Literature Review of new Coleman / Blumler book: The Internet and Democratic Citizenship

I’ve just finished reading “The Internet and Democratic Citizenship; Theory, Practice and Policy (by Stephen Coleman and Jay Blumler) so this my research note for my literature review so there are some observations and then a wrap up from me….this is a long one so you may just want the highlights:

• The analysis of the problem of democratic deficit and political disengagement is excellent

• The authors are proposing a civic commons which is run by an arms length government organisation – something I am profoundly uncomfortable with

• There is a lack of sophisticated interpretation of the social web and the implications of the social connections between individuals – they are still talking about websites as destinations rather than feeds and individual control

• The idea of co-creation is not explored to the extent which I think it warrants.

For those of you with more interest in this here are the notes – or you can just jump to my conclusions. 

 

What do I actually mean by the virtual town hall?

I realise that I keep mentioning it but haven’t actually described what I mean. Here are the main points of the kind of space I am imagining:

• Its designed to incorporate and respond to the next online fad – and the one after that. Its just not efficient for you to keep reinventing your strategy and infrastructure every time the internet herd starts grazing somewhere new. You need a strategy which gets the best out of new technologies and uses new social spaces but always with the aim of bringing the democratic conversation home to a place where it can be had effectively. This really means a native web 2.0 architecture.
• It’s a co-created space. This doesn’t mean its all top down – for a space to be truly democratic it needs to be co-created with all stakeholders having a sense of ownership and stewardship over the space. A single destination for all democracy and engagement activities Your virtual town hall is somewhere where the citizen goes online to act like a citizen – to carry out their civic role. This means it has to have certain ‘rules of engagement’ as does any well run debate.
• Its moderated and managed – by all of the stakeholders.  For the sake of sustainability (you can’t moderate all this content with offices) and to reinforce the sense of co-creation you need to have those rules negotiated with and then managed by members of all the stakeholder groups – yes you need community moderators.
• Content is accountable and transparent. Council’s (or other democratic bodies) can’t make decisions on the basis of how many people join a facebook group – you need to know who is saying what. This doesn’t mean you can’t use screen names have people stay anonymous to the general public – but there has to be the sense that you are accountable for what you say in the civic space.

This is turning into something of a manifesto!!  I’ll go away and see if I can streamline things a bit more

 

The evolution of power and internet dog years

This is just a segue from the research proposal work of the weekend…….

Manuel Castells talks about the fact that institutions will evolve to accomodate new power structures.  I think he’s right – very few institutions are foolish enough not to change and one thing that a universal media age has done is to form institutions in such a way that they are constantly considering how they are percieved by the outside world.  This analysis also supports the idea that institutions will react to social change around them which I also agree with.

The risk with accepting this idea is that it does not encourage you to think deeply about the process of change and, more concerningly, it does assume that these institutions know what changes are needed in order to fit in with a networked society.  My observation when working with Local Government is that very few people within these institutions have a clear idea of how to address the social web and where they need to think about changes to process or to principles.  It is concerning that council’s are currently more likely to block facebook access than to try and figure out what to do with it.

But the big concern is the speed of change online.  Government generally tends to move at a slower pace than the commercial world and this is massively exacerbated when it comes into contact with the internet.  The internet moves in dog years with seven passing online for every one in real time.  Without some fairly bold action from government the internet could evolve past a point where government can catch it up – and then what?  The internet, social websites and mass media are growing in power and influence.  If government wants to have a  part in its own evolution I believe it needs to step up and take part in the debate.

We do live in an information age where change can happen astonishingly quickly.  But I want democracy and government to have a much more active part in shaping how our society functions within this new age.  I find the idea of a culture where the underpinning design principles are those of something like facebook profoundly troubling and I want to see democratic processes and collaborative decision making taking a far more central role in the way in which we build our online spaces.

Without more active involvement from non-commercial interests the social web will be built on foundations which need an ROI to support them.  If we rely on commerce to build our online spaces they will look like shopping centres and not like town halls.

 

Habermas: The public sphere

Jurgen Habermas a pre-eminent social and political theorist whose ideas around the “Public Sphere” have influenced much  of the contemporary thinking around the information or network society.  Habermas describes the public sphere as a shared public conversation which encapsulates political, social and cultural debate.  He argues that this public sphere is essential to the functioning of a society as it provides the guidance and identity needed in order for a society to function.  It is an informal instrument of debate but supports the political process.  To some extent the public sphere is an ideology in that belief in its importance is one of the conditions for its existence and Habermas does describe it as such – as well as his passionate belief in its importance.  However it can also be considered to as an idea in isolation which describes the social interactions which transcend social interactions but are not yet formally political.

Access to information is one of the cornerstones of the public sphere and it is for this fact that it can be linked to information or network society thinking as the pervasive nature of information in a network society should mean that the public sphere will be able to thrive online – and in many ways it does.

Habermas and others voice their concern about the health of the public sphere with direct reference to current trends in mass media towards a simplification of ideas and a drive towards the use of mass communication techniques for advertising rather than debate concern anyone who has a belief in the importance of a vibrant public sphere as an essential element in a functioning democracy.

In my research I am arguing that the public sphere is an essential part of democracy and that the Internet is an important location for these debates.  I will also argue that one of the reasons that it is threatened is because of the increasingly fractionated nature of the Internet and the growth of self-publishing and social networking tools which do not make it possible to connect the elements of debate which could constitute a public sphere.  The CitizenScape research is looking at whether the development of technical and socially co-created online spaces can rejuvinate this public sphere and enable it to support the formal decision making process.

 

The Network Society and a whole new load of reading….

Busy weekend with lots of literature review as well as proposal writing for EU funded projects.  I have also been reading around ideas of co-creation as well the Network Society this weekend.  Both of these are going to be fairly central within my literature review.

The network or information society is a way of describing the intrinsically connected way in which society now functions in terms of data, processes and increasingly people.  These terms are being used in the same way as the agricultural and then industrial revolutions are discussed and is widely regarded as a paradigm shift in the way which society works.  What is less clear of course is what this shift way which is why Frank Webster’s book “Theories of the Information Society” is so interesting as it critiques a number of different interpretations of what the fact that once we are online we can reach so many people and ideas actually means.  I am focusing on two main thinkers in this area – both of which I will need to write more on:

• Jurgen Habermas and his ideas of the existence and importance of the “Public Sphere” where social discourse should happen.
• Manual Castells and his ideas around  the implications of our main exposure to politics being exposure the media

This is obviously vastly over-simplifying things but these two thoughts are both ones which I am now reading more about.

Co-creation is also a central tenant of the CitizenScape approach I am advocating as it describes the way in which I believe that the sites that support democratic discourse need to be truly co-created by all contributors – both government and citizens.  Co-creation can be approached in two ways;  firstly as a tool of citizen engagement of the kind discussed in the seminal Arnstein article or as mass collaboration described in the crowd sourcing crowd pleaser wikinomics.  I am attempting a kind of ‘meet in the middle’ argument with these two ideas as I make the case that mass collaboration techniques need to be applied to democratic discussion in order to ensure that citizens are properly engaged in democracy.