"“Wellman is finding that Twitter isn’t flat,” Vidantam says—as if Tom Friedman’s chimerical “flatness” (the analytic value of which has proven to be nil) is the only possible quality of transformative political agency.

In last year’s revolutions, it wasn’t flatness that gave social media its power. It was its hyperlocality, its novel blending of intimate communities and witness at a distance.

Other work in which Wellman is involved argues for the richness of real-world community life that gets instantiated in Twitter. In a paper called “Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community,” Wellman & his coauthors find that Twitter networks are “the basis for a real community, even though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities. There they conclude that “studying Twitter is useful for understanding how people use new communication technologies to form new social connections and maintain existing ones.”

Here’s the thing: Twitter is part of the “real world.”"

"The trick to sharing "best practices" is to stop doing that. Instead, share "our practices" and let ideas meet, collide, mix, and take root differently in each place. The trick to "scaling up" is the same - stop trying. If BMW has to "Americanize" their cars in order to sell them in the United States (adding cup holders, etc), what makes people like Intel or the KIPP or TFA foundations so arrogant as to imagine that they can replicate themselves among vastly different communities?

Instead we imagine, attempt, describe, converse. We pass along concepts, not plans. We share observations, not blueprints. We accept that whether it is a child or a school, we can not evaluate anything with a checklist or a score, but only with very human description.

That's a less rational world which requires more humane effort, and it contains troubling mountains and deep valleys because it is not flat. But it is the world in which we actually live."

"The Flat World Friedman at first advocated, & which he now treats like gravity—a force of nature outside our control—is a choice…a set of policies designed to benefit multinational corporations. Globalization is more politely refer to as free trade, which is where multinationals convince governments to drop trade barriers so that they—corporatists—are free to move their capital around & invest it in ways that amass the greatest amount in their hands. This means that in the US, corporations can avoid taxes, unions, environmental regulations, & active oppostion to their policies by locating manufacturing & other facilities in countries w/ lower pay & less controls.<br />
<br />
Free trade has also come along w/ Devil’s bargain in the US, too, where states take on more the look-and-feel of third world nations by advertising themselves as ‘right to work’ states, which means that they have made union activities more difficult. Consider…Boeing planning to move jobs from WA to South Carolina."

[Don't fully agree with all that Boyd writes here, not Friedman for that matter, but this is good.]<br />
<br />
"We have a culture where individualism has become so pathological that we cannot heap up our collective experience as victims and craft it into solidarity. As Steinbeck said, ‘Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires’, which is why so many poor people in America vote for the GOP: they identify with the rich, even though the rich are screwing them over.<br />
<br />
But a sufficient dose of austerity — once the street lights are turned off, school class size grows to 50+ because of layoffs, and cities and town cannot afford to rebuild streets after floods and fires — that might start to mobilize people."

"It looks, said Srivastava, as if “what is happening in America is a loss of self-confidence. We don’t want America to lose self-confidence. Who else is there to take over America’s moral leadership? American’s leadership was never because you had more arms. It was because of ideas, imagination, and meritocracy.” If America turns away from its core values, he added, “there is nobody else to take that leadership. Do we want China as the world’s moral leader? No. We desperately want America to succeed.”"

Count on Steve Miranda to save me the trouble of responding to Tom Friedman's clueless column from the other day:

"And so another generation will replay the story of Sisyphus, pushing that boulder—with tenacity, seriousness, ferocity, and quiet heroism—up the hill, only to watch it roll back down again. There seems to be no sense here that the fundamental assumption driving the system—that teenagers should be coerced by punishments and rewards to learn skills and concepts that have no meaning to their lives—is flawed. Instead, Friedman implies, we need to just work harder!

I have no interest in playing the role of Sisyphus. I’m working to gather people who want to build something new and beautiful, and if you want to join us, there’s room for you. Our work is not about tenacity and ferocity, it’s about joy and community. And I’m telling you, it’s really fun."

"What leaders "lead" are yesterday's organizations. But yesterday's organizations — from carmakers, to investment banks, to the healthcare system, to the energy industry, to the Senate itself — are broken. Today's biggest human challenge isn't leading broken organizations slightly better. It's building better organizations in the first place. It isn't about leadership: it's about "buildership", or what I often refer to as Constructivism. Leadership is the art of becoming, well, a leader. Constructivism, in contrast, is the art of becoming a builder — of new institutions. Like artistic Constructivism rejected "art for art's sake," so economic Constructivism rejects leadership for the organization's sake — instead of for society's. Builders forge better building blocks to construct economies, polities, & societies. They're the true prime movers, the fundamental causes of prosperity. They build the institutions that create new kinds of leaders — as well as managers, workers, & customers."

"Tom Friedman's column from yesterday on education is perverse in every facet, but this line made me smile: With Wall Street’s decline, though, many more educated and idealistic youth want to try teaching. Ah yes, those "idealists" who were in recent years going to Wall Street, for idealistic reasons, and have now thought better of it, on equally idealistic terms. Can we have some of those?"

"The other day I was thinking about how I’m going to turn forty soon, how scary that is and what it means going forward. And one of the things I thought, when I was thinking about this, was, “I’m going to have to stop picking on Thomas Friedman after I turn forty. Forty is way too old to still be picking on a guy just because he happens to have been born with a big hunk of granite in his metaphor center.”

"Like George Bush, he's in reality-making business. In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president and country's most important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the proce

"As I attend my 2nd conference in 2 weeks where keynote speaker is Daniel Pink, I feel duty bound to share my thoughts on why his popular pop-business book, "A Whole New Mind," may be the worst book of the 21st Century."

"you can drop all this crap about Tom Friedman, "digital natives," millenials, and every other damn argument that is based on the idea that something fundamentally changed in education the day flickr was launched"

"What if the old industrial schooling system is as threatened by open source as the old proprietary software system?" + "The flat world is different. The flat world really does reward individuality, creativity, freedom, initiative."