Seth Godin wrote today about Citizens.

His post is about choosing a word to describe someone who is not yet in relationship with a marketer or seller.

He writes:

“I was talking with Dan Pink on a conference call earlier and we realized that “prospect” or “target market” are very marketing-centric terms. The person is defined by the marketer, not the other way around.”

I think that’s important – that idea of being defined by the marketer instead of the other way around. Being named by another is not something any of us feel good about, if we think a few minutes.

Peter Block talks and writes about citizens. So does John McKnight.

As a result of my life’s intersection with each of these men on occasion, I have come to appreciate the word citizen a lot more. It doesn’t feel quite so stiff and political to me as it once did, and it carries with it the feeling of power vs. powerlessness.

Some have said the word “guest” is better than the word “citizen”, and I can understand why that may feel true, but I see the word guest as similar to the word client or even patient, because it is still a word conferred upon someone, that implies a relationship of some dependence, real or imagined.

It also, fortunately, implies some degree of choice, which is important. The word guest implies that an invitation may have been offered somewhere along the way, so it’s not as slanted towards possession as client and prospect and target market. Citizen feels even more empowered to me, like a word least likely to be conferred upon me by another – by someone needing to categorize me within their market scope.

What feels most important to me is the implication of choice and personal ownership that comes from Citizen.

Much of the conversation that goes on the the world is powerless. The common, powerless conversation, whatever it appears to be saying on the surface about boss, parents, co-workers, spouse, leadership, etc., is saying that I have to wait for the transformation of others before I can create the life I’ve imagined for myself.

Much of our modern culture has become seller – consumer based, in which I find myself in either the role of marketer, provider, seller, helper, caregiver, etc., or client, customer, patient, prospect, recipient.

It’s not easy to think it through at first exposure, but I’ve found that the work of both Peter Block and John McKnight have helped me think about my life and work in terms of asset based community, personal ownership of my world and growing more open to the idea of discovering the gifts in a life or a neighborhood, rather than cataloging its needs and deficits for some fix or service to be provided “to” it.

The Answer to How is Yes is one book by Peter Block that has helped me move in the direction of working together with others to create an alternative future. Participating in A Small Group Cincinnati (ASG) has also helped create some space for change and personal practice around the “6 conversations“. You might also enjoy reading more about the work of changing the world by changing conversation by downloading the PDF of the Civic Engagement booklet used in the work of ASG.

Citizen Weeks
Cincinnati, OH
2-18-08

Pete Blackshaw created a new facebook group named Digital Cincinnati this week, on the same day that the last ever edition of the Cincinnati Post hit the streets.

From the group info page for Digital Cincinnati:

A networking hub for students, digital entrepreneurs, local interactive marketing experts, online video passionistas, and “old timers” looking to learn from the wired generation, and vice versa. This group will also be a sounding board for new ideas and digital opportunities in the greater Cincinnati region. Let’s think big! Digital breakthroughs have happened here before, and many more can/will!

Check out the information video, as well (on Facebook).

As mentioned in my questionably useful tribute to Twitter earlier today, I received a cell phone “tweet” this afternoon of a story by Joe Strupp about the Cincinnati Post’s impending year end closing. The story is published at: editorandpublisher.com.

Among the interesting points in his story for me was this:

Future plans for many of the staff are telling about the bleak journalism prospects. Shelly Whitehead, a police reporter, is going to work in internal communications at a hospital, while former Managing Editor Mark Neikirk, a 28-year Post veteran, has signed on to run a project at Northern Kentucky University. “There is life after journalism,” Neikirk says, but admits, “I liked going to battle everyday in the newsroom.” He says he has still not let himself think about the paper’s eventual end: “It is bad, there have always been two voices in Cincinnati.”Whitehead, who spoke via cell phone while working her beat at a local police station, said she is glad to get out of news because the industry has strayed from storytelling into “quick, constant updating.”

The part about straying from storytelling into “quick, constant updating” is a thought that strikes me as important.

Quick, constant updating is a data stream, a pulse… it might even be critical and helpful stuff, but it’s just data. It’s the ticker at the bottom of a TV screen. It’s the quick snippets of “Stay tuned for an update on whether that healthy lunch you’re eating might just make you sick… but first the weather”.

There is little room for reflection in the news model of quick, constant updating. There is little space created to consider what is important or why something matters in that world of streaming story updates.

That’s not really story, and story is important, in spite of its reputation of being the slow sibling in the family of modern communication.

Storytelling used to be more common than it is today.

Fact finding was hard work and most information was stored in books, news archives, libraries or corporate and institutional databases.

Today, facts are almost as common as words themselves; as common as pens imprinted with the names of the drugs we’re all supposed to be asking our doctors about… Facts are accessible at every moment — at the speed of an internet connection — and as easily repackaged and republished as they are collected, from Google and other dispensers.

The ubiquity of data and information of all kinds affects us in interesting ways. Like anything that becomes more and more abundant, each fact or detail to which we all have such ready access becomes somehow less important, less valuable than when information was scarce.

Attention is far more scarce than information today, and attention requires more than a steady flow of facts to stay activated. In fact, attention is numbed and flattened by a steady stream of anything.

If they are to matter to me, facts and data need context and emotional connections. They need a little space, or at least I need a little space to process them. The presentation of facts is reporting. Storytelling, though, includes an emotional energy and leaves a space that calls for our reflection. It is quite different from reporting.

Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, offers this simple insight about the difference:

“To paraphrase E.M. Forster’s famous observation, a fact is ‘The queen died and the king died.’ A story is ‘The queen died and the king died of a broken heart.’ “

I want more stories, less “quick, constant updating”.

Some 13 years ago, back in the days before the word blog (or most other e-vocabulary) appeared, when our choices for Internet access were AOL, Compuserve and iac.net here in Cincy, I wrote a journal entry while on a business trip to Shell Island, about getting to watch a kid collect a story for himself on the beach one day. It struck me then, as now, that having a story is better than having facts. A story leaves room for questions, too, and questions are always more useful in the long run than answers, however messy and occasionally cumbersome questions can be.

I have questions about what the many good people at the Post are going to be doing. I enjoyed reading about a few of their plans. I thought about our friend Joe Wessels, who is among those journalists at the Post, and who is working to create a new place for his words and creativity at cincy.com, City Beat and other local publishing ventures.

I’d be happy to hear from others who want to keep on writing, whether or not they are doing it as a full time job. One way to reach me is email to: rbw AT cincy DOT com

I’ve read and heard a number of people concerned about the fact that, without the Post, Cincinnati is left with one News voice, and that we need more than that.

I think I agree, but does the voice have to come from a news organization? I can’t help but wonder about that. Newspapers are a product of a world in which information was hard to find and just as hard to broadcast and deliver.

In a world in which information is so common, and the tools for communicating accessible to nearly anyone interested, isn’t it at least conceivable that the other voice our city needs is its own — our own?

That’s what I keep wondering about, as a non-journalist — What stories do we want told — or want to tell — about ourselves, our city and each other?

There are talented people all over the Tristate. I’m more impressed on many days by local bloggers than I am by what is sold as news.

I imagine a city made more aware of its own rich heritage, interesting neighborhoods, its myriad stories and connections… a city that thrives because it is awake to itself and because it isn’t looking for anyone else to tell it how it’s doing or whom it should blame for whatever it’s been told is wrong with it.

I imagine a city willing to tell its own stories, so I’m telling myself to stop waiting on the sidelines for someone else to do it, and start telling some of my own.

Let’s see how well I listen.

-RBW

P.S. I was part of the team that created the first online edition of the Cincinnati Post, back in 1996. I just checked the Wayback Machine for CincyPost.com and found some of the old issues, including our now very dated mast head. Yes, I think we should find our own voices in this new communication saturated world, but I will surely miss this particular voice…

“The wonderful thing about Twitter, is Twitter’s a wonderful thing” (Apologies to Tigger and Pooh…)You say you don’t know what Twitter is? That’s ok. Lots of us are relative newbies. It’s worth a look and depending on your interest in text messaging tools and toys, it may be worth trying for yourself.

At its most basic level, Twitter is a networking tool that helps users keep abreast of what friends, or strangers, are doing. It can be useless or useful, depending on who you ask and how you choose to use it.

Here’s why it was useful today:

I got a text message on my cell phone that read:

The reason I got it is interesting…

I get a text message, via my randyweeks twitter account, of any twitter post that contains the words Cincy or Cinci. Joe Wessels also started following cincy and cinci on his JoeFoto account at Twitter after we talked about how interesting (or not) it can be some days. You can, too, with your own Twitter account (yeah, I know… you’re thinking, geez, why should I WANT to? I’m not sure. Really. This behavior is a chronic condition of mine).

Back to Twitter:
Twitter allows a user to communicate with family, friends or the world at large by sending and receiving short text messages about pretty much anything. Tweets (messages sent via twitter using the web or registered cell phone) are most often little more than electronic blurts that answer the general question, “what are you doing now?”

It’s kind of like updating your status on Facebook. (You say you don’t know what facebook is? come on…).

Other interesting things one can do with Twitter include:

• follow other users (receive their posts automatically), including news and other publishers
• be followed by other users (have posts sent through twitter received automatically by anyone interested)
• and more interestingly for me, lately: follow (receive automatically) any twitter posts (or tweets) that contain certain words or phrases.

When I signed up a few months ago, I decided to track the words cinci and cincy (because cincy.com also operates as cinci.com and I was curious how often locals or others use the short, friendly “cincy” to talk about Cincinnati — quite a bit, as you’d expect).

It’s been fun to see what kinds of messages get snatched out of the airwaves and delivered from one twitter account to another based on those terms.

Sometimes it’s someone saying “I’m flying into cincy this am”, or “taking the family to festival of lights at the cincy zoo”, or “sigh… watching Cincy get beat again by _____ (fill in the blank…)”

Today, it was the link to a news story about the Cincy Post’s closing.

For anyone interested in the the interpretation of that twitter message, here it is:

The message:

“(Poynter): Romenesko: Cincy Post staffers pack up as they put out their last editions: Editor & Publisher… http://tinyurl.com/35sduu“

came from Poynter.org, which has been broadcasting posts via twitter for a while.

It was an entry by Journalist Jim Romenesko (wikipedia bio) linking to a story about the Cincinnati Post at EditorAndPublisher.com

The full story, by Joe Strupp, is at:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003684364

I’ll write more about that actual article in a different entry, seeing as how I wandered off into geekland in this particular post.

More about Twitter and the use of it by Poynter and other news / journalism sites can be found in this and other articles:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=128918

RBW