GAVNet Collaborative Curation

Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel. It wasn’t a platform for broadcasting pre-planned messages but for interacting with supporters and starting new conversations—however controversial those conversations often were. Bleeker says one of the biggest lessons he’s learned from this election cycle is that social media is increasingly going to be part of any candidate’s so-called “earned media strategy”—that is, the coverage a candidate gets for free in the press. The President-elect has shown he can turn a news cycle in 140 characters or less; in a recent 60 Minutes interview, he said he plans to continue using Twitter as president. “He’s going to tell his side of the story from the digital bully pulpit,” Lira says. Whether fake news did or didn’t affect the election’s outcome, Facebook as a platform did. The winning candidate was not just willing, but eager to break with traditional models of campaigning. His team invested in new ways of using the digital tools and platforms that have come to dominate the media landscape. Anyone who wants to defeat him in the future will have to do the same.

If there is a barrier to Trump resurrecting the massive deportations of the Bush and Obama years, though, it lies in the independence of local law enforcement. To override them is certainly possible. But it would require a vast expansion in federal power that, under any other circumstances, would be anathema to small-government conservatives worried about Washington overreach and rejecting the judgment of local police. The self-proclaimed law-and-order candidate would have to act against the wishes of police chiefs. Trump couldn’t persuade voters in those places to support his candidacy. How much punishment is he willing to inflict on them to ensure they assist in an unprecedented eviction of the American populace?

Why has business education failed business? Why has it fallen so much in love with finance and the ideas it espouses? It’s a problem with deep roots, which have been spreading for decades. It encompasses issues like the rise of neoliberal economic views as a challenge to the postwar threat of socialism. It’s about an academic inferiority complex that propelled business educators to try to emulate hard sciences like physics rather than take lessons from biology or the humanities. It dovetails with the growth of computing power that enabled complex financial modeling. The bottom line, though, is that far from empowering business, MBA education has fostered the sort of short-term, balance-sheet-oriented thinking that is threatening the economic competitiveness of the country as a whole. If you wonder why most businesses still think of shareholders as their main priority or treat skilled labor as a cost rather than an asset—or why 80 percent of CEOs surveyed in one study said they’d pass up making an investment that would fuel a decade’s worth of innovation if it meant they’d miss a quarter of earnings results— it’s because that’s exactly what they are being educated to do.

Recent progress on climate change has been vital, environmentalists say. Although some say that the work is fragile at best and could be undone by the Trump administration, others remain certain that the grass-roots nature of environmental work will protect it from any sweeping federal changes. “Real change — the change that makes a difference — has been made at regional or local levels,” said Lonnie Thompson, distinguished university professor in Ohio State University’s School of Earth Sciences and a senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. “It’s coming from the bottom up, (and) these changes will come no matter who’s in charge, what we believe or what we hope for.”

Voting in elections every four years is not enough. Sometimes, working in policy makes me forget the value of direct service and volunteering. There are civic institutions throughout each and every community, from homeless shelters to schools and community centers, that need support. These spaces present us with countless opportunities for direct human interaction, and they allow us to strengthen our communities in the process. Use your hands to make something. Civic organizations provide critical infrastructure in our communities.

For people who like an orderly, predictable world, this is the scariest thing about Facebook; not that it may be full of lies (a problem that could potentially be fixed), but that its scope gives it real power to change history in bold, unpredictable ways.

One is the ubiquity of Facebook, which has reached a truly epic scale. Last month the company reported that about 1.8 billion people now log on to the service every month. Because social networks feed off the various permutations of interactions among people, they become strikingly more powerful as they grow. With about a quarter of the world’s population now on Facebook, the possibilities are staggering.

Thanks to the internet, now each person with once-maligned views can see that he’s not alone. And when these people find one another, they can do things — create memes, publications and entire online worlds that bolster their worldview, and then break into the mainstream.

Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.

I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.

Her 1,500-word speech, a version of which appears in Vital Little Plans, became the basis for The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her main argument was Kirk’s: Small neighborhood stores, ignored by the planners in their grim demolition derby, were essential social hubs. She added that sidewalks, stoops, laundries, and mailbox areas were also indispensable centers of community activity, and that sterile, vacant outdoor space served nobody. “The least we can do,” she said, “is to respect—in the deepest sense—strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own.”