Max Gladwell

Social media is the accelerant that drives change and innovation, moving us more quickly and efficiently toward the solutions of our time. That’s precisely what it did for Barack Obama.

In this second post of our series on the heroic ideal of the networked social entrepreneur, we explore the networked component: social media.

Max Gladwell was founded in April of this year (2008) as the nexus of social media and green living. We saw these two mega trends coming together to form an exponentially powerful force, and we chose to personify it in Max Gladwell. We positioned this persona in terms of the heroic ideal, where social media technologies are fused with–woven into the very fabric of–the virtues of sustainability and conscious living, thereby giving the technologies purpose and meaning. Social media provides the accelerant for change, as if pouring gasoline on a camp fire.

Obama’s First YouTube Address

Barack Obama did this successfully with his political campaign. In fact, to characterize it as just a campaign is to ignore much of its significance. Obama represents a movement and a revolution, both in terms of technology and politics. The political landscape will never be the same, and we’ll explore how it has impacted American politics and the two-party system in future posts. This one is about Obama 2.0.

The Obama campaign was highly purpose driven, defined by the profound and sweeping themes of hope and change. At the same time, it was grounded in detailed policy positions on healthcare reform, clean energy, education, and solutions for a new economy. There’s been much celebration within the tech world about Obama’s deft use of social media technologies. According to TechCrunch, “[Arianna] Huffington says flat out that if it wasn’t for the Internet, Obama would not be president.” This is only half true, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Still, it’s a validation for many that Web 2.0 has its place in history. While this is also true to a degree, we shouldn’t make the mistake of confusing Obama as a movement with social media as its accelerant.

Barack Obama brought purpose and meaning to Web 2.0, not the other way around. Most of the attention has this scenario reversed: Web 2.0 helped Obama win the presidency. That’s how it’s described. And while that is tecnhically accurate, it misses the bigger picture: what Obama has done for Web 2.0.

Social media technologies are only as valuable as the purpose for which they’re deployed. They can magnify and accelerate a mission. They can further the cause. But they are not the mission or the cause itself. Social media can be an agent of change, but not the change itself. It is a means to an end. This is where much of the Web 2.0 world has gone wrong. It lacks purpose. And that’s what the heroic ideal of Max Gladwell and Barack Obama are about.

These sentiments were echoed earlier in the year by Web 2.0 founding father, Tim O’Reilly, when he said, “There is this amazing confluence of technology and opportunity at a time where we really can change the world. And there are some big problems that need to be solved.” This was well before the financial crisis. At the most recent Web 2.0 Expo, O’Reilly continued to advocate for purpose and meaning in his opening keynote. From CNET:

“(These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways,” O’Reilly said in an address that first had looked like it would simply be a starry-eyed discussion of enterprise opportunities for Web 2.0. “And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble.”

Global warming. The U.S. losing its edge in science and technology. A growing income gap. “And what are the best and the brightest working on?” O’Reilly asked, displaying a slide of the popular Facebook application SuperPoke, which invites you to, among other things, “throw sheep” at your friends.

“Do you see a problem here?” he posed, showing another slide of the popular iPhone app “iBeer,” which simulates chugging a pint. “You have to ask yourself, are we working on the right things?”

The Expo was essentially bookended with purpose-driven keynotes. Vice President Al Gore gave an insightful and inspiring closing speech that urged us to put these technologies to their highest and best use, such as solving the climate crisis.

From ReadWriteWeb: Likening Web 2.0 to the evolutionary path of electricity, Mr. Gore pointed out that the newness of a service or product often creates a ‘wow’ factor that holds up progress until the service is taken for granted. 100 years ago, the early uses of electricity demonstrated the special qualities of the then new conveyor of power; today, it’s everywhere, and people pay it little attention. According to Mr. Gore, much the same needs to happen with the Internet; it needs to get to the point of being like “the water that the fish don’t know they’re swimming in,” he said.

Gore’s point is that we’re in an early phase of Web 2.0 where we’re just beginning to discover how it can be truly useful to business, government, and society. As with electricity, social media is not valuable for its own sake but rather for the value it generates when properly utilized. In Ten Ways that Social Media and Sustainability Align, we wrote that it’s about losing the adjectives. The day when we no longer need to qualify media as being social and energy as being green, then we’ll know we’ve really made it.

Gore also drew the classic comparison of the Internet with the printing press in terms of its historic impact. “It empowered individuals to use knowledge as a source of influence and power, and a new information ecosystem developed that allowed anyone who could learn to read and write to realize they could have a new sovereign – the rule of reason. According to Mr. Gore, this ability to connect, comprehend and make decisions independently matured into the American constitution.”

So if the Internet itself is the modern equivalent of the printing press, how should we characterize Web 2.0? We’d make the case that social media technologies in the collective will have the equivalent impact as the inventions of the telephone and television combined. Yes, it’s that big.

Social media is a platform for publishing, communications, and broadcasting. It’s one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. It’s a mass media channel that can, at once, be as intimate as you need it to be. It can take the form of 140-character text messages, live streaming, and recorded video alike. It’s a resource for information, entertainment, and communications. And yet it’s much more significant than the telephone and television because it’s democratized. The power is not in the hands of a few telecom and media conglomerates. It’s squarely in the hands of the people.

In this sense, social media did have a tremendous impact on the election of Barack Obama. But the claim that he would not have been elected without it is not entirely true.

In the aforementioned TechCrunch post, New York Magazine’s John Heilemann said that “the Internet played a disruptive role in the 2008 election in the same way television played a disruptive role in the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy to president. Neither medium was new in the respective elections, but both ‘came of age’ and swung the election towards the winning candidate.”

This makes for a convenient historical context, but Heilemann fails to point out that Kennedy beat Nixon by the slimmest of margins, wherein television could have conceivably made the difference. Obama beat McCain handily. Social media did not make the difference. If anything, it turned a clear victory into a landslide, which is not the same as “Obama would not be president without the Internet.” As we’d written well before the financial crisis, back when McCain briefly pulled ahead in the polls and Palin was the shiny new object, the economy was always going to decide this election in favor of the challenging party. Obama won the general election simply because he was the Democratic candidate. The general was over before it started. In the primary, however, social media made all the difference.

Obama would not have defeated Hillary Clinton if not for the communications and organizational power of the social web. This is a fact. It is the true victory for the Obama revolution and Web 2.0. The primary was so long and arduous, though, that the media failed to acknowledge Obama’s greatest achievement: beating the Clinton political machine. Most of us felt bad for HRC and wanted to quickly turn our energies to the general. But the generational shift we witnessed in this election was much more profound in the primary, where competition for votes was much more fierce than that of the general election.

Obama energized younger voters and most other people not because he was a Democrat or a Republican. Not because he was a liberal or a conservative. Not because he was white or black, man or woman. He inspired us because he was Barack Obama, a person of pragmatic optimism and compelling ideas. We feel confident in describing him as the first post-partisan president in our nation’s history, because politics is no longer black and white (if you’ll forgive the pun). Obama has given politics an important third dimension, which we’ll discuss in subsequent posts in this series.

In any event, Clinton would have defeated McCain by a margin as much if not greater than Obama. To the extent that the Democratic primary ultimately decided the presidency (it did), these claims about Web 2.0 making all the difference for President Elect Barack Obama are, in fact, accurate.

Related Posts

• CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World
• Public Relations 3.0: Media, Blogs, and Consumers
• Innovation or Extinction: The New Economic Reality
• The Heroic Ideal of Max Gladwell and Barack Obama: Part I
• Ten (More) Ways to Change the World Through Social Media