On 31 May 2011 I am presenting at the I Encuentro CIDER (I Conference on Digital Citizenship and Human Rights). My speech, The Network Society: rights, policies and the exercise of democracy has three parts:
First of all, it goes back to the neolithic revolution and then to the industrial revolution to reflect on how things used to be before the digital revolution. Then, it briefly aims at showing how the exercise of democracy has been (potentially) turned upside down as democratic institutions see their roles totally transformed. This is essentially the same discourse (though adapted to governments and democracies) I explained in From teaching institutions to learning people, the reason being that I believe there is a common approach when dealing about education, governments or even businesses (e.g. the recording industry) that focus on institutions, their role, their added value, and how digital technologies help citizens to circumvent them.
After the potential benefits of “democracy 2.0”, the second part focuses on the barriers and, even more important, the threats, especially those related with (ironically) forgetting about “democracy 1.0”. In this sense, I will stress the point that democracy is time-consuming activity and that those with time and training (and technological mastership) can benefit and even corrupt democratic institutions (even unwillinglly). This is the point I brought in The disempowering Goverati: e-Aristocrats or the Delusion of e-Democracy.
Last, I am using the “power = governance + empowerment” model also developed in the previous article to analyse the Egypt and Spanish revolts during the spring of 2011.
For 300 years we have lived in an Industrial Society and ended up with an Industrial(ized) Education. While this has serious drawbacks, it has also democratized education and provided (in western countries) highest adult literacy rates, higher welfare and higher income for everyone (including the poorest ones). When we speak negatively about Education, we have to keep in mind to throw dirty waters away while keeping the child in.
The Digital Revolution and the upcoming of the Information Society have changed, radically and forever, the landscape as we knew it, due to drastic reductions of transaction costs and the end of scarcity of knowledge based goods. Amongst other things, we necessarily need to redefine concepts such as efficiency and efficacy, upon which we have built our education systems. And, thus, rethink the design of those education systems.
After pointing out some aspects of the current education system that are being critically challenged by the digital revolution, I suggested one path and one goal to be able to do the transition from an industrial education to a digital one. The path could be based on appropriation of the technology, its adoption/transposition to our actual system, improvement of current practices, and total transformation of instructional designs. On the goals side, I go macro and think of empowering people with the ability to design their own learning strategies, powered by personal learning environments.
Assemblages of hope. An anthropological analysis of passionate blogging.Adolfo Estalella
In 2006 takes place the first Evento Blog in Seville, Spain, to debate about the practice of blogging and its impacts in society, especially in changing the world by now having a voice of one’s own, independent from parties and media.
This research aims at providing an answer to questions like what expectations do authors put on their blogs, what are the relationships between their expectations and their hopes, or what are those hopes? And all this in a context of post-modernism, pessimist about a future with no hope.
But some authors do point at the fact that most people have hopes about their lives, about the future, about their endeavours. And hope and expectations are powerful drivers of change or, at least, of action.
In the dynamics between facts and expectations, bloggers link the later to the former, and base their expectations on making facts happen.
They see hope as an assemblage (in the sense of Deleuze). Hope is a self-orientation towards the future.
And the framework is the actor-network theory.
The target of the analysis are 18 passionate bloggers that usually post daily, performing a reflexive practice on their daily lives and blogging itself. They attend events as a commitment in building a ‘blogosphere’.
Most bloggers have a twofold close relationship with their blogs. On the one hand, a technology-biased one, with a passion (love?) for the tool they are using to speak out; on the other hand, a future-biased one, that makes them reflect about the responsibility of blogging, of reaching out, of being paving a path towards change, social change. Bloggers are convinced that they can change society by blogging, they can change the future. But it is not a remote future, designed by others, but a real one, designed in the closest environment.
This relationship is deeply determined by the sense of timeliness of blogs, where the more recent, the fresher news and content are on top, are the most visible.
This sense of always up-to-date is reinforced by the feedback that website analytics provide. The author is fully aware, in real-time, of the impact of their posts, whether they are read and how much, whether they are commented, how many time do readers spend on the site, etc.
Bloggers are, thus, informed people, that deeply know their environment, their social context, and build their discourses and hopes around it. If they have hope is not becauses they are uninformed utopians, but just the contrary: they know where they live, they are savvy about the potential of technology and they put their hopes on it. And it’s constantly depicting the society they live in that positively feedbacks their knowledge about it.
What is not true is that the blogosphere is an open, horizontal, flat space. Bloggers differ amongst themselves and the A-list has a clear profile: highly educated, male, on their thirties, with liberal jobs. Only those who have the appropriate possibilities can actually reflect thoroughly when they post periodically. The A-list of bloggers is indeed an A-list of people too.
Discussion
Some questions from the committee:
Francesc Núñez Mosteo: isn’t it blogging a sort of self-fulfilled expectations?
Francesc Núñez Mosteo: is it possible to describe the blogggers’ practices without a critique to their intentions?
Anna Trias: why is not there a deeper reflection on the anthropology of emotions? Why not exploring other sociological imaginations?
Anna Trias: what do bloggers do to overcome hoplessness?
Francisco J. Tirado: why not analyzing more thoroughly the blogger-related events?
Francisco J. Tirado: why not analyzing in more detail the extreme self-referencing of blogging?
Francisco J. Tirado: is it possible to analyze blogs without analyzing the blogosphere (or the contrary)?
Some comments to the questions:
Some bloggers have become so relevant in their blogging practice that they have ended up being spokesman of or to traditional collectives (e.g. political parties). Thus, sure a critique on their aspirations would definitely had been in place.
There are indeed two different blogospheres: a vertical one, hierarchical and that replicates the hierarchies of society; and a horizontal one, plural, of anonymous individuals. And in these two blogospheres surely hope has very different roles and achievements.
There is a difficult trade-off between ethnography and analysis, and reaching the appropriate equilibrium is complicated. And actually a matter of debate within the discipline of anthropology.
Though it is true that some expectations can be self-fulfilled, it is also true that bloggers’ expectations are adapted on the run as the future becomes present. Thus, it is not the (future) reality that is fulfilled because of expectations, but also that expectations are altered because of the reality.
Isaac Mao: Sharism, Philosophy and New Economic Models
Sharing is a commonly spread way of behaving amongst human beings. Most of the time you are willing to share an apple with your peers, while just sometimes you decide that you won’t: if “sharing” means “giving”, will you always want to give away your property, your possibility to use something?
But on the Internet, there is not such a restriction. The web should not be a “read-only” web, but a “read-and-write” web. Blogging allowed just that. And the more you read blogs, the more prone you are to also write one.
On the Internet you share pieces of information, memes. Linking memes and behaviours can bring a new force up leading to changes. And there are plenty of examples of the power of change of meme sharing.
We should be able to connect the world of memes and atoms, to build up a coherence of atom sharing and meme sharing.
Public bike sharing or (private) car sharing just go on this line of thought.
What will you gain from your sharing?
Identity. Digital identity or identity online is crucial.
Social capital, accumulating around your digital persona.
Credit recording.
Trackback on the Path of Value Adding (PVA)
Sharing is fostered when everybody shares, then one becoming part of a sharing network that acts like a brain and its brain of neurons.
And there are ways to monetize the free circulation of shared information and knowledge.
Sharism = connected + shareable + path. Technically, we and them will be connected; mentally we need more preemptive to feed the world relevant information; if we can economically prove that ‘the more we share, the more we gain’, then the problem is solved.
A share: a new measurement, currency that you can use to capitalize what you bring to your social network.
Debate/Interview
Teresa Turiera: should we foster Sharism with tax cuts to “sharistic” enterprises or similar policies? Mao: Your organization has to be reinvented. Sharism is not about setting up new marketing strategies for social media, but yet another completely different thing. And the human resources cycle should definitely be a part of this new managerial design.
Lluís Pastor (after Twitter): is the way Al-Jazeera uses social media a good practice of Sharism? Mao: definitely. During 2010, their streaming audience multiplied by 20. Social media and content sharing from the grassroots has changed the landscape of news today.
Teresa Turiera: how will the future of activism and revolutions be altered by Sharism? Mao: Social media interconnects people one with each other in unprecedented ways, both horizontally (with your peers) and vertically (across the different strata and structures of society). ‘Signals’ from the grassroots will be increasingly embedded in the political discourse and loop back to the decision-makers.
Lluís Pastor (after Twitter): how can Sharism strengthen entrepreneurs? Mao: A first step is to scale up the idea of Sharism, as it requires a much wider adoption for it to work properly.
Round Table
After de the debate/interview, a round table followed that I chaired and that was participated also by Isaac Mao himself, Ricardo Galli, founder of the “Spanish Digg” (Menéame), and Alfons Sort, CEO of Adobe Systems Ibérica.
In general, the round table gave Isaac Mao another chance to sort out his thoughts, especially in what concerned how to apply Sharism to the world of economics. If I am right, they can be summarized as follows:
For Sharism to work and be economically viable, first of all a critical mass of adopters has to be achieved.
The new currency in a sharism-based system is reputation. This works both for individuals and institutions.
The way this reputation/currency is managed is through a ‘sharebank‘, which acts much like a legal tender bank, but deals with reputations.
As the transition to Sharism implies a radical change, there is a need to design a path to build that transition. That path has to be designed ex-ante.
In Sharism, identity is the key, as reputation strongly lies or depends on it.
The most interesting part to me during the round table was the debate, initiated by Ricardo Galli, whether Sharism was really an alternative to Capitalism or just a change of currency, where legal tender was replaced by reputation, but everything else remained the same.
Personal reflections
As I spoke out during my concluding remarks at the round table, I have never been so much in line with a speaker and, at the very same time, so clueless on how to get to the points he was making. That is, I share the philosophy, but I neither share not even foresee how to make it happen.
Indeed, I was especially surprised to hear Isaac Mao speak about topics that have already been covered by other disciplines and not mentioning them or even tacitly linking to them.
First, the reputation-based economy he’s been talking about has already been much discussed around the general field of the gift economy. Some practices in free software or open content can be explained by it, while some others cannot. And the problems in a gift economy are many and many are unsolved yet.
Second, and related to the former, most of the transition from a capitalist economy towards a sharism economy can be explained by the hacker ethic. Again, a lot has been written — with this name or another one — about the topic and how the Information Society is requiring a change of mindset in relationship with the Industrial Society. The problem, again, is how to deal with transitions, not only in matters of time, but in differnt paradigm economies that are being forced to live together for long periods of time.
Third, I really missed a mention to time banks, cooperatives or virtual currencies (e.g. Bitcoin). Plenty of people have and are experimenting with other ways to organize themselves, assess and value time and commodities and provide alternative societies.
In my opinion, sharism needs some polishing, and not only before it can be applied, but also for being discussed as an intellectual exercise.
Further reading
Official website for Sharism, including a wiki depicting most terms.
The key motivator of Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. […] And it’s okay to seek financial rewards. But you will in every case get something just as substantial: Happiness.
This is Isaac Mao in the essay Sharism: A Mind Revolution that he wrote for Joi Ito’s book Freesouls. While I like the music — I actually hum it myself every now an then — I find the lyrics hard to sing.
Don’t get me wrong: there are almost 2,000 of pieces of work that I am already sharing in this website, ranging from the simplest blog post to the latest version of a learning material, and including slides for presentations, articles, book chapters and so. Everything is (at this very moment) under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, which has not stopped third parties from asking for permission to create derivative works, which has always been granted too.
The reasons for behaving like that are the ones that Isaac Mao is depicting in his essay, and many more, including both my own philosophy regarding the nature of the outputs derived from public funding or the ethos of scientists and their role in society. But this behaviour, while fostered by ideologies, is actually been made possible because my time is already paid: partly by tax payers, partly by students enrolled in my (public) university (tax payers too, after all).
When I wake up in the morning, my mortgage is already being paid. With that in mind, I have plenty of room for putting ideologies into practice.
Isaac Mao speaks about the positive results of Sharism:
You get comments and feedback in general that enrich your work.
You get access to all the other stuff being shared.
Anything you share can be forwarded, circulated and republished, which implies you get recognition and (namely) social status.
What you do, if shared, has a meaning not only for you, but for the whole of society.
But you will in every case get something just as substantial: Happiness.
This works 100% for me. As a scholar, a (mostly) publicly-funded scholar, this works 100%, especially the happiness part. I mean it. Since I began to blog in 2003, I only got benefits from sharing. Sometimes even in cash.
But.
I’ve done my homework (see below). I’ve read what I ought to. And still can’t I see how Sharism — or, closely related, a hacker ethic — can be applicable to the whole economy the way Mao’s portraying. Yes, we’ve got (some) examples in the free software community and (much less) examples in the open/free culture movement. But still, in a global economy where money comes from capturing the added value of an output (where “capturing” is a very broad term for a very complex set of practices, most of them related to restrained access to that output), Sharism will have hard times when it comes to paying a mortgage, which is paid in actual legal tender.
I will definitely bring all my questions on the table with the goal in mind to see whether we can shed some light on the many open topics that, in my opinion, Sharism still has to clarify.
Recommended readings
I previously said that I had done my homework. What follows is a brief collection of readings which I find very relevant for our discussion here. Enjoy.
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?
