software services springing up all around us, it seems inevitable that web-developers start thinking portal as they did in the late 1990s. Those early portals became all-services-in-one monoliths, with Yahoo as the prototype. Today, the model lives on in the form of “typo” domain squatters.
While the portal may have made sense for web services based on information consumption because it centralized otherwise disparate sites into one, I would argue that it is a problematic model for social software. Here I’m defining social software as any online system that makes identity publicly accessible. Public online identities are constructed wherever content is user-generated, anywhere from a comment on someone’s blog to a slideshow of vacation photos. In the social software sphere, it’s become commonplace to attach public “profile” pages, of one form or another, to every personal account.
Then along come services like SuprGlu and the envisioned GoingOn Network, nifty and convenient tools for tying your many dispersed identies all together in a neat package. However, there are emergent sociological dangers that lurk beneath this tidy surface.
Like identity in the material world, identity in online communities is created in social contexts. The embodied world conveniently keeps our many identities distinct because they are tied to different physical places: the office vs. the bar vs. the S & M club. In the collapsed geography of cyberspace, every room is adjacent to every other, and the walls are thin.
While I may lead a less divided life than some, I’m still a little nervous at the prospect of mixing personal and professional identities freely and haphazardly. With digitally-mediated social interactions leaving traces in persistent and searchable databases, and with community contributions tied to public profiles, the neat partitions of identity are eroding. My del.icio.us links are open for anyone in the world to see, as are my flickr photos. We’re waking up to the face that we are many people in one body…people sometimes better left separate. Call me self-conscious, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea of potential employers browsing my vacation photos or taking notes on the political leanings of my Facebook friends.
Case in point
Jennifer hates her chemistry teacher, and now the whole world knows it, possibly her teacher too. The problem is even more severe for active adults with complex, compartmental lives. While it may not seem so bad now, eventually Jennifer is going to grow up and try to get a job; meanwhile the Wayback Machine has been diligently archiving her entire adolescence for her future employers, college admissions committees, boyfriends and landlords to see and pass judgment on.
I see this coming down to a redefinition of public and private in the digital world. This is a new kind of shared space, where the digital analogue of casual conversation between friends becomes world-wide-readable (e.g. Myspace). “Public” should mean something different for an anarchist message board thread than for a blog posting. One is cloistered communication between members of a small, tight-knit community. The other is global self-publication to a world audience. Yet both are about equally findable in a Google Age. You and I, Jennifer and the anarchists — we’re all facing the aggregation of a potentially limitless number of disparate identities into one, very public identity.
Long story short: please don’t build this. 1) It’s ugly and complicated. 2) It breaks identity boundaries (friends and colleagues). 3) It freely mixes public and private.
Instead, make something that puts me in control of my many selves, including who has access to what information. This is the mission of Identity Commons, though it remains to be seen if it’s workable.
Posted by Daniel in : Design, Research, Social Software7 comments
