Move Fast (Together) and Fix Things: Some Lessons of Crisis Leadership

Early this summer in Tokyo, I had the opportunity to hear an insightful presentation on the media and social responses to the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown.  The session was part of a Berlin School of Creative Leadership Executive MBA module in Asia and the presenter was an alumnus of that program, Yukio Nakayama, who serves as Executive Creative Director at the Dentsu advertising agency.  After providing general background on the events, Yukio’s account focused on how Dentsu adapted the Internavi system, which provided everyday on-demand traffic information to individual drivers in Honda vehicles, to generate public mapping of road usage and access through Twitter and Google in the early days of the crisis. Extending the Internavi system and data on 311 is an inspiring example of how creative solutions to crises can emerge with the right leadership.

Before sketching out possible broader leadership lessons of the episode, we should be clear about what we mean by “crisis.”  Helpful here is Herman “Dutch” Leonard’s call to distinguish routine from novelty.  We can’t, Harvard professor Leonard believes, treat a true crisis as simply an “overgrown routine situation.”  This problem of misperception occurs even in conscientious crisis preparation and planning efforts, when the underlying approach is to deploy more of the same kinds of resources (like police, medical, and food, reconstruction, data management) as during normal, non-crisis times.   

We need also to take care to differentiate crises of the order of what happened in Japan in 2011 from crises faced by many organizational and business leaders.  As important, even existential, as the latter may be for some firms, their crises lack the social, cultural and economic scale and sweeping life-and-death risks of 311.  That said, in assessing such an immense event, we might nevertheless extract some principles that bear on the still complex decision-making and communications challenges faced by business leaders.  

Explaining how Dentsu adapted Internavi’s capabilities within 20 hours for public benefit, Yukio illuminated several key tenets of successful leadership.  These began with a situational awareness that enabled his colleagues to recognize the difference between the exceptional character of 311 and routine accidents or congestion.  Also necessary was an understanding of how to build sudden collaborative structures across diverse institutions and constituencies.  Preparation was essential, but, again, had to be of the appropriate type: while simulations and scenarios were fine, developing and testing capabilities for cooperation across organizations and with the public proved more helpful once the nuclear disaster occurred.  Those capabilities, more specifically, included how to enable improvisation and, in this case, address and communicate quickly the problem of producing accurate traffic and road information. 

The development of Internavi is a great example of decentralized intelligent adaptation at a societal level.  Structurally, that decentralization involved non-hierarchical or top-down relationships among multiple public and private institutions enabled by technology.  The intelligent adaptation was likewise marked by an ongoing and effective process of inquiry that facilitated collaborative problem-solving and communications.

Such tenets and tendencies are hardly unique to the Japanese experience, of course.  In the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing Response [MBR], analysts found the successes of a variety of responders benefited from similar values of situational, collaborative, improvisational and inquiring leadership.  In fact, the preliminary findings of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, released in April 2014, identified five foundations of the intelligence and leadership that shaped the Boston MBR:

1) An overriding objective that: forges unity of mission and connectivity of action; is compelling enough to override standard practices as needed; and obviates bureaucratic obstructions, distractions or bickering.

2) A spirit of generosity that rallies groups and individuals to assist one another and overcome constraints of resources, know-how or tools to achieve the paramount mission, expressed as “Whaddya got? Whaddaya need?”

3) Respect for the responsibilities and authorities of others, described as “staying in one’s lane” while assisting others to succeed in their lane to accomplish mission-critical duties and tasks.

4) Neither taking undue credit nor pointing blame among key players, oftentimes portrayed as “checking your ego at the door.”

5) Genuine inter-personal trust and respect developed well before the event so that existing and dependable leadership relationships, integrity, and camaraderie can be leveraged during the event, often described as “don’t wait for an emergency to exchange business cards.

The preliminary report discussed these findings as a positive instance of “swarm intelligence,” which is more generally understood as the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems.  The concept initially arose with efforts to analyze and explain complexity in multi-agent systems, from bacterial growth, ant colonies and fish schooling to robot interactions and artificial intelligence.  Among the usual precepts of swarm intelligence are diversity, independence and decentralization.  In contrast to other approaches to group interactions and behavior, the concept also recognizes that too much internal communication can make the group as a whole less intelligent. 

Analyses of responses to 311 in Japan and the Boston Marathon bombing offer valuable insights for leaders about how to work effectively in complex, decentralized systems dealing with novel and fast-changing situations.  Yet their lessons, important as they are, tend to focus on the macro-level of institutional relationships or group dynamics and on the resulting decision-making, action and communications.  While they recognize how essential are collaborative and trusting interpersonal relationships, in other words, it was beyond the scope of the analyses to examine more closely how individual leaders should behave to ensure the best collective decision-making and actions.   

That research is ongoing elsewhere, perhaps most notably at the Center for Collective Intelligence at the MIT Sloan School of Management.  Among the key factors of collective intelligence that have been identified there thus far is “social perception,” that is, the ability to discern someone else’s thinking and emotions.  “When it comes to the effectiveness of groups,” said Thomas Malone, head of CCI, in a recent interview, “we are what we see in each other.”  Beyond empathy, this social perceptiveness involves discernment of others as well as a kind of ongoing awareness of, and commitment to, the versatility of thinking and equality of contributions across the group.

A final level of leadership to be addressed in coping with crises involves the leader himself or herself.  Not surprisingly, perhaps the best guidance in this regard comes from Bill George, the former Medtronic CEO and current Harvard Business School professor of management practice who wrote Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis in 2009.  While much of the book addresses larger aspects of crises, it does so from the leader’s perspective (e.g., “dig deep for the root cause” or “blending internal and external communications”).  However, at least two of George’s lessons, including the first, concern the leader’s own self-understanding: “Face reality, starting with yourself” and “You’re in the spotlight; Follow True North.”

Recognizing one’s strengths and weaknesses and remaining true to one’s values and purpose are enablers of leadership success in all situations.  However, in crises, such self-understanding and authenticity in decisions and actions are vital.  George goes on to ask, “Will you stay focused on your True North or will you succumb to pressure?”  The pressure and stress of crises derives from many causes, notably the novelty, complexity, and urgency of the dynamic situations they present.  Retaining the presence of mind to think, act and work with others according to one’s own values while responding to those situations is a consummate leadership challenge.

Whether they are at the scale of 311 and the Boston Marathon Bombing or of a single organization whose local world has been turned upside down, crises are crucible experiences that define leaders.  Yet perhaps counter-intuitively, an abiding lesson of the responses to these massive events is that more effective leadership resulted from individuals ceding control, sharing responsibilities, and openly collaborating and communicating with others.  Rather than relying on a single authoritative leader taking unilateral actions and decisions, success emerged from individuals humbly willing to contribute to decentralized leadership and decision-making, to work collectively with a common purpose, and to learn together to solve novel problems.

Recommended Readings for Creative Leaders to Close Out 2013

In the first half of 2013, we saw several new books that were not merely provocative but pioneering in the lessons and insights they offered to creative leaders. These included Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s manifesto for women in business, Lean In, Columbia Business School Professor Rita Gunther McGrath’s call for The End of Competitive Advantage in business strategy, economist Mariana Mazzucato’s iconoclastic analysis of the necessity of The Entrepreneurial State for successful innovation, Wharton professor Jonah Berger’s best-selling account of social transmission, Contagious, and psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman’s revisionist study of talent and creativity, Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined.

For the second half of this year, various new titles have appeared (or are scheduled to shortly) that can also speak directly to the work and lives of creative leaders. These range from in-depth popular accounts of successful creative firms to more scholarly approaches to entertainment, marketing, and creativity itself. All can contribute, however, to fostering more effective leadership and successful creative businesses.

1) Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work (Jossey-Bass) Blogger Scott Berkun’s lively account of working for a year at Wordpress.com, the world’s 15th busiest website, where he led a team of programmers and learned very practical ways to nurture a successful culture of creativity.

2) Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship and Betrayal (Portfolio) Bilton, a New York Times reporter, tracks the growth of podcasting start-up Odeo and how it morphed into the $11.5 billion dollar Twitter, particularly following the relationships between the four mercurial founders.

3) David Burkus, The Myths of Creativity: The Truth about How Innovative Companies and People Generate Ideas (Jossey-Bass) Management Professor Burkus offers an accessible history of creativity dating from the ancient Greeks as the basis for exploring contemporary myths and, most usefully, techniques for improving business creativity in the future.

4) Niraj Dawar, Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers (Harvard Business Review Press) To succeed in the world marketplace today, argues Ivey Business School Professor Dawar, firms need increasingly to look ‘downstream’ to where you interact with customers.

5) Dave Eggers, The Circle (Knopf) In this novel, the experiences of an idealistic protagonist who goes to work at the world’s most powerful internet company are the basis of a far-reaching meditation on work, privacy, democracy and knowledge in the wired era.

6) Anita Elberse, Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking and the Big Business of Entertainment (Henry Holt) Elberse, of Harvard Business School, describes how building an entertainment business around blockbuster products and stars has recently been and remains the surest way to long-term success.

7) Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy and Imagination in the Digital World (Yale University Press) Gardner, the originator of the theory of multiple intelligences, and Davis discuss the increasing ‘app-dependence’ of technology users and its consequences for identity, relationships and creativity.

8) Jocelyn K. Glei and 99U, Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (Amazon Publishing) The latest in the 99U book series, this collection offers actionable recommendations and techniques from the likes of Seth Godin, Dan Ariely and Stefan Sagmeister for developing successful creative practices in a distracted world.

9) Tom Kelley & David Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All (Crown Business) The Kelley Brothers, founder and partner in the design firm, IDEO, offer an invaluable and entirely usable guide to proven practices of better creative thinking, doing and confidence-building.

10) Charlotta Mellander, Richard Florida, Bjorn T. Asheim, and Meric Gertler, The Creative Class Goes Global (Routledge) 11 years after Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class transformed discussions of creative economies and urban planning with a focus on U.S. cities, this new work expands critical attention to the growth and development of the creative class in cities around the world.

11) Alexis Ohanian, Without their Permission: How the 21st Century Will be Made, Not Managed (Hachette) The reddit.com co-founder offers a paean to the endless opportunity of the open internet that is equal parts American Dream story (his own), start-up MBA, and two-fold plea to the government to keep the perfect marketplace open and to individuals to make the world better with innovation.

12) Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy (Patrick Brewster Press) Tech journalist Scoble and consultant Israel describe the new five forces: mobile, social media, data, sensors and location – and the trust required for businesses to make them work – in a book project innovatively sponsored by the likes of Autodesk, Bing, and charity:water.

13) Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Little Brown) Journalist Stone’s detailed, revelatory (and controversial) account of the online retailer, its visionary founder, and how they seek to re-invent (again) the future of customer experience and the digital economy.

Going Deeper on Dark Social: What the Invisibility of So Many Social Referrals Really Means

I've been thinking about a provocative piece published by Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic online last weekend. "Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong" makes a simple yet profound point about the social web that has emerged over the last decade to transform interpersonal interactions and communication. Madrigal's assertion is that while we celebrate the measurement of social interaction on Twitter and Facebook, these sites are but "the tip of the social iceberg." The bulk of sharing done online, he claims, occurs through email, instant messages, and chat that are largely invisible to existing analytics. Madrigal calls this mass of social traffic, which one study has constituting 69% of social referrals, "dark social."

For anyone who has already puzzled over how to measure, analyze or monetize social traffic, particularly across multiple platforms and networks, this is a daunting proposition. Madrigal's piece goes on to make an important observation about the structuring of social referrals. Essentially, he says, the ability to measure and analyze social traffic rests on public publication and sharing. Public sharing, in turn, is made possible in exchange for the personal data that we as individuals provide the networks.  That logic is powerful and drives Twitter and Facebook but it doesn't operate as directly with a range of other semi-private networks, again with email and IM being the most obvious examples. The implications of this line of thinking for marketing, brand communication, social media generally and even privacy are immense.

Yet for me the power of "Dark Social" is what it potentially says more broadly about open markets, the visibility and publicness of social interactions, and capitalism itself. That's quite a lot, of course, and I'm currently researching some of the complex connections for a project entitled, "The Age of Piracy." Suffice it here to extend Madrigal's provocations in two comments. First, there's a need to step back from believing that increasing social traffic or digital communication is somehow necessarily accompanied in lockstep by an increasing capability to measure and analyze that activity. The often-defining unwieldiness and dynamism of social technologies and platforms means that neither the hopes of marketers seeking foolproof metrics and monetization schemes nor the fears of civil libertarians wanting to deny ever-greater techno-surveillance and intrusiveness into private lives are being fulfilled today. Social traffic and networks may not be in the Wild West stage of their development but, as systems and networks, they remain largely fragmented, unstable across diverse markets, and obscure to consistent analysis.

A second extension or, really, expansion of Madrigal's thinking is the topic of the project I mentioned. Piracy today can be understood to embrace familiar acts of criminality and violence on the high seas, infringement of digital rights and other intellectual property, and the financial machinations of rogue traders, black markets and off-shore banks. Unlike terrorists, whose attacks rely on media amplification to instill fear across wide populations and to create platforms for political and economic critiques, these apparently disparate behaviors are driven by many of the same strategies: their actors want to remain invisible before the glare of media, they care little about conventional nation-states or legal regimes or religious values, and they seek to participate in unfettered capitalism. A final twist, ironically, and as I've previously written here, is the moniker of "pirates" adopted by the creators of the MacIntosh computer led by Steve Jobs at Apple and, in years since, by other innovators wanting to think differently. 

Piracy, in this sense, is more than the cyber-criminality that Misha Glenny and others have written about or even the cyber-threats made to both national security and individual privacy. Instead, it is the shadow of twenty-first century global capitalism that thrives precisely by exploiting the system’s digital and global connectedness, uncoordinated regulation, penchant for risk-taking, and pursuit of quick and massive profits. While that may seem an intellectual leap from Madrigal's invisible emails and instant messages, I would contend the difference is of scale and complexity rather than kind. For social traffickers and economic pirates alike, the informality and lack of metrics that have emerged around the boundaries of new technologies, networks, and markets allow for enormous opportunities to operate in the dark. Our challenge in response may therefore should not simply be to strive to create new tools for shedding light on what's currently invisible (emails, again, from Madrigal) but to re-think the structures of emergent networks and markets such that their boundaries (say, of intellectual property regimes) don't create such dark shadows.

No more social media navel-gazing... A Resolution for 2012?

I've had the good fortune to travel widely, to more than 100 countries in all, and one of the recurrent experiences I've had in doing so is also one of the most banal: many people who travel widely spend a great deal of time while traveling, particularly in unusual locales, talking about traveling, particularly to unusual locales.... Now I grant this might reflect more on the people I associate with and the places I go, but it comes to mind when reading two recent pieces about social media. The association is that many people who use social media (Twitter, especially comes to mind first here, but also FB, Tumbler, FourSquare, and blogs) do so largely to reflect on their use of social media. I plead guilty to such navel-gazing myself, occasionally, and perhaps we're all justified with being fascinated, exhilarated, frustrated, or just plain curious about new technologies and the routines and interactions they enable. The real issue I'm raising is one of proportion and arises when the majority of tweets, comments, or posts are primarily self-referencing. Only a few insightful folks can really get away with this -- for me, the few like Jeff Jarvis or Seth Godin --and the rest of us are simply adopting a parallel of the proverbial self-conscious tracking of what one is having for breakfast or ordering at Starbucks.

The two pieces that prompted this thought are from Seth Godin and Alexandra Samuel. Godin's piece is about marketers' (mis)use of social media and the noise it creates. While not directly the problem I'm pointing to, I believe it speaks to the same push-pull of fascination and uncertainty around social media that generates endless (and mostly vacuous) reflections. For marketers, indeed, the imperative is to use social media, any social media, to increase their numbers of fans, friends, and followers regardless of content or the reasons why. The underlying rationale Godin seems to identify is, the more tweets, posts, or other words, the more followers -- while the real result, as he says, is actually just more volume, or noise.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/12/the-trap-of-social-media-noise.html

The second piece also speaks to the allure of increasing numbers in social media, though for Alexandra Samuel it is more about personal benchmarking -- again, though, of friends, fans, or followers, in raw numbers or composites like Klout. Her response takes the form of ten commandments for social media sanity in 2012. Threading through the list is a desire to escape the measurement trap and even the resulting dehumanization she sees such benchmarking as possibly contributing to. While that more far-reaching claim deserves a longer discussion than is offered in her post, it does speak to the potential stakes of incessant social media navel-gazing. That all may be worth a resolution, or at least some offline reflections, as the new year approaches.

http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2011/12/a-social-sanity-manifesto-for.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Social Media and Change in Moldova

Moldova has just held another contested election. The small eastern European country, which rose to international headlines after elections in April provoked two weeks of anti-government protests (amplified, it was celebrated, by Twitter and e-mail communications), had another very close vote this week that appeared to produce a victory for opposition parties seeking closer ties to Europe. The electoral closeness emerges in part from the need of these parties to preserve a fragile coalition. Still, one could see progress in challenging the authority of the pro-Russian government by a younger generation able to mobilize in important part with new technologies.

It is possible to conclude summarily that the Twitter Revolution of April has finally succeeded, albeit after a delay of a hundred days and still only gradually. Yet we need to be cautious. If indeed it has happened, the political shift toward a European-leaning coalition and away from the Russian-supported Communists may well be more a reflection of longer-term generational changes and the continuing drift in former Soviet republics and bloc countries away from communist or socialist rule. Did Twitter accelerate this process in Moldova? Perhaps. Better to say now that events – and communication media – in the spring contributed to an array of compelling trends toward change.

However, those trends are both political and economic and finally transcend the familiar East-West reading. On the ground, in the hearts of many Moldovans desperate for greater opportunity and change, they are trends that often converge in ways that contradict distant analyses grounded in pitched oppositions of Russian and EU-supporters. The Financial Times says Moldovans "want it both ways." Quite right. Rather than this being a sign of greed or unreasonableness, though, it is more likely a symptom of wanting and needing to embrace as many possibilities as exist. As the FT piece concluded on Thursday, "Moldova has no interest in choosing between them. It needs them both."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f19164a-7d2c-11de-b8ee-00144feabdc0.html

Thanks for the Compliment (about not being simplistically partisan or ideological)

A few words about a direct message I received on Twitter. It made my day. I just signed on a couple weeks ago and still notice and appreciate new followers. Here's what came in earlier:

I can't figure out if you're a liberal or a conservative. But your tweets are interesting.

I was glad to know at least one person finds my tweets interesting, but even more was pleased to learn my messages didn't betray any simplistic political perspective. I definitely situate myself on one side of that seeming divide, but believe doing so publicly, at least through a one-word label, is counterproductive. I'm convinced that the effect of such simplistic partisan or ideological affiliation has been toxic for our politics over the last two decades (at least). Of many examples, recent events in the New York State legislature, which for weeks were deadlocked in a 31-31 partisan tie, with both Democrats and Republicans wanting to be the majority, come to mind as a ridiculous, adolescent exercise serving no one.

In the echo chamber of contemporary media politics, I've long thought that media and journalistic reports should stop automatically including the party affiliation following a legislator's name (e.g., Peter King (NY-R) or Al Franken (Minnesota-D)). What value is added by those letters? Yes, I recognize that politicians self-identify with parties, rely on them for funding and support, and work in groups or caucuses organized along party lines. With so much information available from so many sources, it's perhaps understandable that having ready hooks on which to hang one's views and build communities of interest makes not only good sense but effective strategy. Perhaps most fundamentally, an R or D, a L or C not only neatly -- too neatly for me -- summarizes re-assures us that we belong to a political tribe. Of course, the price, the loss of genuine nuance and robustness and contrarianness in our social and political discourse, seems much greater.

It's probably naive to think so, but every step that can be taken, by media organizations as well as citizens and social media participants, to acknowledge more fully the complexity of political and social life today should be embraced. So I hope I can keep on being hard to figure out, at least in terms of labels. The best ideas, I'm convinced, are often interesting precisely because they don't simply re-affirm already known positions or platforms but provoke one's thinking beyond.

Imagining Moldova -- and the First Twitter Revolution (Part 1)

I recently had the opportunity to spend a week in Moldova. I confess I knew little about the place before my plans formed. Most of what I knew (vaguely) derived from the public protests in the capital, Chisinau, as well as the second, city, Balti, that occurred last spring and briefly dominated Twitter.

Protesters took to the streets in early April following Parliamentary elections in which the ruling Communist party won roughly 50% of the seats. They picketed the Election Commission Headquarters and then the President’s residence before temporarily occupying both the Parliament building and the President’s office. Organized largely via Twitter calls under the tag, “#pman" (for the capital’s main square, “Piata Marii Adunari Nationale”), sizeable public gatherings numbering as many as 15,000 continued daily for more than a week claiming election fraud and later illegal arrests and the violation of human right. While the government agreed to a re-count, the election results stood and the Communist party president and parliamentary majority remained in power.

Wanting to know more, I consulted with several Romanian friends and their advice was simpler: the country is poor and stagnant, they responded quickly, but it has great wine and beautiful women. Perusing maps of the region and tourist websites, friends in New York had an even more peremptory assessment: I was heading to an only slightly Europeanized land of Borat -- Kazakhstan with a splash of Romanian charm. Okay. Thanks.

So I sought out more background. There's not a lot out there in terms of books or detailed websites. Wikipedia has a cursory if up-to-date entry. Lonelyplanet.com offered a worthwhile download of pages from a travel guide primarily focused on Romania. The one helpful book available on Amazon was the scholarly if conservatively slanted The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture, by Charles King (2000). (Another that I ordered but didn't arrive before departing was Steven Henighan's travelogue about a Canadian teaching English in the country, Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family [2003].)

The broad strokes of what I learned are these. Referred to by some as the poorest country in Europe, with a GDP per person estimated by the IMF at only $2200, Moldova is situated to the far east of the continent, nestled between Romania and Ukraine. The land is arable (to the degree that volumes of its soil were actually shipped to the Soviet Union in past years) but holds few mineral reserves. The geographical position speaks to the complex status of the country’s people, politics, culture, and even language as a meeting ground of east and west, of Romania and Russia, of Europe and Central Asia. As former Soviet Socialist Republic of the USSR, Moldova's present-day relation to Russia remains strong, not least in the continuing rule of the Communist party. Complicating politics further are two regions of simmering independence movements. Transdniestr, which declared its autonomy shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union and Moldova's own declaration of independence, and Gagauz, an area in the country's south populated by Turkic Orthodox Christians.

Not a bad overview, particularly in the individual strands of historical development. But in pursuing various sources, a serious question arose for me: how does Twitter or any of the vaunted digital information and communication technologies we enjoy actually deepen our understanding of the world to which we seem to have much fuller and more rapid access? Part of this concerns Twitter specifically, with its endless stream of brief information text and its ongoing tracks of trending for certain topics that seem to feed on themselves. While many well-researched sources are only a link away from the tweets, there’s little telling how many are accessed or read (or, particularly for the uninitiated, which are genuinely well-researched and which to be avoided). The result is that Twitter becomes the latest manifestation of a digital source of nearly endless information for which the political (and reading) preferences of the user shape the eventual output.

Put differently, it’s very easy to maintain a thorough familiarity with headlines and the soundbytes of political rhetoric or policy and other debates, but delving beyond that superficial and ephemeral familiarity to a deeper understanding is anything but assured. That seems especially true for geopolitics today, when news cycles and attention economies rely on a dizzying shifting of media focus (yes, trending) from one hot spot or crisis or disaster to another. It is still more an issue with the lack of history that figures into even many of the better accounts of contemporary events. Beyond the disconnected entries offered by Wikipedia and other scattered websites, printed materials and fictional films, the history even of the late twentieth century that unavoidably shapes our lives and world today is increasingly grounded in fragmented digital sources.

I offer all this as prologue to recounting my physical entry to Moldova precisely because my reliance on Twitter and various, mostly web-based accounts of politics and peoples so strongly framed my thinking and expectations of this place about which I knew so little. While similar in ways to what has long been available to travelers in guidebooks, from the nineteenth-century Baedeckers onward, the contemporary mediascape has grown both quantitatively and qualitatively different. The digital world is ultimately smaller, infinitely more accessible, and, particularly as one imagines lesser known places like Moldova, conducive to unprecedentedly superficial and partial understandings.


In Part 2, I move from my imagined Moldova to the actual, physical country.