Social Media for Social Change

A Few Conceptual Threads

Posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 12:31 am by Jeremy in research | 3 Comments

On Friday, the team met for our first discussion and all around introductions. I asked Nick and Jethro to talk briefly about their work in the Action Mill and detail a few projects which can inform the SMSC project. Their presentation and our subsequent questions, comments, and discussion suggested several pertinent research threads to follow, which I want to quickly document below.

The Commons
The Commons is a concept which I think we all are struggling to (re)define in a useful manner for our work in this project with social media, civil discourse, and democratic participation. The traditional understanding of the Commons applies to ye olde common pasture that local farmers shared as a material resource for their grazing livestock. Of course, the dilemma here is that the abundance of the resource is negated through overuse by individuals acting in their own self interest, which leads to Garrett Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. There has been renewed interest in the Commons in the era of networked technologies. Larry Lessig’s Creative Commons initiative and advocacy for more open and transparent intellectual property ownership and licensing stands out, as does the advocacy organization On the Commons, whose mission is “to advance a new worldview by naming, claiming, protecting and expanding the commons for the good of all.”

I think we are more interested in thinking about the Commons in terms of ideas — that is, an infinite public resource, a publicly accessible realm where thought is communicated and exchanged freely between the all members within a society. This is quite general, so it remains to be seen how useful it will be. Another issue is the relationship between the Commons and public space: how do these concepts overlap? are they redundant? are they operationally similar or different? the metaphysical and physical sides of the same coin? does one enclose the other? (Add to this pair Habermas’ description and theory of the public sphere and further complexity ensues.)

Constraints and Participation
In describing their ongoing Enough Fear project — an action which allows Americans to speak directly with Iranians as a form of peopl-to-people diplomacy — Nick and Jethro reiterated for us the importance of building constraints into participatory actions. The American-Iranian phone calls are deliberately brief, prompted with suggested topics and questions for conversation (a kind of script, actually), and facilitated by a English-Farsi translator. What is instructive about this very elegant framework is that in our experimental social media scenarios we do well to be very specific about building the parameters of how those interactions are created and limited in order to discern useful information for our design problem.

There is a relevant body of research that critiques the lack of structure (aka Jo Freeman’s “tyranny of structurelessness”) in so-called relational aesthetics artworks, those kinds of loose, participatory art projects whereby events are organized by artists with the implicit goal of empowering individuals and engendering more democratic social relations. In fact, the rules of engagement are often entrenched, yet subtle, regardless, and structurelessness merely reinforces dominant power relations. To be explicit and even heavy-handed about the rules of participation in creating our discursive social interactions is to hopefully discover more useful trajectories for how mediated and networked debate and discussion occur.

Mediation
Also interesting to me about the presence of translators within the Enough Fear conversations is their function as mediators. Each translator uses her discretion to mitigate potentially virulent turns in the conversation by either redirecting the conversation, privately consulting with either party about the perceived state of the exchange, or even terminate the conversation. This role is dependent on particular subjectivities and could obviously be used to the detriment of open and free communication between the callers, but it does seem to be another useful constraint. Conflict resolutions of all kinds often come via the diligence and skill of mediators (eg. labor disputes, difficult divorces, warring nation-states), and I wonder how useful some kind of mediation or mediator might be to our planned scenarios. Jethro astutely observed that in the context of certain online situations (and otherwise), even when we don’t perceive a mediating factor, it is often there — perhaps a non-human entity, an aspect of the technology, a seemingly innocuous intermediary step in the process of communication. Nick reminded us of Google Goggles, the optional late-night mediator that can potentially thwart the occasional drunken email (you must correctly solve a series of math problems in order to send the email). How might other mediating factors built into the technology foster better, more thoughtful, more respectful discourse and debate?

Relationships and Civil Discourse
Jethro stressed the importance of building relationships in his work as a community organizer, and he finds that their public actions often create radiant spaces in which he can talk to people (both supporters and “opponents”) in order to build understanding of and even support for the issues of the day. Importantly, forming relationships with those who are on the other side of this or that issue can lead to a mutual respect that does seem to be a prerequisite for civil discourse. (Also, your opponent on this particular issue just may become your ally on the next one down the road.) In my own brief history as a community activist and organizer (and working alongside Jethro for most of that time) I’ve found the importance of people-to-people relationships to be paramount both for sustaining the hard work of affecting change in the world and actually moving people towards one’s point of view.

Social media and networked technologies dramatically change the dynamics of the relationships between us. My “friend” on the latest social network site not necessarily of the same character as my friend from down the street. The complexity of our online interactions and relationships, as well as the relatively immature conventions of these mediated communications, presents serious barriers to the kinds of interpersonal relationships and interactions that have been the foundation of traditional civil discourse (not that traditional discourse is free of violence and abusive exchanges). We’re looking for different formats, structures, technologies, implementations, processes in the terrain of social media.

I do not doubt that my memory has partly failed me in recounting all of the details of our discussion, so everyone forgive my omissions — there are plenty of blanks here left to be filled in through further research, conversation, and development.

3 Responses to “A Few Conceptual Threads”

1. # On February 2nd, 2009 at 10:00 am Sara MacDonald wrote:

   I’d like to see more on the site about civil discourse: what you mean by that and how you hope to enhance it.

   If you’re discussing civil discourse, what about the people who are left out because they don’t have Internet access, or have very limited access? There’s a lot of technological social inequity, and I think civil discourse on the Web is definitely a middle class and above arena.

2. # On February 2nd, 2009 at 12:42 pm barbara wrote:

   Jeremy et al - fyi a side view:

   Wednesday, February 4 Making a Career in Social Entrepreneurship

   4:30 pm at Jon M. Huntsman Hall, Room 265, 3730 Walnut St., Phila
   Jonathan Harrison, a leading social entrepreneur, will discuss the topic of “doing well while doing good” and share his professional and personal experiences in the field of Social Entrepreneurship. Mr. Harrison is the Director of Rubicon National Social Innovations and has devoted his career to building and running community-based enterprises. This lecture is sponsored by The Wharton Ethics Program. FREE.

3. # On February 2nd, 2009 at 10:28 pm Jeremy wrote:

   Sarah - Thanks for commenting. Part of our initial research will be focused on understanding civil discourse in both its historical and contemporary meanings. I might begin by describing it as any rational form of debate or discussion that is practiced by members of a society which ultimately strengthens the bonds of those in that society and leads to an enhanced sense of shared responsibility and tolerance. This discourse happens in many different forums via many different media, one of which is the Web — although in this project I am interested in hybrid forms that connect online communications back to interactions in physical spaces (and then back again). The fundamental problem I see is that with a loss of truly public spaces on the one hand and a dramatic shift to more time spent interacting via networked technologies on the other, we must rethink those networking tools so that they can effectively support and enhance civil discourse for the health of the society.

   You’re right to pose the question of access, although it can be difficult to generalize across purely economic or class lines (at least in the US); generational affiliation may have more weight in determining access. See these recent Pew Internet reports — one on broadband usage from 2008: http://pewinternet.org/PPF/r/257/report_display.asp and the other on generations online from January 2009: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/275/report_display.asp. Globally, the picture changes quite a bit, with internet usage declining significantly outside of the first world; see http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. But interestingly, mobile phone usage has increased much faster in the third world, and may become more viable for increased access to information, rather than PC-based Internet connectivity. However, the scope of this project is limited to the question of the quality of civil discourse within the context of social media and networked technologies.