. This review appears in the upcoming print issue (now online)
Not many people who
write about the future
frame their argument
in the context of rabbinical
teachings from
the first century AD.
But in the closing pages of
Rewire, Ethan
Zuckerman quotes Rabbi Tarfon: “It’s not
incumbent on us to finish the work, but neither
are we free to refrain from beginning it.”
Zuckerman, director of the Civic Media
Lab at MIT and founder of the widely read
website
Global Voices, clearly recognizes
the rhythm of history. In
that way,
Rewire marks a refreshing
shift in tone from most other
books in the futurist genre, which
tend to read as if time had only
just started and as if the issues
that we face today had never
before confronted humankind.
Zuckerman’s argument is simple:
Now that we can all connect
via low-cost global communications tools,
we must use those tools to achieve positive
change. That’s what Zuckerman has aimed
to do with Global Voices, an online service
that provides news and opinion about more
than 100 countries around the globe. The
site, which offers content produced by in-country
volunteers, grew out of his concern
about the parochial nature of most print
and broadcast news.
Since launching Global Voices in 2004,
Zuckerman has learned a humbling lesson:
Just because we can gather information
from every corner of the earth faster and
more easily than ever before doesn’t mean
that anyone will pay attention to that information.
Internet technologies won’t make
people care about world events if they aren’t
already prone to do so. “I had hoped Global
Voices would influence agenda setting. …
I believed that by providing coverage of
events that other media outlets had missed,
we would help challenge the imbalance in
attention,” Zuckerman writes. In fact, he
notes, journalists today use the site for purposes
that don’t always reflect his lofty goal:
“It means that Global Voices offers reporters
a way to get quotes from countries experiencing
sudden turmoil, rather than using
us to find important unreported stories
before they break.”
Rewire is at its best when it focuses on
the dynamic interaction between digital
tools and those who use them. Zuckerman
observes how the choices that engineers
make can facilitate serendipity or ease the
process of making new connections. One
important contribution that the book makes
is to help nontechnical readers truly see the
way that sites do (or do not) respect their
wisdom and their needs. Zuckerman cites
Jane Jacobs’s views on city planning, and
his book resembles her work in its focus
on helping ordinary residents of the “digital
city," as he calls it, better understand
how their surroundings—digital surroundings, in this
case—shape their behavior.
But in paying homage to
Jacobs, Zuckerman doesn’t go
far enough. He stops short of
directly challenging the wisdom
of the new digital-city planners.
Jacobs didn’t play nice with
Robert Moses, the legendary
New York City “master builder” who became
her nemesis. She organized take-to-the-street confrontations to stop him. In
her books, she didn’t mince words. When
she thought that the big shots were wrong,
she said so—and offered strong arguments
to counter their top-down approaches.
Zuckerman, by contrast, seems more
intent on persuading Web designers and
online managers to do the right thing—to
“curate,” “translate,” and “contextualize,”
as he puts it. He doesn’t ask the reader to
consider the structural impediments, the
competing motivations, or the basic power
struggles that might stand in the way of
individuals’ use of Internet tools to foster
greater engagement or activism.
Such faith in the goodwill of engineers
and designers doesn’t seem adequate.
Zuckerman nods to the power of manifestos
(including the one that launched Global
Voices), but in the end his message is not
one of revolution. Instead, he merely calls
for a more deliberate application of the
lessons that we’ve learned over the past two
decades. That’s a good idea, to be sure: All
of us who shop on, get news from, seek a
job through, or connect with friends via the
Web should have a better understanding of
how design choices shape our behavior. Yet
we’ll need more than mere understanding if
we are going to rewire our own behavior,
and not just have it rewired for us.
---
In a twitter conversation with the author following the posting of this review on SSIR, I noted my frustration with the last chapter of the book. To me, that chapter reads like it was written by an editor - suddenly Zuckerman's personal voice is lost and we're given bulleted lists of things businesses could do to follow his advice. He noted that, yes, that last chapter was shaped in such a way to appeal specifically to business book readers. I laughed to myself about this - I am so tired of lists, 2 x 2s, sidebars, and icons in books, a structure so common in "business books" it's hard to find actual paragraphs anymore. I could go on about this but I won't. My advice - read Zuckerman's book up to the last chapter.
