For this week’s assignment to analyze a Wikipedia article, I chose my hometown Charlottesville, Virginia—which is also apparently hometown to the world’s worst motto, “a great place to live for all of our citizens.”  [The motto wasn’t cited and a Google search only produced this equally bad rendition.]

Before reading the article, I wrote down some of the points I would expect to be touched on in a decent citizen write-up of the town.  These included significant historical landmarks in the area such as TJ’s Monticello, Monroe’s Ash Lawn, and the Rotunda; the University of Virginia; the unique political make-up of the town—i.e. a liberal haven within a conservative state; the contentious civil rights history of Charlottesville public schools; and maybe some puff stats like it having the most restaurants per capita (or at least that’s what we all say) and that it is ranked the best place to live in the nation.

Upon reading the article, I thought it captured a lot of facts about Charlottesville but was lacking in narrative and poorly organized.  For example, there is a pretty extensive section on Charlottesville’s climate with a chart of the average temperatures every month, but there was no discussion about the political leanings of the area. Charlottesville plays a unique role along with Northern Virginia and Roanoke as one of the three main Democratic engines in the state.

The article has a pretty elaborate “History” section that elaborates on Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison’s roots in the area, the origins of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the period of massive resistance in 1958 when Charlottesville shut down its public school system rather than integrate.  However, the existence of the Astronomy Observatory and a list of major employers are also tacked onto the end of this section rather inexplicably. Other sections are choppy with little logical flow.

I noticed a few omissions in the data. WUVA 92.7 KISS FM is left off an otherwise exhaustive list of radio stations (odd because it is certainly one of the most popular stations in the area.) Friday’s After Five, a weekly concert on the Downtown Mall that attracts thousands of people, didn’t make the “Attractions and Culture” section.

Sourcing seems fair enough, but is limited to online sources.  The Hook, a local newspaper, has the largest share of citations, though it is not the most widely circulated newspaper.

Charlottesville has a complex relationship with Albemarle County. While it is an independent city with an independent City Council and School Board, the city is embedded within the county and thus the two have many shared attractions and functions.  The article mentions this relationship but is inconsistent with its application.  For example, the list of the largest employers only pulls from those physically located within the city limits, while there are much larger ones a mile or two out that employ vast amounts of city residents. Conversely, the list of notable residents includes Sissy Spacek and John Grisham, who both live outside city limits.

The graphics on the site are decent except for a random map titled Census Map that provides no useful information apart from the location of several vein-like creeks that I can only imagine depict the Rivanna Watershed.  If so, it should be re-titled.

My favorite part of the article was the discussion page—especially fun because I recognized some of the contributors.  Here’s where I found interesting commentary on the birthplace of Meriwether Lewis, discussion about prejudiced comments that had been removed, and a discussion of who should and should not make the “Notable Persons” list.

I did learn a few things from Charlottesville’s Wikipedia page and I love its collaborative nature.  But perhaps it’s expecting too much to hope to see a entry worthy of a traditional publishing house.

Before reading In the Plex by Steven Levy and certainly before taking Nicco’s class, I was happily stumbling though life, ignorant of the intuition behind PageRank (Google’s search algorithm) or why triathlon gear ads kept popping up on the sites I visited (how did the Wash Post know I was shopping for wetsuits????)  Armed with some understanding, I now feel a mixture of awe at the dimensions of connectivity the young founders and engineers at Google were able to conceptualize and capitalize on and alarm for what an abuse of such information could entail.

Levy walks us through Google’s conception at a Stanford computer science doctoral lab, paying particular attention to the developmental psychologies of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.  Larry is the ambitious, big picture thinker; Sergey the brainy, technical guy. Both men are products of the Montessori school system—a pre-elementary school learning philosophy centered on independence and student choice. [My Montessori friends in Charlottesville learned to sew before they learned the alphabet.]  Levy thinks this “follow your own interests” approach contributed significantly to the development of key Google attributes as well as to the creative, collegiate culture at the Googleplex.  A large part of Google’s success, he claims, stems from this open, collaborative, comfortable culture.  “We just hired people like us,” Larry remarks in the book.

Google was celebrated in its early years for its ingenuity and its focus on product, not profit.  Taking from the academic citation model, Google’s big innovation was to use inbound links as a measure of legitimacy.  Many other factors contribute to its PageRank algorithm, but this one in particular helped shake up traditional notions of legitimacy.  For the first time, heavily-trafficked blogs and the open source encyclopedia Wikipedia were competing favorably with institutions like the New York Times.

Google search made relevant information instantly accessible and Larry and Sergey put a premium on search’s utility to the user.  If the user wasn’t happy; they weren’t doing something right. With their AdWords and AdSense advertizing mechanisms, Google still managed to keep this promise.  By capitalizing on the Long Tail of advertizing, Google made boatloads of money and empowered individuals to advertize while retaining the trademark austerity of their search page and the relative unobtrusiveness of the ads. [With Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick and its extensive use of cookies to track user preferences, this integrity gets a little blurry in my opinion.]

If there is a model of a happy Google user, it is my mom.  For her, Google search is more of a friend or confidant than binary code masking a great number of electrical impulses. Mom types elaborate, perfectly punctuated queries into Google, “If one feels feverish but is not running a fever, what could this mean?” Amazingly and to Google’s great credit, she gets accurate results.

This user focus is, in my opinion, the essential and most pure component of Google’s outlook and what hopefully will prevent it from vast abuse of private data.  It is also an emphasis that the government should emulate.  Then-candidate Barack Obama stressed exactly this point in his 2007 visit to the Googleplex.

The kind of grassroots participation and enthusiasm that the Internet engenders (and Google Search depends on) thrives within campaigns but is too-often snuffed out once the electeds reach office. Levy describes the paralysis former Google staffers felt when the campaign was over and they moved into the White House. He quotes Katie Stanton, “Working in government is like running a marathon. Blindfolded. Wearing sandbags.” She was referring to the restrictions on social media due to possible FOIA requests, but also to the stifling bureaucracy preventing innovation, efficiency, and change.

I worked on Capitol Hill for three years and often my job felt more like managing constituent expectations than learning from or incorporating them.  I’ve been following the new Obama Administration initiative to collect input from the people We The People with avid interest for this reason.  It is a really noble experiment (even though thus far, the legalize marijuana folks seem to be sucking up all the air.)

With 64.8% of the current market share for search, Google’s motto of “do no evil” is being challenged by its establishment role in the Internet scene.  We will have to wait and see if Google’s user focus can keep ‘em honest.

Clay Shirky’s 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations describes the power of technology in the form of online tools and platforms to aggregate public interest, not merely for group formation but for action.

Through an anecdote about a railroad superintendent devising a management structure that will allow trains to run on time, safely, Shirky describes the development of the traditional hierarchical management structure for running an organization—a structure where controlling responsibility and communication was the only way to make even a large organization manageable.  This was the model for most of the institutions of the 20^th century.

Social platforms enable a new model for organization—one that doesn’t just lower transaction costs, it practically eliminates them. Online tools such as Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and blogs provide a platform for easy sharing, organization, and often enough, action.

Side note: Chris Anderson’s concept of the long tail applies this notion of minuscule transaction costs to supplier markets.  Companies facing transaction costs have traditionally operated under a 20-80 model, whereby twenty percent of goods usually generate eighty percent of revenue.  Consequently, they only stock their shelves with “hit” goods that will sell at a higher rate.  In a world of minuscule transaction costs, companies can afford to provide a much higher selection of goods, thereby tapping into the revenue that falls under the “long tail” of the distribution curve [see below].

Shirky calls the boom in the accessibility of finding and sharing information “mass amateurization” and describes in great detail its contribution to the erosion of the traditional journalism and publishing sectors.  This hits home especially hard for me.  Before switching professions, my father was the political reporter for my hometown’s newspaper for many years.  What worried our family most for his career wasn’t actually mass amateurization, but what enabled it—the rise of online news sources and the subsequent scramble to keep newspapers profitable.  Papers began firing journalists and hiring marketers, at considerable cost to their underlying duty to inform and report the news to the public.

As a result of this mass amateurization, Shirky describes how the reining philosophy on publishing has changed from filter-then-publish to publish-then-filter.  He acknowledges that a lot of this “user-generated content” is nothing short of hyperpersonal drivel and that it can generally be filtered out with the right tools, but he doesn’t touch on one aspect of mass amateurization that I find to be particularly detrimental—the dismantling of mainstream, syndicated news sources has brought the polarization and self-selectivity of viewpoints.  Because many traditional journalistic expectations can be skirted by amateurs, people are increasingly reading biased accounts of events and forming their own opinions from those of like-minded, editorializing partisans.  Instead of opening up channels of communication for constructive debate and engagement, like-minded groups are forming that further the erosion of civility and bipartisanship in politics.

I do agree with Shirky that overall, these changes we are experiencing in the ease of formation and subsequent strength in action are beneficial.  Shirky cites the collective action behind removing the sleazy cardinal from his leadership role in the Catholic Church and the power of peaceful protest via flash mob in Leipzig and Belarus in pressuring undemocratic governments to bend to the will of the people or crumble entirely.

One arena to watch closely is our own legislative system of government.  A hierarchical power structure in Congress based not on merit, but on seniority; a dangerous and overused precedent for filibustering; increased polarization due not only to the afore-mentioned ease of interest group formation (i.e. Tea Party) but also due to gerrymandering; and a rigid structure and rules system that will not change unless the Constitution itself is amended all stand firmly in the way of the sort of the positive collective action Shirky claims will wipe-out inflexible institutions.  This fight won’t be pretty.

Welcome to the initial entry of my blog, formed in accordance with the syllabus for Nicco Mele’s class on the evolving digital age at the Harvard Kennedy School.  Over the next semester, I’ll post analysis and commentary on readings and trying to tease-out out my own identity and utility as a big, bad “blogger” [scary Dracula cackle!]  You can also find me on Twitter @Rivannarvr