With the goal to analyse and propose a debate on the nature and depth of this new framework of social relationships, the challenges it entails, for example, from the point of view of social inclusion, or opportunities from the perspective of health systems, social participation and education a series of conferences has been planned in Seville (Spain): [sic]*: Conference series on trends in the Information and Knowledge Society
The conferences are made up by six debates, and I am taking part in two of them:
1. Introductory session. 18 april 2012.
Topics: information society, network society and technological revolution, how ICTs have penetrated into European, Spanish and Andalousian societies, and what are or what should be the public policies in this area.
Participants: Eva Piñar, General Director of Technological and Information Society services at the Andalousian government; Ramón Compañó, programme coordinator at IPTS-JCR; Josep Lladós, director of the PhD on Information and Knowledge Society at UOC.
2. Progressing towards the Information Society. 2 may 2012.
Topics: present of the implementation of ICT at different levels: infrastructure, knowledge economy, legal framework, content and services. And delving into the economic dimension of the information society: business, resources, innovation, etc..
Participants: Ismael Peña-López, professor a the School of Law and Political Science at UOC; Marc Bogdanowic, leader of the Information Society Unit at IPTS-JCR.
3. Technological prospective. 16 may 2012.
Topics: what will be the future technologies, usage standards, protocols, etc..
Participants: César Córcoles, professor at the School of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunication at UOC; a TBC representative from IPTS.
4. ICT and Education. 6 june 2012.
Topics: aspects of the relationship between training and ICT, how educational technology is already helping to change the way it delivers training, how can ICT help in shaping tomorrow’s education.
Topics: how ICT have changed the relationship between citizens and the government, what are the new forms of participation based on the use of ICT, Transparency, e-government, etc.
Participants: Ismael Peña-López, professor a the School of Law and Political Science at UOC; Gianluca Misuraca, researcher at the IPTS-JCR.
I want to thank Eva Piñar and Alfredo Charques both for the initiative to organize the conference — when reflecting on what kind of Information Society we want is so necessary — and, of course, for inviting me to take part in it.
When we speak about politics and social networking sites, we’re used to speak about David vs. Goliath: common people fighting against the powerful.
For the first time in many years, we are not facing a strong political power, but a weak political power. A political power disconcerted by the markets, globalization, a smart society. But, is that society that smart? Is it true that the digital revolution has had an impact on politics (and political parties and governments) and not on common people? Why should be common people be spared from that impact?
It is only natural that the political system and what happens out of it (unions, nonprofits, civil associations, etc.) advance in parallel and, in their confrontation, consensus and solutions emerge. This means that it is interaction what makes society advance, and not that it is society that is right despite the opposition of the political system.
Indeed, we do need an articulated civil society, as articulated as political parties and governments. Not a chaotic or disorganized one. Only an organized civic society can face a disorganized, weak political power. But there is a deep difficulty to articulate a general purpose strategy, especially when populisms leverage the fact that no-one seems to be accountable for their decisions.
The utopia of dis-intermediation
We are witnessing times were intermediation is toughly fought against: there seem to be no need for politicians, journalists, teachers, distributing industries, etc.
While there may be a positive side of dis-intermediation (lesser costs, a more straightforward access, increased availability of knowledge, etc.) there is also a dark side of it. The expert becomes a contested institution while the cult of the amateur becomes the norm.
The huge challenge is how to rebuild new mediators, more flexible, more participative, and not getting rid of them. Democracy is about commitment and engagement, and oftentimes this can only be achieved through representation.
Ballot boxes and dreams
A mature democracy is not about setting highest ideals, but about identifying what is the second best and being able to tell whether it is acceptable. If the second best is too far from ideals, society won’t progress; if the second best is too close to ideals, fanaticism takes place.
Our society is deeply de-politicized: not only technocrats are taking the power, but “tea parties” are stepping in the centre of the political debate. Those are parties or groups of people, without second best options, and that fight within the party for it not to agree with anything with the “enemy”. This breaks party-to-party and party-to-society communication. In many senses, the hardcore of the political blogsphere is made of “tea parties”, extremist partisans that radicalise the debate.
Paradoxes of democratic self-determination
Echo chambers (Sunstein) and the Daily Me (Negroponte) have been side effects of democratic self-determination, with the result that the quality of democracy is impoverished. People that thinks different from us protects us from insanity and fanaticism.
We certainly need to keep a certain distance from reality to see other opinions. And representation is just about this, about seeing the whole picture.
Untangling an illusion
The Internet implies a high degree of empowerment for the citizenry. And, historically, every new technology has come along with a utopia: technology will bring a social change or revolution. But, will it?
There is a common believe that a new technology appears in the void, in no social or economic context. But it does. And that is why the same (new) technology has different effects in different places, or “unexpected” or “undesired” changes instead of what we dreamt of.
There is a common believe that social media decentralizes and democratizes power. But the nature of power is not so: there are gatekeepers and mediators in the Internet. The Internet does not removes the relationships of power, but transforms them. E.g. in the top 40 political blogs in the US, there is also one woman, two hispanics, and no afroamericans. The top 40 political blogs in the US are made up by WASPs… as US politics.
Censorship, for instance, is not any more about governments censoring, but about crowds doing it willingly. Search engines are not really neutral, as they redirect traffic, etc.
We have to acknowledge that democracy is about design: social and power hierarchies have their mirror in the online world. Imperialism is not anymore about culture, but about protocols: we are living the imperialism of protocols.
There is a common believe that criticising (or demanding accountability) and building is the same thing, and it is not. Democracy is not only about winning elections, but about governing; or about reporting injustices, but about coming up with a better social design to avoid/correct them.
Digital revolutions have been more focused on accountability and reporting than on building.
The Internet is based on easiness and trust, and that is, precisely, its weakest point.
Discussion
Q: is it possible that the Internet stops us from a critical thinking? Innerarity: It depends. We sometimes need some things to just happen, without us having to think about how their work; but we sometimes need to stop and think. What we are in need of is to be able to turn the switch on or off, so that we are able to stop and think about a given aspect, and without, in the meantime, being dragged around because of the speed of times. Politics has lost its ability to set up, to propose: it’s reactive and not propositive, thinks short term instead of long term.
Q: are we confusing mobilization with engagement? Innerarity: organization is fundamental to perform deep and lasting changes. What organization? Whatever, but organization.
Q: has the Internet been able to engage more participants in politics? Innerarity: the network has sometimes provided an illusory activism, where the activist believes that they are having a deep impact and the truth they are having not.
Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí: so, the Internet is a menace for politicians and they should fight against it? Innerarity: it definitely is not, the Internet can help in doing better politics. The problem with politics and the Internet is usually on the politicians’ side.
Ismael Peña-López: what will be easier: to transform the actual institutions (parliaments, parties, schools and universities, etc.) or to substitute the with brand new ones? Innerarity: renewal is a must, that is out of question. Or parliaments become spaces for reflection, or they will legislate about the past, about past problems. But we’d rather update the institutions we have than try and substitute them with new ones: the cost might be higher and no one says traditional institutions could not be transformed.
Notes from the research seminar The influence of the Internet on voting behaviour: tracking ERC’s massive vote loss in the 2010 Catalan Elections, organized by Joan Balcells and Ana Sofía Cardenal, Open University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science, and held in Barcelona, Spain, on 1 December 2011.
Joan Balcells, Ana Sofía Cardenal The influence of the Internet on voting behaviour: tracking ERC’s massive vote loss in the 2010 Catalan Elections
Data from the Catalan elections in 2006 and 2010 show that there was an important shift of voters from the main Catalan political parties towards (a) other minor/new parties, (b) Convergència i Unió (CiU, the right wing nationalist party) and (b) abstention, with minor shifts from major parties towards other major parties (e.g. PSC towards PP).
Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC, the main Catalan left-wing nationalist pro-independence party) is the one that loses more voters, losing them in benefit of many other parties: other nationalist parties, other left-wing parties, ERC spin-offs, and abstention.
What is the role of the Internet in this vote drain? General hypotheses:
Normalization hypothesis: the Internet is yet another communication media, where big parties have more resources and, thus, benefit more from the Internet.
Equalization hypothesis: the Internet is a different communication media and, thus, provides new opportunities to those who know how to manage the Internet to reach out.
Web analytics (Alexa) show that small parties did have lots of visits on their websites. Indeed, Solidaritat Catalana (one of ERC’s spin-offs) had more visits than ERC, and ERC had more than CiU. In many cases within small parties, only the website would provide full information about their policy proposals, implying that people would often visit the website to get what was behind a simple message (unlike major parties, whose messages were given fully by traditional media).
Working hypotheses:
Exposure to political information online will reduce the likelihood of voting again for ERC.
Greater exposure to political information online will have no effect on probability of abstaining.
Greater exposure to political information online will increase the likelihood of voting for small and fringe parties, while offline exposure to political information will increase the probability of voting for large parties (equalization vs. normalization).
Dependent variable: vote 2010. Independent variables: media environment (online and offline exposure), acceptance/resistance of new political messages (political interest and party identification), controls (support for independence, age).
Results
It does not seem that exposure to political information online reduced the likelihood of voting again for ERC, while greater exposure to political information online didn’t seem to have an effect on the probability of abstaining.
On the other hand, online exposure significantly increased the odds of voting for Solidaritat Catalana, as did identifying oneself with ERC and stating support for independence. That is, former self-identified ERC-voters with high online exposure were more likely to vote for Solidaritat Catalana. Indeed, the more the online exposure, the higher the likelihood of vote drain from ERC to Solidaritat Catalana. Thus, the Internet will be playing an equalizer role.
Online exposure plays no role in the probability of voting again for ERC.
Being exposed to online political information has no significant effect on the probability of abstaining.
Being exposed to offline political information does not increase the probability of voting for CiU.
Being exposed to online political information increases the probability of voting for Solidaritat Catalana.
The limits of the mass media and the emergence of mass self-communication in the digital age Lluís Bassets (El País Associate Director), Manuel Campo Vidal (Journalist), Mayte Pascual (TVE Journalist), Ricardo Galli (Meneame.net), Klaudia Alvarez (Communication group DRYbcn), Vicent Partal (Vilaweb, chairs)
Ricardo Galli
(this speech is partly based on Ricardo Galli’s article Pienso, luego estorbo — I think, therefore I’m in the way)
Some of the reactions against the 15M movement were expected — as the ones from the extreme right wing — but some others were unexpected, and nevertheless were as foreign, strange, surprising for the activists of the social movements.
Several initiatives like #nolesvotes or Democracia Real Ya’s protests for May 15th (15M) became extremely popular in online platforms, with massive acceptance and viral communication and, notwithstanding, they would not appear on the papers. Why?
Lack of belief that things would come to something real. That is, lack of belief that there would not be a transposition from online spaces to offline spaces.
Lack of a press conference. Indeed, there were some, but were unattended by journalists.
Avoid a call effect: if it appears on the papers, there is more likelihood of success. Thus, let us not air it.
Phagocytosing of the topic by some journalists, that love being the subject of their own news, instead of reporting the real characters of the movement.
After the 15M, some media begin to cover the events, but also to discredit both the movement and some of the more visible heads (or arbitrary so-called heads of the movement — which were not).
Some of the things that have happened — and media still have to learn — is that lots lots of things have happened since 15M, there are lots of people involved, the movement is evolving… and nonetheless, it is still being ignored.
Lluís Bassets
We have to think of mass media as institutions that are evolving themselves, and sometimes it is this very same evolution or transformation of the media the most interesting event. Media are not mirrors of the society, but institutions that are part of it. And, as such, are actors worth being analysed too.
We also have to deal with the 15M phenomenon in its context: the Arab Spring and the economic crisis. This is a global revolution due to a crisis of representation, of mediation: the mediation of governments, of trade unions, of media.
What is a TV, a radio, a newspaper on the Internet? sections? a 24-hour cycle? Media have to become just the contrary of what they nowadays are. And journalists do still have a future — and a very bright one, indeed — if they stick to their core values: verifying the sources.
But big journalism needs time, reflection, quietness. And the problem is that the pace of the new times is so fast that makes it difficult for this journalism to take its time.
Manuel Campo Vidal
Media are in a deep and long transition. And not only because of the crisis of the paper vs. digital, and not only because of the crisis of advertisement. The economic crisis only implies more speed and depth, but the transition is not a consequence of the economic crisis. The nature of crisis of media is the divergence between old and new media.
But conspiracies might not be the best way to explain what is happening, the reasons why media companies and most journalists are fighting against the unstoppable change. It has to be acknowledged that we are living in disconcert: we know what we are leaving behind, but we do not know where are we heading to.
The Arab Spring was tweeted, but Twitter did not spark the Tunis or the Egypt revolution. Or Facebook. Or any other social networking site. The Internet was a valuous instrument, one without which the revolutions may have not been the way there were, but by no means the revolutions began on the Internet.
The real challenge now for traditional media is to recover their lost reputation. Reputation, in an Information Society, is the only thing of value (information is free), and that is the capital that a journalist should take care of.
Mayte Pascual
There is a mutual lack of confidence between traditional media and digital or new media. And mutual understanding would be highly beneficial for both parties.
We need to be more communication-literate to understand the new era we are entering. More and more things will be explainable in terms of communication, and thus we must know how communication happens, how it shapes people’s minds, etc.
And traditional media have to learn too how the inner functioning of social movements.
Klaudia Álvarez
What is relevant is not whether a medium is traditional or new or digital, but who owns it, who is speaking through it.
Related to that, another huge different is whether in a given medium sender and receiver are interchangeable or not. Can I be a sender and not only a receiver in that medium? This really makes a difference.
Being a writer and not a reader, having a blog, is not only writing or having a blog, but changing your mindset: you are building your own reality, they are now aware of their possibility to create a reality. Communication autonomy is about building realities.
But empowerment happens only for people that can actually be empowered, that is, people in the bad side of the digital divide, or socially excluded, are more difficult to reach by empowering tools.
And empowerment comes in detriment of (traditional) media. And traditional media usually fight this loss power, which indeed happened in the 15M.
Discussion
Manuel Castells: if there is something left to journalism, it is credibility. And there is a clear deadline for the disappearance of traditional media: the day all people now aged 60 or older are already gone. There is thus an unavoidable need for a transition, but this transition has to be smooth, with as less victims as possible.
Arnau Monterde: the collective intelligence is transforming the way information is created and distributed, the way the sources are verified. Thus, it is very difficult to state that media-literacy is a personal must, because now the media are produced by the collective and collectively. It is the outcome of minor contributions that becomes a major contribution.
Campo Vidal: there is a media bubble that is unsustainable, both economically and socially speaking. There are — in some fields — too much media (e.g. digital TV) and clearly overrated.
The incidence of the new social movements. Exploring new fields for political action Joana Conill (UOC-IN3, chair), Mònica Oltra (Coalició Compromís), Joan Subirats (IGOP), Raúl Sanchez Cedillo (Nomad University)
Mònica Oltra
Increasingly, governments and political parties lie as if their citizens were uninformed idiots. The political discourse has reached astonishing levels of misery that thus keeps the citizen away from politics. And it is very difficult to articulate a political discourse out of the party system, out of partidism.
Added to that, we live in an information blackout, as mass media have been taken over by political parties and lobbies.
Did the 15M Spanish Indignants movement had any impact on political parties and governments? Partly yes, as minority parties were just making the very same demands on the democratic process that were made on the 15M protests. Thus, these minority parties have somewhat been legitimated in their demands by the movements and, vice-versa, the social movements have also somewhat been legitimated by a part of the formal political institutions that are represented by the minority political parties.
But social movements should not be capitalized and appropriated by political parties, even minority ones. Parties should take part and participate in the movements — preferably at an individual or personal level —, but not appropriate them.
What parties can do is to represent the rhetoric of the invisible ones, the ones that are not represented by anyone, any political party, the ones that do not appear in the political agenda.
And the way to make (new) politics should be reporting accompanied by making proposals: “destroying” accompanied by “building”.
Participation is not freedom of choice amongst some given options, but freedom to decide what has to be chosen.
Joan Subirats
Democracy has been emptied out of values, and only the rules, the procedures remain:
Representation: citizens do not believe that political parties represent them anymore.
Intermediation: political parties do not seem to be channelling the needs of the citizens to the places where decision-taking happens.
Function: political parties do not represent the citizens because they are no more their equals. Politicians are privileged ones and thus cannot understand nor share the needs of “normal” citizens.
Insiders: political parties have evolved from citizen tools to influence the institutions to tools of the institutions to influence on the citizens.
The 15M movement is stating that politics can happen outside of institutions; that the public sphere is not the monopoly of the public powers; and that representation do not compulsory has to take place by means of institutions.
We need not to improve, but to transform. And this transformation might be a shift back to the commons:
Polity
Policy
Improve
Reform of the voting system
e-Government
Open Government
Transform
Commons
Raúl Sánchez
It is difficult to tell where the thresholds of a movement are when it is based on network architecture and collective intelligence.
The 15M movement is an open, autopoietic system that is constantly creating and reshaping itself. The 15M is a movement based on Spinozan affections and the estigmergies amongst its members.
The 15M movement proved that it is possible to take decisions without anyone taking them. The 15M is a actor in a non-place, a neuronal network without a central subject, challenging the current scenario of politics, contesting the statement that things cannot be different.
Discussion
Q: does the 15M need to move from movement, and embody itself in an organization? Sánchez: most probably the network that the 15M is definitely in need of a “body”, a formal way to present itself before the others. And this can happen formalizing its members in an organization, or achieving some milestones that define the movement through specific actions.
Mayo Fuster: I sometimes have the feeling to be watching a 15M ad, in the sense that few people acknowledge that many things just happened, without much planning, and most of them difficult to foresee. How do you see the 15M in a 10 year horizon? Oltra: got plenty of hope with people camping on the streets, hope that the movement won’t be absorbed by other movements or institutions, that it will achieve something. Subirats: don’t think that the 15M is not a movement, but the expression of a change of era. Thus, in a 10 years future, what is likely to happen is that some structural changes if have not happen they will certainly be slowly happening. Sánchez: most probably there will be the very same sense of transition that we are now living in, only deeper.
What are the big changes that we are facing? It is not an era of change, but a change of era, Joan Subirats. The 15M movement has put the spotlight on many ongoing dynamics that were working for the change. And, arguably, the ones that understand the 15M are part of it, and one can only be part of it if one understands the movement. There are new languages, platforms, ways to communicate, and that is part of the change too. And maybe these processes are the very true outcomes of the movement, and not what it is traditionally asked to a movement: an impact on institutions or the taking of power.
Joan Coscubiela
Our society is in a dire crisis, especially in our social organizations. And this crisis is boosted by technological change.
The relationships between economics and politics, and between corporations and unions have been altered, and the balance of power amongst these institutions has radically changed. Some reasons are that the habitat (the factory) has been radically transformed; the disappearance of the aggregation of interests due to the disaggregation of identities; the difficulty to build a collective identity upon which to leverage a movement.
The dismantlement of the factory, the dismantlement of the national economy, and the dismantlement of the nation-estate. The integrated factory becomes the networked enterprise. There are central workers and workers on the periphery.
There is also a crisis of the communication channels in traditional unions, based on the integrated Fordist factory and the assembly of workers.
All these crises are undoubtedly weakening the strength and even legitimacy of traditional trade unions. But, if this crisis of legitimacy will be especially tough in Anglo-Saxon unions (based on the firm or the factory, or European unions (based on the economic sector), it might be that Mediterranean-type unions (based on the notion of class, or of social equity) will have it more easy to regain legitimacy, even if a deep transformation is notwithstanding required.
The great opportunity for trade unions is how to leverage the power of ICTs to regain legitimacy to refund the forms of participation.
Gemma Galdón
With the coming of the Internet and the intensive use of social networking sites and similar tools make the medium become the message: the fact that the 15M movement is very live on the Internet is part of its very definition, of its DNA, and tells much on the nature and characteristics of the movement.
There is a qualitative leap in the way participation is understood: besides being present on a demonstration, being active on the Internet (gathering information, commenting, creating opinions, broadcasting messges, etc.) can be as much important as physical presence. Notwithstanding, either on the street or on the Internet, legitimacy comes not from the diffusion of information, but from being committed with the movement. Only commitment leads to legitimacy and reputation, and not only mere participation by being active on social networking sites.
The logic of expansion of social movements is no more centralized, but rhizomatic: it obeys to no traditional logics, especially cultural logics or logics of power.
Indeed, social movements of the past five years have detached themselves from the international political and economic agenda. Nowadays movements no more follow international leaders to their international meetings of the World Bank or the G8. Social movements increasing have their own agenda, and an agenda that is created and updated ad-hoc.
This change is partly due because information and the communication tools have been democratized to the limit. What is difficult now is opacity and non-transparency. Diffusion of information and ideas and calls to action are now cheap and fast. On the other hand, this is a double-edged sword: repression is now more easy than ever for the ones in power, as identification of individuals and collectives is immediate.
The problem is: are we making any impact? When the whole world protested against the second invasion of Irak, nothing happened. And, worst indeed, there does not seem to exist an alternative to the broken representative democracy.
The challenge is how to leverage the common sense we reconquered and turn it into a driver of change, based on new forms of political transformation.
Ada Colau
The new forms of participation not only surprised the traditional social movements, but also the newer ones, that became “obsolete” even if they were recent. These newer social movements were based on platforms that (a) focused on a specific issue and (b) acted as a helping collective so you could reach out (instead of a vertical organization where the individual helps the organization to reach out). These platforms had to transform into networks and the new ways to organized that the Internet and, especially, social networking sites made possible.
That was the case of V de Vivienda [H stands for Housing] in Spain, on of the seeds that afterwards would nourish the 15M Spanish Indignants movement. V de Vivienda was auto-convened and auto-organized, by means of SMSs and e-mails.
V de Vivienda succeeded in putting on the political agenda the housing bubble and the social and economic problems derived from it.
The answer from the political institutions to the movement was very shy and myopic. So, after all the energies poured into the movement, it does not seem be having much impact. What to do about it? How to keep on without being discouraged? The new strategy is increasingly being civil disobedience, so that a change in the Law is forced. But civil disobedience is individual, not collective, so the collective has to find ways to support the individuals that will enter civil disobedience (i.e. in the present case debated here, resistance to eviction and the movement helping people to resist evictions and, at last, stop them).
The network helped in building a critical mass around the issue of mortgages and evictions, as this is not a geographically concentrated problem, but quite a spread one.
Discussion
Manuel Castells: one of the reasons of the crisis of trade unions is that they are part of the power, they come from a paternalistic way to understand society. And social movements are fighting just against that.
Manuel Castells: changes, real and structural changes need their time and own pace, and that that change begins with a change in the processes.
Ismael Peña-López: acknowledging the truth of the aforementioned statement, the problem is that people’s lives happen in the short run (evictions, unemployment subsidies have limited time spans in the range of months), and thus some milestones have to be achieved in the short run. This is especially true not only to protect the victims of economic crisis, but also to avoid the draining of energy of social movements, that can fade away and dissolve if anything tangible and concrete can be achieved (and this should be achieved without violence).
I am professor at the School of Law and Political Science of the Open University of Catalonia, and researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute and the eLearn Center of that university.
![Logo of the [SIC] conference series](/img/postssr/0000000486.jpg "[sic]*: Conference series on trends in the Information and Knowledge Society")
