A Shift In Power

Warren Kinsella: Ipso facto, voters have misgivings about all of the parties.  So, none of the parties is definitively ahead.

The rest of Kinsella's analysis talks about how the Convervatives will become competitive again, with the focus being on someone eventually becoming the people's choice.  That's how the system works, isn't it?  You gotta have a government, it's gonna be a party, so it's just a matter of choice.

Martin Regg Cohn: Canadians everywhere — everyone, it seems, except the federal government — are moving into that political vacuum. A lack of leadership and an absence of empathy have left the field wide open for others to respond decisively at every level of government, and especially at ground level.

This in response to an emerging reality:

An urgent humanitarian response is only human, but it is not enough. We must also reduce the causes of mass migrations (conflict and chaos), and avoid making those migrations even more dangerous (by tempting people to start a stampede) because people will die in the crush, drown on the high seas, suffocate in sealed trucks.

See, we can't keep playing the starfish-throwing game and patting ourselves on the back righteously - it isn't enough.  

The world is changing - literally - and it's impacting us all in more pervasive ways than at least we in the West are used to.

Which means that the way governance works needs to change and adapt.  As happens always, it's an organic process - as existing systems fall behind need, others step up to fill their place.

We live in interesting times...

Paradise Lost?

Or perhaps, knowledge gained?  It's a tricky business, understanding...

Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past

By Marlene Zuk

The Kobal Collection, Hammer

Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. (1966)

 

The first thing you have to do to study 4,000-year-old DNA is take off your clothes.

 

I am standing with Oddný Ósk Sverrisdóttir in the airlock room next to the ancient-DNA laboratory at Uppsala University, in Sweden, preparing to see how she and her colleagues examine the bones of human beings and the animals they domesticated thousands of years ago. These scientists are looking for signs of changes in the genes that allow us to consume dairy products past the age of weaning, when all other mammals lose the ability to digest lactose, the sugar present in milk. After that time, dairy products can cause stomach upsets. But in some groups of humans, particularly those from Northern Europe and parts of Africa, lactase—the enzyme that breaks down lactose—lingers throughout life, allowing them to take advantage of a previously unusable food source. Sverrisdóttir and her Ph.D. supervisor, Anders Götherström, study how and when this development occurred, and how it is related to the domestication of cows for their meat and milk. They examine minute changes in genes obtained from radiocarbon-dated bones from archaeological sites around Europe.

 

The first step is to extract the DNA from the bones. But when examining genes from other humans, you must avoid contaminating the samples with your own genetic material. Sverrisdóttir, a tall, blond Icelandic woman who looks like my image of a Valkyrie, at least if Valkyries are given to cigarette breaks and bouts of cheerful profanity, has brought a clean set of clothes for me to put on under the disposable spacesuitlike outfit I need to wear in the lab. I have to remove everything except my underwear, including my jewelry. Götherström says it is the only time he ever takes off his wedding ring. I don the clean outfit, followed by the white papery suit, a face mask that includes a transparent plastic visor over my eyes, latex gloves, and a pair of slip-on rubber shoes from a pile kept in the neverland between the lab and the outside world. Anything else that goes into the lab—a flash drive for the computer, say—cannot go back in once it has gone out, to prevent secondary contamination of the facility. Finally, I put on a hairnet and tuck my hair underneath.

 

We enter the lab, where the first thing we do is stretch another pair of gloves over the ones we just put on. Sverrisdóttir takes out a plastic bin of bone samples, each in its own zip-top bag. The bones themselves have been bleached and then irradiated with ultraviolet light to remove surface contamination. Before setting the bin on the counter, she wipes the surface with ethanol, followed by a weak bleach solution, and then with more ethanol. Apparently the saying that one can't be too careful is taken literally in this lab. "We all have to be kind of OCD to do this work," says Sverrisdóttir, smiling. Or at least I think she is smiling under her mask.

 

Enlarge Image

Engine Collective for The Chronicle Review, original image from Gianni Dagli Orti, Corbis

 

 

Engine Collective for The Chronicle Review, original image from Gianni Dagli Orti, Corbis

Engine Collective for The Chronicle Review, original image from Gianni Dagli Orti, Corbis

 

To obtain the DNA, the bones are drilled and the powder from the interior is processed so that the genetic sequences inside are amplified—that is, replicated to yield a larger amount of material for easier analysis. Some bones are more likely to be fruitful than others. Most of the samples are about 4,000 years old, but one of them is around 16,000 years old. It has already been rendered into powder, and I look at it closely, but it doesn't seem any different from the others. One of the pieces is a flat section of skull, while others are sections of leg or arm bones, or a bit of pelvis. Sverrisdóttir and I wonder briefly who all these people were, and what their lives were like. The details of their experiences, of course, are lost forever. But the signature of what they were able to eat and drink, and how their diet differed from that of their—our—ancestors, is forever recorded in their DNA.

 

Other than simple curiosity about our ancestors, why do we care whether an adult from 4,000 years ago could drink milk without getting a stomachache? The answer is that these samples are revolutionizing our ideas about the speed at which our evolution has occurred, and this knowledge, in turn, has made us question the idea that we are stuck with ancient genes, and ancient bodies, in a modern environment. We can use this ancient DNA to show that we are not shackled by it.

 

Because we often think about evolution over the great sweep of time, in terms of minuscule changes over millions of years, when we went from fin to scaly paw to opposable-thumbed hand, it is easy to assume that evolution requires eons. That assumption makes us feel that humans, who have gone from savanna to asphalt in a mere few thousand years, must be caught out by the pace of modern life, when we'd be much better suited to something more familiar in our history. We're fat and unfit, we have high blood pressure, and we suffer from ailments that we suspect our ancestors never worried about, like post-traumatic-stress disorder and AIDS. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist writing in Glamour magazine, counsels that if you "feel less than human," constantly stressed and run-down, you need to remember that "the way so many of us are living now goes against our nature. Biologically, we modern Homo sapiens are a lot like our cave woman ancestors: We're animals. Primates, in fact. And we have many primal needs that get ignored. That's why the prescription for good health may be as simple as asking, What would a cave woman do?"

 

 

"Our bodies evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and they're perfectly suited to the life we led for 99 percent of that time living in small hunting and gathering bands," writes a commenter on the New York Times health blog Well.

 

It's hard to escape the recurring conviction that somewhere, somehow, things have gone wrong. In a time with unprecedented ability to transform the environment, to make deserts bloom and turn intercontinental travel into the work of a few hours, we are suffering from diseases our ancestors of a few thousand years ago, much less our prehuman selves, never knew: diabetes, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that for the first time in history, the current generation of children will not live as long as their parents, probably because obesity and associated maladies are curtailing the promise of modern medicine.

 

Some of our nostalgia for a simpler past is just the same old amnesia that every generation has about the good old days. The ancient Romans fretted about the young and their callous disregard for the hard-won wisdom of their elders. Several 16th- and 17th-century writers and philosophers famously idealized the Noble Savage, a being who lived in harmony with nature and did not destroy his surroundings. Now we worry about our kids as "digital natives," who grow up surrounded by electronics and can't settle their brains sufficiently to concentrate on walking the dog without simultaneously texting and listening to their iPods.

 

To think of ourselves as misfits in our own time and of our own making flatly contradicts what we now understand about the way evolution works.

 

Another part of the feeling that the modern human is misplaced in urban society comes from the realization that people are still genetically close not only to the Romans and the 17th-century Europeans, but also to Neanderthals, to the ape ancestors Holland mentions, and to the small bands of early hominids who populated Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is indeed during the blink of an eye, relatively speaking, that people settled down from nomadism to permanent settlements, developed agriculture, lived in towns and then cities, and acquired the ability to fly to the moon, create embryos in the lab, and store enormous amounts of information in a space the size of our handily opposable thumbs.

 

Given this whiplash-inducing rate of recent change, it's reasonable to conclude that we aren't suited to our modern lives, and that our health, our family lives, and perhaps our sanity would all be improved if we could live the way early humans did. Our bodies and minds evolved under a particular set of circumstances, the reasoning goes, and in changing those circumstances without allowing our bodies time to evolve in response, we have wreaked the havoc that is modern life.

 

In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello, president of the renowned Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, called "paleofantasies." She was referring to stories about human evolution based on limited fossil evidence, but the term applies just as well to the idea that our modern lives are out of touch with the way human beings evolved and that we need to redress the imbalance. Newspaper articles, morning TV, dozens of books, and self-help advocates promoting slow-food or no-cook diets, barefoot running, sleeping with our infants, and other measures large and small claim that it would be more natural, and healthier, to live more like our ancestors. A corollary to this notion is that we are good at things we had to do back in the Pleistocene, like keeping an eye out for cheaters in our small groups, and bad at things we didn't, like negotiating with people we can't see and have never met.

 

I am all for examining human health and behavior in an evolutionary context, and part of that context requires understanding the environment in which we evolved. At the same time, discoveries like those from Sverrisdóttir's lab in Sweden make it clear that we cannot assume that evolution has stopped for humans, or that it can take place only ploddingly, with tiny steps over hundreds of thousands of years. In just the last few years we have added the ability to function at high altitudes and resistance to malaria to the list of rapidly evolved human characteristics, and the stage is set for many more. We can even screen the entire genome, in great gulps of DNA, looking for the signature of rapid selection in our genes.

 

To think of ourselves as misfits in our own time and of our own making flatly contradicts what we now understand about the way evolution works—namely, that rate matters. That evolution can be fast, slow, or in-between, and understanding what makes the difference is far more enlightening, and exciting, than holding our flabby modern selves up against a vision—accurate or not—of our well-muscled and harmoniously adapted ancestors.

 

The paleofantasy is a fantasy in part because it supposes that we humans, or at least our protohuman forebears, were at some point perfectly adapted to our environments. We apply this erroneous idea of evolution's producing the ideal mesh between organism and surroundings to other life forms, too, not just to people. We seem to have a vague idea that long long ago, when organisms were emerging from the primordial slime, they were rough-hewn approximations of their eventual shape, like toys hastily carved from wood, or an artist's first rendition of a portrait, with holes where the eyes and mouth eventually will be.

 

Then, the thinking goes, the animals were subject to the forces of nature. Those in the desert got better at resisting the sun, while those in the cold evolved fur or blubber or the ability to use fire. Once those traits had appeared and spread in the population, we had not a kind of sketch, but a fully realized organism, a fait accompli, with all of the lovely details executed, the anatomical t's crossed and i's dotted.

 

But of course that isn't true. Although we can admire a stick insect that seems to flawlessly imitate a leafy twig in every detail, down to the marks of faux bird droppings on its wings, or a sled dog with legs that can withstand subzero temperatures because of the exquisite heat exchange among its blood vessels, both are full of compromises, jury-rigged like all other organisms. The mantid has to resist disease as well as blend into its background; the dog must run and find food as well as stay warm. The pigment used to form those dark specks on the mantid is also useful in the insect immune system, and using it in one place means it can't be used in another. For the dog, having long legs for running can make it harder to keep the cold at bay, since more heat is lost from narrow limbs than from wider ones. These often conflicting needs mean automatic trade-offs in every system, so that each may be good enough but is rarely if ever perfect.

 

Engine Collective for The Chronicle Review, original image from Gianni Dagli Orti, Corbis

 

Neither we nor any other species have ever been a seamless match with the environment. Instead, our adaptation is more like a broken zipper, with some teeth that align and others that gape apart. Except that it looks broken only to our unrealistically perfectionist eyes—eyes that themselves contain oddly looped vessels as a holdover from their past. Wanting to be more like our ancestors just means wanting a slightly different set of compromises.

 

Recognizing the continuity of evolution also makes clear the futility of selecting any particular time period for human harmony. Why would we be any more likely to feel out of sync than those who came before us? Did we really spend hundreds of thousands of years in stasis, perfectly adapted to our environments? When during the past did we attain this adaptation, and how did we know when to stop?

 

If they had known about evolution, would our cave-dwelling forebears have felt nostalgia for the days before they were bipedal, when life was good and the trees were a comfort zone? Scavenging prey from more-formidable predators, similar to what modern hyenas do, is thought to have preceded, or at least accompanied, actual hunting in human history. Were, then, those early hunter-gatherers convinced that swiping a gazelle from the lion that caught it was superior to that newfangled business of running it down yourself? And why stop there? Why not long to be aquatic, since life arose in the sea? In some ways, our lungs are still ill suited to breathing air. For that matter, it might be nice to be unicellular: After all, cancer arises because our differentiated tissues run amok. Single cells don't get cancer.

 

If we do not look to a mythical past utopia for clues to a way forward, what next? The answer is that we start asking different questions. Instead of bemoaning our unsuitability to modern life, we can wonder why some traits evolve quickly and some slowly. How do we know what we do about the rate at which evolution occurs? If lactose tolerance can become established in a population over just a handful of generations, what about an ability to digest and thrive on refined grains, the bugaboo of the paleo diet? Breakthroughs in genomics (the study of the entire set of genes in an organism) and other genetic technologies now allow us to determine how quickly individual genes and gene blocs have been altered in response to natural selection. Evidence is mounting that numerous human genes have changed over just the last few thousand years—a blink of an eye, evolutionarily speaking—while others are the same as they have been for millions of years, relatively unchanged from the form we share with ancestors as distant as worms and yeast.

 

What's more, a new field called experimental evolution is showing us that sometimes evolution occurs before our eyes, with rapid adaptations happening in 100, 50, or even a dozen or fewer generations. Depending on the life span of the organism, that could mean less than a year, or perhaps a quarter-century. It is most easily demonstrated in the laboratory, but increasingly, now that we know what to look for, we are seeing it in the wild. And although humans are evolving all the time, it is often easier to see the process in other kinds of organisms.

 

Humans are not the only species whose environment has changed dramatically over the last few hundred years, or even the last few decades. Some of the work my students and I have been doing on crickets found in the Hawaiian islands and in the rest of the Pacific shows that a completely new trait, a wing mutation that renders males silent, spread in just five years, fewer than 20 generations. It is the equivalent of humans' becoming involuntarily mute during the time between the publication of the Gutenberg Bible and On the Origin of Species. This and similar research on animals is shedding light on which traits are likely to evolve quickly and under what circumstances, because we can test our ideas in real time under controlled conditions.

 

It's common for people to talk about how we were "meant" to be, in areas ranging from diet to exercise to sex and family. Yet these notions are often flawed, making us unnecessarily wary of new foods and, in the long run, new ideas. I would not dream of denying the evolutionary heritage present in our bodies—and our minds. And it is clear that a life of sloth with a diet of junk food isn't doing us any favors. But to assume that we evolved until we reached a particular point and now are unlikely to change for the rest of history, or to view ourselves as relics hampered by a self-inflicted mismatch between our environment and our genes, is to miss out on some of the most exciting new developments in evolutionary biology.

 

At the same time that we wistfully hold to our paleofantasy of a world where we were in sync with our environment, we are proud of ourselves for being so different from our apelike ancestors. Animals like crocodiles and sharks are often referred to as "living fossils" because their appearance is eerily similar to that of their ancestors from millions of years earlier, preserved in stone. But there is sometimes a tone of disparagement in the term; it is as though we pity them for not keeping up with trends, as if they are embarrassing us by walking (or swimming) around in the evolutionary equivalent of mullet haircuts and suspenders. Evolving more recently, so that no one would mistake a human for our predecessors of even a couple of million years back, seems like a virtue, as if we improved ourselves while other organisms stuck with the same old styles their parents wore.

 

Regardless of the shaky ground on which that impression lies, we don't win the prize for even most recent evolution; in fact, we lose by a wide margin. Strictly speaking, according to the textbook definition of evolution as a change in gene frequencies in a population, many of the most rapidly evolving species, hence those with the most recent changes, are not primates but pathogens, the disease-causing organisms like viruses and bacteria. Because of their rapid generation times, viruses can produce offspring in short order, which means that viral gene frequencies can become altered in a fraction of the time it would take to do the same thing in a population of humans, zebras, or any other vertebrate.

 

Evolution being what it is—without any purpose or intent—evolving quickly is not necessarily a good thing. Often the impetus behind rapid evolution in nonhuman organisms is a strong and novel selective agent: A crop is sprayed with a new insecticide, or a new disease is introduced to a population by a few individuals who stray into its boundaries. Those who are resistant, sometimes an extremely tiny minority, survive and reproduce, while the others perish. These events are not confined to crops, or even to nonhumans. Some estimates of death rates from the medieval outbreak of bubonic plague called the Black Death in Europe have gone as high as 95 percent.

 

Natural selection thus produces a bottleneck, through which only the individuals with the genes necessary for survival can pass. The problem is, that bottleneck also affects a lot of other genetic variation along with the genes for susceptibility to the insecticide or the ailment. Suppose that genes for eye color or heat tolerance or musical ability happen to be located near the susceptibility genes on the chromosome. During the production of sex cells, as the chromosomes line up and the sperm and egg cells each get their share of reshuffled genes, those other genes will end up being disproportionately likely to be swept away when their bearer is struck down early in life by the selective force—the poison or pathogen. The net result is a winnowing out of genetic variants overall, not just those that are detrimental in the face of the current selection regime.

 

The evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, says that the one question he always gets from public audiences is whether the human race is still evolving. On the one hand, modern medical care and birth control have altered the way in which genes are passed on to succeeding generations; most of us recognize that we wouldn't stand a chance against a rampaging saber-toothed tiger without our running shoes, contact lenses, GPS, and childhood vaccinations. Natural selection seems to have taken a pretty big detour when it comes to humans, even if it hasn't completely hit the wall. At the same time, new diseases like AIDS impose new selection on our genomes, by favoring those who happen to be born with resistance to the virus and striking down those who are more susceptible.

 

Steve Jones, a University College London geneticist and author of several popular books, has argued for years that human evolution has been "repealed" because our technology allows us to avoid many natural dangers. But many anthropologists believe instead that the documented changes over the last 5,000 to 10,000 years in some traits, such as the frequency of blue eyes, means that we are still evolving in ways large and small. Blue eyes were virtually unknown as little as 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, when they apparently arose through one of those random genetic changes that pop up in our chromosomes. Now, of course, they are common—an example of only one such recently evolved characteristic. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending even suggest that human evolution as a whole has, on the contrary, accelerated over the last several thousand years, and they also believe that relatively isolated groups of people, such as Africans and North Americans, are subject to differing selection. That leads to the somewhat uncomfortable suggestion that such groups might be evolving in different directions—a controversial notion to say the least.

 

The "fish out of water" theme is common in TV and movies: City slickers go to the ranch, Crocodile Dundee turns up in Manhattan, witches try to live like suburban housewives. Misunderstandings and hilarity ensue, and eventually the misfits either go back where they belong or learn that they are not so different from everyone else after all. Watching people flounder in unfamiliar surroundings seems to be endlessly entertaining.

 

But in a larger sense, we all sometimes feel like fish out of water, out of sync with the environment we were meant to live in. If gnawing on that rib or jogging barefoot through the mud is therapeutic, enjoy. But know that should you wish to join us, the scientific evidence will gladly welcome you to the 21st century, in all its inevitable anxious uncertainty.

 

Marlene Zuk is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota. This essay is excerpted from her book Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live, to be published in March by W.W. Norton & Company. Copyright (c) 2013 by Marlene Zuk. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Bill Clinton's Tantric Speekmaking

 

"We believe that 'we're in this together' is a far better philosophy than 'you're on your own.'"

 

- Bill Clinton 

 

 

As someone who actually has read the Kama Sutra, I fully appreciate Scott Feschuk's description of Bill Clinton as a tantric speechmaker.  The man certainly has some skeletons in his sexual closet (Clinton, not Feschuk, at least so far as I know) - but then, to say that trantic sex is just about sex is like saying the Bible is a book about genealogy, or that LOST was about people fighting on an island.

 

 

Clinton weaves a tapestry where we are collaboratively the threads.  Like the best of film makers, his words and presentation create a commonality of experience that, even if you don't believe, you can still taste the magic.

 

 

Whether you follow politics, enjoy writing or think deeply about the issues greater than our individual selves, watch this speech, and enjoy.  You'll thank yourself for doing so.

Don't Be Afraid of The Other

The other aspect is that the Sikhs were targeted by the apparent “White Power” sicko, ex-soldier Wade Michael Page, because they are identifiably “different” — not because there is any reason to be upset at what Sikhs do, or represent.

Peter Worthington writes a heart-felt piece, heart-breaking in its simple honesty.  We don't let people buy and uses bombs or landmines because they serve one purpose - to kill people in quantity.  Gun rights activists aren't crying foul over this fact.  Well, assault rifles are just that - rifles designed to assault multiple parties.  By the same token, we don't allow people to walk around streets with swords strapped to their hips - again, because those swords would serve one purpose - duels, revenge, combat.  Handguns serve the same purpose - they are designed to kill people.

Make the argument that more people with guns will lead to less violence due to a leveling of the playing field.  But then provide one example in history that backs that assertion up.  You can't; the history of weapons is the history of increasingly powerful violence.  As weapons have broadened their scope from killing one to killing millions, we use them less because the risks are less.  The more firepower you have, the more powerful you feel - and the more strongly you feel the need to defend that power.  It's psychological; if you walk around with a gun, the temptation to use it either assertively or defensively multiplies.  The same rule applies to office politics or political attack ads; if you go looking for a fight, you're sure to find one.  It's that simple.

This is a world you'll never understand. And you always fear what you don't understand.

But there's a much deeper message in Worthington's piece, one of understanding.  We fear the unknown - we're programmed to.  It's a genetic fail safe that protects us from threats that emerge from the darkness faster than we can consciously process them.  Truly, that's all that instinct is; the triggering of pre-programmed or learned experiential biases that kick in an immediate, reactive response.  With aggression comes threat and with threat, the need for rapid response.  You will get anxious about public displays of gay behaviour for the same reason a you would be suspicious of a man in a turban or a woman wearing a veil - a hormone called cortisol.  This is the same hormone that will make you feel uncomfortable in the presence of a leper or burn victim; your limbic brain is perceiving something it registers as a threat and preparing your body for a fight-or-flight response.  It's no different from being afraid of the dark.

As we learn to populate the dark with knowledge rather than confabulation, it loses its terror.  The exact same truth applies to people.  I've been around the world, literally, exploring the ways in which people are similar and different.  Like many others, I've studied language, culture, history, geography, even neurochemistry to figure out where the commonalities lie.  I've spent nights with street people in Lima, Peru, watching them exhibit the most basic tenet of society - altruism.  I've laughed at the way in which an Arab Moroccan university professor stigmatized Italians in the same way an Italian grape grower stigmatized Moroccans.  Kids in small town Korea or post-war Sarajevo or downtown Toronto all want the same things from life; to have opportunity, to be happy, to be loved, to leave something behind.  We all feel the same way - what changes is the Way in which we express those feelings.  To me, there are no monsters in society; just behaviour, what causes it and how that behaviour can be influenced.

If I could have one wish, it would be for every person on earth to have the opportunity to be a stranger in a strange land and experience first-hand the kinship that connects all of us.  Homo sapiens are one species; there is far more that binds us together than there is separating us and where the differences lie, so to does opportunity.  Back to guns - where did gunpowder come from?  Thinking of China - where did pasta noodles come from?  What does the First Nations medicine wheel have to contribute to Western approaches to medicine?  Why is it that cultural groups from around the world land on the same metaphors, symbols like the tree of life, fire, the snake, the pyramid?  These aren't externally imposed things - they're internally derived.

JFK hit the nail on the head: "For in the final analysis, our most basic common link, is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal."

We can continue to focus on killing or dominating each other over personal fears, or we can learn to move forward together in understanding.  If we limit ourselves to looking through the lens of one political or cultural tribe, or even as one nation pitted against others, we are blinding ourselves to our shared birthright as human beings.  The true enemy we share is not external troubles, but internal fears.

When understanding is achieved, violence becomes unnecessary; threats cease to hold power over you and instead become opportunities to be seized. 

Fear can be overcome, but only by doing so consciously.

The Future of Social Media and Politics (by Matt Silverman)

Yup.  Social media is creating new opportunities and new challenges for traditional players like politicians, press and stakeholders.  At the same time, it's opening up the the system so that grassroots folks like Min Reyes and organizations like Why Should I Care can play a major role.  Interesting times!

Politicians are brands. Like their counterparts in the private sector, we’ve seen some pretty interesting things when it comes to using social media on the campaign trail.

Representative democracy seems the perfect place for social media — a direct communications channel between the governed and the government. But are we headed toward a more interconnected body politic, or a new sea of unmanageable political noise?

With the U.S. midterm elections in their final throes, we spoke to some key players for their views on what the rise of mainstream social media has in store for the next generation of political campaigns.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, But Perhaps Tweeted

The medium is the message, and like television before it, the social web will radically alter who is electable, according to Matt Lira, the director of new media for Republican Whip Eric Cantor. “Before television, there was a dramatically different set of candidates who could win that didn’t have a chance once television emerged,” Lira said. “Social media’s effect will be no less dramatic.”

Lira notes that at first, campaigning on TV was viewed as a gimmick and was given to young staffers to experiment with. “Over time, television asserted itself as the dominant form of political communication — remaking our nation’s politics in the process.” If that progression sounds familiar, it’s because we’re reliving it today.

It’s about how the social web is rapidly becoming the default place where people spend their time and discuss issues that matter to them. “It will be about how much society has integrated itself into it,” said Gerrit Lansing, the new media director for Congressman Peter Roskam (R-IL 6th). “Citizens will be far more accustomed to being a fan of their congressman on Facebook, because it will soon become one of the main ways in which they communicate with him.”

“What we’re seeing across the political spectrum right now is a rejection of traditional media,” said A.J. Bhadelia, the online communications coordinator for Congressman Mike Honda (D-CA 15th), who represents the Silicon Valley district in California. He notes that among Rep. Honda’s constituents, a quarter of the people who get their news online get it from social media. “[I]f given the opportunity, it will take up any space that traditional media has conceded.”

 

The New Grassroots

Like many publishers and businesses, political media relations are still entrenched in a “one-way announcement or press release communication” style, as Bhadelia puts it. But today’s forward-thinking campaigns offer a glimpse into what political activism might look like a few years on.

“Future candidates who ‘get it’ will be conducting increasingly supporter-centric campaigns that put the needs of the candidates’ most enthusiastic and ardent supporters at the center of the campaign,” said Brian Komar, the director of strategic outreach for the Center for American Progress. As social media trust continues to shift away from organizations and toward individuals, a highly social political campaign can decentralize its message and create what successful marketers have been tapping on the web for some time — brand ambassadors.

Komar told us that since experts are generally more trusted than institutions, a key component of their outreach has been to train staffers to be individuals with a message, rather than representatives of a large organization. “We’ve had considerable success with this decentralized approach, ranging from tweets being picked up directly by major press outlets to tweets being forwarded by influencers to high-ranking White House officials, to enhancing various policy experts’ reputations.”

Essentially, we may be looking at political outreach coming full circle over the course of a few generations. Focus was initially on personal grassroots activism, then on mass media, and is now returning to a one-on-one trust model for the digital age.

Socially Connected Legislation

The ancient Greeks probably would have dug social media for its potential to realize direct democracy. But can millions of people updating, tweeting and texting really generate a vox populi worth a senator’s attention?

“I believe that social media must be fully incorporated into the daily operation of the United States Congress,” said Lira. “Not simply as an outbound communication tool, but to actually include the American public in substantive legislative decision making.”

Lira cites one digital democracy experiment led by House Republicans called YouCut, a social media hub where participants can suggest and vote on which government spending programs should be cut from the federal budget.

“For the first time, the public is able to have direct impact on what their representatives vote upon on the House floor,” said Lira about the YouCut initiative. “The public’s response to this program validates that they will engage with Congress when given the opportunity to do so.”

Lira said that more than 2 million votes have been cast on the YouCut website so far, and every week that the House is in session, the item that receives the most social media votes is brought to the floor for debate (typically 45 minutes) and an actual legislative vote. “To date, no cuts have passed the House, but all we can do in the minority is force the debate and the vote,” said Lira. “The full voting records are available online, so people can know where their representative stood.”

Komar cites another success for connected legislation in a recent campaign by the Enough Project. The organization pushed for regulation on the U.S. import of conflict minerals (tin, tungsten and tantalum, which are commonly used in electronics) from eastern Congo, where mining operations for these valuable materials are often used to fund violent and genocidal military groups. Ten members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee were targeted by the Enough Project and their supporters.

“Within 48 hours, about 500 people posted on the Facebook walls of these members. Soon after, two of the 10 members agreed to co-sponsor the bill and another three members of the committee who were not targeted also agreed to co-sponsor,” said Komar. “The committee’s chairman, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), then took the unanticipated step to not just put the conflict minerals bill up for a vote, but also put a second bill that the Enough Project was pushing, up for a vote, too.” Both bills passed unanimously out of committee.

Both YouCut and the conflict minerals bill serve to illustrate that legislators can cut through the social media noise the same way many businesses do — by listening to and tackling the issues raised by small, focused online communities.

“By focusing public engagement on a specific challenge or issue, I believe that elected officials can attract the involvement of the experts and activists most interested in solving any particular issue,” said Lira. “The audiences that congregate around each specific challenge will also be motivated to keep the discussion qualitative.”

But social media isn’t yet the proverbial “town square” democracy that some might hope for. “The current platforms … still have far to go before there is direct governance,” Bhadelia conceded, citing concerns about verifying the locations and motivations of the most active politically minded social media participants. “Is this person a constituent? Are the views held by a broad slice of the district or the vocal few?”

Hands-On Candidates

To win at social media, you’ve got to keep it personal. In the future, can a political candidate still be in the game if he or she is delegating social outreach to staff, as many do today?

“A good new media guy who can write well can still do it,” said Lansing. “Five years from now, it will need to be at least 50/50.”

“I don’t believe that an elected official can be removed from the process,” Lira added. “The staff can, as they do in other areas, support that communication. The essence of that communication, however, begins with the elected official.”

Komar sees social media as yet another component of the larger communications picture, and handing off responsibility might just be a matter of course in terms of time management.

“[P]oliticians and candidates delegate drafting of press releases to staff. They delegate drafting of speeches to staff. They delegate drafting policy positions and fundraising asks to their staff. So yes, serious politicians can still delegate some social media outreach to staff as well.” He noted, however, that candidates who pass all of their social media engagement on to staffers will be missing big opportunities for authentic engagement of supporters.

The Takeaway

As in many sectors, it’s likely the political landscape will be radically different in just a few years thanks to social media’s pervasive influence on our ideas about culture, business, celebrity and public discourse. The ways in which we think about candidates and elected officials will change based on how connected we feel to them. And that will influence how we vote.

“The day is fast approaching when you can win your election on the basis of a really good social media campaign,” said Lira. “Build genuine connections with your constituency, authentically engage with them, and you can earn their support.”

Lansing’s advice to would-be candidates of the digital age is to “be very aggressive. What social media allows you to do is build an empire, and the timid do not build empires.”

What do you think? Does your local congressperson have a place in your Facebook newsfeed? Do you engage your government directly via Twitter? Do you feel your online voice matters to legislators? Share your thoughts on the future of social media and politics in the comments.

Free Will in the Land of the Blind

Many people have tried to define what media bias is, and attempted to measure it, but I want to try to answer a different question here: not how we can decide if the news is biased, but how each of us actually does decide — and what it means for journalists.

"In the Land of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king."

Ready for it?  You don't really have free will.  At best you have semi-free will that is heavily influenced by factors beyond your control, whether you're conscious of it or not.

It's a topic that makes people squirm (or get angry); the idea that you don't have internal control can be a terrifying one.  How many people are more comfortable with the notion of a War of the Worlds than they are with the concept of Invasion of the Body Snatchers?  There's a reason why it's the Zombie Apocalypse we fear most.

The truly amusing part is that every hyper-confident element of society thinks they're exempt from this risk; they have it all figured out, they're the one-eyed kings, the Shauns of the Dead.  When disaster strikes, they're the ones who will escape - not be part of the zombie horde.  It rarely occurs to them that maybe, just maybe, there's another veil to be lifted, another connection they haven't quite made, but could.  Yet almost cyclically society becomes so fearful that these folk, the people in whom we have placed our trust don't have the answers that even they start to doubt that anyone knows what will happen next.

A bit of doubt is a positive thing; it keeps you questioning, challenging, pushing boundaries and peeking around corners.  The more conscious you of are of the things that shape your perception, the more clearly you see; it's through that level of transparency we truly understand who we are and what we're part of.  It's not the destination, but the journey, etc.

We don't live in a two-dimensional world of black and white; life is more like a sphere reflecting the full spectrum of light.  If you go inward deeply enough, you see where everything connects, at what Lao-tzu called Tao.  Science is still trying to quantify that space through the quest for a Theory of Everything.

In terms of cognition - it's there, at the centre, that you don't gain control but become control.  From the centre, all things are possible:

     The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
     When his work is done,
     the people say, "Amazing:
     we did it, all by ourselves!”

That's a path open to all of us - we just need to be conscious of the terrain.

UPDATE 15/11/14:  Fear the stirogi, fearsome not-quite-humans with a hive mind?  Exactly.

Don’t Panic: Diversity Is Good For You

“I beg of you not to do this to my daughter… and not to do this to Ontario’s children.”

Charles McVety speaking out against Gay-Straight Alliances in Ontario schools

“Whether you believe deafness to be a disability or not, Deaf cultures and communities are part of Ontario’s cultural diversity.  Thus, Ontario government has no business favoring the Hearing world over them.”

M Jordan expressing his fear of “deaf genocide”

We’ve got leaders railing against the perceived threats from foreign students and foreign workers.  In Quebec, there are language laws to protect and maintain the authenticity of an evolved dialect of Latin.  In other parts of Canada, there are staunch opponents to national bilingualism, despite the evidence suggesting that knowing more languages provides greater opportunity and can reduce risk of Alzheimer’s.

To me, these are all variations on the position of not wanting a daughter because 1) she can’t carry on a family line and b) she’s going to be taken away from you.  They imply a fear of loss, of subjugation, of losing out to another.

They are all instinctual, reactive positions.  They might feel right, but they aren’t based in fact.

Having a son-in-law is not detraction; it’s an addition, a linking of families, a provision of new opportunities for partnership, expansion and growth.  Plus, if there are grandkids, your genes get carried on anyway.

Learning more languages doesn’t steal from the richness of mother tongues – it adds to one’s capacity to think in different ways, come up with better solutions and develop competitive advantages.  In a global economy, who doesn’t want multilingual employees?

Deafness is a condition of biology that getting cochlear implants doesn’t change, only accomodates.  Having assistive technology enhances your ability and can actually facilitate cognitive development (plus, you can still turn them off when you want silence).  There aren’t separate “deaf” and “aural” worlds – there’s just one world.  The only question is how much access to it do you have?

Foreigners are the embodiment of diversity – you can feel they threaten your genetic/culture superiority, but what they really do is challenge your stagnancy.  We’re all about innovation, right?  Infinite diversity allows for infinite combinations.  We want more diversity, not less.

Gay isn’t a contagion.  Hearing about or even seeing gays kissing doesn’t impose any physical “risk” or “contagion” (even if you feel that it does).  For that matter, science isn’t a threat to religion any more than religion as a concept is inherently an impediment to science.

We all inhabit this small planet.  We all breathe the same air.  We all cherish our children’s future.

And we can only move forward when we do it together.

Who Shall Lead?

"His modern-day heirs might have the right formula. But they need an articulate leader who can explain social entrepreneurship to Canadians and give them a stake in its success."

  - Carol Goar, The Toronto Star

There it is again - we need a leader. 

I have heard this from academia, from the world of finance, from Not-For-Profits, from the public services, from teachers, students, parents, seniors, from government, from all walks of life across every cultural and social divide imaginable.  The world is changing, the models we have relied on for so long are simply not up to tomorrow's challenges - and nobody quite knows what comes next.

Everyone is waiting for someone to bring forth one answer that is so clear, so irrefutable, that we'll all have no option but to follow the singular path laid down before us.  Alas, the only thing that seems irrefutable is the KISS principle: even when we have seen that message brought forward as part of a broader context, we miss it, focusing on the trees rather than the forest. 

Of course we're talking societal development, economics and poverty, here - not religion.  Yet there's a common theme, isn't there?  It's not for us to take responsibility, think impossibly broadly, make the tough choices, risk being wrong and then owning our mistakes; that's someone else's job, right?

It all keeps bringing me back to this quote from LOST:

"It's been six days and we're all still waiting. Waiting for someone to come. But what if they don't? We have to stop waiting. We need to start figuring things out.

"We need to figure out how we're going to survive here. Now, I found water. Fresh water, up in the valley. I'll take a group in at first light. If you don't want to go come then find another way to contribute. Last week most of us were strangers, but we're all here now. And god knows how long we're going to be here. But if we can't live together, we're going to die alone."

Whoever you feel we are waiting for, consider this - leaders don't come down from on high, they emerge from within.  Same is as true in business, politics, social revolutions and industrial revolutions as it is in every major world religion being practiced today.

"The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!”

If you're religious, call it God manifesting through His/Her/Its own creation.  If you're not, consider it social evolution.  Either way, the leadership we seek is already here; all that remains is for us to become conscious of that fact.

Walking the Walk

What do you communicate when you walk?

I know I gauge body language at least as much as words; it's the subtle ticks, gestures and postures that let me know if you're being honest, obfuscating, avoiding, disengaged, etc.

Words have power, but they're only a thin wedge of what makes communication.  Communication is a two-way street, too - what we convey, consciously or unconsciously, sends a message.

Quick little example - you roll your eyes at someone with the intent of indicating you dislike what was said or the person in general.  Your signal out is your point of view, but remember, the recipient is looking to relate that information in their own context.  Therefore, an eye-roll could say that you are a rude, disengaged person; that could be the message that gets shared about you down the road.  If you're shouting to assert authority, the message being received is that you're volatile; not the best brand to have.

Be conscious of your behaviour and its impacts; not just the ones you want to have, but the ones that will actually be picked up on, too.

Nothing to Fear...

"My solution? So glad you asked. Let’s admit our approach is wrong and reverse course. Completely. Let’s embrace Death."

Although the approach he takes is a bit facetious, he's not wrong in his analysis.  The Bushido code required Samurai to embrace death - this wasn't intended to foster a cult of dying, but rather to enforce  a way of living.

See, when you accept death as inevitable, you stop hiding from it.  You stop living in death's shadow and as a consequence, slowly cease to be controlled by fear.

It's surprising how clearly you see once you start to put fear behind you.  Like waking from a dream, you perceive depth and nuance; patterns emerge that aren't based on offense and defence, but on connections, like a puzzle.

It's self-interest - dominance and fear - that blind us to this broader reality.

And as we all know, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.