Bryan Zelmanov: Did early communication make organized religion possible? Or vice-versa? or both, dialectically?

Need Writer: Do you think that avatars are an extension of human capabilities, and if so, can we see virtual worlds as extending possibilities for social justice (Martha Nussbaum argues, for example, that social justice is the maximization of human capabilities)

Desideria Stockton: Will the nature of communication ethics change with new media formats and virtual worlds?

Pepto Majestic: Do you think our ability to adapt to change in how we communicate, initiated by our own actions, is keeping up with the rate of those rapid changes?

CJ Carnot: How do we ascertain who or what ideas are socially important or beneficial now that the media available to us no longer defines or filters them as they did in the past ?

ZacharyLark Zhangsun: How has English language use in online communication affected non-English lang speakers? is this another aspect of the so-called digital divide? I'm wondering what we English-only communicators are missing out on, and whether this is the new imperialism?

Kah3na Falken: You stress the democratizing imperatives inherent in the development of print, but in fact, print was also quickly split into class forms, "high art" and "Low art." Our postmodern time translates this into access: upper-class has access, while the poor and underclass often does not. How does this impact collective action in your sense?

Meridelle Mauvaise: What size of a community is a "functional" community and how will intimacy and friendship change accordingly?

Maor Quimby: Through the mobile- the lines between the digital and physical space are being 'blurred'... can you speak to the public vs private identity issues of the user ?

Bryan Zelmanov: Question about literacy and elites: is the proportion of the population with the power to use the tools recurrent?

I think you could argue that the ancient near east when the alphabet emerged, or Europe after the emergence of printing, experienced information ages; that, in fact, this is the network age. Building and using social networks to get things done, what some people call social capital today, that is an essential human trait that I think I don’t need to belabor the point. It’s something that people do whenever they have an opportunity to do it. They do it for beneficial reasons, they do it for destructive reasons, they band together to feed each other, they band together to fight each other, but there are limits on how humans can use their social networking capabilities.

There is a limit to how many people I can gather in my network. There is a limit to how quickly I can summon that network or how widespread that network is. With the network technologies, starting with what’s been called the Victorian internet, starting with the telegraph, and the landline telephone, and now the internet, the wireless internet.

What that enables is the lowering of thresholds and the crossing of barriers that prevented humans from creating and deploying and exploiting social networks. To do things together with people that they weren’t able to do things together with before, to organize collective action on scales that we weren’t able to organize before, in places and at speeds and paces that we weren’t able to organize before.

I would like to get to talking about the multiple literacies that are emerging today. Here we are in Second Life, and many of us use e-mail and instant messaging, and Twitter, and Flickr, and YouTube. That’s not just the alphabet and print. We have multiple literacies, and we also have a real challenge in regards to education.

Of course, the revolution in the United States of America, the French Revolution, and the revolution in England in which the monarchy was replaced by parliament as the main seat of power. These were all very much based on print literacy, and the whole theory of the public’s fear has to do with the idea that what we call public opinion arises from citizens and somehow influences the policy makers. That no longer could the king act on a whim. The king had to, in some sense, accept the consent of the government.

In the colonies, the revolution was organized by committees of correspondents who used handwritten documents that were passed around. When, after the revolution, the American colonists argued about the form of government to be taken, those arguments took place in the newspapers, in what we call the Federalist papers today.

In the summer of 1776, Thomas Paine’s book, Common Sense, for which he refused to accept royalties and died in poverty, in fact, that sold 300,000 copies that summer. It was the first really great best seller.

What I am not saying here is that the printing press created science or the Protestant Reformation or democracy. Again, I am talking about this revolutionary system in which print lowered the threshold for print literacy and enabled a large population to learn, and that large, literate population began to do things that they weren’t able to do before.

So if you think about science, about apprehending the universe in new ways that can be very useful if it has to do with building bridges or curing diseases or making warfare, humans had depended on geniuses for a very long time. They had to wait for an Aristotle or a Newton to come along to apprehend the universe in a new way and then explain it to the rest of us.

The real genius, I think, of Baconian, Cartesian, or Galilean science was that, besides the scientific method of performing experiments and observations and formulating theories, there was a social basis. If you had a sufficiently large population of sufficiently literate people then you could circulate the rules for science, and people could perform observations and experiments and report on what they discovered. They could publish and they could build each others knowledge. Science became a collective knowledge gathering enterprise.

If you think about Wikipedia today, people building on what others contribute, I think, in a similar way, and I don’t want to stretch the analogy too far, we saw science accelerate very rapidly because a literate population was able to gather and aggregate and argue about knowledge through print literacy.

Of course, the Protestant Reformation was all tied up with the changes that the printing press enabled. Luther nailed his famous 95 theses in handwriting to that cathedral door, but within a few years hundreds of thousands of printed broadsides in many languages began to circulate.

The printing press was very much like the internet revolution in terms of the explosion in usage and literacy. Within decades of the invention of the printing press the literate population of Europe expanded vastly from thousands, probably tens of thousands, to millions. Those people began to do things that they weren’t able to do before.

I think it is worth noting that the printing press as a technology had been invented in China and in Korea prior to this. Although, their alphabet was more difficult, I think some of the reasons why a literate population grew explosively in Europe, and did not in China, had to do with factors that were exogenous to the technology itself.

I am very much not a technology determinist. I think when you say technology you have to look at the social and historical and cultural conditions around the actual tool to look at how it is used. In Europe, there were many competing states. In China, there was one centralized state. In Europe, of course, there was the Protestant Reformation, which had a great deal to do with the individual ownership of bibles. Of course, Gutenburg was an entrepreneur and wanted to sell a lot of bibles.

There was a mystery for quite a number of years among archaeologists about a lot of small clay figurines that were found at the sites of early large cities in the Fertile Crescent. A woman by the name of Denise Schmandt-Besserat solved that mystery and really came up with a good explanation of the emergence of writing from these cuneiform marks on clay.

They became more organized, but what people started doing was making these little figurines. If you were in a city in one of these early empires, and you were a farmer and contributed 40 bushels of wheat to the granary, you needed to prove that the granary owed you for the bushels of wheat when the time came to remove it. So contracts were created by making little figurines of bushels, or if they were sheep that you contributed, little figurines of sheep, and these were put in little clay envelopes and baked, and then when it was time to retrieve your contract the envelope was broken open.

Eventually, people figured out that they didn’t have to make these figurines and put them into envelopes, they could just impress the figure of the bushel or the little sheep on the surface of the envelope, and we began to get this simplified record keeping.

The people who were really in charge of symbolic record keeping were the ones who worked for the emperors. About 5000 years ago, the alphabet became the great breakthrough. The emperors, the large city states of the time, were organized with collective action on a scale that wasn’t possible before. Of course, this was a hierarchal system. Slavery was involved, organized military was involved, but it was, I think without much argument, a new level of complexity for human social collective action, and writing was truly a miraculous power.

If you learned a new hunting technique, or a new agricultural technique, it no longer depended on oral transmission to keep that knowledge alive. You could transmit knowledge across time and space, and that very powerful code for transmitting and storing knowledge was controlled, the literacy, the ability to encode and decode, was confined to an elite that was chosen by the emperors and controlled by them for thousands of years.

In fact, one of the interesting, I think probably a side-bar to this, one of the interesting findings recently was that one of the advantages that homo sapiens may have had over the Neanderthals was that the homo sapiens had some gender specialization. The men went out and hunted, the women took care of the children and gathered, and that gave the species a broader selection of food. The Neanderthals all hunted together, so when the hunt failed they went hungry. Certainly, for the 100-150,000 years that we have existed as a species shows the vast majority of that time extended family groups wandered as hunters and gatherers.

That is pretty much how humans have populated the planet. Although we don’t have a lot of physical evidence of how that came about, we know that more recently in that history those extended family groups started to band together into larger groups and to hunt larger game.

We don’t know exactly what kind of arrangements they made, but I think we can make a couple of assumptions. One, they must have solved some kind of collective action problems. It’s not easy, and in fact probably downright dangerous, to be hunting something this big while you’re squabbling with the other hunters. I also think that a new form of wealth must have forced new kinds of social arrangements, which must have been mediated by some communication form.

Humans need proteins, which is a problem for hunters and gatherers. You can only pick up so many rabbits and squirrels if you are in a small group, and since we can’t store protein it is a constant hunt for protein. If you bring down a mastodon, you have more protein than the hunter and a hunter’s family can eat before it rots. So the question arises, “Is this a public good?” If everyone had access to it, did the people who ate but didn’t hunt pose something to the hunter and the hunter’s family.

I wanted to preface that by a really high-altitude, long view look at the co-evolution of communication and collective action, and to parse that a little bit more, the co-evolution of technologies we create, and the media that are quite often appropriated by people and sometimes specifically designed by the creators of the technology to be communication media, and the ways in which literacies that emerge from the use of those media enable people to do things together in ways that they weren’t able to do before.

Collective action being that fancy sociologists worked for, being able to do things with people. I mean that in the broadest sense; socially, culturally, economically, and politically. I think that if we take a look at the long view, the moment that we are in now takes on a particular importance. The importance, I think, of the literacies, not just the availability of the technologies, takes on more importance.

A lot of this, I think, goes all the way back through my thinking, since I first started using computers to communicate with over 20 years ago. It’s really become more clear to me recently, since I finished Smart Mobs, which of course, was published in 2002, I worked on it in 2001, and in internet years that was quite a long time ago. As I was saying, Smart Mobs is about the kind of things that people able to do together, because the threshold for doing things together has been lowered by both the internet and the mobile phone, and in particular the combination of the two.

When I finished the book, I found that I continued to be interested in this long term story, not just about the technologies.