Curiouscatherine’s Blog

I have decided to get on and set-up my pilot questionnaire in order to establish a benchmark of behaviour from the pilot sites so that I can then see whether or not the work at the sites is having any effect.  I plan to administer the same questionnaire to all stakeholder groups as I think there will be some interesting reactions from the local authority groups and I want to try and tease out one of the contradictions which we often come across which is that they talk very enthusiastically about using new technologies and indeed social networking and yet institutional and personal barriers are raised to actually doing this.  Is this because they don’t really realise what is involved?  Or if they do realise is it cultural or democratic process barriers that cause issues – ie does the formal process need to be updated before Local Authorities can make use of social media?

I also want to try and find a way to find out if people respond to the idea of creating new spaces to do democracy online – does the guarantee of an appropriate online space make people more or less likely to participate?

So – the questionnaire is going to be in three parts;  simple demographics, attitudes to Internet usage and attitudes to democratic participation.  The questionnaire will be administered online, on paper if people want it and also as the basis as a number if interviews.

Looking at the world with a social captial filter on we need to remember the three types of social captial – Bonding, Bridging and Linking (Putman).  One of the notable features about most online communities is their homogeneity – ie their bonding capital.  Given the need for formal democracy to be inclusive I need ways to ensure that spaces that we create have bridging as well as bonding capital.

At home we call this the PLU factor – People Like You – which is a lazy way of grouping people with the same attitudes and world view as yourself.  This is considerably less messy than the democratic reality that you need to rub up against all kinds of people to make a country work.  When we all trusted and respected our politicians, and when the world was perhaps a simpler or at least slower place, then the PLU factor didn’t matter – your representative was there to deal with this messyness.  Now however we all need to find a way of meeting different types of people with whom we share resources and requirements in order to figure out what to do.  Another reason for doing this online – apart from all the arguments of convenience and authenticity is the fact that it is a lot less threatening to meet new people online than in person.  the flip side of this is the fact that we are known to value these relationships less.  I am hoping to show that by giving these groups of people a common democratic purpose and also by making it clear that they have common problems to solve we are able to create bridging as well as bonding capital in the groups we work with on the project.

Still at it with the actual research question so am trying to come at it from a different angle.  This post is as I was at the dentist earlier in the week and trying to explain what I was doing to Charlie (the dentist) as an avoidance technique – which is of course foolish as I am a grown woman and should be well over this dentist fear – but I digress. We had a good but brief discussion about it (until she came at me with the local anaesthetic and I could only drool) and it got me thinking about how I move from the narrative which I draw for people when I talk informally into an actual research question that I can measure and evaluate results from. I am perhaps ambitious but I am determined that my PHD will be something with a narrative pull for the reader as well as being academically vigorous. I don’t think the world should make space for a badly written thesis.

When I speak to people about my PHD research I tend to tell them that I am trying to find a way to get people doing something useful online. I explain that I feel that far too much internet is pointless noise and that my definition of useful is getting people to be more involved in local democracy. In turning this into a research question then – can I use “Is it possible to get people to take part in Local Democracy online”. Well no – ‘get’ is not precise enough and I will need to define what I mean by take part – i.e. what is participation.

I then return to the informal narrative. I tend to further explain to people that I want to recruit people who are already active online and move them from informal participation in informal spaces (for example facebook) into informal participation in more formal spaces (for example taking part in a discussion on a community website). But for a really successful outcome I then want to get them to carry out a piece of formal democracy – which could be signing a petition, contributing to a consultation or even becoming an elected representative. Because this unlocks the underlying aspects of my thesis:

1. There is a real need to reinvigorate our formal democracy which is, by most measures, withering on the vine. Part of the problem is that people are choosing to post opinions in places where the decision makers are not able to hear them. This leaves citizens and elected representatives frustrated and unsatisfied with the process.

2. I believe that the best chance of success in terms of getting people to participate in democracy is to go and find them in the places where they are already making a contribution and point out to them that they could do the same things in a more formal place and explaining the benefits of doing so

3. Serious conversations needs serious places to have them.

4. We can learn a lot from commercial websites

Though my literature review I can evidence the decline of democratic participation and also the fact that people are participating in informal online spaces. I then need to draw some parallels with these two kinds of participation so that I can justify my belief that it is possible to draw people from one kind of participation into another – this is the first place where I need to hunt harder to check whether or not this has been explored before. Once I have this parallel established then the work becomes very very detailed as we have to focus on the trigger points that take people between these different stages (and justified why these are reasonable stages in a ‘ladder of participation’ (yes – Arnstein!)). What stimuli work to effect people’s behaviour firstly to get them into the formal space and then to get them carrying out a democratic action? At this point I want to step back and look at online marketing research and user behaviour studies to see what the people who do this already think. Commercial sites are very skilled at moving their web traffic through different states and engineering activity and we should learn from these with the caveat that we also need to ensure that well established rules of debating behaviour are supported so that we create spaces where ideas are given respect and attention.

All of these leaves me with my narrative and also with a more focused research question: “ Is it possible to motivate people who are already active online to take part in informal and formal democratic participation in a pre-designated webspace?”. Returning to my informal narrative – can I find interested people and get them to a Local Democracy website so that they can connect with the formal process? Can I get them to the right place and the right time to get the most out of the democratic process? We shall see….

End of ramble – I shall sleep on the question and see if I still like it in the morning.

Another day, another book review…..I picked up the Pippa Norris book as there seemed to be some interesting parallels between what she was talking about in terms of Internet take up from third world countries as a way of looking at the problems of getting first world users to adopt technology for a specific purpose.  I am not sure in the end that this was as useful as I anticipated though it was a good example as to why I need to very clearly position which part of the democratic process I am interested in.  I am looking at the transition point from a purely social discourse to one with the potential for a formal democratic outcome.  I need to look at how you build a vibrant social network and then be sure of the point at which you introduce the formal element – I have assumed a linear approach with the participants being aware that this is a ‘journey’ but this is perhaps not accurate when I am actually suggesting that you go off and ‘harvest’ groups from other locations in order to seed the democratic debate.  But this is something of a digression – main points from the book are:

• Useful content on the cultural differences between democracies (p.34):  “The rapid adoption of the Internet as a lobbying and fund-raising tool in American electoral campaigns, for example may reflect the particular form of interest group pluralism and money-driven political campaigns found in the United States, rather than a model common in many European democracies”
• P.97 – comments about how the Internet can increase access and do broaden involvement – and can “facilitate opportunities for direct democracy”
• Schumpeterian definition of democracy “that defines representative or liberal democracy in terms of its structural or institutional characteristics”.  This is worth looking at more with respect to Democratic benchmarks
• She has a very sensible warning about assuming that online activists are active because they are online – and not because they would be active anyway.

I have been re-reading Howard Rheingold’s book on the virtual communities and wanted to save my observations while they are still fresh in my mind. Its brilliant book where his enthusiasm for the the ‘electronic frontier’ that the internet provides is palpable on every page. He is also eminently readable which is a welcome relief from some of the other stuff I have been reading over Christmas!

I am using this book as a jumping off point for my literature review on virtual communities as well as some early work on democracy online – he makes an excellent distinction here: “Democracy online” refers to something distinctly different from “the impact of online culture on democracy” (p.338). He means this to talk about the difference between creating democratic structures to help online communities work democratically however I think that this blurring also needs to be taken into account as people get confused between being heard online by their online communities and being heard in a formal democratic process.

Other ideas from the book which I will follow up on are:

• The importance of the face to face as well as the online. There are countless examples in the book of the mixing of online with face to face interactions and the ways in which these complement each other. He also picks up on the Sheri Turkle work on online indentity which is interesting. This is relevant to me as one of the key assumptions around my CitizenScape work is the idea that the process needs to incorporate online and offline interactions in order to make it work. This is especially relevant as what I am trying to do is to engineer a community which is in many ways similar to the ones which he as observed for the book.

• There an interesting comments on Japanese communities and the idea of “cultural co-emulation” – which he describes as a social metaphor for making different cultures work together online (P.220). This does not fit with my examples as they are mono and not cross cultural – however most large scale online communities have developed in a ‘co-emulated’ way without a dominant culture in place. Makes me think of Neil Stephenson et al!

• There are some thoughts about the idea of using physical building (or cities) as a metaphor for community building (P.225) – not an original idea but a good example. I will add this into the thoughts about the Citizenscape methodology as it is a very simple way of explaining what we are doing to people

• He makes some interesting observations about the significance of using online communities to support products and services – is this commerce using people or people humanising commerce?

• Some very prescient remarks about the way which the style of democracy in a particular country influences the way in which it uses the online sphere. I say prescient as it reminded me of comments around the Obama campaign where people confused their incredible ability to mobilize money and voters with actual online democracy (P.305). Also some useful comments about the way democracy is functioning: “A politician is now a commodity, citizens are consumers, and issues are decided via sound-bites and staged events”

• Some political philosophy references to Bentham’s Panopticon and the central position this was given by Foucault as “a blueprint for the way future tyrants could use surveillance technologies to wield power”.

• There are huge numbers of useful references in the bibliography (specifically from the last 2 chapters) which I will be plundering!

But to summarise – the book’s strength is around showing that virtual communities are virtual only in location – in terms of their impact on on people they are very real. Further to that there is a strong argument for an open and cooperative style of internet which has been claimed back from commerce.