The charitable organization MySociety which builds civic websites in the UK has launched its first campaign - Free Our Bills. It’s a rather wonkish one but well worth supporting. Basically they are putting pressure on parliament to improve the way it publishes legislation online to make it easier for independent groups like them to parse the data and pull out key parts of the text (see their detailed description of the changes sought if you are interested).
I came across a great piece of research six years ago - interviews and focus groups in the UK with general public, ethnic minorities and people disadvantaged by disability or homelessness looking at their attitudes towards e-democracy proposals and what might encourage them to participate. It was commissioned by the Office of the e-Envoy and published online on edemocracy.gov.uk - a website to support consultation on edemocracy proposals. Alas, first that website and then the e-Envoy’s office were closed, and the archive of the e-Envoy’s site didn’t include this document anywhere. So in the interests of science (and with the permission of the report’s original authors, Creative Research) I have hosted the report myself. So if you’re interested in e-democracy, check out:
Creative Research (2002) “E-Democracy: Report of Research Findings” Office of the e-Envoy, London. http://davidbrake.org/ukedemocsresearch.pdf
It’s dismaying to me to see that even in a country with a healthy budget for and interest in egovernment, valuable information (paid for by the taxpayers!) can disappear from view after just six years…
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This video is very popular among technophiles, as its ranking on Technorati demonstrates. It suggests that thanks to Web 2.0 technologies (which it neatly explains) “we’ll have to rethink copyright, identity, ethics… ourselves”.
While I am by any measure a heavy user of Web 2.0 technologies, the sunny optimism of some social web enthusiasts this video and the absence of a wider social perspective on the phenomenon really irks me.
Update: Michael Wesch responded to this post (see comments below) and it appears I have misrepresented him - I should not have read sunny optimism into the video. After all in the time available it is asking a lot to both present the potentials of Web 2.0 as he has done impressively and to critique them. But to continue…
The fact remains that according to a recent survey only a little more than a quarter of US online users have ever tagged anything and only 7% of them do so daily. And who are the people who tag (and by extension use a variety of Web 2.0 services?). As Pew notes, “classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income.” Eszter Hargittai’s earlier research bears out this relative lack of interest in Web 2.0 usage - even among American college students. Hell, this video itself, although it is the toast of the blogosphere at the moment, has been viewed less than 20,000 times. Doesn’t that say something about the limited scale of interest in Web 2.0?
So what? Well the creator of this video and other Web 2.0 enthusiasts believe that tagging is “easy” and “anyone can do it”. Tacitly then they also believe that the contents of user-content databases and the “folksonomies” that are created therein represent (if not now then soon) the preferences and interests of everyone - or at least everyone who matters - instead of the somewhat self-reinforcing interest clusters of a technologically savvy elite.
It concerns me that thanks to this presumption and thanks to the ease with which this data can be mined by journalists, marketers, politicians, PRs and other trend-spotters, the interests and preferences of this narrow group will tend to be over-stressed at the expense of those without the time and inclination to surf and tag.
Of course tagging is in its infancy and doubtless it will grow in popularity. But does this mean it will become mainstream? I have my doubts. And even if it does I suspect most content creation and tagging will continue to be done by a passionate (or geeky) few, likemyself.
This, I suggest, is what we need to bear in mind before we “rethink governance” based on an enthusiasm for this new set of technologies.
PS it is an ironic commentary on the “ease of use” of Web 2.0 technology that I had a great deal of difficulty embedding this video. Comments are now working so please feel free to add your own in the usual way (and comment on any past posts here if you had trouble doing so before!).
The excellent academic group weblog Crooked Timber has produced a kind of online seminar via their weblog about Yochai Benkler’s recent book The Wealth of Networks which has attracted much attention in the blogosphere and contends that the Internet has enabled a new model for producing public goods which is under threat from corporations and governments.
The seminar happened back in May ‘06 so you won’t be able to join the discussion there any more but the archives are still available and worth reading. And if you want to comment further Benkler’s book is - appropriately - online and in wiki form.
If you’ve been wondering what the man who popularised the term virtual community has been thinking about these days you should check out this post he wrote on the Annenberg Centre’s DIY Media blog. It outlines the potential importance of digital literacy for enabling political engagement. Well worth a look as is the weblog as a whole.
One of the cliches of weblogging advocates is that webloggers are disinterested ordinary people whereas journalists are biased and prey to PR ’spin’. Well it turns out that PR agencies are increasingly targetting bloggers as well - with some success. This NYT story about Walmart feeding bloggers stories shows bloggers doing the kind of things “MSM” journalists are often accused of - copying and pasting press releases.
And one aspect of the story the NYT didn’t concentrate on - the PR agency in question, Edelman, has written a report last year (Ironically entitled Trust ‘Media’: How Real People Are Finally Being Heard) urging just this kind of active engagement with selected bloggers.
Neighbornode is an interesting new project that encourages neighborhood-based virtual communities by providing messageboards that are associated with local wireless networks. Nobody who is not actually connected to that wireless node can read what is on that bulletin board, but ‘nodes’ that are adjacent to each other are linked together.
I often thought that one of the things standing in the way of neighborhood-based virtual communities was simply the problem of 1) getting a "critical mass" of people in a neighborhood online and 2) making a space online where there was a reasonable likelihood that your neighbors would also hang out. This new scheme seems to neatly solve both problems…
Inna Kouper pointed me to a report by a left wing think tank claiming that there are now more readers of left than right wing weblogs. It is a pretty partisan report making some bold and not substantiated claims - for example that the right wing blogosphere is "nurtured by institutions and is part of the conservative,
right‐wing media machine" while the left wing blogosphere is "introducing new actors into the political scene".
The most interesting claim which they support with some survey evidence (though without giving enough methodological detail) is that "as of 2003, the conservative blogosphere was between two and three times as large as the progressive blogosphere, and held a commanding lead in terms of overall traffic", but "In less than two years the progressive blogosphere had grown from less than as big as the conservative blogosphere, to nearly
double its size" [in terms of traffic].
I find it hard to get too excited about the stats until I read some more detail about how the statistics were collected (particularly because the organization they say did much of the research, MyDD, is a Democrat politics blog not a market research organization). But if they were true it would be an interesting springboard for future research…
Today we launch the first of three week-long online consultations, as a way of gathering opinion, ideas and recommendations for our Digital Manifesto. We will post questions under the following themes, over the following weeks:
7th-13th April: Innovating
14th-20th April: Reassuring
21st-27th April: Empowering
In each instance, we invite replies to our specific questions (added to this blog) from all sorts of perspectives, and all types of expertise. With authors’ permission, we would like to be able to use or quote these ideas in our final publication, and credit them accordingly.
I reckon that media and new media scholars should make their voice heard about their preferred direction of new media development in Britain (and elsewhere)? Top of my head: open source, in-house capacity, surveillance, digital inequality, etc, etc, and unfortunately etc. again.
Finally someone from the mainstream media (Steven Levy) asks this obvious question. He gets part of the answer - bloggers tend to link to people like themselves - but tacitly assumes that there are a large number of (for example) black women blogging about the same kinds of things that the leading (white male) bloggers are and being excluded.
This misses the wider point that sociologists like Bourdieu have explored - that many people - particularly those of lower social status or women - may simply never think of political discussion as something ‘for them’ either because they don’t see politics as relevant to them or because they feel their opinions would not be listened to.
Needless to say this has touched off a lot of discussion including a spectacularly over the top and sociologically uninformed contribution from one A list blogger.
I logged onto BBC News this morning and found that an iCan story about a community centre had been picked up and featured on the front page - albeit at the bottom right hand corner. I always said that iCan (a BBC project to encourage and facilitate online activism) would only take off if the BBC used its media muscle to highlight cases drawn from it where ‘ordinary people’ made a difference. Looks like this is finally happening (on a small scale).
It will be interesting to see what they do with iCan as it gets close to the election and if people start using it for party political issues…
I’m blogging this from the LSE itself today - I’m at an event about blogging and journalism. My comments in italics
Meta comment: The notes below may or may not turn into a ‘proper posting’ - as John Lloyd and Robin Mansell pointed out one of the problems with blogging as an alternative space for journalism is that good journalism requires time and time is money. I could spend several hours turning the comments that follow into a report on the event complete with my own thoroughly-thought-through comments but when I was a journalist that would cost you at least £200 to get. There are very few opportunities to make a reasonable income from blogging so it will always be dominated by people who have time to do it either because they have an income elsewhere and adequate spare time or because they have an axe to grind about some particular issue.
Time taken to improve this blog posting would come at the expense of my thesis and at the moment I can’t really afford it. Anyway, nobody said anything that sufficiently outraged me to make a counter-blast worth my while.
If I had spoken out at the meeting it would have been to suggest that what is needed now is some way to broaden the kinds of people who blog today. There are millions of people who might want some way to express themselves but who feel nobody would want to listen to them. Perhaps some kind of school blogging programme should be considered alongside other IT literacy items on the syllabus?
