DigiActive.org

Power & the Network: 3 Mechanisms & 1 Caveat

The central question of digital activism is whether and how the digital network will redistribute political power.  It is not a new idea that networks challenge the foundations of the world’s current centralized and hierarchical power structure (see work by Mark Pesce and Yochai Benkler, among others).  What I’d like to lay out here is the process by which the network poses that challenge, the mechanics of the power shift.  Here are the 3 mechanisms, and 1 important caveat.

1. The network allows for multiple sources of information and interpretation, which creates multiple possible realities.
2. Reinterpretations of interest can result from exposure to these multiple realities.
3. When people reinterpret their interest the network also allows near-free mass broadcast and collaboration, which allows people to act collectively on behalf of their new interests.
4. But…the network does not tell people which action would be most effective, leading to passionate yet often ineffectual responses that challenge but do not significantly change the existing power system.

These points are explained in greater detail below.

1. Multiple sources of information = multiple realities.

It is practically a cliche now to say that citizen-generated media like blogs, Twitter, and cell phone video, challenge the political status quo.  Think of Twitter-assisted protests in Moldova, cell phone video captured in Iran, and China’s impressive efforts to censor and spin blog content.   These examples are deliberately mixed between examples of citizens disseminating objective information (an un-doctored image, recounting of an event) and subjective interpretation (whether a policy is good or bad, the implications of the event).

Both information and interpretation can be dangerous to a repressive regime because they create multiple perspectives and thus multiple realities.  In one reality, disseminated through state-sponsored propaganda and spin, a government may be powerful yet beneficent.  In another reality, propagated by bloggers and tweeters, the government is dictatorial and abusive.

According to the “three faces of power” framework of British political scientist Steven Lukes,  institutions exercise power at three levels: the level of decision-making (policies that are voted on or otherwise debated, like gay marriage in 2009), the level of non-decision-making (policies that cannot be publicly debated because of stigma or social sanction, like gay marriage in 1979), and the level of ideology (policies that are not debated because citizens are unaware of – or oppose – a policy that would be beneficial, like gay marriage in 1879).

Citizen-generated information and interpretation, which the network disseminates, operate at the level of ideology.  New information causes citizens to see authority figures or social practices in news ways.  New interpretations cause citizen to re-evaluate information they were previously aware of, changing “corruption is a part of life” to “corruption is an injustice I should resist” or “people are mostly free in my country” to “the government frequently commits human rights violations.”

2. Reinterpretation of  interests

This new information and interpretation can make people reinterpret their own interests within the political system.  For example, when the woman who once thought corruption was an unchangeable part of life now sees it as an injustice to resist, she may cease to be complicit with corrupt officials by not paying bribes  or at least no longer align herself with their interests by turning a blind eye.  A man who once saw his country as basically free and is now aware of human rights violations by his government may join an opposition group or may simply act with greater scepticism about the governments actions.  He now sees his own interests as being different – or even in conflict with – the interests of the government.

3.  Collective action

So far, we have really only addressed the network characteristics of Web 1.0, the readable web: citizens receives new information through the network and, in response, reinterpret their own interests with relation to the power structure.   However, we are now in the age of Web 2.0, the read-write web.  People not only consume content online, they create it, and not only at the level of isolated content like uploading a video or writing a blog post. The global middle class is in many instances tethered to the Internet and other networked devices, like cell phones and smart phones.  They are exchanging content with friends, colleagues, and strangers every day through IM, SMS, email, and status updates on social networks.

It is this intensity of communication, of constant yet small-scale content creation and response, that allows for massive collaboration.  In analyzing the network with regard to collective action, we should thus not focus on citizen-generated content.  This is only the beginning of a much more interesting chain of content and response that allows collective action to form: an active blog thread becomes a call to action, a Twitter hash-tag moves from observation to planning.

4. Action occurs, but is often ineffective.

So actions occur: short-lived outdoor protest movements, like those in Moldova, Burma, and Iran, strikes like the one in Egypt, and sometimes even vandalism, like the recent unrest in Greece.  After these spurts of activity, nothing really changes.  The power structure carries on more or less the same.  Citizens are now disillusioned with that power structure but see their action as ineffectual, and fall back into patterns of acquiescence, which is indistinguishable from consent with the status quo.    The power structure has certainly been weakened because citizens no longer align their own interests with those of the power structure, but that does not mean the structure will shift.  It will likely only become more violent and oppressive due to fear of its own citizens.  This violence, of course, results in further acquiescence.

The network provides the motivation and means for political action, but not the answer as to what that action should be.   This is no coincidence.  Information on how to change the existing power structure is deliberately hidden from citizens by the power structure itself, particularly in authoritarian societies.  Thus, even citizens who want to change the system fall back onto hackneyed and often ineffectual actions: protest rallies, sign-waving, petitions.

This is not to say that the collaborative action made possible by the network never succeeds, but when it does it is the result of sophisticated strategy that gives citizens a meaningful action to take part in.   One of the clearest examples of this is the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, a long-shot at the beginning of the primaries who became the favorite to win through the creation and exquisite execution of a brilliant mix of insider (delegates) and outsider (organizers), online (MyBO, donations) and offline (caucusing, house parties) strategy.  (Disclaimer: I was an employee of the campaign).  The fact that Barack Obama’s election does not seem revolutionary is only a testimony to its success.  What was previously unimaginable is now normal. But the edge case of the Obama campaign is of little relevance to most movements.   They are merely groups of citizens.  They have no background in strategy and are likely to reiterate tactics they have seen in the media without understanding the logic behind them.  If they do something creative and effective it is often a result of guess-work.

Post Script: Re-Engineering Activism for the Network

In a recent article, “Against Transparency”,  digital entrepreneur and activist Lawrence Lessig wrote that the “nature of digital is perfect copies freely made.”  At the most fundamental level, these copies – of web pages, videos, songs, text – are the content which flows through the network.  If this is the nature of the network, the challenge for people who want to encourage more effective digital activism is to figure out which content will both assist activists in creating effective campaigns and which can be disseminated most effectively online.

A few days ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the launch of Civil Society 2.0, a grants program to deploy experienced technologists around the world to assist civil society organizations.   The content of the program is 2.0, but its modus operandi is 1.0. Deploying physical resources around the world to create custom solutions is the antithesis of digital.  It is not “perfect copies freely made.”  It is “original content created at great cost.”

The holy grail in this field is not technical assistance.  It is finding the content that will be useful to activists that can be digitized (valuable in “perfect copy” format to a range of activists) and updated seemlessly (guides, a relic of the paper era, are easily digitized but become obsolete in months).

This is what I am seeking: digital content that not only inspires and directs citizens to act, but also tells them how to act. For too long the focus has been on content dissemination and collective action over the network, but this is only 2/3 of the solution to effective digital activism.  The content – the how – has still not been successfully digitized.   We need to re-engineer activism for the network, or at least re-engineer the way we spread knowledge about activism.  We need to find a new and better way to spread the how.   Fortunately, the digital network was made for such tasks.  It is up to us to find the solution.

image: Dreamscape Photographs/Flickr