DigiActive.org

Against Crowdsourced Politics

The last post begins with the seemingly benign phrase “the promise of digital activism is to crowdsource global political transformation.”  I wrote it and I was pretty proud of myself.  I thought it succinctly summed up the potential of decentralized politics, where power is defined at the edge and by the grassroot, by thousands of ordinary citizens mobilizing together.   Well, Michel Bauwens set me straight.

Michel is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives.  I heard him speak yesterday at the great Internet as Factory and Playground conference in New York.  Michel didn’t set me straight directly, but his definition of crowdsourcing, and its distinction from peer-to-peer collaboration, made me see the error of my ways.

The key is that crowdsourcing is still centralized: the producer is still a cog in a machine, only the machine is bigger.  It’s not a factory, it’s the entire world, and producers are connected by the network, not be shared physical space.  The individual producer chooses which part of the task she will take, she takes a much smaller part, and she decides whether or not to participate, but she does not decide what the overall project is.  Whether the task is something as malevolent as identifying Iranian protesters for the government or as benign as fans re-shooting Star Wars, the task is defined at the center, produced at the edge.   It is no coincidence that the term crowdsourcing derives from another practice of hierarchical labor distribution: outsourcing.

Peer to peer production is different:  it is center-less and it is non-hierarchical.  Even if someone is organizing, that person has no more power than any other member of the project.  There is no center and edge.  There is only the network.  The web site doesn’t make the origins clear, but if Star Wars: Uncut is organized by a group of fans, then their project to re-shoot their favorite movie by piecing together thousands of scenes re-staged by other fans is peer-to-peer.  If the project is organized by Lucasfilm Ltd., then it is being crowdsourced.  It is all about who benefits and where the power lies.

What would this mean in the political realm? Crowdsourced politics means that the center benefits ultimately from the divided labor: for example, a political campaign asking supporters to host fundraisers in their homes or directing citizens to call their Congressman to support or  opposed a piece of legislation.   The effects of crowdsourcing might be in the public interest, but even though execution of the task occurs at the edge, the ultimate decision of what the activity will be is decided at the center.

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A Broader Network for Digital Activism

Update:  Thanks to  feedback from Dirk Slater I’ve changed the title to “A Broader Network for Digital Activism”, which recognizes the great work that organizations like Tactical Tech have done to create  global networks of activists.

The Promise of Global Citizen Empowerment

The promise of digital activism is to crowdsource global political transformation by giving ordinary citizens around the world the ability to more effectively campaign for social and political causes. The collective result of these campaigns would be a global closing of the gap between the powerful and powerless and a fundamental shift in political life around the world.

The Reality of Limited Success

Yet this best case scenario is only one possible outcome of the injection of digital technology into politics. Repressive governments around the world have proven quite adept at spinning and blocking the tools of digital activism and censoring and persecuting activists. Though the technology-assisted protest movements in Iran, Moldova, and Egypt, received a great deal of press, they were not successful in challenging the political power structures in their countries or even in winning modest reforms.

For all its success in spreading information and facilitating the mobilization of people and resources, the successes of digital activism are few and far between and its future is far from assured. If we want to achieve the promise of digital activism, interventions will be necessary.

The Disconnected Players

There are many players who intervene on behalf of digital activism, whose actions serve to spread and strengthen it. There are governments, private foundations, non-profit and for-profit trainers and consultants, public intellectuals, software and hardware companies, the media, and of course the activists themselves. Together they create the digital activism ecosystem.

Yet these players do not see themselves as part of the same ecosystem. The COO of Facebook may meet with an official at the State Department, but a representative of Hivos, an active Dutch technology funder, probably will not be in the room. High-powered political technology consultants may meet prominent bloggers at a conference, but a representative of the GSM Association, which facilitates global mobile phone standardization, probably will not be invited.

In order to create a common agenda for the promotion of digital activism around the world, players must first see that they are playing on the same field.

The Need for a Network

What is needed in this field is a networking organization unlike any other. The purpose of this organization will not be to strengthen the bonds of an existing network, as is usually the case, but to create a network where none currently exists.

What would be the strategy of such an organization? The expectation would be to go straight to policy by holding events on mobile innovation or technical assistance programs and seeking to build collaborative relationships between the various institutions in the field.

However, starting at the institutional and policy level would be premature. The first step should be to focus on relationships. It is daunting to try to engineer organizational coordination between the Department of State and the GSM Association, but can Alec Ross, Secretary Clinton’s Senior Advisor on Innovation, share a coffee with Tom Phillips, Chief Government and Regulatory Affairs Officer at the GSMA? Yes, he could. Could Ory Okolloh, co-creator of the mobile crisis mapping platform Ushahidi, and Josh Elman, Twitter’s Product Manager, also be at that meeting? Yes, they could, and what an interesting meeting it would be. Imagine the e-mail thread the day after and the effect of future cooperation. Read more »

Social Media for Social Change in the 1800’s

A massive system of human rights abuse is occurring in the United States.  Activists, intent on putting a human face on the mass tragedy, appropriate photographs of victims and disseminate them through their social networks.  Soon the mainstream media catches on, furthering the outcry.  The year is 1863 and the human right abuse is slavery.

When we think about “social media” we most often think about digital applications: blogs, social networks, wikis, SMS.  Yet Wikipedia defines social media as “media designed to be disseminated through social interaction,” and these practices have existed for centuries.  Looking at historical cases of social media outside the digital context can help to clarify underlying mechanics which are often lost in the hype surrounding current tools.

The image I referred to in the first paragraph is above at left: a man named Gordon who was formerly  enslaved in Mississippi before escaping and taking refuge with the Union Army in Louisiana during the American Civil War.  The photograph was taken by an army doctor and used by activists to vividly illustrate the inhumanity and cruelty and slavery.  While the image was disseminated in mainstream media outlets like The New York Independent and Harper’s Weekly newspapers, and as a projected image in lectures by abolitionists, the social media aspect of the campaign was the “carte to visite”. (source)

Cartes de visites – French for “visiting card” – were a very popular social practice among wealthy and middle class Americans in the 19th century.   The cards, which used to simply bear a visitor’s name,  were originally used in the social protocol of aristocrat Europe.  They became popularized with the advent and increasing affordability of photography and were collected among friends and neighbors.  It would not be uncommon for a collection of cartes de visites to be displayed in the parlor.  Photos of political celebrities were particularly popular and social campaigns also used the practice to spread their message. (source)

So what can we learn about modern social media activism from the analogue social media of the visiting card?  Here are 3 lessons:

1. Effective social media campaigns are built on top of robust social practices.

In this day and age we tend to focus on new tools and what they can do.  We pay less attention to the social practices that surround these tools.  Many nonprofits create Facebook and Twitter accounts because of the hype surrounding them, even if their target audience is not using the application and if there is no clear connection between the organization’s strategic goals and the application’s capacities.

The first cartes de visites were created in 1854 in France, but did not arrive in the US until several years later.  If American abolitionists had come up with a campaign in which people distributed photos of  slaves through their social networks in the early 1850s, the campaign would have fallen flat on its face.   The success of the abolitionists’ carte de visite campaign was reliant on the practice of carte de visite just as much as  the technology of the photograph.

2. Technology creates affordances, making new outcomes possible but not certain

In his great book, The Wealth of Networks, Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler describes technology as creating “affordances”, qualities of the object that make an action possible.   Just as the technology of the social network today allows for free international collaboration and event organization, the photograph allowed middle class urban people in the 1800’s who had never visited a plantation to see the horrors of slavery.  The key here is possibility.   The technology of  the photograph made the grassroots carte de visite campaign possible, but the it was the practice of sharing cartes de visites that made it a success.

3. A successful social media campaign will give equal weight to the technologies available and the practices of the target audience.

Recent history has taught us that successful social media campaigns occur in the sweet spot of social practices and available technology: the American middle class and online campaign donations, Facebook and expatriate communities,  SideWiki and British news junkies.

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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.

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Defining Digital Activism: Part 3 – Where Are We Going?

So we come to the end of our journey  (well, this series anyway).  We’ve answered the first two of Gauguin’s existential questions.  In the first post we asked “Where do we come from?” and realized we’re Builders, Doers, and Thinkers (graphic below).  In the second post we investigated “What are We (Thinking)?” and found we operate in a mish-mash of terminology that make effective discussion of technology and activism difficult.  Now we come to the final question: “Where are we going?”  This is the most interesting question and also the most perilous, as prognostication always is. Rather than attempting to look into the crystal ball only two be proved wrong in three years (or three months), I’ll talk about the factors that will determine the future of digital activism: what activists actually do and what people think about those action.

The Knowledge Loop: How Digital Activism Improves

Digital activism is nothing more than a series of practices and our interpretations of those practices.  Digital activism practitioners (Doer group) use a Facebook group to organize, publicize a cause on Twitter, create a group blog.  These activities are at the heart of digital activism, but our perceptions of this field are formed in large part by the interpretations put forth by the Thinkers (mainstream media, bloggers, trainers, scholars).  These interpretations in turn influence our practices, particularly in the case of an influential Thinker.  I call this feedback cycle of practice > interpretation > new practice the digital activism knowledge cycle and in order to explain it I will use the examples of two bloggers: cyber-optimist and digital activism promoter Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog, and cyber-pessimist and digital activism critic Evgeny Morozov of Net Effects.   Each approach to interpreting digital activism implies a different future for the field.

Beth’s Blog is probably the most widely-read and respected blog on social media use for nonprofits.  A couple of weeks ago, Beth wrote a post on how nonprofits can improve blogger outreach.    I’ll use this post to illustrate the digital activism knowledge loop: outreach practices occur, Beth observes outreach and writes post making recommendations for improvement, some nonprofits read this post and implement her improvements leading the new practices, then the cycle begins again.

In this example, digital activism is validated and the goal of interpretation is to improve that practices of activists and advocates.  Negative interpretations of digital activism have their effects as well.  Evgeny Morozov is a well-known critic of digital activism.  His widely-read blog, Net Effects, focuses on the destructive and ineffective aspects of digital activism:  the “spinternet” of government propaganda, cyberwars, and ineffectual online “slacktivism.” Evgeny is an excellent analyst of the political uses of the Internet and his arguments on these issues are sound.  Nevertheless, because of the influence of these ideas, there is the potential for self-fulfilling prophecy.  If funders, nonprofits, and activists read these negative posts and come to see the digital activism as primarily a realm of manipulation, crime, and ineffectiveness, funders will be less likely to pay for digital activism trainings and nonprofits and activists will be less likely to use digital activism in their campaigns.

In a recent post on slacktivism, Evgeny finished his critique with recommendations for making activism more effective.  I hope Evgeny and critics like him will use their influence to make digital activism more effective rather than simply dismissing it.  Either future is possible.   This is the power of the interpretation step in the knowledge loop and of the Thinker group.   Activists (the Doers) make decisions on technology use based on knowledge of the practices of other Doers which they gain from the interpretation of the Thinkers.  Some digital activism practices work and some fail utterly, for a variety of reasons.  There is no doubt of that.  However, if these failures are interpreted by the Thinkers as opportunities for improvement then Doers will be inspired to change their tactics and try again.  If Thinkers interpret these failures as signed of the inherently flawed nature of digital activism, then Doers may abandon the practice, leading to a withering of digital activism, despite its potential.  Through our action, we will create the future, and it will depend on our current beliefs.

Knowledge Ecology: Intellectuals, Trainers, & Media

Of course, bloggers are only a part of the larger knowledge ecology.   There are many other actors that determine how digital activism will evolve in the future.  According to the framework laid out in the first post of this series, the actors that make up the field of digital activism is made of Doers (practitioners), Thinkers (interpreters), and  Builders (creators of infrastructure).    There are multiple types of actors in each group, as show in the graphic at left.   Though knowledge passes through all actor groups, the principal conduits are not surprisingly in the the Thinker group, particularly Public Intellectuals, Trainers/Consultants, and the Mainstream Media.   Bloggers like Beth Kanter and Evgeny Morozov fall in the Public Intellectual group (Beth is equally well-known as a trainer).  Public Intellectuals absorb and interpret both the practices they observe (as shown in the knowledge loop graphic above) and the interpretations produced by other Thinkers, be they scholars, entrepreneurs, members of the mainstream media, or other bloggers.  Public Intellectuals interpret this information for consumption for all three groups.  Sometimes this information is simply re-consumed by the Thinker group, creating closed loops of elite knowledge.  Ideally, as in the case of Beth’s Blog, knowledge is interpreted to be accessible to Doers and thus improves practice.  Let’s look more closely at the other two important knowledge conduits: Trainers/Consultants, and the Media. Read more »