It has become cliché to note to observers of history that advances in communication technology have powerful effects on social, economic, and cultural change.  Martin Luther would not have sparked a reformation without the printing press.  Martin Luther King Jr. would not have been able to lead a movement so far and so fast without television.  The Berlin Wall would not have fallen when and how it did without satellite and cable television.  And, more recently, many believe that Barack Obama would not be President and the Iranian election protests would not be possible without the Internet and social media.

Each new communication technology has its own fundamental characteristics and develops its own unique patterns of usage, adoption, and ultimate impact upon society.  Often the early innovators and participants take action at key points of development and play a powerful role in shaping the societal effects of a new technology.  We are in one such moment now.  And, the next few months and years are vital to the development of the next revolutionary communication technology – social media.

The recent Pew Internet & American Life Project’s survey of 2,253 adults found that the adoption of social media is soaring with one third (35%) of American adult internet users having created a profile on an online social network.  MySpace founded in just 2003 has over 250M registered users globally and Facebook founded in just 2004 has over 200M active users globally.  The rate of adoption represented by these numbers makes social media the fastest growing communication form in history.

The ever expanding capabilities of social media are profoundly shaping the ways that people and organizations of all types interact.  This fact presents a tremendous challenge and opportunity to those seeking to advance public purposes.  It can be summarized in a basic question with complex answers — “How can we develop the use of social media in the public interest?”

The technological, business, and civic innovations of social media have been driven to date by a relatively small, but fast growing number of people.  Like the early innovators in television they come to the new medium with different objectives and with different ideas for what the medium can become and what it can and should do for people and society.  And, similar to the early innovators in television, social media leaders have stakeholders ranging from employees to investors to application developers which rightfully push them to develop the commercial potential of the new platforms and related products.

But, these leaders and the various stakeholders know that social media holds promise far beyond its commercial potential.  And, that in many respects the user communities of social media platforms will demand that this promise be developed and reward those companies and platforms that enable public purpose innovation.  The public and civic impulses and activities of social media users in fact represent a new kind of “public interest” in media – an interest not represented by requirements defined by government in exchange for broadcast spectrum allocations, but by the dynamic interests of the communities of participants in social media.

ThinkSocial is a platform dedicated to advancing the public interest through social media.

With your help our aims are to:

• Conduct, aggregate and share research and new developments
• Recognize people, initiatives and institutions taking bold and innovative action
• Enable networking and collaboration among social media, private and public sector leaders

Building upon the inherent dynamism of social media technology, ThinkSocial is a community of people seeking to foster a more inclusive and activist definition of the public interest than is currently understood in the broadcast media area.  ThinkSocial will emphasize the “two-way” nature of public interest responsibilities and opportunities in social media.  The social media companies themselves can and should serve the public interest.  But, other companies, governments, nonprofits, and citizens can and should use social media to advance the public interest as well.  The development of a two-way understanding of the public interest will be a win-win for social media and public and third sector stakeholders.

This online presence is our first attempt to launch a satellite into the social media universe which can collect the people, projects, and viewpoints that are contributing to the public interest.

Please take the time join our community, share your stories and insights and encourage people in your network to do the same.

Thank you.

Rob Kramer

ROB KRAMER
Founder, CEO of PopRule

Rob has spent the past 20 years as an entrepreneur and executive in the media, technology, environmental, and non-profit sectors. Rob is the co-founder of PopRule, a distributed democracy platform and application for taking and distributing rapid political action.

TS: Tell me about PopRule why did you start it?

Rob Kramer: I started it to get the tools back into people’s hands so they could take political action and actually effect change in their own lives. We live in a country of so-called representative government, but in a sense we’ve been duped. We create this incredible relationship with our elected officials during their campaigns – we all get very excited about certain candidates, whether they’re local school board officials or the president. But the moment they take office the relationship basically ends. Or it only continues to the extent that the politician needs to reach out to his or her constituents.

TS: So do you think that social media is the tool we need to make politicians more accountable?

RK: I really believe it can change the world on so many levels, whether it’s politics and government, or humanitarian issues, or green issues.

TS: Is there anything you’re seeing apart from, obviously, PopRule, that you’re really excited about? Any ways people are using the technology or any new technology that’s coming about that you think might have some impact?

RK: Technology doesn’t solve problems, people do. Is crowdsourcing a technology? Not really. Does the underlying technology enable the crowdsourcing – the social networks that crowdsorucing can happen around? Yes. Social media is a reflection, an exteriorization of basic human behavior from the beginning of time. We’ve been in this very one-way world recently, and that’s changing through social media. There was a point at which it was all about corporations running the government and the economy – which they still do, in many respects and the traffic was all one way.

TS: And what do you think the threats are to people using social media in the public interest?

RK: I think one of the threats is this issue of net neutrality and whether or not these tools are going to be in the hands of a select few or have the ability to benefit everyone. There is the threat of further segmenting certain parts of society and leaving them behind. I do believe though that social media is truly democratizing.

Television is a one-way medium. It’s a passive medium. Whereas if I participate in social media or social networks or distributed democracy, I am participating in the process, I have the ability to create, I have the ability to activate, and I have the ability to distribute that action. It requires me to participate. That’s a good thing, and it is the way human beings have always lived. We entered a period for maybe a couple hundred years where it everything was very top-down. And some people were marginalized. Social media is a much more inclusive, participatory model in which people can self-organize.

TS: Where do you see the public interest of social media in a couple of years?

RK: In politics, from a PopRule perspective, we really believe that by the presidential election 2012 every candidate will have an open channel of communication with various issue-based sectors of society through these tools. People will actually contribute to policy, contribute to the shaping of a particular platform that the candidate of that party stands on. They will actually be participating in government like we did when we had tribal councils By 2012 social media will have changed and transformed the entire political process all the way through legislation it’ll be crowdsourced. There will always be representative, I imagine but the people will start to inform the representative on how they want to be represented, as opposed to the other way around.

TS: So essentially we will have come full circle from tribal villages through technology to a position where every elected official is as accountable as a shaman in a tribe.

RK: Yes, I think so. We’re not re-inventing behavior here, we’re re-discovering behavior. In the green sector, for example, there’s a great desire to find solutions – whether it’s climate change, or transportation, or alternatives to fossil fuels, the collective society has the opportunity with social media and its infrastructure to crowdsource solutions and ideas that collectively benefit us. Social media is going to enable us to do it more rapidly than we could possibly do it for some top-down corporate, entrepreneurial or governmental approach.

We need all of the spare brain cycles that everyone has, the wisdom of crowds, collectively, as the human race work through this challenge. There’s no way a corporation or government is going to be able to do this alone. Social media is going to be the tool, the environment, and the guide through which we can achieve things that we couldn’t otherwise achieve. I ve actually been involved with the international water sector for about five, six years and done clean, safe water projects in three developing world countries. Every time I go to those countries it’s a big challenge; it takes 6 weeks and it’s a lot of planning, and you’re going into a place that you don’t know about. Well, because of social media we’re able to find problems and solutions much quicker, we’re able to plan ahead in terms of what’s required, at what point and where around the world, and we can collectively deal with those issues. So when we do show up on the ground we’re actually much more effective. The perfect example of this is that you could go online right now and donate 25 dollars to a social entrepreneur in Bangladesh who needs to buy a couple of sewing machines to start his textile business.