To understand social media, it helps to think about how people lived before. So, a story:

This true story begins simply enough. The couple, Elise and Otto Hampel, lost a family member serving in a war they did not believe in, a war of conquest. They could not explain away or justify his death. In their grief, they looked for a way to protest, but they had no political skills or alliances, no say in the workings of their country. Even though they lived in the capital city, their government was out of reach; Elise and Otto might as well have been mute. And to make matters worse, this was Nazi Germany, one of history’s most brutal dictatorships. They knew the consequences of opposing Hitler.

And yet there in Berlin, in the midst of war and tyranny, they hit upon a mechanism for protest. They began to print messages on postcards, no more than a couple of dozen words on each card, in large block lettering, denouncing the dictatorship. Over many months, Otto left these little messages, each one about the size of a Twitter posting, in public places around the city. Frightened citizens or patriots turned the cards over to the police. Eventually the Gestapo, the secret police, took up the case.

This story is told as fiction in the recently-translated 1947 novel, Every Man Dies Alone, by German writer Hans Fallada.* But the book’s appendix offers pages from Otto and Elise’s real Gestapo files. You can see the couple’s stern mug shots, taken after their arrest, the typed confessions they signed after interrogation and, likely, torture, and Otto’s own handwriting on a few of the postcards themselves. Der Hitler Krieg ist dess Arbeiters Tod, he writes. Hitler’s war is the workers’ death. Seventy years ago this spring, the Hampels were convicted of treason and beheaded in a German prison. If their police files had not come into the hands of the novelist, most likely their story would have been lost.

Fallada’s novel is suspenseful and chilling. Written just months after the war, Every Man Dies Alone is thick with details that hint at the every day, every minute terror of Nazi tyranny. But those self-composed faces in the mug shots and the bold script on the postcards get at something that can outlast terror, something that tyranny seeks to eradicate. And that is the sound of a dissenting voice. The beauty of the novel and its appendix is in large part that in the direst of circumstances there is someone who intends to keep speaking.

But Fallada considered how little these brief messages probably accomplished amidst the chaos of world war. Full of doubt, he raises the question explicitly in a stunning passage—but to say much more about that late chapter would ruin a portion of the novel for you. Imagine the issue yourself: Elise and Otto invented something like Twitter, little messages that they hoped would matter, and sent them out into the world that was not ready to receive them.

Commitment, reflection, writing meant for a public audience–traits that cover a good portion of what we now call social media–produce messages that need somewhere to land. They need a social structure that welcomes and thrives on commitment. The authors of these little messages need a civic and social world to bond to. Reflection, writing, publishing, creating bonds in a functioning civic society, and taking action as a result–the Hampels had no chance to accomplish the fourth and fifth of these steps. There was no functioning civic society to receive them.

Their bravery is indisputable. The justice of their position is undeniable. Their example still shines for us. But their story shows that a citizen needs more than a space for reflection and the courage to speak. Next time I will turn to another historical episode where hopes were pinned on tiny messages, this time Twitter messages submitted into the noise and static of the Internet. This next story will help clarify what else besides a citizen’s thoughtful bravery a society needs.

This post follows up on issues raised in the “Disenchantment, democracy, and blogging” post.

*Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone, trans. Michael Hofmann (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2009).

Why are people so disenchanted with their democracy? Lots of reasons, but over a cup of coffee with a friend I might sketch the troubling model of citizenship I often see around me. My story would go something like this:

Certain kinds of citizens are essentially silent. They vote, or they don’t vote, but otherwise they keep mum. In school they learned a misleadingly rosy and general lesson about how democracy works. Accordingly, they haven’t built public speaking or writing skills and don’t know how to find a regular civic audience. They don’t belong to organizations that help them rise in public to work on an issue. The news they receive is poisoned by partisanship and by gutless journalism that doesn’t dare take a stand, so they doubt their own understanding of the country or they are reduced to polar generalities that don’t explain much. In despair, indifference, cynicism, or fear, they turn to their private lives, where they work and consume entertainments and where, by their silence, they essentially write themselves out of the democracy.*

Their silence is a blessing to the big players who like having free rein in the marketplace and in civic life. And these quiet citizens, understandably, don’t know what to do about it. Who can blame them? And who can blame powerful people for loving to see quiet citizens remain exactly as they are?

But blogging reveals a more interesting model of citizenship; prominent bloggers realized this and wrote enthusiastically about it, especially in the heady early years.** But nobody managed to change the world while typing away in a bathrobe, and our easily bored society, thinking it has sucked all the marrow out of that particular bone, has moved on. Why look back? Blogging is over.

[Time for a second cup of coffee by now, and I’m buying, since you are too good a friend to up and leave just because I won’t stop talking about blogging.]

Why look back, you ask? Here’s why. Because the experience of blogging hints at good things that might someday come. Because people who have had that experience advance toward the messy world instead of backing away from it. Because the experience of blogging has hope and responsibility and adulthood wrapped up in its DNA, and in our dumbed-down and younged-up society it feels good to act like an adult.

I’m not talking about telling everyone about your life on social media, and I’m not necessarily talking about political blogging either. I’m talking about the way a blogger lives, how a blogger reads and thinks, and how a blogger takes other people seriously through reading and writing with them.

But first you have to get that blogging is not the same as a blog. If when I say “blogging” you are only thinking of the posts, you are not a blogger. Blogging is not the the posts that slide down the screen on your laptop.

The posts are just the places where blogging puts its feet down for a moment as it walks along. Blogging is the motion of a writer through experience of self, events, text, and audience. It’s a self-observation, a self-recording, and an engagement with experience and with others, all tracked and promoted and provoked further along its way with texts that are the traces. Blogging is a way of life; it’s a reflective practice that casts off texts as it goes. Because it keeps tossing out these texts, others can play along.

A writer who lives as a blogger lives feels pretty good, even in bad times, because this is a way of being more alive. Still, I can see that you are about done here. You don’t want any more coffee and you have the counter-example in your head. What about the bathrobe bloggers who haven’t changed the world? Or, better yet, what about the social media heroes who have helped overthrow a corrupt government only to find that the next government was its moral twin? You want to ask: Isn’t it time to be done dreaming hopefully about blogging?

Those are the right questions when a friend you care about won’t stop talking about blogging. Hopefully, the friend has a good answer. Because I’ve tried your patience in this long posting, I hope you will return someday to consider my answer.

That answer involves a story or two. There will be corrupt corporations and principled journalists, heroic citizens and vigilant bloggers in this story. Government institutions get challenged; people’s lives are at stake; the quality of democracy is too. As you might guess, that first kind of citizen is not involved. Stay tuned.

*This description is based on an earlier blog post.

**For example, see this important essay by Tim Dunlop.

***This too is based on the final section of an earlier blog post.

In the public space of Istanbul’s Taksim Square, “strangers have discovered one another, their common concerns and collective voice,” says Michael Kimmelman. “We have found ourselves,” says one Gezi Park participant. They found the opportunity there to work out the character of their shared concerns. [Kimmelman’s video report and article]

But for the prime minister, Kimmelman says, “the goal is a scripted public realm.” And not just at Taksim: “Yet another of his projects envisions a hygienic parade ground on the southern outskirts of the city, designed for mass gatherings as if to quarantine protests.” In both cases nothing is meant to be worked out.

Note: Pushing public meetings and protests to the edge of town would recreate a failed government strategy during the early days of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.

But the poets got here first. See W. H. Auden’s razor blade of a poem, six lines in all, called “Epitaph on a Tyrant,” which begins, “Perfection, of a kind, is what he was after…”

(“In Istanbul’s Heart, a Leader’s Obsession, Perhaps an Achilles’ Heel,” NY Times, 6/8/13, and video)

Writer Barry Lopez proposed some time ago that a university have a student with appropriate skills receive a stipend to do research, record data, and inform the public about the natural environment of the campus. There would be a title like University Naturalist or College Naturalist. Over time, data about the ecology of the campus and the region would accumulate, and people might take a wider interest in both. I think his proposal was in the final chapters of Crossing Open Ground. I haven’t heard of any campuses that have picked up on this idea.

One other virtue of the idea is that it models a public writing role for students on campus. So much of the work they do is never read outside the confines of the classroom. Surely some of the work students do could be shaped so as to have value for a wider audience. Imagine how much of the alienation of higher education would be drained away if that were so.

PS. Here is an earlier blog entry with a somewhat different brainstorm about Lopez’s idea:

I was reading the last essay in Barry Lopez’s essay collection called Crossing Open Ground yesterday when I came across his suggestion, in the final essay, that a university appoint a campus naturalist to study, preserve knowledge about, and teach about the natural history of the campus. I thought immediately of the St. Joseph River here at IUSB. Said by some to be polluted so thoroughly that one shouldn’t touch it, the river glides past our campus and through downtown South Bend, forming the scenic core of the city.

Imagine a botany course that studied the natural history of the river, posting its findings on a weblog every few days, and accompanied by a history class that placed the river in the context of North American history, perhaps for a couple of weeks, and an anthropology class that also had a unit contextualing the river from that discipline’s perspective, and a sociology class that studied the social systems that spring up around rivers, and so forth. All of them could post their findings on the weblog, and then shape the best of it into a more lasting presentation on a wiki site. Link the whole package to the university’s home page, so there was almost always new content there from student-conducted research, along with all sorts of other new content that ought to be generated on a campus weblog. I would think that other campuses would send students to the site, high schools would send their students to the site, regional newspapers would visit and write stories, donors would pop by once in awhile to see how their money is being spent and see new things each time they visit, and so forth. And students would see that knowledge is something people like them make, preserve, present, not consume.

I like that last sentence: “And students would see that knowledge is something people like them make, preserve, present, not consume.”

May 10

• Publishing in the past
  • I’m just wondering whether Fargo will let a fellow publish in the past. I backdated this posting quite a bit as a test. Wonder, too, if the RSS will notice it. PS. Testing Jeffrey’s script for adding a tweet link at the top of a post–a success. Now testing an informal tag+keyword search script–it works. Now testing Theron’s tag script.

Just thinking out loud here. Based on my use of the Fargo outliner so far, I have this to say:

1. I tried outlines before because someone I respected spoke up for them in public for years. Until now, I never really got the point.

2. As a outliner newbie, I’m happy about the outlining functions. They seem clear and practical to me as a solo user. They bring organizing and composing into plainer view for me as a writer. The ease of web publishing is very useful, too.

• a. Two things that would help me–maybe just me, maybe nobody else–would be, eventually, no rush, i) to have a word count option on an outline, and ii) to be able to paste in a paragraph from Word and have it appear as a single headline instead of as a bunch of headlines. Item ii is kind of big for me since I have to work in Word quite a bit.

3. For years Dave Winer has been explaining how important it is to send content to Twitter from one’s own realm, rather than to live as a writer inside Twitter. I’ve been utterly persuaded and I have to guess Fargo is heading there. This seems vital. I hope I’m reading the right tea leaves.

4. I have a very strong sense that collaboration is going to be one of the huge features here–more likely, a whole collection of features. I’m very eager to see that unfold–maybe hungry is a better word.

The concept: Build a group of 250 donors who will each contribute the cost of one native spring-flowering tree a year for five years. Plant care-free native spring-flowering trees in great numbers along the river in South Bend. Within a few years the flowering season for dogwoods and redbuds would become very extravagant. The river during those weeks would become a very desirable destination, among the most noteworthy sights to be seen in the region. Beauty leading to renewed community pride, new economic activity…

Native trees

• Low needs for care
• Longevity and high rate of survival

Spring flowering

• Extravagance of display in spring
• Simultaneous flowering before their leaves come out–a very fancy showing

Likely varieties

• Dogwood
• Redbud

Budget

• A group of 250 donors
• Commitment to sponsor one tree a year for five years
• Planting costs covered by the city? By grants?

Research needed

• Extra care needed the first year after planting? Extra watering?
• Which particular native species are best? Which varieties of those species?
• How to evaluate the best places to plant these varieties?

Likely or possible partners

• City of South Bend
• Neighboring towns along the river.
  • Do the other towns and the county handle their own projects or is it a regional project?
• The county.
• Botanical team.
• Landscaping and planting team.
• Fund-raising team.
• Publicity team.
• Donate-a-tree campaign can be shared by community groups–churches, youth groups, schools, seniors groups, etc.

Ways for people to feel a shared sense of pride and ownership in the project

• Website of donors
• Photo gallery contributed by community members
• Annual photo or painting prize for showing off the spring flowering along the river
• Other ways?

Strategy ideas

• Start with one stretch of the river so the impact is visible very soon?
• Plant somewhat larger trees from the start?

Brainstorming about other aspects of the project

• Link to Bike the Bend or other community event?
• Draw the concept out into neighborhoods with more trees or with front-yard displays of bulbs that flower at the same time?
• The seed of a springtime festival of some kind?

This outline also appears in an online version that will reflect new ideas and updates, posted here. It will not display in Internet Explorer.

In a 2013 Indiana University commencement address, a witty and irreverent David Brooks asked that question. He considered the fate of people who take all their values from the marketplace, filling their minds, he said, with a “mental materialism” that infects every aspect of their lives. Of that sort of materialism, he said:

• If it’s all you’ve got, you lose the ability to speak in a sophisticated moral language, you have trouble thinking outside the categories of the market. You turn into shrewd animals, crafty self-preserving creatures who are adept at playing the game and who turn everything into a game.*

A person doesn’t just shake off this disease, he implied. A person must have a contrasting source of strong values and voices:

• So it’s important to have a counterculture. Many of us found our counterculture at university.

This is not “the counterculture” of the 1960s but the long heritage of writers and activists who provide other ways of thinking–kinds of introspection and moral reflection, kinds of commitment not limited to the logic of buying and selling. For Brooks, by reading and rereading a person can draw on elements of this heritage over the course of a lifetime:

• And if you do, you’ll find yourself living by a moral logic that is completely different than the logic of the shrewd animal.

*These comments take place from 14:12 to 16:25 in the video.

Reading the unfolding story of the Fargo outliner in its Docs pages, the part where the “post to WordPress” feature is unpacked, I notice this sentence:

• You can use the outliner to organize a library of posts you want to be able to access quickly.

Now, to me, that sounds like the curtain in front of a showroom window just before a new model is announced. I start thinking about what might be behind the window. Blog posts, published over weeks and months via Fargo, yet organized into something larger. A way to bring the blogger’s ramble–the best parts of it, anyway–into some kind of shape.

I’m thinking: book manuscript, tech manual, giant company report. Book manuscript.

I’m thinking:

The outliner publishes in time but organizes in space, making easier the birthing of these fraternal twins: blog and book manuscript. Via outlining, the practical, structural kinship of blog posts and book manuscript is revealed.

[…because some book projects are strengthened by the involvement of online readers along the way.]

I am exploring specific uses for the new Fargo outliner. For example:

–I have an annual report that is easier to complete in January when I always have a convenient note-taking tool available on the different computers I use. But now, having a single file, updated automatically, no matter which machine I use is, is great.

–Because it lives online, this outliner works very well for research notes involving linked, online sources. And again, one file, different machines, auto-update is a real step forward for a person with less than perfect organizing skills, like me.

But the thing that made me want to jot down some ideas here in this blog post is this one, which I hadn’t imagined until today:

–As a teacher, I can use Fargo’s Reader to publish class notes that students can use as a skeleton or grid for their own in-class note-taking or out-of-class studying. I can guide their efforts with the grid of ideas or questions contained in the outline.

–As semesters go by, I can easily continue to improve the outlines for a course.

–Furthermore, students could fill out the details from an outline and share it as a learning resource for classmates in a course. [Any team of people could also do that in a workplace, building a reference or training manual for key elements of their work.]

–if I asked students to fill out the details of an outline as we work on a course topic, I will see what they understand and where they are struggling. While any course assignment does this, an outline gives structure to the content, so it might be easier to see areas of strength and weakness.

–My favorite of these last few ideas is this: School has enough wasted motion, enough going-nowhere assignments. But if students build outlines of course content, they can pass those along to the next semester’s students, who can use and refine them, then pass them on again. They make something that serves a living purpose, which feels good and is unlike the feeling one gets from too much of school anyway.

It’s fun to think about uses for a writing tool that helps to foreground (at lightning speed) the structure of content. That structural aspect seems very positive for clear thinking and efficient learning.