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Social networking is on everyone’s radar these days. Facebook had more than 123 million unique visitors in just one month recently. MySpace has become a consuming obsession for many youth and young adults. Even the business community is following suit, building community and sharing resources through websites like LinkedIn and Pulse.
A young woman named Tila Tequila used MySpace to attract more than 1 million “friends” and parlay them into a career in reality television. Barack Obama has used his website, designed under the guiding hand of one of the founders of Facebook, to attract more than 1 million donors to his campaign and could possibly parlay their activist support and network-building into the presidency of the United States.
“Seeing dangerously” this month does not extend in any way to suggesting political endorsements. But what Barack Obama has accomplished is both interesting and instructive as NAEA prepares to launch our new website this fall. Throughout the discovery and planning phases, our intent has always been to actively use it as an innovative channel for attracting new members, building community and solidarity of purpose, promoting intellectual debate, and fostering activism among our members.
Within weeks, when the www.arteducators.org website goes live, we will be providing you with guidance for navigation and making the best use of all that this 24/7 virtual community-of-practice offers. But that’s just the mechanics of the website. What I want to talk about here is the culture of the website.
On one level, much of how NAEA has always worked is embodied in the new website. Art educators come together around a shared vision, a common interest and/or a given task. Others are recruited. Strategies are developed. Resources are identified. We communicate and collaborate and delegate. It’s all entirely in keeping with our “by the members, for the members” ethos. We have a mission—and bit by bit, along hundreds of different fronts, we keep making incremental steps forward in our efforts to bring arts education to a new and better day.
However, “incremental” is not the way the Web works. In an anecdote made famous in his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell told of how Hush Puppies footwear went from tripping along as an also-ran brand, selling 30,000 pair a year in the early ‘90s, to selling 430,000 in 1995 and more than 1.6 million in 1996.
That is the power of the network, of the meta-community stretching its legs and lining up behind a mission, an idea, a plan … or a product …or a candidate. And that phenomenon—that lightning in a bottle—is what we have to make happen. For months now, my mantra for how the 21st-century NAEA needs to work has been, and continues to be, “Fast, Fluid, Flexible.” The new website is fundamental, as a conduit and catalyst, to bringing that about, and enabling us to find and express our collective voice and the particular messages found within our dynamic profession.
Of course, it is the evolving nature of the “collective” that will be finding its voice on the new website that I find the most intriguing, powerful, and “dangerous” aspect of the social network we will be creating. We have recently created a Community Advisory Committee (CAC) to help NAEA address issues of diversity and community ethos as we spread our wings and become a more dynamic and empowered organization.
One of the things the CAC will be addressing is the very elastic definition of diversity. Diversity today means much more than ethnicity, age, and gender. In our community, for instance, there is the diversity in artistic background, academic disciplines, and the arena for practicing our discipline. And in the context of the Web and what it can empower, I think there is an increasing diversity in the objectives we may choose to address as an organization.
For me, it helps to imagine NAEA as an hourglass lying on its side. From the wide bottom on the left come our 20,000-plus members, from their varied backgrounds and geographies and disciplines and perspectives. We amass as a community in the nipped-in middle of the hourglass on our new website—no bigger around than the display on our laptop computers. Then we go forth, spreading wide in a multitude of different directions—unified in purpose, but diverse in the activities we pursue to achieve that purpose and the Web-empowered groups that take these activities on.
In the age of social networking, diversity is not about where people are coming from, but where they’re going and the paths they take to get there.
And that is the crux of both the power of the new website and the acts of “seeing dangerously” that it will foster. From an organizational standpoint, NAEA follows certain universal conventions, like having a governance structure. But the culture of social networking works both within and beyond governance, tending to be more independent, even anarchic at times. How do we leverage that power of independence and the exponential multipliers of power that social networking can bring to the table? Might we create new dimensions of governance that give us greater flexibility and productivity as an organization? Might we more agilely build our membership to encompass new disciplines as the definition of visual arts evolves at the fringes?
Some fireworks are bound to happen as we unleash the full power of the new website. In fact, I can easily imagine the website creating a new organizational paradigm for us—perhaps even leading us to revisiting our governance structure and rethinking how it applies to the digital dynamism of the 21st-century NAEA. The policy implications of today’s Fast-Fluid-Flexible organizations are something with which all organizations must grapple.
As I write this in early August, on the eve of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, I’m reminded that the Chinese have a saying: “May you live in interesting times.” When it comes to the threats and opportunities presented by the new website, we will definitely be living in interesting times—and I choose to think it will be a blessing for our organization and our professional lives as individuals. While “seeing dangerously” may sound like merely a theme for this year’s columns, I hope to see it become an actual practice, for both NAEA and our membership—and, ultimately, a habit. The new website and the social networking that it will enable are destined to become powerful tools in our promising transformation.
Deborah Reeve
NAEA Executive Director
dreeve@arteducators.org
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