As I listed to this morning’s session on “Doing Something in Your community” – essentially a call to leadership – I was struck by the Visible Moment. Then the familiar jingle from a cell phone interrupted the call.

Virtually everyone in the room recognizes that a decisive moment is upon us where the capabilities to lead communities and foster citizenship have been enhanced by mobile media and social technologies. As Steve Gunderson, President and CEO of Council on Foundations, explained, the tendency is to look at the moment through the lens of technology. That both highlights and underestimates the opportunity.

While the tools empower, the real opportunity is extending the social frameworks at the heart of community foundations. Social frameworks help explain events and connect them to humans.

We’ve heard how mobile devices -- the preferred communications tool of the young and increasingly everyone – can create new forms of social and political networking. Our cellphones, ourselves.

The great sociologist Erving Goffman mapped myriad possibilities of human interaction in social space, and his observations take on a new relevance in our cell phone world. Crucial to Goffman’s analysis was the notion that in social situations where strangers must interact, “the individual is obliged to ‘come into play’ upon entering the situation and to stay ‘in play’ while in the situation.”

That’s a big idea for communities. We use our cell phones to exert our status in social spaces. As a society, we are endlessly forgiving of our own personal “emergencies” that require cell phone conversation and easily apoplectic about having to listen to others’.

As if, on cue, the ringtone heard throughout the Country Club Room was an inevitable occurence. Rather than turn it off, its owner answers, says hello, listens and talks.

Rude? Boorish bad manners? Perhaps. But the owner is exercising his right to be connected. Getting my attention, I make sure my phone is set on “silent.” At least for the moment.

The point is that community leaders now have the opportunity to make new kinds of conversations, create new kinds of social frameworks.

Conversation (as opposed to “talk”) is to genuine sociability what courtship (as opposed to “hooking up”) is to romance. And the technologies that mediate these distinctions are important: the cell phone exchange of information is a distant relative of formal conversation, just as the Internet chat room is a far less compelling place to become intimate with another person than a formal date. In both cases, however, we have convinced ourselves as a culture that these alternatives are just as good as the formalities—that they are, in fact, improvements upon them.

“A conversation has a life of its own and makes demands on its own behalf,” Goffman wrote. “It is a little social system with its own boundary-making tendencies; it is a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains.”

Cell phones provide us with a new, but not necessarily superior means of communicating with each other. They encourage talk, not conversation. They link us to those we know, but remove us from the strangers who surround us in public space. Our constant accessibility and frequent exchange of information is undeniably useful. But it would be a terrible irony if “being connected” required or encouraged a disconnection from community life—an erosion of the spontaneous encounters and everyday decencies that make society both civilized and continually interesting.

— Dale Peskin

Let's see if we can compress complex thinking from Monday into a few, big ideas:

1. What we know is falling. Newspapers and traditional media no longer have the capacity to foster democracy, organize communities and serve the information needs of citizens as they once did.
2. Knowledge and citizenship are being redistributed. Access is open and pervasive.
3. Almost nothing has been invented yet. Place-based organizations and the Creative Class hold in their hands the opportunity to spread knowledge and fill the gap created by the decline of traditional, informed intermediaries.
4. What to do and how to do it?

The day's program gave us many possible solutions and challenged us to think creatively about a response. Best of all, it challenged us to think through new metaphors of storytelling and understanding: mobility, social media, geo-location, augmented reality, games. There's more to this than putting old wine in new bottles. I think its about small moves and new metaphors.

Small moves -- even ones that seemed obvious for years -- can yield dramatic results. The lesson is that breakthrough ideas rarely come from inventing the next big thing or forcing four-square values into the circular holes of the latest technology. Rather, they are more likely to come from simple changes that respond to continual, contextual shifts in the marketplace, workplace, the human condition and, of course, community.

My organization calls that Game Changing. It is our way of looking at breakthrough approaches to common challenges.

Game Changers see what everyone else has seen, but think what few have thought. They discover something new by accepting the possibility they can make something better. Typically, they succeed through a creative approach to an old problem. The rest is proving that genuine creativity is not necessarily a result of out-of-the-box thinking, but of true expertise.

We shouldn't look at this moment as the sad decline of familiar formats, but rather as a renaissance for knowledge, understanding and citizenship. A renaissance is a moment of reframing. We step out of the frame as it is currently defined and begin to see the whole picture in a new context. We can then play by rules new and old.

Renaissances are great eras. They are opportunities, as the word “renaissance” implies, for things to be reborn in a new context. We can then play by rules new and old.

Where the Renaissance took us out of a dark age and provided metaphors for the arts, literacy and civilization to flourish in an age of discovery and reason, so too can the current renaissance lift our current condition. We have the online web of hypertext and a universe of digital metaphors and connections that allow any idea to become linked to another. Our equivalents of the printing press are the computer, the Internet and the mobile device.  We not only can read, but we can write documents that are available instantaneously to citizens almost everywhere. All citizens can participate.

With this world comes complexity, and some say chaos. But there are new ways, and new metaphors, by which we can organize knowledge for our communities as well as foster citizenship within them.  Complexity is an opportunity to engage with the structures of news and information on an entirely new scale.

Almost nothing has been invented yet. We can establish systems to preserve the values of news and information that need to be preserved in this complex era. Addressing real needs rather than trying to “create a need” for existing services becomes the solution to the problem.

— Dale Peskin

Amy Webb's smart presentation focuses on media behaviors as much as the emerging media platforms and tools -- mobile and geo-local -- that are changing behaviors.

That's a smart way to look at the new world.  Look outside the room to the way people conduct their lives through personal media and their network of friends. Everyday People are creating personal technocracies -- from the Greek tekhne meaning skill, kratos meaning power -- that provides an ordered structure for conducting their work, their business and their lives. Their personal devices, mobile and always-on, are the conduits for essential information they require to discover, synthesize, connect, share and transact with others. Their devices are extensions of of themselves.

The emergence of personal, digital technocracies replaces the long-powerful idea of the Industrial Age, which organized the masses around the efficiencies of mechanical systems. Mass production, mass media and mass marketing are all based on the premise that human beings can fall into place as cogs in highly mechanized systems and then behave with great predictability.

Efficiencies in production and distribution are the priorities. Over the past 150 years, this strategy has succeeded in growing some of the largest and most profitable businesses the world has ever seen. At the end of the Industrial Age, they are collapsing around us.

It’s just over. No matter what set of metrics you apply to measure them, mass production, mass media and mass marketing are all in decline. That is because the basic organizing principle of the Industrial Age -- that technology should be used to manage complexity and the masses -- is obsolete.

Yes, the Internet changed the world,  but not in the way people think. Truth is, most people -- especially those in business -- don’t get the Internet. They tend to think of computers, cell phones and networks as extensions of industrialization and automation of the workplace and market. They are quite the opposite.

Personal technocracies restore life and unpredictability to virtually anything they touch. That’s because these technologies are not so important for any particular thing they can do, but for how they change our perspective on everything else.

To orient to the new, interactive ecology of culture, commerce and consciousness, you don’t have to understand how any single piece of technology works. You just have to understand how the proliferation of all this stuff has worked to change the way people relate to everything from newspapers and brands to business and, most of all, one another.

"It's got to be social," says the savvy Ms. Webb. She's got it right. The Internet is neither technological or media phenomenon: it is a social phenomenon.

— Dale Peskin

No less than Barry Diller has called local "one of the few areas that hasn't been colonized" on the Web.

Now comes Patch, AOL's big local play. So far, local sites in 37 communities. Some professional journalists, some volunteers, and robust directories on local businesses.

New AOL CEO Tim Armstrong thinks there's a fortune to be mined from placed-based communities where most transactions still occur within 10 miles of where consumers live. Armstrong, who invested in Patch while he was Google's sales chief, thinks Patch can succeed where local sites such as Backfence have failed. He's put professional journalists, a big investment in technology, and AOL's marketing power behind.

The Patch sites are great models on how to organize local content around community. Will they succeed as businesses that compete against the big aggregaters?

We'll see. You can check it out at http://www.patch.com/about and weigh in.

— Dale Peskin

The initial round of afternoon breakout session has me thinking about the speed of change. Several people have noted that news organizations have been slow to react to the precipitous changes impacting news in a connected society. Others have worried about the implications of change -- and keeping up with it -- for community foundations.

Technologies take time to move from invention to arrival in our lives. Because we assume adoption will be more rapid, we inevitably overestimate the short term and underestimate the long-term impact of new technologies.

Futurist Paul Saffo says the lesson that we constantly forget when it comes to new technologies is to never mistake a clear view for a short distance.

“It’s that sense of standing on a ridge looking out across a great forest at a distant mountain,” says Saffo. “The peak is so close it seems you could reach out and touch it. That is, until you reach out amid the trees and start beating your way towards the mountain.”

Change creates a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last decade hasn’t been ordinary; the fabulists have been closer to reality.

That is what revolutions are like, says author and media scholar Clay Shirky: 

“The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

Who could have predicted that Twitter would make real-time, on-scene correspondents of us all, 140 words at a time?

— Dale Peskin

In his opening remarks, Alberto Ibargüen referenced the initiative by the Federal Communications Commission to ensure that Americans have access to vibrant, diverse sources of news and information.

This morning the FCC announced its agenda for its March 4 working on "Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era". Go to http://reboot.fcc.gov/futureofmedia/ to access the agenda.

It will also be broadcast live over the Internet from the FCC Live web page at http://www.fcc.gov/live. ; Questions from the Internet audience can be submitted throughout the course of the workshop.

Citizens can also share their stories about media at Reboot, the FCC's new portal.

Two other events to learn more:

First, FCC Managing Director Steve VanRoekel will talk about efforts to make the government more transparent and accountable at the We Media conference, in Miami next week. He'll be interviewed by Sunlight Foundation Executive Director Ellen Miller. Go to http://www.wemedia.com.

The Personal Democracy Forum, June 3-4, in New York, explores and analyzes technology's impact on government, governance and politics.

— Dale Peskin

The inevitable question about Twitter came: Are we losing content, meaning and nuance in 140-character stories?

Here's one kind of answer from the origins of the Twitter News Network:

Freshman Kevin Cupp, a freshman Business Information Technology major, was one of many wired, student witnesses to the tragic events at Virginia Tech. The webmaster of Planet Blacksburg, Cupp provided compelling, real-time account of events from campus -- through text messages, SMS, web posts, blogging, and digital photography even as he was locked down after the shooting spree. His cell-phone and web posts on Twitter -- a new global community where users describe what they’re doing at the moment -- provided a chilling record of reality captured and shared by a connected community.

Cupp’s work was used extensively in reporting by Mainstream Media, as well as shared and redistributed extensively throughout the Internet.

— Dale Peskin