I was only one of millions who found themselves in front of a computer rather than a TV (or in DC in person.) According to Akamai, who handles one-fifth of the world’s Internet traffic, Obama’s inauguration set a new record in the number of simultaneous data streams, which mostly carry live video: seven million data streams with a max of 2 terabits per second. (via xconomy and VentureBeat)

The Google Blog looks as some search data from this and previous inaugurations tell a story of how far the Internet has evolved in the past 8 years:

During the last nine years, the growth of the Internet has changed the way the world seeks information. From President Bush’s first inaugural address in 2001 to his second in 2005, the number of inauguration-related searches increased by more than a factor of ten. From 2005 to today’s address, the number grew even more. Few of the 2001 queries requested “video,” and none requested streaming. By 2005, a few queries such as inauguration audio and streaming video of inauguration appeared. Today, technology has become so prevalant that queries such as YouTube live inauguration, live blogging inauguration, inaugural podcast, and Obama inaugural speech mp3 formed one-third of all inauguration-related queries.

And if the overall query volume at Google is any indication of online activity, there is also has a fascinating graph on search patterns during Obama’s speech. It seems like as Obama was giving his speech, people on the Internet actually stopped to listen and watch:

It’s more than fitting that Obama’s inauguration would make waves around the Internet, as a kind of capstone to how well his campaign had leveraged the power of the Internet during the election. But watching the inauguration wasn’t all that we were doing. I was impressed by how many websites had pulled out the stops for their inauguration coverage. Bits at the New York Times had list of the digital spaces the inauguration would watched and discussed. I watched the speech on CNN’s website, and when the video site first popped up, I was surprised to see not just a live stream from DC, but my Facebook friends smiling at me too:

I wasn’t standing in the middle of an animated crowd, but watching a stream of my friend’s statuses placed me amidst an equally excited digital crowd. It reminded me of watching the debates while perusing the streams on election.twitter, and unsurprisingly, Twitter too was a flurry of activity on Tuesday.

What do these changes mean for the Obama administration? For digital natives who are participating in this new world of politics? I don’t have any solid answers – if you have any insights, share in the comments! — but I would like to point to one thing: all the chatter surrounding the new White House website and blog. The simple fact that we care about whitehouse.gov is amazing enough. I can’t think of the last time I went the site before Tuesday’s redesign, and now we’re even analyzing the website’s robot.txt file. “Change has come to America” announces the White House website banner – true, where change will lead us remains to be seen.
-Sarah Zhang

On October 15, 2008, 12,800 bloggers came together for Blog Action Day and helped spread the word about the issue of global poverty. From a social media measurement perspective, the day was a success, with blogs ranging from personal journals to big-name news sites such as The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and other members of the Technorati’s top 100 blogs posting on the subject. According to the Blog Action Day website, the message reached 13,498,280 “readers” on the internet.

Over at PepperDigital, we decided to post for Blog Action Day because it was for a good cause which allowed us to be part of a community working toward a common goal. I shared my view on creating an online homeless database in the United States, while other blogs made additional suggestions and observations such as Teen Ink Magazine’s post about Poverty Awareness Week and children who live in poverty around the world. Blog Action Day gave all its participants a chance to voice their views on global poverty, pose solutions, and push out a common message.

Blog Action Day put the power of mass communication in the hands of the blogosphere, harnessing the power of digital natives who possess the tools and know-how of communication via social networking, video, mobile, micro-blogging, and other digital tools to implement solutions to the problems of today and the future.

The new media environment offers us the potential to transform “existing structures of knowledge and power,” and harness the “collective intelligence” and “ability of the net and the web to facilitate rapid many-to-many communication,” as stated by Henry Jenkins, co-Director of the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies, in his writing on the topic of “the collective intelligence of media fans.”

From telemedicine projects in Africa such as the Harvard Initiative for Global Health to helping political candidates stay on top of digital tools, we digital natives have a bright future ahead of us filled with opportunity, but communication is the key. We have our traditional forms of media and dialogue like word of mouth, television, phone (dare I say fax?) and the printed word, as well as newer forms of communication like mobile and online video, the 24-hour news cycle, text messaging, IM, e-mail and microblogging. It is our responsibility to channel and grasp these formats so our messaging and calls to action are heard by the right audiences.

My question to you is which medium will reign supreme? Will blogging stay alive and will we still have the success of Blog Action Day 2008 in 2009 and beyond, or will we be broadcasting our thoughts through a different medium that gets our message across just as well? How can we continue to make calls to action such as Blog Action Day successful, and what mediums will be used?

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Rob Longert is an account executive at Peppercom, a mid size PR firm with offices in New York, San Francisco, and London. Check out the PepperDigital blog for more commentary from Rob and the PepperDigital team on the current digital landscape.

According to John Palfrey and Urs Gasser in Born Digital, “the ability of networked activist to transform politics in some countries could prove to be the single most important trend in the global Internet culture… If these early signs turn into a bigger movement, politics as we know it is in for big changes.”

We at the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement believe these big changes are right around the corner and we’re trying to make them happen.

So far, things that happen on the internet, and stay on the internet, are not helping social movements grow as much as some hoped. An example of this is when users on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook join causes or groups that are dedicated to raising awareness about a social movement. This is often seen as the equivalent of putting a “support your cause” bumper sticker on your car.

However, social networking sites are making it much easier for anyone to connect, communicate, and organize with people in their local area as well as around the globe. The internet has made creating and executing social movements much easier than ever before.
This is great and all, except the most popular social networking sites focus more on gossip within your social network than on creating positive change in your community.

The solution to this is to create a social networking site that focuses on the goal of creating positive change in your community.

PugetSoundOff.org is a revolutionary site that does just that. The focus is to connect teens in the Puget Sound area that care about the same social issues so that they can create positive change in their communities.

Here’s how it works.

Sean, a junior at Bellevue High, loves art. He respects the street art culture, but also knows it creates problems within a community. When an artist paints on the sidewalk or the side of a building, people become upset and damage is done.

To solve this problem, he’d like to have the city install an Art Wall, where street artist can go and display their art legally. However, he can’t do it alone and doesn’t know any of his friends who would be interested in helping him get the Art Wall installed.

Sean decides he’ll hop onto PugetSoundOff.org and write a blog about the problem he sees, what he wants to do about it, and if anyone else wants to help.

A few days later he sees he has 3 comments from people saying they would like to work with him to make this happen. He organizes a meeting with them so that they can do more research on the problem and solution so that they can create an action plan to make it happen.

Now, Sean is in a group of 4 people who really want to make this happen. However, they’ll need more support to really make this happen.

They decide to make a group on PugetSoundOff.org so that they can invite their friends to join the cause.

The group features an information section which teaches people about the problem and solution. It lets people know when they are getting together to talk about and implement the plan. It also has a few documents promoting the cause that people can download, print out, and distribute to their friends.

After a few weeks of hard work and determination the group has grown to 200 people who support the cause.

Now that they have the support they can really start to make an impact in their community.

And so the story goes Sean and his group follow their action plan and get the Art Wall to be installed so that everyone can enjoy the street art culture legally without any problems.

By using the site, Sean was able to connect with other teens that cared about the same problem as him. They worked together to create an action plan and gain enough support to implement the plan so that they could solve the problem they care about.

It’s a beautiful thing. However, PugetSoundOff.org, as a new initiative, is still working out all the kinks.

Check out the site and let us know what you think. What works, what doesn’t? What would make the site easier and better to use? Through comments and suggestions from you we can really make these types of sites powerful political tools.

Tyler Goulet is a Junior at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is currently triple majoring in Communication, Political Science, and Community Environment and Planning. He has been a Research Assistant for the CCCE for nearly a year. For more information on Tyler Goulet check out www.tylergoulet.com.

To kick off this week’s series of posts on Digital Natives as activists, I wanted to take a look at the future of Digital Natives as politicians beyond the U.S. Though we normally think of “activists” as individuals working outside government structures, it seems that governments still provide useful avenues for action. As such, those who work against the system occasionally accept the charge to work to change it from within. With the call for “Change” still reverberating through the blogosphere and collective imagination of the U.S. in the wake of the recent election, the possibility for internal activism seems particularly pertinent at the moment.

But how might this work in other countries—and in a future where digital fluency for policymakers is the norm, and not the exception? Global Voices recently excerpted one forecast by Mona Eltahawy, imagining the impact that the Middle East’s “Generation Facebook” might have on politics in the year 2033.

In Eltahawy’s essay, published by the World Policy Journal,

It’s October 2033 and Shahinaz Abdel-Salam, 55, has just been appointed Egypt’s first female interior minister. She’s about to address the nation by live holofeed to explain why she’s accepted a post that as a young woman she’d always dreamed would be abolished because, in the Egypt where she grew up, interior minister was synonymous with “chief torturer.”

As the excerpt on Global Voices continues, Shahinaz’s father

stopped speaking to Shahi for a few years after she started blogging in 2005. At the time, she would tell any journalists who would listen that she’d started to blog so that she could call the then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak a dictator…Shahi had tried to explain to her father that she belonged to a generation that would change Egypt, but to his death her father remained skeptical. He never told her that he’d read her blog secretly and was especially proud of the role model she had become for other young people when she started blogging…But Shahi’s father couldn’t imagine how a bunch of kids could change the country using their computers.

In the 2033 of Eltahawy’s world, Shahi’s father’s sentiment sounds hopelessly outdated. And perhaps it is a sign of our own times that it already sounds misguided. “A bunch of kids” have already begun to change their countries using their computers; and as their countries change, the world changes too.

Eltahawy closes her essay about the future by grounding it in the present.

Generation Facebook is the godchild of two important developments that took off in tandem over the past three years in Egypt—an increasingly bold blogging movement and street activism. Both are among the few reasons for optimism in a country where most are pessimistic about the future.

… The recent Internet-inspired activism has flipped the script—the needs of the masses have sparked a wave of unprecedented activism among young Egyptians. Bloggers have been instrumental in the conviction of police officers for torture and in getting neglected stories into the headlines.

Young Egyptians activists today, as Eltahawy’s essay illuminates, may well become the political leaders of the future. They will bring into office the concerns and causes that have occupied them for their whole lives. It seems increasingly probable that these preoccupations will arise from the swirl of information and activism that pervades the Internet. The future of politics in the Middle East (and the rest of the world) will fall to a generation of dual citizens: Digital Natives who have grown up in a liminal zone, shuttling between being online and off.

The wonders of the World Wide Web have been talked about for years now. The internet has evolved from a media similar to T.V. (one way interaction) to a media where content producers can interact instantly with the audience. This type of interaction has never been made so easy. In fact, the instant interaction between people hundreds of miles away is making social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook explode in popularity. Anyone who uses the internet can see the benefits of joining social networking sites. The question must be asked. Can social networking sites be used to leverage political power?

More and more people are starting to believe in the power of social networking sites. Some would argue that our most recent President-Elect, Barack Obama, would not have been elected if it hadn’t been for his use of social networking sites.

Using social networking sites to communicate and organize has proven to be very effective in many campaigns. We at the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement (CCCE) are trying find a solution to the downward trend in youth civic engagement. We believe that social networking sites may be the key to defeating this downward trend.

Professor Lance Bennett, the director of the CCCE theorizes that there has been a fundamental generational shift in how today’s youth view civic engagement versus past generations and how they have viewed civic engagement. His paper on this topic can be found here.

In summary, he argues that today’s youth “see [his]/her political activities and commitments in highly personal terms that contribute more to enhancing the quality of personal life, social recognition, self esteem, or friendship relations, than to understanding, support, and government” which is how previous generations have viewed civic engagement (Source p. 6).

What does this mean? Well, it means we need to stop telling the youth what political issues to care about, let them choose what interests them (aka what would enhance the quality of their personal life), and teach them how to become involved. We need to give them, and teach them how to use, the tools to create and implement a plan to solve issues they care about. A little spark of confidence and help in getting the project off the ground would help too.

In order to ensure that they have social recognition from their community and to increase their friendship relations, the project they work on should be local. That would make recognition easy and simple because their impact could be seen easily. If the project they are working on is local than they can include their friends and have them help which would increase their friendship relations. A local project will also show more immediate results than a large scale project. Once a youth has complete a local project and sees positive results their self esteem will increase and they will be more likely to continue down the civically engaged path they have stumbled down so far.

Currently the CCCE is working on a project that will allow the youth in the Puget Sound area of Washington State, which includes Seattle, to do all of the above.

www.PugetSoundOff.org is a social networking site designed to connect teens with similar political passions so that they can easily organize and communicate with each other in order to solve problems they care about in their communities.

The site was recently launched at the beginning of September. We currently have about 500 members. The website is a revolutionary experiment in youth civic engagement. Stay posted for more blog posts about the future of PugetSoundOff.org and how it relates to Digital Natives.

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Tyler is a Junior at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is currently triple majoring in Communication, Political Science, and Community Environment and Planning. He has been a Research Assistant for the CCCE for nearly a year. For more information on Tyler Goulet check out www.tylergoulet.com.

Lena tries to make sense of the relationship between the Iraq War and her personal beliefs on the value of protesting through an interview with a committed protester:

“Personal connections, friendships, loss… are often what galvanize people into taking action… But is that what it’s going to take? Do we have to wait for everyone to have a friend step on a landmine before we really organize or mobilize against war? Or will I, or will we all, continue to sleep in on Saturday mornings and rely on (protestors like) Alan Wolf to do it for us?”

Greg shares his experience of attending an extravagant dinner with former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich:

“It was like the Matrix, because in that movie the main character finds out that everything he thought was real was just a perception of real. He gets taken to a world which is parallel but very separate. I feel we’re just trapped in our own matrices, and the only way out is to realize that we need to understand other perspectives. I was there to see what they were all about, but I could never see them trying to figure out my life.”

By promoting an atmosphere of civic engagement and critical, political analysis among America’s youth, GPRX challenges pundits who argue that we are “Generation Q” or the “Quiet Americans.” Although political participation and civic duties have increasingly been transferred to the online sphere, initiatives by Digital Natives such as Our Time are neither to be underestimated nor ignored.

Keep up the great work GPRX!

Such “flash mob” happenings have picked up in popularity over the last few years thanks to the publicity they have gained through blogs, online event pages, and most especially Facebook. Of the event in Boston, one site wrote, this “silent dance party involves a large group of people assembling at a given area on a pre-decided time. They mill around inconspicuously, and at the signal (in this case, an airhorn), insert their headphones into their ears, hit play on their portable music player and start dancing as passersbys confusingly look on as a swarm of people dance in silence.”

You can check out this hilarious, spontaneous production below:

Enjoyed this video? Look out for more Reporters-in-the-Field productions every week.

The mission of MideastYouth is “to inspire and provide young people with the freedom and opportunity of expression, and facilitate a fierce but respectful dialogue among the highly diverse youth of all sects, socio-economic backgrounds, and political and religious beliefs in the Middle East.” MideastYouth.com fights for social change with podcasts, blogs, social networks, and online video.

In this podcast, Esra’a talks about the ability of the internet to empower minorities with a voice, the mission of MideastYouth.com, and the change it has sparked in the world.

Listen to the podcast

And learn more about Esra’a, winner of Berkman Award for Internet Innovation, who when not “kicking butt” directing the ever impressive MideastYouth platform, “enjoys drinking flavored milk and writing about herself in 3rd person to remind herself of her existence.”

Along with Dr. Sunshine Hillygus, Keli Goff, Nasser Wedaddy, and Judith Perry, Paul Selker, Director of Outreach and Communications at Obama Works, will be discussing ObamaWorks with us today. Earlier, summer intern Nikki Leon talked to Paul on camera about how online interaction can breed offline activism.

Obama Works is an independent grassroots organization that helps Obama supporters in neighborhoods across the country to organize community service events. The group was founded in early 2008 by a group of Yale students who were inspired by Barack Obama and felt that the energy surrounding his campaign could be channeled to do more than generate votes.

In this video, Paul Selker (a recent Yale grad and one of the group’s earliest members) discusses how the organization came together, how they use the web, and what role the internet has played in enabling people of all ages as activists. Produced by Nikki Leon, with camera work by Kanupriya Tewari, and audio engineering by John Randall.

For more on Digital Natives issues, come back next week for new multimedia, and check out recently released Born Digital, and the reactions.

But this plea for donations was different. Sean did not tap the “netroots,” (the left-leaning political blogosphere). Instead, he posted a simple website containing a web-comic telling his story. Using an Internet meme archetype to illustrate his absurd hometown political reality, he hit a nerve. Self-consciously designed utilizing simple xkcd-style stick-figures, and making a few quasi-insider-but-not-too-elitist geek references, he managed to simultaneously solicit outrage, empathy, and, most importantly, lots of donations.

P.J. Huffstutter reported Sean’s story yesterday in the LA Times Huffstutter mentions Sean’s jokes about “down-modding” and “trolling.”, The story also identifies the stick-figure style as being based on the stick-figure illustrations found in xkcd, a popular web-comic by Randall Monroe (…an web-comic author who has somehow managed to earn a stylistic monopoly on stick figure drawings.) While Huffstutter describes the details accurately, I don’t think he realizes how significant these cultural touchstones are.

Sean is an insider of a growing internet sub-culture. By making quips about “down-modding” Arlen Siegfreid’s conservative ranting “below the thresh-hold” in the first frame of the comic, Sean is consciously proving himself to be an insider in a particular slice of a rich semantic web 2.0 / 3.0, social bookmaking, viral meme-generating online cultural space. Sean obviously lives in this space, as does his audience of donors. (Huffstutter’s style indicates that he is wading through at least somewhat unfamiliar territory in his LA Times article.) (Hang wrote this great post last week about masquerading as an insider not just by knowing a few facts, but by knowing the jokes and therefore demonstrating knowledge of the professional culture.)

This sub-culture is far larger and far more accessible than it ever was. The behaviors (and values?) of this space are going slightly more mainstream as a new generation of Digital Natives comes to occupy the space. Conversations and ideas that seem outlandish in suburbs across the nation have taken root online and drawn in new audiences through computer screens. These conversations have even leaked off the web into our newspapers, helping to make Al Gore a hero and Richard Dawkins culturally relevant.

By demonstrating that he is a cultural insider with this particular slice of internet-meme generating culture, Sean strikes a nerve that garners support on an emotional level. Sure, it helps that his politics agree with mine– but the cultural references in this comic signal more. Sean socializes the way I do, and derives pleasure from the things I derive pleasure from. Sean lives the way I do. The details of Sean’s politics aren’t important; Sean is -like me-, and therefore… of course Sean will fight for the things I would fight for.

This tactic, this emotional connection stemming from a feeling of likeness, has always been a powerful tool in politics. “That politician is a [religious group here], like me.” “That politician is a family man, like me.” “That politicians daddy was a coal-miner, and therefore worked as hard as my dad did.” “That politician speaks with a southern accent, like me.”

As a sub-culture becomes less insular and community grows, they realize that they actually have the power to create change.

Sean’s online culture has been testing the waters for a while now. In what has seemed like online mischief, they have used social networking sites to swarm news sites with precision timing to alter the results of online polls. In December, the whale adopted by Greenpeace was officially named Mr. Spashy Pants, the name that beat the runners up Humphrey, Aiko, Libertad, Mira, Kaimana, Aurora, Shanti, Amal and Manami with almost 80% of the vote. This particular community is also responsible for swarming countless MSNBC, ABC, and CNN online polls to express their support for Ron Paul, and swarming many other online polls to express a lack of religious belief. It was only a matter of time before the sub-culture graduated into real politics.

Perhaps Sean Travis embodies the next step in this sub-culture reaching for political power. By insinuating that anything is possible because “THIS IS THE INTERNET!” he is cracking open a new political reality. Unlike Jello Biafra, Sean might actually win.

-John Randall