ICTlogy

Within the framework of the workshop Participation and new technologies: challenges and opportunities organized by the Diputació de Barcelona, I have imparted the two first sessions (29 april and 5 may 2011):

1. Introduction to the Web 2.0, a really elementary approach to what is the Web 2.0, including a small choice of tools that are more commonly used in e-Participation;
2. The Web 2.0 in the public agora, which includes a categorization of Web 2.0 tools and applications and a long showcase of these tools and applications in practice.

The materials are in Catalan (though they are, I guess, easy to follow without much understanding of the language) and, as I said, they are really introductory to the topics. Here they are:

Peña-López, I. (2011). “Introducció a la Web 2.0”.

 

Peña-López, I. (2011). “La Web 2.0 a l’àgora pública”.

The eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (JEDEM) has just published its Vol 3, No 1 (2011) featuring an article of mine, The disempowering Goverati: e-Aristocrats or the Delusion of e-Democracy.

This paper is the latest, improved and merged version of two previous lines of work. On the one hand, a reflection on e-Readiness, digital literacy and its role in participation, which I presented at the 4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010 (EDem10) in Krems last year. On the other hand, the reflections on how the distance between governance and empowerment has been increasing due to Information and Communication Technologies (Empowerment and Governance in the Information Society (I): the hourglass of information power, Empowerment and Governance in the Information Society (II): digerati, goverati and the role of ICT4D) and which later became my position paper for the Democracy and the power of the individual conference at the Ditchley Foundation.

Abstract

When disaffection on political parties and politicians is pervasive, most argue whether it could be possible, thanks to the Internet – and Information and Communication Technologies in general – forget the mainstream political system and let the citizenry express their own opinion, debate in virtual agorae and vote their representatives and policy choices directly. In other words, the claim is whether the actual intermediaries can be replaced by citizen networks or, in the limit, just be overridden.

Our aim in the following lines is to (1) explain that some dire (socioeconomic) changes are actually taking place,(2) why these socioeconomic changes are taking place and (3) infer, from this, what conditions shall take place in the future for (4) another wave of changes to happen that could eventually a much acclaimed new (e-)democracy. In a last section, we will discuss that despite lack of data, the trend seems to be just in the direction of the impoverishment of democracy, partly due to the weakening of political institutions.

Citation and Download

Peña-López, I. (2011). “The disempowering Goverati:
e-Aristocrats or the Delusion of e-Democracy”.
In eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 3 (1), 1-21.
Krems: Danube-University Krems.

Last 3-5 February 2011 I attended the conference Democracy and the Power of the Individual, organized by the Ditchley Foundation.

John Holmes, the Director of the Foundation, has published his traditional note on the conference. The note is not only worth reading as an approximate summary of what was discussed during the sessions, but especially as a good state-of-the-question list of the most relevant topics concerning democracy, politics, governance and citizenry. I honestly think that the paper definitely is a good starting point or a faithful snapshot of what is going on in the intersection of the Information Society and Politics in a very broad sense.

The Chatham House Rule wouldn’t allow me to liveblog the event as usual. Besides, that was one those events where you’re not a mere spectator but an active contributor, which puts taking notes down on your priorities pushing up thorough reflection and participation. There are, notwithstanding, some notes worth putting in order. As the Director has already published what can be regarded as the proceedings, I’d stick to my own ideas and reflections, acknowledging that many of them were triggered by the discussion and, thus, I should not be granted full ownership.

Power: empowerment vs. governance

As I explained in my position paper, I think that Information and Communication Technologies are both empowering individuals to be more active citizens and act freely within the system and, at the same time, are impoverishing democracy as we knew it. Cause and consequence at the same time, the reason behind this apparently inconsistent dichotomy is that democratic institutions have become weaker in recent years: the power to manage and change the system has shifted upwards, from national governments to supranational organizations and institutions thus depriving the former from power, while the individuals are circumventing those governments with their newly accessed digital technologies, thus strengthening their weakness.

(Political) disaffection is but a lack of hope to get to the strings that rule or can change the system, out of reach of their democratic representatives. From time to time, a quantum leap of power, a revolution, is set free and the man in the street can actually make contact with the actual decision makers.

In Tunisia or Egypt, social media fed mainstream media (mainly Al Jazeera) with grassroots-generated multimedia content and thus caught the attention of, amongst others, the US Secretary of State that was pressured by their own citizens to take sides and do not look away from the conflict.

When such things happen, is it easy to see social media as new ways of self-determination and the right to information a most valuable right.

Cause-led activism vs. policy-led politics

The problem with this self-determination that empowering ICTs provide might be that politician action becomes so atomized that once the quantum leap is over, leadership might be difficult to determine and policy making, planning, just too difficult to assemble.

The citizenry is, in this scenario, triggered by the very short term and is aware — or simply does not care — neither of the consequences in the long run nor on the possibilities of political negotiation and bargain.

In this sense, if decisions/negotiations take place just once in time, the negotiating parties have an incentive not to move and to bring discussion to stalemate situations. If, on the contrary, there is the possibility of continuous/sequential negotiation, along time, in the long run, with several rounds, negotiation becomes a game (in the sense of Game Theory) where there is a possibility to plan, to deal, to develop agreements, etc.

A short-sighted-politics scenario plus an hourglass-like distribution of power render information worthless. The abundance of information provided by openness, transparency, crowdsourcing… is useless, a placebo, if it is not aimed at bridging a democratic gap both in time (short-term vs. long-run) and space (national government vs. supranational elites).

From political institutions to democratic processes

This shift from the monolithic institution to the liquid political engagement has some causes in social media and the raise of the Web 2.0.

On the one hand, social media turns “tough politics” into “swallowable politics”, as they make complex discourses more granular, highly visual, and definitely straightforward. Once again, if social media had any kind of prominent role in the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, spread of the message through virality has been one of them.

On the other hand, social media has linked content with people, so that people are bound to their own opinions, images, sounds, videos… and personal relationships 24×7, in their presence or in their absence, as their social networking sites profiles speak for them all of the time. Indeed, this deep interlinking between people and constructs provides a much needed context in politics, in citizen action.

Last, but not least, social media enables emergent behaviours, that is, complex systems that perform collective activities after simple actions. Emergent systems usually create patterns that a wise observer should be able to recognize. While we focus on how governments and political parties should use social media as individual users do, it is highly probable that they would rather leverage the power of networks by effectively identifying the patterns that the addition of individual action creates.

Indeed, transparency has changed. It now comes with the possibility of feedback attached, and most of the times feedback is generated automatically: when one link is created, it becomes part of the existing mesh of content, people and the construct that they both make up. The possibility of emergency is enabled and, with it, the generation of patterns and mass (sometimes mob) trends.

Situated politics

What to do in such a scenario?

The world of education and training is in its way to reinvent itself and is already taking about situated learning: the need to learn happens everywhere and everywhen; we should thus be able to situate learning where and when it is needed.

Situated politics is about providing tools for participation when and where the citizen needs them to carry on a civic action. In this sense, we should also enable, encourage and foster participation or engagement that is tacit or informal. And social media can play an important role in linking both sides (tacit/explicit, informal/formal) of political participation.

One of the most thrilling issues in today’s politics is that we are facing a chicken and egg dilemma in democracy:

• We want, first of all, to change our weakened democratic institutions, leaving for later the decision whether and how social media can contribute or impact on those institutions.
• But social media are already questioning many fundamentals, assumptions and procedures of traditional democratic institutions, thus we need to know how and what are they doing to democracy.

And maybe, one of the first topics we should address is how political action has changed of shape. On the one hand, we have communities originated offline; on the other hand, we have networks originated or powered online. These are two social organizations that have different structures, power distributions, needs, degrees of commitment. How do we try and put to work together communities and networks?

The Ditchley Foundation has invited me to take part in one of their conferences under the general topic of Democracy and the Power of the Individual, taking place in Ditchley Part, 3-5 February 2011. The aim of the conference is that the participants debate around the impact of Information and Communication Technologies onto democracy and democratic forms of participation and engagement, including governance. There will be three main discussion lines:

• Democracy and social change, dealing about democratic systems and the ongoing social changes in the Information Society, engagement, how and why people participate, etc.
• The health of institutions, that is, whether institutions are of any value nowadays, how should they be changed or how should day accommodate to the pace of new forms of participation, what is the role of governments and political parties, etc.
• The international environment, to reflect on how globalization affects the exercise of democracy, how human rights and citizen liberties are transformed, what happens with political jurisdictions, etc.

Though participants are not required to prepare any kind of material, I have tried to sort some of my ideas on those topics — which, in many ways, are a follow up (or actually a “prequel”) of what I presented in my keynote at the 4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010 (EDem10) in Krems last Spring.

So, what follows is my “position paper” for the conference and the aforementioned keynote speech for anyone to downdoad, read and, hopefully, commment.

Position paper:
Empowerment and Governance in the Information Society

Keynote:
Goverati: e-Aristocrats or the delusion of e-Democracy

In Empowerment and Governance in the Information Society (I): the hourglass of information power we described a way to look at power, empowerment and governance, and ended up facing an odd distribution of power in the Information Society. A close up to that distribution may look like the following image:

Distribution of power in the Information Society [click to enlarge]

This image aims at visualizing how power is distributed along all the strata of nowadays structure of society.

The lower part is a hat tip to cyberutopianism, at least on what concerns individual empowerment: I believe there is enough evidence to strongly state that Information and Communication Technologies (the Internet and mobile phones and all the applications and appliances were unimaginable without them) have radically changed the degree up to which a human being can (potentially) manage their own life. Getting their own information (much more information, and on a very wide array of quality sources) and communicating with others at lowest costs and with no barriers of time and space have changed the way we can socialize and become more empowered citizens; and being able to access very low cost production tools and being able to create from scratch is an empowerment leap compared to an industrial society where capital (as a production factor) was out of reach for most people.

The upper part, though, is a frontal opposition to the “now people rule the world” thesis. While people are absolutely more free/empowered to act within the system, the strings that manage and can actually change that system are way beyond the control of the e-empowered crowds. Indeed — and as recent economic and political events have proven — the ability to manage and change the system of the world is even beyond the control of the representatives of those crowds, that is, national governments and parliaments.

I believe that there is a deep democratic gap between the increasingly empowered citizens and the increasingly independent, non-transparent and non-accountable forces that rule the economic and political systems from the top. Traditional institutions — parties, governments, elected representatives — fail both in upwards transmitting the citizens’ claims to shape a system according to their needs and wills, and both in top-down transmitting the need for some transformations that this system requires after the world has been made totally global, spaceless, timeless.

The good goverati, the bad digerati and the ugly outcome

Taking the place of those weakened democratic institutions, two new agents arise.

On the one hand we have bad digerati (bad not necessarily meaning evil, though their actions — consciously or unconsciously — do harm democracy as it is now designed), digitally literate elites that leverage their knowledge and the power provided by ICTs to reshape the state of things in their own benefit. These bad digerati understand the changes in society due to ICTs, the huge lag in Law to catch up with the pace of change, the digital illiteracy of governments, politicians and citizens, and succeed in circumventing democratic institutions. Incumbent telecom operators, digital media corporations, news conglomerates, a-legal or plainly i(l)-legal businesses operating in the very verge of written law (some P2P network facilitators, some piracy-related firms, etc.), banks and financial services, etc. Many of them are but the local/national branch of supra-national institutions and organizations that fully scape the reach of governments jurisdictions and, thus, act totally out of control.

Good goverati aim just precisely at the opposite of bad digerati: correct and fix the democratic misadjustments that the Information Society brought with it. Knowledgeable and savvy both in digital and political matters, they leverage the power ICTs granted the citizenry to promote a more direct and committed involvement in public affairs: e-democracy and direct democracy, open government and open data, e-government and government 2.0, e-participation and hacktivism, etc. are some of the many initiatives that non-governmental organizations, government institutions, citizen collectives and individuals are fostering. In my opinion, though, they are quite often too helping to circumvent democratic institutions and contributing in their weakening. But the upper levels of power may actually be far too high.

Thus, the ugly outcome is a complete wreckage of the democratic transmission chain, a democratic gap that both (bad) digerati and (good) goverati are but widening. Hence, the distance between the freely empowered citizen is also increasing, resulting in a democratic paradox: empowerment is not accompanied with better governance, but just the opposite. And in absence of a legitimate transmission chain, representative, plurally elected, we find different individuals and organizations (sometimes anonymous) that no one chose and that many times no one deeply knows their interests or their backing powers.

The role Goverati and the role of Information and Communication Technologies for (democratic) Development (ICT4D)

When talking about the intersection of Information and Communication Technologies and Development (see, for instance ICTs, Development, disciplines and acronyms) it is very common to focus on empowerment or the empowering factor of ICTs.

Indeed, after years of cultural imperialism through development cooperation policies, development agents (especially development policies’ beneficiaries or “developees”) have developed certain allergies against anything that might sound as imposing a certain political system.

But if our approach proves to be right, empowerment is nowadays becoming but the XXIst century version of bread and circus: let the hamster spin the wheel at will, but don’t it dare to open the cage.

ICTs focused only in empowerment are beginning to look like development policies focused only in humanitarian aid and relief, but with no sight on the far horizon: effective in the short term, a vicious spiral towards black hole in the long run.

In my opinion, ICT4D have also and always include a governance factor in their design, as development policies have to focus on sustainable development.

At their turn, goverati should refrain from weakening or even attacking their democratic institutions. We have seen some of these, and this does not mean that institutions and their people should not be totally transformed, but I think the only way to leverage empowerment for governance is, precisely, through democratic institutions, because I think they are, most times, the only legitimate bridge towards real change, towards real power.

Recently — in the most recent years, but especially in recent months — the debate whether Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) empower or disempower, democratize a society or increase control over the citizen has been fuelled, both in the literature after appropriate research, and on newspapers, due to several events that have been read as turning points or milestones in the road towards the Information Society.

As it is usual in almost any debate around the impact of ICTs on the society, equidistant opinions are rare and extremes are much more abundant. In this case, it is my personal opinion that both extremes apply, that is, that there seem to be two divergent but simultaneous trends towards empowerment and towards a decrease in the quality of democracy or, as I will be putting it, a decrease in the quality of democracy (understood as a loss of control over governance by the citizen).

In the (sometimes difficult to avoid) trade-off between rigour and pedagogy, I have consciously chosen the latter in what follows. Many definitions are not very orthodox and most labels (and charts) are absolutely made up. I ask the reader for benevolence, forgiveness and, why not, the references that back (or refute) my arguments and that I was too lazy to look for.

Let us (re)define power as: Power = Empowerment + Governance

Where:

• Empowerment: the capability to freely act and develop oneself within the system (very much in the line of Amartya Sen, 1980).
• Governance: the capability to rule and especially change the system itself (the institutional dimension of human development that, when in hands of the citizen, leads to effective democracy as described by Welzel, Inglehart & Klingemann; 2003).

According to these definitions, we can describe, even in a very rough manner, how power distribution has been like during history. The image below pictures an approximation of this power distribution.

Pyramids of power along time [click to enlarge]

We can consider than in very primitive societies, the individual held all the power. As social organizations became more complex, the need for a minimal coordination comes evident: tribes got their chieftains to guide the collective. An organized procedure to choose the chieftain is what ended up in Greek Democracy. So far, the idea is that both empowerment and governance remain in the individuals’ hands.

The growth of communities and the need to strengthen coordination — especially against the “threat” of other communities — imply (amongst other factors) the militarization of a society and, sooner or later, the seizure of power by the military chaste. Warlords and absolute kings (and also Pharaohs, etc.) do not only rule but also reduce the degree of freedom of their subjects: governance shifts upwards while empowerment is drastically reduced. It is the ideas behind the Enlightenment and of modern democracy that pretend to give some power back to the citizen while keeping governance (increasingly important) in the hands of nation-wide institutions.

It is within this framework that capital becomes more important as industrialization deploys over all aspects of life. Gradually, economic elites gain more power with two parallel effects: on the one hand, what Marx called the alienation of the working class, now reduced to a mere production factor; on the other hand, the possibility to directly or indirectly affect all matters related to politics and the public sphere so to shape it for their own purposes. Again, the pendulum swung back and the Welfare State came to correct both the loss of freedom (and protection) of the citizen and to take some control of the public arena by keeping for itself the management of the Economy (Communist states pretend to be doing that too). New at this stage, supranational governmental organizations are created to coordinate what goes beyond the national powers: a new layer of power is born.

The strengthening of trend towards internationalization — ending up in sheer globalization — of the Economy has brought us in the past decades to a re-edition of industrialization, with the predominance of Neoliberalism setting the path of the Economy. Like industrialization, power shifts towards economic elites, but now split in two stages: the local and the global levels.

Many claim that the Information Society is empowering back individuals, and it well may definitely be true: never before as now can people or people have the potential to freely act, create, speak, reach out… within the given system. But it may also true that, never before as now is governance — as the power to change the system — so far from the citizens’ reach… even of their direct representatives, which are controlled by higher powers, most of them out of anyone’s jurisdiction. Like in an hourglass, the distribution of power is shifted to the (upper and lower) edges, the question being: who is playing the role of the transmission chain between these two edges?

Continues in: Empowerment and Governance in the Information Society (II): digerati, goverati and the role of ICT4D.