I was just reading today’s Wall Street Journal when I noticed this picture attached to an article about a labor strike in France. I was immediately struck by the fact that most of the protesters in this picture are wearing masks.

Maybe its because recently I have been reading and listening to a lot of stories about the American Civil Rights movement — where protesters put their lives and the lives of their families on the line — but I have a difficult time taking these people seriously. I don’t see a bunch of people passionately fighting for what they believe in; I see a collection of cowards.

About a year ago I ran into the same thing on the streets of Boston. I was on my way across the Charles River to buy boxes for the move to San Francisco when I got stuck right in the middle of a protest aimed at The Church Of Scientology. The protest was sponsored by the Internet group Anonymous. They too were wearing masks (the picture at right is of the actual group I ran into).

Since it was a Saturday I actually hung around the protesters for a little while and I tried my best to understand what they were actually protesting and why they were wearing masks. They didn’t have a good answer for either, frankly I think they were just bored. When I challenged them with the crazy idea that if they truly believed in what they were fighting for they should be proud to show their faces they asked me to move along. I even offered to join them in their protest if they removed their masks. All I got for my offer was more blank stares from 20 or so Vs.

In my view anonymity is one of the more problematic features of the Internet, and is the cause of much of the hate and vitriol we find there. Anonymity gives people the freedom to do and say things they never would have otherwise and while this has benefits, the ranks of ugly episodes are growing. Lets hope we don’t see more of this type of protest spilling into the physical world.

If you believe in something, stand behind it.

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Every couple of months we see a breathless report about how ‘bad guys’ make use of the same tools as the rest of us — cell phones, email, facebook, twitter, and so on and so on. Its a pretty basic, if not eternal story. Technology designed for good, gains a following, used for evil.

Well we can officially add mashups to the list. Yesterday I ran across a new mashup (hat tip: http://sf.curbed.com) that efficiently informs would be vandals and muggers where donors to the Proposition 8 campaign — outlawing same-sex marriage in California — live and work. Like all mashups it does its intended job very nicely. With just a couple of quick mouse clicks I could find out who in my neighborhood donated  and where exactly I could jump them (see below).

Now, don’t get me wrong, the creator of this mashup is clearly not doing anything illegal. All the information used is publicly available. But we have to ask: What is the purpose of this mashup? It can’t be for good, that’s for sure.

The bigger issue however is what we as a society do about it. All the rules set down deciding what the public should and should not have access to were established long before mashups, and even the Web as we know it today were around. Would the sponsors of the donation disclosure legislation — designed to clean up government with transparency — have been quite so forthcoming if they knew this would be the result? My gut says no. But to what end? Should any potentially incendiary information be kept from the public because the simple but effective  barrier of having  to get off your couch, go down to city hall during business hours, and request it is now obliterated?

Could it be that mashups are going to quickly become one of the major challenges to a free and open democracy? If you had asked me yesterday I would have said you were crazy. But once the properties listed here — or in the similar mashups sure to come for future debates — are vandalized there will be two effects: An outcry to restrict access to this information and a chilling of political donations and activity (or at the very least a strong incentive to take it all back behind the curtain). In either case our society will be poorer as a consequence.

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I find it hard these days not to glaze over when I see article after article about the death of the newspaper industry. It’s an industry in what looks like a death spiral, and has been for quite some time. Surprisingly though the news seems to get worse nearly every day.

So it was with much sadness that I read today (in the Wall Street Journal online edition delivered via RSS) that the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, the two remaining daily newspapers in Detroit, are expecting to stop delivering physical newspapers all but three days a week. My normal response would have been to note this as yet another sign of the death of the industry — as I imagine most everyone else has — but this one struck close to home; literally.

Though I live in San Francisco now I was born and raised in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe — where my grandmother, parents, brother, and extended family mostly still live — and grew up reading the Free Press. My parents have subscribed to the paper for as long as I can remember and it was my first introduction to newspapers, current events, and becoming an informed citizen. My mother worked for both the Free Press and the News as an art director, and many of my parent’s closest friends still work in the industry. It would be fair to say the the paper was a constant presence in my life, though in many cases it went unnoticed, only remarkable when there was a protracted labor dispute in the 90’s, a frame worthy front page when the Red Wings or Tigers won a title, and when Mitch Albom stopped writing a daily sports column.

But like most newspapers those in Detroit have been hit hard by the systemic changes in the industry, namely the Internet, and more accurately Craigslist. It has been hard not to notice the impact. A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of coming downstairs one morning around Christmas to see my father — who is 6′4″ — sitting in his usual chair straining to read a paper the size of a comic book. And now the companies are planning to stop delivery of those comic books all together, save Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, the most lucrative of days. Though I believe strongly in the power of the Internet, business efficiency, and progress, its hard not to feel disappointed.

From a strategy standpoint the newspaper industry is serving as a stark reminder of how nasty the innovators dilemma truly is — though calling the News and Free Press “great companies” may be a tad hyperbolic. Its clearly difficult to walk away from profitable businesses in favor of the inevitable future. But what I find more interesting here is not the destruction of long standing institutions but the lack of a viable economic alternative to take its place. While Craigslist is wildly popular it does not come close to matching the revenues of the newspapers it is leaving in its wake. Yes, Craigslist doesn’t even try, but I have a hard time believing it could if it wanted to.

If we were to be perfectly honest though newspapers have always been a strange beast: a forced bundle of journalism people were willing to pay a bit of money for and classified ads which pulled in the real cash. All with advertisements tossed in on top for good measure. The Internet has blown that bundle to pieces — as it has done with the musical anomaly called the “album” — and they have all been sold off at the lowest possible prices; reporting is free (with ads of course) and classified are mostly free (save a few select ads and a few select markets that subsidize the rest of us; thank you San Francisco job postings and erotic services).

I’m all for killing off inefficient industries, but in this case we don’t seem to be taking inefficient resources and capital and moving them to more efficient uses. Maybe its because I think citizen journalism is a sham, but real journalism practiced by newspapers is a critical part of how our society stays on track and nothing seems to be coming up to take its place. This despite the fact that it is an incredibly valuable service. Just this week we’ve seen a corrupt governor go down in no small part because of intrepid reporting from the Chicago Tribune. Ironically The Tribune Company filed for chapter 11 at exactly the same moment they filed the story; its hard to believe the governor would be on his ass today if the Tribune was already gone.

The simple problem is that We The People have been conditioned to think of journalism as a free good. This is not a new development; over the last hundred years the price we pay for journalism has been slowly coming down as it was subsidized by classifieds and advertising. Mostly what people pay for in a newspaper subscription is the convenience of delivery and the pleasure of holding a physical object. Now the News and Free Press are left with just the reporting as a viable offering but have priced themselves out of a business model. Further, nothing short of ‘free’ will work for anyone else trying to provide journalism. We’re not even willing to pay to remove the ads!

Frankly, I don’t see an easy way out. We’re in a situation which, in economics, we call path dependent. The newspaper industry started down this road years ago making rational choices, but now is unlikely to survive as more than a shell of its former self because of those very choices. And the rest of us appear to be screwed, as we have been trained to expect free journalism so no viable replacement business model is apparent. There are a lot of very smart folks looking at how to save journalism and it appears the numbers just don’t crunch.

So, consider this a warning to other industries: bundling is a thing of the past. You must assume hyper efficiency in the future and prepare for it today. Its the only way to stop yourselves from becoming path dependent.

As for this post, consider it a love letter to my hometown newspapers, or at least what is left of them. And a recommendation that they buy a few more servers; at least make it a fair fight.

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Yesterday the New York Times published an article detailing a recent study from the MacArthur Foundation that examined the role of the Internet in the lives of teenagers. According to the Times:

“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

On the surface this looks like good news; the behavior that has become so ingrained in our high schools and middle schools is building actual skills. The open question however is the ultimate impact of this behavior. How this sort of socializing and identity creation impacts long-term development is poorly understood. The researchers themselves acknowledge the deficiency: “Ethnographic studies like this are good at describing how young people fit social media into their lives. What they can’t do is document effects. This highlights the need for larger, nationally representative studies.”

For our part, Forrester’s own research on teen behavior shows tremendous usage of social networking sites. In fact, we found in 2007 that nearly two-thirds of US online teens – those ages 15-17 – visit social networking sites at least monthly. A full 20% of online youth – ages 12-17 – visit social networking sites daily, and most update their profiles while there. We recently updated much of this survey work for 2008 and while I have yet to dig into the specifics for the youth market I would be shocked if it did not mirror the overall trend of greater participation and levels of engagement.

But is this participation and engagement a positive development? The MacArthur Foundation researchers suggest it is. Personally, I have some doubts. Granted, learning how to create a home page may be of some value, and I will be the first to admit that I never really learned to touch type until I got going with AOL instant messenger in high school. But these skills seem pretty superfluous.

Where the researchers start to talk real value is in the notion of getting along with others, and creating a personal identity. But any sociologist or psychologist in the world will tell you that the teenage years are when everyone learns to be social and create an identity, internet or not. So now the questions becomes not “are the kids creating an identity” but “are the kids creating an identity that is healthier than they would have created otherwise?”

At the risk of coming off as a Luddite I’m going to suggest that the answer is no. Ever since it was released nearly three years ago a study in the American Sociological Review by researchers at Duke University has been stuck in the back of my head (those of you who have spent much time with me are likely sick of hearing about it). At the time the researchers reported that:

“The evidence shows that Americans have fewer confidants and those ties are also more family-based than they used to be,” said Lynn Smith-Lovin, professor of sociology at Duke University.

“This change indicates something that’s not good for our society,” Smith-Lovin said. “Ties with a close network of people create a safety net. These ties also lead to civic engagement and local political action.”

Let me repeat that, just so we don’t miss it: this change indicates something that’s not good for our society. Despite the hordes of new technology – email, IM, social networking –at our disposal we are actually distancing ourselves from other people. And this is among adults who learned these behaviors over time. The kids are defining themselves in terms of this technology from day one.

Of course there is the chance that growing up with these tools will better equip you to manage your relationships through them. However if we look again to Forrester’s Consumer Technographics data the story is a lot more complex. We find that the kids are lying (only 53% even claim to tell the truth on their profiles), creating multiple identities (49% report creating multiple online identities), and hiding parts of their lives from others (58% of multi-identity teens have social networking profiles they only give to certain people). If we couple this with the notion that the kids are becoming self-obsessed, voyeuristic, and abusive to each other online I think there is reason for real concern.

I don’t (yet) have children, certainly don’t have teenagers, and am only an armchair sociologist. I am not, however, naïve enough to believe these behaviors are new behaviors. All kids lie, hide parts of their lives from others, and experiment with multiple personalities. But in the past it was much harder to hide this from parents, friends, teachers, and others who provide the proper guardrails for kids. The internet makes it too easy, in my view, for kids to grow up by themselves.

The MacArthur Foundation researchers are trying to calm parents fears about their kids online and in one sense they are right to do so. Fears of online predators are overblown, and kids need to be allowed to socialize, regardless of medium. Banning social sites or internet access outright is counter-productive. That message makes sense and needs to be repeated. But parents need to approach the Web with a skeptic’s eye. The fears many parents have may not be well founded, but I wonder if parents are missing a bigger problem developing right beneath their noses.

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