Matthew Allen

I recently attended an excellent presentation by Catherine Middleton at the Australian Media Traditions conference at which she discussed the contradictory positions of the Government and the NBN Co on the way in which we might understand the difference that the National Broadband Network will make. Her paper was entitled, “Have We Ever Needed a Killer App? What could the NBN learn from the 1990s?”. Here are some notes, with a few asides from me.

 

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Middleton begins by reminding us of the importance of the rhetoric of the “killer application” in the policies and plans of broadband development. She notes that, often, this “killer app” is located in the future, still to arrive but promised or imagined.

Broadband networks were initially understood as delivering content to people in a manner like television; but the alternative perspective which Middleton’s research has clearly demonstrated is that the broadband is a network – in effect, broadband is its own killer application, infrastructure to enable connectivity and user-based activity. Her problem is that the Autralian government promotes the NBN as infrastructure, as a network, but the NBN Co is building a model which implies content delivery.

Recounts the history of trials for broadband in the mid-1990s in the USA which concentrated on interactive TV, TV on demand and so on – these trials were seen as failures (as Time Warner concluded, however, the failure was one of the economics – insufficient demand to justify the investment). Killer application blurs with ‘compelling content’ – that the content is the application. However, as Middleton discovered, the story being told by the individuals connecting was different to that of the providers. The providers had not understood exactly what connectivity would do – evident in the reflections of providers who were ‘surprised’ by the importance of email. Another perspective was a provider saying it was ‘arrogant’ to assume that people want information pushed at them.

This resonates with my own arguments relating to the different understandings of how the Internet might ‘arrive’: telecommunications and media providers were strongly oriented towards a model of the Internet in which they, not users, played the determining role. In fact, the Internet as it developed, relocated the power to determine utility to the user. The internet that I claim was ‘the future-in-the-present’ was precisely a network where users’ social interconnectivity through information exchange was the primary experience of network connectivity

Middleton emphasises how content is central … but not as a given, as a contested space about the economics of exploiting content – who creates it, who circulates it and who benefits from it. Providers, not surprisingly, saw themselves as the owners of the only legitimate content.

Equally, I believe, telecommunications companies did not understand that communication would be textual, distributed and not real-time circuit-switched.

Middleton returns to the NBN, noting how the current rhetoric of the NBN is similar to that the 1994 Broadband Services Expert Group

I would add that of the 2001 report on Broadband]. It therefore implies that there is something of a return to the past, a recouping of the ideals which had first inspired the BSEG and similar thinking: but which was never realised through both failures of infrastructure development but more importantly the success of the Internet as it actually developed.

The government rhetoric is that broadband is understood as an investment in services, as an infrastructural multiplier of the investments in other areas (health, education) – that the NBN will leverage that investment, just as those investments also make the NBN sensible. The NBN cuts costs, but also improves outcomes. But, the rhetoric from elsewhere, often read off the plans of the NBN Co but also through the retail service providers’ assumptions, is a re-invention of the plans from early 2000s for the high-speed Internet as telephones and television via IP.

I would probably add a third perspective: I am not entirely sure that the ‘infrastructure’ model from the Government is that different to the content/communications model of the NBN Co which mimics the roll-out of cable for cable TV. This third perspective is that of users who are not currently connected; or which connection that maximises the immediacy and distribution within the home of connectivity – effectively more connectivity. In essence, the challenge is that the size of the investment does not match the perceived benefits of connectivity.

Essentially, Middleton concludes that there is a disconnection between the policy and developmental rhetoric (Government and NBN Co). She notes the difficulties of the current political climate within which the Opposition is critical of the NBN precisely because there is no compelling story about the difference that this massive (and world-leading) investment will make.

Middleton argues that the pay-tv approach might be the ‘leader’ to get people connected who then will discover all the other things that can be done online. But in Australia may not work because there is a significant number of people who have chosen not to connect for Pay TV.

Ultimately, Middleton concludes, there needs to be a new way of thinking about the way broadband is understood, outside of the competing rhetorics of ‘content delivery’ and ‘social infrastructure’.

 

In questions, Middleton makes the excellent point that the political messages needed to manage the contests over the NBN are simple and simplistic: that the faster speed justifies the investment.

Gaining a Past, Losing a Future: Web 2.0 and Internet Historicity

Paper presented at 7th Australian Media Traditions Conference: Trends, Traditions & Transformations, Melbourne Australia, November 2011

 

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This paper considers the emergence of the historicity of the Internet – that is, the explicit sense with practical consequences that the Internet has a history, and that it exists within a history which, through our use of it, also defines us as beings in time. For many years, the Internet existed as a kind of cultural future-in-the-present. For example in the 1990s, talk of the ‘Internet frontier’ was a metaphor to give cultural substance to this new and inexplicable space called cyberspace. But it was also a temporal metaphor: the frontier was the future, as much as it was a place. The alterity of the Internet, where people found freedoms not imaginable in ‘the real world’ was also an alternative time, a world of future possibilities, made real through the magic of networked computing. The Internet might have had a history, but it had no historicity. That has changed because of Web 2.0, and the effects of Tim O’Reilly’s creative marketing of that label. What can we make of the last decade of the web, which has in popular commentary, clever marketing, and actual socio-technological development, become a second version of the web we had in the 1990s? What are the consequences of coming into history for the Internet? How might Web 2.0 inform us of the way the Internet is culturally constructed through changing patterns of relations of past, present and future?

Draft paper (not for citation):

Gaining a past, Losing a future: Web 2.0 and Internet Historicity

Just attended a great panel at the AoIR conference Internet Research 12.0 -  performance and participation. Three quite distinct papers on politics, discussing norms of behaviour in online forums, the avoidance of news during election campaigns, and the digital divide and why it is so hard to achieve universal service.

Reflecting on the three papers together (Fa Niemei,- http://snurb.info/node/1598 , Ericka Menchen-Trevino – http://snurb.info/node/1599 and Susan Kretcher – http://snurb.info/node/1600   blogged by the excellent Axel Bruns (@snurb_dot_info)), I am reminded that at its heart the Internet is a platform for conversations (diverse, stupid, brilliant, failed,sustained, confusing, enlightening all at once). What emerges from the conteporary use of the mainstream broadcast media is an almost wilful pursuit by opinionaters (that most normal form of contemporary journalism, with some notable exceptions) of communicative irrationality. Rather than the seeking of a communicative moment in which differences are aired and understood so that the differences between people become the basis for their connections with one another (I understand you think diffrently, so therefore I become more at one with you) – which for me is the essence of communcative rationality – the media creates a space which divides people from one another and requires instead allegiance to the opinion of the moment. Our social relations are emptied out and we form instead relations with half-truths masquerading as the truth. It is a form of knowledge fetishism, I guess. The truth object becomes the fetish object of our desire to belong and be heard and be knowledgeable.

Communicative irrationality deliberately excludes the diversity of opinions necessary for the operation of democracy: not because each voice is equally worthy or should be enacted in some policy or plan, but because the multitude of voices speaks the landscape of the polity. Communicative irrationality is quite literally the closing of doors in the faces of those whose opinions deviate from the accepted view. And while contemporary media (such as Fox News) practises this form of exclusion everyday (ref: punk band Bad Religion) it probably commenced with the political leaders such as Bush and Howard who created a closed world of policy and advice drawn from the sources which aligned already with the aims and expectations of the two conservative administrations which have so dominated the polities of the countries I am most familiar with in recent years.

In essence, politics can only now occur through conversations between people, mediated yes, but not by and through the ‘media’ as we might aggregate that social formation of institutional news/information/production/distribution. We hear about the death of the newspaper, and the end of the mass-audience television channel – but what we might hope for is the death of the undebated, opinionated, non-commentable ‘news’ which they tend more and more to circulate, whose primary audience is most likely the politicians whom this ‘news’ institution seeks to depose or retain.

In its place, the online spaces for conversation (which are not an ideal form of course) will proliferate I hope. How do we make sure these spaces  – where norms of behaviour are contested and politics is enacted at a micro-level – might become connected to a different form of polity which is conceived in more local terms and is not dependent on the election of one or other political party whose success and operation requires them to continue irrational communication?

 

Disclaimer: liveblogging

Nicholas Proferes, “Oh, the Ethics You’ll Know”

Analysis of research ethics from the Air-list – using nvivo. Ethics is a strong component of the air-list discussion. When is something public? Private? Both? Are author intentions important? What about context in which originally published? Note the link between ethical debates and new platforms/ technologies. Importance of graduate students in stimulating debate. Problem of using analog analogies: nuance of digital realm lost? There is a challenge to make space for new approaches to ethics.

Outstanding – Dr Seuss is honorary member of AoIR from now on

Alex Leavitt, “How I Saved An Internet”

Looking at Encyclopaedia Dramatica – archive of digital subculture. Assumption of net researchers is that the space / place we visit online sort of ‘stays there’. But it is not that way. Leavitt found that ED was completely deleted one day. And Oh Internet was created in its place. (but along the way, all the wiki edits which Leavitt was studying were lost). Nice contrast of ephemera vs visibility. Leavitt restored the wiki from oblivion (not always without complaint). Importance of researchers’ relationship to the objects they study.

Clever, researchers serve and protect the Internet

Janet Salmons, “See Change: the Visual in the Virtual Interview”

Importance of move from text to image in culture because of the Internet. Must questions be posed with words? Or indeed should they be answered in words? Nicely drawing on the depth, complexity and multi-dimensional form of the image which distinguishes it from words. Visual elicitation stimulates interview subjects to respond. Nice – idea of mind-map as stimulus for interviewee responses. In an online interview, a white board can be used to create visuals on the fly.

Excellent: lots to think about here because images say so much, but quickly – overcoming major challenge of interviews

Susanna Haas Lyons, “Flexing Facebook’s Civic Muscles ”

The enormous amount of people on Facebook really matters. What however are the dos and don’ts of mobilising Facebook for public deliberation for civics. Important implication – recruitment of participation is done in part through the extent of reach in Facebook. App used to create the engagement space. Nice, but also limited. “Discuss, Propose, Promote” – excellent empowerment of users by making them also responsible for building support for particular promotion. Participants have lower privacy concerns. While Facebook is not totally representative, a combination of Facebook with other methods can work. Asynchronicity of participation important. “Learn from fails”

Good presentation: liked the focus on taking risks to experiment with what works.

Stuart Shulman, “The bin Laden Post Mortem Tweets”

Focus is on crowds. Notes that political scientists did not see it coming –that there would highly charged political action from the crowd, powered by social media. Can you harness the power of the crowd to do large-scale text analysis in academia? To make the money go further, or do things which cannot be afforded. Crowd-sourced analysis of OBL tweets. There was an especially interesting approach relating to humour in the tweets. 26 people, $750 cost. Simple coding of the humour-value of tweets.

Humour does make a difference: opening our minds to new thinking – great research method.

Brian Hughes, “Super-charging Creative Teams with Negative Feedback”

Importance of negative feedback – but it is not placed on line…except by their friends! Creative teams need to be kicked sometimes. Make it personal – people need to feel disappointed. It has emotional strength – hard to get, but also hard to give. Reasonable. Thoughtful – there has to be thought involved, so it is complex. Easier to give NF to a team. Coaches and mentors are better placed to give negative feedback. Share the vision, criticise the methods. And the feedback might come in a roleplay environment.

Solid, clear and direct: no reason to give negative feedback on this one!

Richard Smith, “Doing It Right: Professional Digital Media Education”

Distinguishes professional education from research-led education. Four universities own this degree. Digital media here means ‘interactive design’. How can students create digital media experiences?  – address a need, serve a problem – real-world focus. Teamwork is central to the degree. Some of the material learned is about teams – e.g. project management. Importance of who this is for – the user, the users’ stories and expectations. Humility matters – as does courage and curiousity. And reflexivity makes a difference. Teams fundamentally depend on trust and individuals need passion. Note professional educational needs – importance of limited residency, compressed program to suit needs of people already working. Professional development is a future goal.

I like the way that the team and the task is central to the pedagogy here.

Ericka Menchen-Trevino, “The Future of Internet Research Methods:  Combining Real-World Observation & Self Reports”

There are challenges in bringing everyday life into the lab – it is too artificial. The data from companies is, while extensive, shallow. So, create some software that will acquire the rich content of individuals’ uses of the web for news consumption. Clever use of proxy server for data collection. But combined data with interviews. An interesting question: recruitment. Cragslist! Would it seem creepy to ask a person about their habits in searching and reading online. Not really. Crucially, the ‘overuse’ of media which is reported is now solved because there is evidence which can be used to prompt people who might have forgotten what they have done online.

A little challenging to consider the recording of use, but perhaps that is a sign of people’s pleasure at being research subjects? Great software idea.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Social Life of Scholarship”

Hilarious – a book on the falsehood of the ‘death of the book’ was written, but could not be published! Average sales of humanities books? 400 over lifetime – and most to libraries. So perhaps a book that is dying is this form. It does however conflict deeply with the scholarly futures of people. Importance of other forms of publication such as blogs which are vibrant and reach people more deeply. The problem is, always, credit: blogs are not creditable for jobs and productivity because of a lack of peer-review. Peer review = gate-keeping, to create enforced scarcity. In fact, we need to move to an economy of abundance in scholarly communication.

Brilliant – she nails it, and the problem is truly the move from scarcity to abundance.

Speaking in a couple of weeks at the Internet Research 12.0 conference ‘Performance and Participation’

My paper, Web 2.0 from the ground up: defining the participatory web in its own terms, is based on an analysis using Leximancer of 750,000+ words used to describe 12,000+ Web 2.0 applications. Some of the fun I am having includes generating dubious yet intriguing infographics….

However, I am still struggling to find the right way to explain how I get from this to what I seek to conclude, concerning the way the discourse of Web 2.0, very much a language of computing, is now reshaping our sense of self.

Listening to Michael Dyson, from Monash talking about portfolios in teacher education: great presentation.

Dyson says:

• Education of educators is first of all premised on turning them into people who practice self-development. gives example of very first unit. [So, care of the self is central, and making students include themselves as subjects in the learning process - nice!]
• Learning is change dramatically – globalisation, computing, and so on. [But, perhaps, there is an important qualification on some of the more optimistic claims for 'new' learning: learning is embedded within society in ways that shape those possibilities in ways that are not entirely concerned with 'better' learning. At the very least, the definition of better is contested: is it cheaper? is it more orderly and commodifiable? is to linked to national norms and needs?]
• The creating mind is the goal. [Interesting - not creative, but more positive and active - creating. Good difference]
• Reflection is essential to achieving the kind of succcesses in self-developmental learning; using Dewey (2003), emphasises “active persistent and careful consideration”; reflection is not taking “things for granted…[leading to] ethical judgment and strategic actions” (Groundwater-Smith, 2003).  [ Further work needed, perhaps, to understand reflection for this new generation, if one takes as given the significant changes in knowledge: is reflection as developed in 20th c the right kind of reflection?]
• ALACT model – action, looking back, awareness of the essential aspects, create alternatives, trial.

[This is really helpful - I like the added 5th step, compared to the normal action research 4-step model]

• “the artefacts placed in their portfolio showcase who they are and their current onling learning”; these artefacts are attached to the standards which define what it is to be an educated teacher according to outcomes required. [So portfolios are a clear negotiation of the student's understanding of those requirements and standards?]
• Exploration of the actual portfolios that students have created, using a paid-for service iwebfolio (was subsidised). Variety of successes and failures, all the material goes into a digital, not paper portfolio. Notes the fact that the metadata on when and how material uploaded is available, unlike other means of generating a portfolio. [I emphasise: the portfolio is a genuine, real requirement for teaching employment. It is authentic learning]
• Use of standards / outcomes as information architecture to drive cognition in inputting information (adding artefacts, commenting etc [So, the portfolio is 'scaffolding' into which a building goes, with a clear design brief. It might be a hghly structured knowledge engine]

I am wondering if the students genuinely are doing this work for themselves or if they imagine an audience of ‘judges’ – their teachers who grade the portfolio or the employers who might use it? Managing multiple audiences is tricky, even with technology that allows it – because if you can shape the portfolio for several audiences…. then does the self audience survive?

Then again, maybe the whole point is that the students are not yet capable of being their own audience.

Some other portfolio software (and look how it is more than just a portfolio…)

http://mahara.org

http://www.pebblepad.com

On Thursday 2 December, I am presenting at the National Curriculum Innovation and Quality Forum on the subject, “Risks and opportunities in authentic learning via the Internet”.

The basic brief for this keynote presentation is to:

• summarise approaches to authentic learning in the BA (Internet Communications) at Curtin University;
• identify the key benefits in using a public knowledge networking approach to authentic learning; and
• highlight risks and strategies for managing those approaches in the pursuit of authentic learning online.

While I hope to do that, with a particular emphasis on giving some examples from the great work that students in the BA (Internet Communications) have done, I also have found that in preparing my talk I have had to develop a more coherent argument about the nature of authenticity in learning and the relationship between education and learning.

The talk can be found here: http://netcrit.net/content/nciqf2010.pdf

Slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/netcrit/risks-and-opportunities-in-authentic-learning-via-the-internet

This paper draws also on some specific work I have done on the authentic assessment in our online conference unit, Internet Communities and Social Networks 204 (slides here) and more generally on social media and authentic assessment (presentation in the UK, May 2010 here)

Some of the examples I refer to will be listed on my blog within the week.

Disclaimer: live blogging

Will we be smart enough soon enough?
Putting Civic Intelligence into Practice

Doug Schuler

(Keynote paper, Research for Action Workshop, Making Links 2010 Conference)

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Civic Intelligence defined pragmatically: people to have the ‘smarts’  by which to acquire the things they need to prosper in society.

The world needs ‘our’ help: global problems, local problems – all need attention and those in power, and the operation of the free market will not solve them. Doug frames his work by asking: “How smart need we be to solve these problems? Will we be smart soon enough for the problems to be solved before they overwhelm us?”.

Civic intelligence is a concept to lead us to the answer to these questions. It refers, effectively, to a judgment of how smart a group might be relative to the problems it faces; it is a form of collective intelligence, focusing on shared problems (eg the problems that define the group). Civis intelligence is about being smart, through civic means, to achieve civic goals. A particular modality of this form of collective intelligence is its distribution throughout society. Civic intelligence as a paradigm for activists and researchers.

Examples:

Sustainable prisons: question – “Can prisons save money and the environment while changing lives?”

Sidenote This example suggests that productive action to solve significant social problems lies in joining together multiple problems – it is not so much finding innovative answers to a single problem but, rather, actively constructing a new problem set in which the action serves two or more problems at once. In this example, spending money on a sustainability project within prison not only makes prisons better at the ostensive goal (rehabilitation), but also contributes to the problem of educating people about how to live and act sustainably while also, potentially, making prisons more productive and therefore cheaper

Beehive Collective’s work in relation to land degradation and renewal, “The True Cost of Coal” – sophisticated interweaving of skills and action, notion of research through action at the grass roots.

Sidenote This example suggests that productive action involves very different paradigms of knowledge work where creativity, sharing, working together to represent the world and tell stories about it is more effective in addressing problems (and in doing so building civic intelligence) than traditional models of ‘research’

Liberating Voices project: promote and assist citizen engagement through thought and action – pattern language responses. Everyone is an activist. Patterns are not recipes: “tools for thought”; patterns “change the flow of what would have happened in its absence”.

Patterns here could be understood as scaffolding for cognitive developmental action – without them, people don’t know where to start even if they know what the goal might be. Patterns don’t determine the outcome but give sufficient support for people to begin work. Moreover, patterns provide a shared language through which people can identify commonalities and work together. Without them, they remain individuated. So, do patterns create a kind of autonomous foundation for collective engagement?

Interesting diverse list of points to define civic intelligence, interesting because of its diversity of categories:

civic intelligence builds more civic intelligence (it is productive beyond any specific act)
inclusive and participatory
efficient and creative
real problems (e.g. inequality, not just increased wealth for a few)
addresses several problems at once

The last point is especially revealing: “Make activism cool (again)”. Schuler comments – “what is preventing people from doing this stuff? It’s not cool”

I believe this comment taps into the increased knowledge- and engineering-focused state of contemporary society – what is now ‘cool’ is doing knowledge work so demonstrations, ranting, protesting which used to be cool forms of social activism now appears to be insufficiently ‘efficient’ and ‘creative’ for our contemporary society.

Keynotes, Day 2, EDEM10 Conference

The Promise and Contradictions of E-Democracy, Obama Style
Micah L. Sifry (Personal Democracy Forum)
Sifry begins by drawing a distinction between the social media, Internet based mobilisation from Obama during the election campaign and the lack of such activity within the administration, since Obama’s victory. At first (for example the Transparency and Open Government directive), there was a strong sense of Obama moving towards digitally enabled collaborative and participatory government. But, we have ended up, Sifry says, with an administration that is centralised and traditional and dominated by the big institutions.
Sifry demonstrates that the USA is now in an era of mass participation in the electoral process; gives the example of the Vote Different citizen advertisement pro-Obama and against Clinton. Sifry asserts that Clinton campaign was a monologue – not a conversation; scripted and led from the front by Clinton; Clinton was ahead clearly in 2007 and Sifry claims the Internet was the key factor which pushed Obama ahead. Relations between citizens and activists, not just between citizens and the leaders/ politicians are what the Internet enables; that said, the mass mobilisation effects did depend a lot on Obama’s personal qualities and the particular spirit of the times. Fundamentally, though, the mass of the population – even over 60 – are all now getting online. “people are not just going online to access information: they are doing it to participate” (based on Pew ILP data). Data on Obama campaign – 13 million email addresses; 200,000 events; 75,000 related (self-made) webpages; 4 million donors; 2 million people on myOB social site; $750 million raised, 2/3rds online – so clearly this campaign worked.

Simple argument here, based on pretty clear data, that Obama was compellingly successful in mobilising people for his electoral cause – not just giving money, but organising activities, linking between the campaign and the voters. It’s clear that Sifry has identified the key point: social media not only recruits, and funds, it also empowers a cadre of activists, turning followers into micro-leaders.

Starts the next part of the speech with a deeply offensive image of Obama which was made by the Tea Party and is being distributed, via social media, by the rightwing of US politics. The point is: social media is not just ‘the good guys’. It can go in both directions and there is perhaps less grass-roots that Obama might like to claim.
Sifry now starts to unpick the mythology of the ‘small donor’ myth of Obama. The trend in US politics is who raises the money, from big business, in the year before the election wins. This is true for Obama – he got 36%, Clinton only 30%. Obama also has an overall donor pattern that is similar to McCain and others. Howard Dean, in fact, had all the ‘small donor’ ($200 or below). Obama might have tapped into some additional funds, but principally his campaign was funded in the normal way.
Turning to the grass roots campaign – shows video of Obama expressing his hope that the network he has built around his campaign will be sustained “I want to continue that after the election”, he says. “I want to revamp our Whitehouse website…I want people to be able to say, today, this issue is going on…Creating the kind of situation where, if people want to get involved, they have the information they need”. Not just Internet, however, he focuses also on town hall meetings and getting leaders out from Washington to visit the people – “the more we can enlist the American people to get involved, the more we can move forward”. Ties this sort of participatory behaviour to fighting the Washington special interests and institutional structures.
Reviewing this myth, he cites one of Obama’s key campaign managers – at first, the campaign didn’t really appreciate what they were doing, and perhaps even saw some social media use as simply a way of creating a positive spin for the campaign through traditional media. Plouffe is cited saying his view of the campaign’s email havesting was “we had essentially created our own television network, only better”.

Sifry reveals here that the Obama campaign did not, itself, understand or deploy social media so much as discover it, and then harness it, all the time seeking to turn it back into something which is controlled, managed, and top-down and hierarchical. Once again, the Internet blindsides the centres of power because it threatens their identity as the experts of media manipulation

Sifry then turns to analyse the way Obama behaves as President – highly critical of the level of control from the Whitehouse press office (less press conferences than Bush); also critical of the trivialisation of participatory forums online by Obama. Notes, too, the way the special interests (such as the Tea Party) have attempted to hijack some of the open government debate. Looks at the way very few people have actually participated in the open government dialogue, though some valuable information gleaned.

Sifry is trying a difficult trick – to see both positives and negatives in the way the Obama administration has done ‘open’ online digital government. Speaks of the duality of “Obama”. It is clear that the duality is partly to do with the fact that there are many players (various departments and agencies), that some e-government topics / uses are not very contentious or perhaps appeal to the ‘rational’ in the public. A good analysis, if perhaps needs to explicate the way in which e-government has a series of dimensions – political, rational, expressive and so on – which don’t always fit together easily.

Sifry now reports that the kind of engagement Obama promised has not really occurred and indeed those things which have been done have not had any impact on the populace. Asserts that there is now a loss of trust; that the administration has not been ready to cope with, to embrace the “loss of control” which social media requires. Uses a slight analysis of health care speech by Obama to show that the “we” and “us” of the campaign has morphed into “I” and “you” now that he is President. And yet, Sifry cleverly identifies that the participants themselves have “walked away” from their responsibility to stay engaged.
So, conclusions. The Internet doesn’t empower anyone; we empower ourselves. One-to-many and many-to-one are easy; many-to-many is hard. Describes the Internet’s technologies for collaboration and networking as “weak tools”. Ends up, really, with a technologically oriented approach – it’s the tools that are the fault.

Sifry’s analysis is very useful here. He doesn’t explicate it, but hints at the reasons for the failure – that opposition and campaigning is not the same as government and administration. The promises were easy to make, and were – through the force of the campaign – easy to build on, but the realities are much more complicated. Furthermore, he astutely undercuts the reality of the ‘social media’ campaign idea – in fact it was only marginally so, or (perhaps) was seen by grass-roots participants as participatory while seen by the campaign management as not at all like that. It is therefore slightly unusual to see him conclude that we need better tools. I am wondering whether, in fact, the point is this: all online tools are weak tools and thus what matters is the intersection between strong ties outside of the Internet, with ‘weak tools’ to sustain and expand those ties across distance. And, in discussion, Sifry to some extent showed the problem: the tools can be made stronger – at least in the USA – in electing candidates, or shaping the candidates to stand, but become less effective when those candidates are serving politicians.

Discussion: media….“the government’s ability to be media is incompletely understood” (that is, how to mediate a conversation) ; discussing the failure of the mass media, the bias, the extremes and immediacy of cable news and the way the mediasphere in US politics is adapting to change by emptying itself out of authority through reporting and demanding authority through opinion (“truthiness” – reference AoIR Conference keynote 2009)

And, interestingly, a lot of Sifry’s discussion of successes with social media were couched in terms of ‘and it made an impact on the mass media’: so, is this too media-focused?

Discussion: “weak tools”…“politicians really do respond to money in the USA” – discusses how tools, especially around money raising and making visible the aggregation of micro-contributions, can show politicians why and how people are giving; yet still, Sifry notes, the problem is this: what happens when the political candidate is elected – do they remember what the participation meant and why they received the voter support?.
Discussion – Obama campaign had massive plans for transition of themselves to administration and no plans for transition of the grass roots to a supportive governmental grass roots campaign. Cites the fact people were calling up their local Dem office and saying ‘what do I do now?’ that Obama has won… there was nothing. Concludes – most Obama people do not believe in and are hostile to grass-roots empowerment: Democrat party is cynical of their own voters – even despite the evidence of Obama’s success.

Keynotes – E-Democracy conference (EDEM10)
4th Conference on E-Democracy, EDEM10, Krems, Austria
Conference blog: http://digitalgovernment.wordpress.com/

Over the next two days I will be attending the 4th E-Democracy Conference, EDEM, in Austria; this is the first of several slightly live blog posts that will report and reflect on the proceedings

Distribution and Empowerment: Embedding Citizens at the Heart of Democracy
Andy Williamson

Williamson avoids the phrases e-government and e-democracy – “nobody knows what democracy is”, adding the ‘e’ probably means it is even more abstruse and excludes the participants. “the conversation is not about technology; it’s about people”. Importance of making a difference: “we are sitting on a technological wave of innovation that allows us to reconstruct our world” but, “our society is not static – we are in a neo-liberal environment”. Notes the shift to consumers, not citizens – this includes attempts to make people consumers of democracy and its services. Links this shift also to the way we are now a society of individuals, not a community.
Key concern for Williamson: “Privileging individuals over the collective reduces opportunities for citizens to be engaged, debate and modify their beliefs”

Am struck by the last point – “modify” – engagement is often thought of as ‘having a say’ but perhaps it is also about creating a space for ‘listening’ to others; and, in a collective, social world, it is listening to others of the same kind – other citizens – which will help to ‘modify’ beliefs

Starts with ideas that most people are not actively engaged in political action. In the UK – 4% are actively engaged; – very small, sure, but Williamson focuses our attention on the 5% who say they are NOT engaged but WANT to be. 25% do not want to be ‘active’ but want to have a say in how their communities are run.

Reminds us that digital engagement in a particular country is linked to the culture and social standing of ‘politics’ as an activity. Focuses on the fact that people want engagement at local levels, outside of the broadly politicised circuits of power. For example, in Britain, politics and politicians are held in contempt by most people; there is a lack of respect for politicians. And, as he states later in his talk, governments hold people in contempt. And a further development – if civil society is a sign of a healthy democracy, then we are in trouble, because civil society is now layered and complexified by the significant number of NGOs between citizens and their governments. NGOs abrograte to themselves the power to speak for fractions of society and yet are deeply unrepresentative and non-consultative. Governments like working with NGOs because they are within the discourse, speak the same language as government. Effectively, Williamson implies, government and non-government organisations collude in the further marginalisation of citizens from actual engagement. Finally Williamson concerned about the potential of the independent public sphere to work for democracy because the public sphere is “colonised” by the media and, indeed, by government.

The Internet might help, through both changes to the mediasphere but also in managing better communications between and from and to citizens, but Willimson remins us of the problems of technology adoption: he points to the ‘gap’ between early adoptors and early majority – this is the gap that, if not bridged, will lead to the failure of a technology dispersion and adoption process. This gap is clear at the moment in relation to e-government. This gap can be understood as access problems – lists several: mental; material; skills; usage; civil; democratic. This is a very rich picture of the potential and actual digital divide around e-democracy. It is not just technical skill, nor physical access. “The Internet doesn’t change my motivation to do something…what motivates me is an issue that I feel passionate about…what the Internet does is lower the threshold at which engagement occurs.”

Utilising addiction theory as a guide, points out how helping people past addiction requires a focus on disruption of the preparatory stages which lead to the addictive action and that this disruption has to be persistent, not a one-off intervetion: claims that e-government initiatives are often failing because they are not sustained, do not lead to systemic changes in mindset, both among citizens and government.

To make egovernment (what Williamson wants to call digital democracy) work, “digital media [needs to be ] positioned as an integral part of the democratic process, giving equal recognition to the folksonomies of civil society as is currently given to the taxonomies of experts”; it’s about translating the questions and processes of gaining opinion into the language, needs and expectations of citizens, not requiring them to become part of the discourse of government.
Discussion: – nice question – essentially mobilising a ‘will citizen participation lead to fascism?’ argument – Williamson’s response – voters know there is a problem, but don’t understand the issues. So, digital democracy can work, implicitly, to prevent totalitarianism in two ways – first, by helping people to become educated; second, by extremists getting elected and then they will be observed to be doing nothing. The vote for extremism is a vote for action: it produces no change.

I am not convinced that citizen participation necessarily means that we can avoid the spectre of fascism or totalitarianism; but it would seem that this threat is everpresent in democracy and therefore we should not fear the people’s voice. Indeed, the fear of ‘too much’ democracy is indeed totalitarian, but expressed from the smug position of the entrenched and comfortable elites

Discussion: question regarding bridging gap from issues-based movements to persistent citizen motivation to engage. Part of Williamson’s answer? Government to go into the spaces of citizen debate and discussion and place themselves within that discourse, rather than requiring citizens to move into governance.

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Goverati: E-Aristocrats or the Delusion of E-Democracy
Ismael Peña-López
Opens with a brief discussion of the production process in an industrial society: resources feed into the production process leading to outputs; the production process is formed at the intersection of capital and labour. The process can be understood as the sum of scarcity, transaction costs and intermediation (eg the coordination of suppliers and consumers)

Then looks at the democractic processs – five components: information (getting informed); accountability; deliberation / argumentation; negotiation and opinion formation; voting / explication of preference.
Information – the internet changes things – information is now more available, it is not scarce and, more importantly, the transaction costs (time and money) are significantly reduced.
Deliberation – how do people work out together what they should do – calls out to the historical model of ‘gathering together’ to discuss and debate: claims this cannot be done by a large number of people (high transaction costs) which now perhaps can be done via the Internet
Negotiation – refining the proposal so that it can gain a consensus. Again, made easier via the Internet
Voting – the final moment of decision, where people commit to one proposal or another. Voting is very expensive and complex unless it is done electronically (again focus on transaction costs).

The way Pena-Lopez is describing democracy doesn’t account for the fact that democracy has emerged, over time, as a non-participatory system not just because of external, economic reasons – eg transaction costs – but because it has been thought to be better if there is less direct involvement by citizens in government

So, for Pena-Lopez – who accepts he is an economist and is taking that approach – the key issue to discuss is cost optimisation of democracy – optimise the fit between the outcomes and the costs.
Now, looking at a model of the information economy – Inputs and outputs are both information; labour is now ‘knowledge’ and capital is ‘ICTS’. This is a new productive process. This reduces scarcity and transaction costs and the intermediation process has changed dramatically. Looks at how this might provide a new model for democracy.

While Pena-Lopez’s model is seductively simple and, therefore, a useful approximation of reality for the purposes of debate, I find it overly focused on the dramatic changes which technologies of IC normatively make, but which are not made so clearly or effectively in reality. It certainly reduces users / voters / citizens to objective elements in an informatic machine, modelling the notion of perfect information action that can be presumed of computers. Not only does this approach fail to grasp the complexity of ‘the human’ in the system, but it also presumes computers themselves are neutral simple actors. They are not. Further, by using comments like “All the information you want”; “there’s no lack of information”; “no barriers to access” – there is a serious problem here with the discourse of technology-centred hyperbole around e-government.

P-L looks to be on safer ground when he looks at the way information can be transformed and manipulated into new versions and narratives online – uses the example of nuclear power stations mapped in the USA from public, but otherwise difficult-to-access information. He argues that information can then become more useful, in forms more suited to citizens’ needs. He gives another example of citizens ‘voting’ for particular directions and possibilities in the development of a city’s infrastructure: not clear if the relatively small sampling would be representative. He also provides better examples from the more politicised aspect of e-democracy – the use of the media for many voices to emerge critiquing or supporting existing political positions (eg examples from US presidential campaign).
Overall, P-L presents a broad picture, very positive, about the way the internet, especially in its Web 2.0 form, has improved the way democracy functions due to the rapid and different interactions of people with information. It’s not without merit, but makes some big assumptions about the scale, effectiveness and value of e-government. He then does start to present some of the challenges – questions of digital divide, especially in terms of skills, knowledge.
A useful point – Digital Presence is formed at the intersection of informational literacy and media literacy, founded on technological literacy and then leading to, or enabling people to have e-awareness.
P-L’s creation of a ‘gap’ between the idealised and the muddy reality is a useful reminder of the significant journey ahead of us to implement effective e-democratic activities and institutions. His data show that, at least for Spain (and probably elsewhere), the lack of knowledge of what to do online and how to do it (both explicit and implicit knowledge) impedes most people and therefore means the Internet has become a place where elites colonise and lead debate, political activity and so on, just as they do in the offline world.
So, while P-L is probably overly optimistic in his analysis of the normative state of edemocracy, he is right on the mark with his analysis of the kinds of literacies needed and how they fit together.