(It’s the media’s silly season. So instead of telling you about the Net Neutrality paper I’m working on, or wondering about what we can learn from failed community networks, here’s a story from my visit home to Saskatchewan)
My dad doesn’t have broadband. Perhaps this is shocking given what I spend my time researching. But he’s an old-fashioned sort who doesn’t like to change things too fast. His household information nexus is the phone book, which is stuffed into a drawer underneath the phone. The phone book has always been in the same place, since this was where the phone was hanging on the wall when I was a kid, before the telephone company bought back all the rotary phones.
Inside the front cover of the phone book are pasted Post-Its with all the important long-distance numbers and addresses my dad might need, and local numbers that he doesn’t want to take the time to look up. There are also slips of paper that provide extra context for particularly important pieces of information. It’s best not to open the phone book the wrong way otherwise all that context could tumble out.
I thought maybe my dad’s phone book was a very specific information source, and that other people used the Internet as much as I did. But I’d forgotten about the other context – specifically, the context of my home town.
The roof was leaking. I offered to find a contractor. Googling “roofing contractor” and the name of my hometown returned a set of listings sites scraped from . . . the online version of the phone book. No recommendations, no location tags, just phone numbers and addresses in industrial sites out of town.
I went across town to see a friend for morning coffee. I’d used Facebook to schedule lunch with another friend, leaving my dad’s number for her to leave a message. When I called home, she’d organized to meet me a half hour earlier, and hadn’t left a number. I hung up, disappointed to have missed her. The friend whose kitchen I was standing in looked at me like I was crazy. “Why don’t you just look her up in the book?” She walked over and opened the cabinet underneath the phone, and took out the phone book.
My other friend was, of course, listed. And yes, we managed to meet for lunch.
The moral of the story? Our own assumptions about how and why other people use certain kinds of media and information tools can make us blind to what’s really going on.
And no social network update can replace a good lunch with friends.
Nearly six weeks ago I promised to post these speaking notes from FutureEverything, and now that I’m at another conference doing another talk, I finally have.
None of these ideas are really new – what I wanted to do with this piece was think through some of the complexities of participation in what I call “the politics OF the network.” It was a fun talk to give with a great audience, and here is, more or less, what I said:
Introduction
This conference is about the future, and I think, in an unspoken way, about technology’s impact on the future. I want to shift our attention, for a few minutes, to the past. Don’t worry, I’ll get back to the present soon, and maybe even to the future. But I’m skeptical of presuming that the past has nothing to tell us, and that we should stride forward in the expectation of perpetual progress. There are many thing about our present social media landscape that are different than what we’ve experienced in the past. People get much more information much more easily, and this information is mediated in very different ways than it was in the past. They have faster access to other people as well. And an increasing number of people have access to technical tools that they can build and change in order to take advantage of these other factors (what social scientists call “affordances”). So as citizens, we in the privileged West are in a position to share information (which we do at an unprecedented rate) but also to collaborate to make change.
In any case, to start out I’m going to talk about our historical models for citizenship, and the media spaces that they are associated with. Then I’m going to talk about the media spaces of the present, and the way that filter, feed and funnel shape our opportunities for participation. I’ll talk about some of the problems of social media participation, and then suggest things we can think about – and DO – to use the opportunity that our networked communication provides.
Part 1: Our historical models for citizenship: Spaces and Media
It’s only been since the 19th century that westerners have had an understanding of people outside of the elite as citizens, who could discuss and debate opinions about how the world operates. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the concept of the “public sphere” which is the space of democratic discussions – deliberative democracy, if you will.
1. In the beginning, there was the cafe, and the newspaper. This was the Habermasian model for deliberative democracy. Guys get together and talk about the news of the day. Sometimes their voices amplified by the press, and then perhaps a response to the press from the elected representatives. The emergence of the press was huge! All of a sudden people were aware of the decisions elites were making, and able to read comments on them and discuss.
2. Then there was the street, and the zine, which are spaces and media more associated with Nancy Fraser’s view of the public sphere as also producing counterpublics. Obviously this conception of the “public sphere” was a very limited one: it didn’t include the resistance, all those counterpublics with different ideas. So there were other ways of occupying the street (public spaces) and alternative ways of producing media.
3. There are technological publics too, as Christopher Kelty (and others) describe. The development of free software licenses has meant that code can also act as a way of deliberating the issues of the day. GNU public license stipulated that the software could be freely copied, modified and distributed that every piece of software using the license had to also be subject to the license.
Part 2: Social media models for citizenship
Ok, so now we have a networked set of publics, supported by social media. The great thing about social media is that it’s a set of functions that can work in all kinds of different ways. It’s not the newspaper with the public opinion. It’s not the radical zine. It’s both, and it’s more. I’m going to talk about 3 things that social media does that are significant for participation, and some examples of how they contribute to citizenship
Filter – if we think about the movement from the cafe and the street to the network, what’s one of the most significant media transformations? Quite simply, the end of scarcity of information. Now we have the opposite problem of the early newspaper reporters. We have to make sense of this. That’s where the filter logic comes in. We choose what to attend to, determine what conversations to respond to. It’s no longer a mass media situation, instead its an algorithmically sorted feed of information that can also be used participatively.
Feed – remember the cafe? The feed (Twitter, Facebook) is the public sphere we choose, or, as Eli Pariser points out, is chosen for us based on algorithms that our participation determines. The level of deliberation on feeds and blogs rivals that of the public sphere, but it’s a public that’s chosen and refined
Funnel – This is where individual practices change the larger structures. The difference between previous public spheres and media was that the power coming from the top down was not met by the power of the resistance. Now we have the ability to amplify our views – although we’re not always perfectly in control of how they are amplified. Various projects like MySociety’s Fix my street aim to take advantage of this possibility for amplification.We also have opportunities to use the features of social media progressively to work together. What useful things could we do with the funnel? How about, monitoring air and water quality locally? Using motion sensors to map safe cycling routes from the perspectives of cyclists?
Part 3: Dark sides. The echo chamber
1. social media networks can be elitist publics
When we think about the publics that are made easier by social media, we have to keep in mind that filter, feed and funnel are ways of connecting data to participation. We also have to understand the complexities of the situation. Young people are less likely to use Twitter than adults aged 25-40 (although teenage girls are an exception). They are also less likely to blog. This finding should remind us that participating in social media is not a unified experience. The relationships that committed Twitterers of a certain age construct (your author included) may be more representative of our age and demographic than indicative of social media itself.
In other words, a feed of people you’ve chosen is a public, and it can be full of exciting political discussion. But it might be just an elite a space as the cafe in the 19th century. Furthermore, Facebook feeds are full of people with whom you have reciprocity, while Twitter does not. At the moment we have a pretty narrow set of opportunities for engagement.
- Funnel processes means that we are generating data, and value for others.
The processes of participation offered by social media mean that we can amplify and aggregate our views and our data and provide them to those in power. They are powerful but the question is, who is in control? Centralized social networks like Facebook provide platforms for engagement, but their cost is that they collect an enormous amount of information.
Our relationships with social media infrastructures influence our participation in ways that aren’t easy to see. Filters are part of what makes the platforms and infrastructure opaque. We don’t see the algorithms that sort our relationships.
- We create relationships with infrastructures
One big difference between social media participation and participation in other types of politics ishow these applications are now becoming infrastructures for participation. To understand them, we need to know more about how they are built, how they work, and who controls them. Yes, we want to make things together, and we want to make relationships with people. It’s easier to do this using applications like Facebook Twitter, and YouTube. But this also means creating a relationship with the platform itself. The algorithms to which we’ve delegated the work of connecting and communicating also have agency. We don’t know much about them and their relationship to our participation is opaque. Sometimes, we get a small view into the algorithms of certain systems – but generally we have so little understanding of the ways that our participation is mediated through the experiences of filter, feed and funnel.
The question of social media use and agency is not just a question of knowing or being able to understand the design process. If different generations or social groups want to relate to each other in different ways, then there’s social interest in understanding how different infrastructures shape and are shaped by those relationships. But we are participating more – and this needs to be more progressive than simply turning icons green, or saving the Brazilian Galvao (see Ethan Zuckerman on this inside joke).
Part 4: So what do we do?
HACK IT
- build our own infrastructures. This is the most direct form of participation. There are lots of good examples of this, from community broadband infrastructures to local wireless networks like Ile Sans Fil in my hometown Montreal or the Friefunk network in Berlin. Hardware hacking and the developoment of open source hardware is also part of this participation. These are access networks but they are also participation networks – getting people together in real places to apply technology to a problem. And local infrastructures can turn around feed, filter and funnel. Local WiFi hotspots can provide information using the location as a filter, inviting engagement in local art or in local politics. But they are again limited by the insularity of their
- Open the code: local networks are made possible by both free software and by the network. Now there is recognition that centralized social networks are using funnel to generate too much value for too few people. Crabgrass and possibly the Diaspora project (when it’s built) are platforms that use the beneficial affordances of social networks but are based on the principles of GNU Social, and on individual control of privacy.
- Figure out how feed, filter and funnel can work transformatively. It’s tempting to argue that “we” the technically-savvy should remake social media, but network effects mean that common platforms will be used by more people, so creating an alternative infrastructure may not be the most effective way of working for transformation. Participation means everyone – and the logic of social media makes it harder for everyone to be heard The challenge is to make things BESIDES the tools open – like organizations, innovation cycles, and structures of participation.
Back in the day, we shared Wi-Fi. We kept our connections open, and imagined that this would be a way to get to know our neighbours, or to build community. So excited were we that Sociable Design created a “Wi-Fi Thank You.” to start making some of those connections between people connected in the ether. Cities and governments came up with ways of sharing Wi-Fi too: it spawned a whole industry in the United States (and more than a few PhD theses). We scholars came up with models to describe how this sharing could define Wi-Fi as a public good – as a communications infrastructure that didn’t have to be privately owned and that would benefit a broad range of citizens.
But it would appear that the days of sharing are numbered. Ofcom’s “Online Infringement of
Copyright and the Digital Economy Act 2010″ makes people who share Wi-Fi liable for any copyright infringement on their network, as PCPro reports today. The Act states,
“We consider that a person or an undertaking receiving an internet access service for its own purposes is a subscriber, even if they also make access available to third parties.”
These rules make anyone who shares, liable for copyright infringment – potentially to the tune of £250,000.00. Heavy legal provisions have already made community Wi-Fi projects dry up and disappear in France, and in Germany Wi-Fi must be locked by law. So much for the internet as a public good!
So, what to do? Well, Ofcom’s consultation is open until June 10, so you can submit a response . . .
Or, you could follow the letter of the law. The proposed act states that if Wi-Fi is provided along with another good or service, the provider is considered to be an ISP – and the Act’s provisions don’t apply to ISPs with fewer than 400,000 customers. That means hotel lobbies and coffee shops aren’t considered as individual subscribers – because there’s a financial transaction somewhere. By my reckoning, we don’t normally pay for public goods. But maybe the cup of coffee could be really, really cheap – so cheap, we’d still be sharing.
A few days after the end of FutureEverything, the fog is beginning to lift. The conference and festival were a whirlwind of ideas and images. I visited the Manchester FabLab, a space where physical prototyping tools are available for use by anyone who wants to build electronics, sew, fabricate 3D articles or etch large things with precision table saws. It was an inspiring example of the new, more social contexts for DIY and making. Getting better access to tools in a social space is a way to gain technical skills, yes, but also another form of social organization and collaboration.
The winner of the festival prize, the EyeWriter also demonstrated the connection between social action and technology. It’s open source software that can be connected to an inexpensive, sunglass-mounted eye tracker that reads eye movements and transforms them into line drawing images that can be painted on to the sides of buildings (or other large areas). One possible use is as an assistive technology for disabled graffiti artists. The number of disabled graffiti artists in the world may be rather small, but that’s hardly the point. The big idea is that a simple, elegant piece of technology can give someone whose movements are restricted in space the ability to make very public interventions. On Saturday, one of its inventors, Evan Roth, described the work of the Graffiti Research Labs as working in the overlap between free culture, open source, and art. The group’s projects are all elegant and funny explorations of art and hacking.
My own talk, about social media publics and the affordances of Filter, Feed and Funnel, was likely a good deal less elegant. My goal was to provide some handy concepts that might be fun or useful to people thinking and playing with media tools. HighWired has live blogged it here, and eventually I will post my own notes – or even link to the video so you can see me wave my hands around in the air.
There’s so much going on at the FutureEverything conference that it’s difficult to sort through the experiences to find a highlight. One that certainly stands out, from among the very reflective and critical conversations about technology, social change and open data, is the success of GloNet, a new platform for global participations in conferences. I’m normally somewhat dismissive of “beaming in” participants, but GloNet has won me over. It’s a multi-city network, connecting participants in Vancouver, Manchester, Sao Paulo, Instanbul and Sendai. Most significantly, in each city workshop teams had been working with participants (and rallying audiences – early in the am in Vancouver) to respond to some shared questions about technology and the city. The result was that the participants in other cities were not remote, but very present – and also connected by a networked living room that could front on the other locations.
Each city site was connected with a different organization: at W2 in Vancouver they asked questions about how technology and engagement works in different cities, and the
Tribes in cities are reinforced by our use of social media – working with the idea that this reduces the amount of serendipity in the city. W2 in Vancouver explored how or whether social media would benefit the poorest in Vancouver. When we talk about open data open standards open source we are talking about conversations that happen differently. Were we before on a trajectory towards isolation, and has this trajectory been reversed?
Questions were also raised about the power dynamics of the ownership of social media platforms, and also about the presence or absence of serendipity within systems run on algorithms.
There was enthusiasm from Adam Greenfield about the possibility of autonomous creativity to solve the challenging problems, based on a technical infrastructure of open data and open culture.
Open data was a defining theme for the day. Nigel Shadbolt described how open government data moved from idea to reality, and artists presented projects involving everything from maps of Oyster card transactions to data in the forms of games. There is a sort of gleeful sense that more data will make the world a better place – I agree, although I think that the structures (the media, indeed) through which we encounter and make sense of these data are what really become important.
I’m getting ready to head to FutureEverything in Manchester, an amazing festival of art/technology/ideas that runs from May 12-15. The conference/ideas stream features several interesting tracks including discussions on open data, local broadband, and collaboration. I’ll be speaking on DIY citizenship, social media and social change.
Since my panel collaborators Mushon Zer-Aviv and Alexandra Deschamps-Sosino are probably more connected to how revolutions in design and availability of technologies are connected with innovation and participation, I thought I’d talk a bit about how social media affordances have provided us with new models for citizenship, and what we can do with these models. I’ll provide a bit of history about how citizens role in discussing and participating in politics have been thought about – and organized – in the past, and how media have played a role. Then I’ll discuss the current media environment, hopefully asking some hard questions about how we use the participation that our environment offers to sustain our citizenship and work for social change.
I’m also a speaker blogger, and am looking forward to exploring the explosive world of art, thought and music that the festival promises to be. More later . . .
The Pew Internet and American Life project released their findings on young people’s use of social media yesterday. Apparently young people are less likely to use Twitter than adults aged 25-40 (although teenage girls are an exception). They are also less likely to blog. I don’t think that this survey data indicates that young people aren’t engaged in meaningful social life online or elsewhere – youth do lots of socializing online. This finding should remind us that participating in social media is not a unified experience. The relationships that committed Twitterers of a certain age construct (your author included) may be more representative of our age and demographic than indicative of social media itself.
No, what I’m thinking about is along the lines of what Christian Sandvig is working on: these applications are now becoming infrastructures for participation. To understand them, we need to know more about how they are built, how they work, and who controls them. Yes, we want to make things together, and we want to make relationships with people. It’s easier to do this using applications like Facebook Twitter, and YouTube. But this also means creating a relationship with the platform itself. The algorithms to which we’ve delegated the work of connecting and communicating also have agency. We don’t know much about them, in the main. Sometimes, we get a small view into the algorithms of certain systems – this week, I learned more about the School of Everything and how its search and matching
The question of social media use and agency is not just a question of knowing or being able to understand the design process. If different generations or social groups want to relate to each other in different ways, then there’s social interest in understanding how different infrastructures shape and are shaped by those relationships.
I feel that sometimes, the social media world that I’m part of acts like an echo chamber, with the kinds of relationships that “people like me” form getting reproduced by our practices – and perhaps even by our media infrastructures. We start thinking that social media works a certain way because that’s the way it works for us. I think it’s critical that research understand both ends of this process – the way systems are designed, and the potentially very different kinds of things that designs make possible, among different kinds of people. Otherwise we’ll all simply be shouting into our own social media echo chambers.
I took my sweetie to London’s best holiday nerdfest last night – Robin Ince’s 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People. It was a three-hour celebration of the wonders and beauties that science can reveal – along with lots of hilarious British standup comedy. Throughout, there was lots of emphasis on the role of evolution in creating fantastically complex organisms – and societies. But there was something bittersweet, to me, about celebrating how much our society has evolved, especially in the wake of the disastrous lack of results from Copenhagen.
Yes, our society has evolved and created astonishing innovations like the computer I’m using to write this, and the network that ensures all of you can read it. The internal combustion engine, in particular, has facilitated extraordinary developments in transportation, commerce, health and well-being.
But such development comes with consequences, as we now know. Our evolved intelligence has got us into this mess, and now must get us out of it. Unfortunately, much of society is now in thrall to a particularly well-evolved form of self-interested greed. The policy debates about how to respond to climate change illustrate this well: everyone agrees that something must be done, the conclusive data is building up, but there is hesitation. Why? In many cases, because agreeing to collectively solve a problem interferes with the pursuit of individual gains – a pursuit so well supported by today’s capitalism.
Luckily, we have also evolved an ethics of collective action. Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning work explains that societies have also evolved innovative ways of sharing resources to avoid the “tragedy of the commons.” As the pressure to define ourselves as self-interested consumers mounts in this holiday shopping week, it’s important to remember what else our society has evolved: ethics, compassion, and a sense of the collective good.
Happy holidays – I’m off to slow down and enjoy the snow.
The growth of the open source software development movement is held up as one of the great successes of a networked world – leaving source code open is associated with global-scale participation in software development and open-source products that are now central to the technology industry. This has in turn inspired calls for opening up other “closed” processes – government, education, knowledge (like Wikipedia). There’s now talk of a global “open everything” movement.
But as Steven Weber explains, there are some specific elements to open-source development. First, that open code is a way of providing easily modifiable basic tools that can be customized to solve a whole set of different problems. This is one key to the success of open source – it’s the utility of the source code that’s available, and ability to modify it. So my friend who is working on a totally bespoke database can draw elements of source code from other databases built by others, even if those other products have little to do with what he’s making. Weber’s second element is that open-source is based on principles and values rather than efficiency.
Given these key elements, can we expect to produce “open everything’? Under what circumstances does an open-source model translate outside of software? To investigate this I’ve started watching the nascent movement towards open hardware development. Of course, hardware is a physical product with manufacturing costs. But if we think the design and production process, there are some clear opportunities to create an open source production ecology.
First, hardware designs are not material objects. They are, like software, intellectual products. Currently, most hardware production is based on patented designs. But hardware hackers (or hobbyists) can upload, view and download designs at OpenCores, which also allows would-be manufacturers to produce prototypes of their chip designs. Second, the realms of software and hardware are converging. The cost of developing software-controlled chipsets is dropping, with the major cost now being the software development itself.
The larger issue is how to grow an open source development and production ecology. In software development, one aspect of this ecology is the licensing framework, which identifies free software and makes using source code conditional on releasing any subsequent source code. How could this happen in the hardware world? How would a prospective hardware (re)designer know that the amazing mobile widget she/he was holding had an open design?
The solution, according to a nascent coalition called the Open Hardware and Design Alliance (OHANDA – watch this space) would be to develop a trademark sticker, to identify a piece of open hardware. The sticker would include a registration key, pointing to a design held in a repository somewhere. Then that design could be reused.
This potential intervention raises some interesting questions about “open everything.” How do open ecosystems grow? How modular do the “open” elements have to be? (it would be obviously more valuable to have a few, easy-to-use open hardware models than one design that’s difficult to reuse). And finally, what are the defining values of openness? OHANDA may provide some important lessons.
I was delighted to read that the Personal Democracy Forum’s 2009 Conference (twitter slurp here) includes a Birds of a Feather meetup on the topic of “Hacking the City.” I first heard community technologists use this phrase in 2005, when Mike wrote a post about how community Wi-Fi is a way of hacking the social space of cities. What he was referring to was the way that community interventions in provision of communications infrastructure could change how people socialized – since so much of our interactions are mediated by various types of networks.
But “hacking the city” like so many good ideas, has taken on another life. It’s now used to describe how networked technologies can be harnessed so that citizens can take action in their own cities. There’s DIYCity.org, where volunteers in cities around the world build open source tools and advocate for open data , New York City’s The Open Planning Project (who advocate for open source software in government, and run several citizen-participation blogs) and MySociety’s FixMyStreet, which features maps where my neighours have flagged two instances of fly-tipping and two piles of dog poo within 1 km of my house.
After doing some work this year about other types of digital activism, I’m returning this summer to thinking about the politics of local networks – it’s time, and furthermore it matters! Can anyone think of other good examples of hacking the city?
UPDATE: Exciting! Personal Democracy Forum Europe in Barcelona in November.