Für die aktuelle Ausgabe des Magazins move moderne verwaltung habe ich einen Artikel zu den Chancen und Herausforderungen der Nutzung von Social Media in öffentlichen Verwaltungen geschrieben. Das Heft ist inzwischen erschienen und den Artikel kann der geneigte Leser hier finden.
Andreas Jungherr. 2012. “Spannende Ergänzung.” move moderne verwaltung 10(2): 30-33.
Die CDU NRW hat mich in einem kurzem Interview gefragt warum und wie Landtagskandidaten das Internet und Social Media im Wahlkampf nutzen sollten. Das Ergebnis gibt es hier.
Vor einigen Wochen führte Philipp Albrecht von politik-digital.de ein längeres Interview mit mir zu dem Spannungsfeld Wissenschaft und aktiver Mitarbeit in Kampagnen. Sein Artikel, der auf diesem Gespräch basiert, ist inzwischen erschienen.
Kommenden Montag werde ich in Jena während des Demokratiekongress 2012 der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung zum Thema “Partei 2.0 – Kommunikation, Parteien und digitale Gesellschaft” mit Tankred Schipanski und Mario Voigt über Facebook, Blogs und Twitter in der Politik diskutieren. Hier vier Thesen zum Thema:
1. Soziale Netzwerkdienste erlauben es ihren Nutzern, sich durch die Kommunikation über für sie interessante Themen zu vernetzen. Diese so entstandenen Netzwerke formen sich in der Regel nicht entlang politischer Sympathien sondern an der Lebenswirklichkeit und den Interessen der Nutzer.
2. Wird in diesen Netzwerken über politische Themen kommuniziert, so müssen dies nicht die Themen sein, die gleichzeitig auf der Medienagenda stehen. Auch entspricht die Form der Kommunikation über Politik nicht den Regeln der medialen Berichterstattung. Es wird über das kommuniziert was den Nutzern wichtig ist und es wird so kommuniziert wie es den Nutzern gefällt.
3. In diesen Netzwerken sind Politiker solange Teilnehmer solange sie als Menschen kommunizieren. Nutzen sie ihre Facebookseite oder ihr Twitterfeed nur als einen zusätzlichen Verbreitungskanal für ihre politischen Botschaften so bleiben sie wenn sie Glück haben Objekt der Kommunikation, wenn sie Pech haben bleiben sie unbeachtet.
4. Die Öffentlichkeit und die Zählbarkeit von Beiträgen oder Kontakten in Sozialen Netzwerkdiensten führt dazu, dass die spontanen Reaktionen Nutzern dieser Dienste von Medien gerne genutzt werden, um Zustimmung oder Ablehnung zu politischen Themen darzustellen. Hier muss die Gesellschaft lernen wie diese Reaktionen zu interpretieren sind.
[Update 2012/02/16]
Andreas Mehlich schreibt auf Jenapolis über den Demokratiekongress: Partei 2.0 – Kommunikation, Parteien und digitale Gesellschaft.
Bericht der KAS über den Demokratiekongress 2012.
Last Thursday Philipp Albrecht interviewed me for politik-digital.de on the state of online campaigning in Germany. We talked about some recent examples of successful online campaigns by political parties in Germany. In addition we discussed general functions of online elements in German campaigns: Die Zeit des Kampagnen-Twitterns ist vorbei.
This is a very good natured book on how to approach academic writing. The simplest, while probably also the hardest, advice Silvia offers is to stick to a regular writing schedule instead of trusting the spur of the moment or the occasional inspiration to provide writing impulses. To this recovering binge writer this seems to be very sound advice, indeed. The upbeat prose and some practical tips for the journal submission process makes this a very agreeable and helpful read.
There seems to be a pattern with me and books by Clay Shirky. I see the talk, like the basic idea and leave it at that, only to return a few months later to actually read the book and find much of value there. This was true for “Here Comes Everybody” and it’s also true this time around for “Cognitive Surplus”. Let’s see if the pattern holds in the future.
In “Cognitive Surplus” Shirky argues that during the second half of last century the majority of people in the West suddenly found themselves with a lot of spare time on their hands. Shirky calls this the Cognitive Surplus. To Shirky social media would enable users to do better things with that surplus than watch TV. Shirky starts by describing the new media environment and the ermergent possibilities to use social media for social good. Still, he does not argue in favor of a simplistic technological determinism the likes of: “We have the tools now they will be used for good”. Instead, he discusses preconditions for the successful use of social media, the strongest being: intrinsic motivation of the contributors and a supportive culture among groups of users. He closes with some rules of thumb of elements that, in his experience, contribute to the success of social media ventures. Usually I am not a big fan of those list, but his remarks seem sensible enough and might actually help in the development of social media services.
As usual with Shirky, “Cognitive Surplus” is a very readable book. Shirky uses well chosen stories to illustrate the possibilities of social media use. He combines these stories with accounts of research relevant to his argument. For me “Cognitive Surplus” works as a very useful addition to his prior book “Here Comes Everybody”. While in his prior book he argued very convincingly in favor of the transformative potential of widespread social media use, in “Cognitive Surplus” he adds some useful conjectures on the reasons why people might be motivated to invest significant time and effort into producing content through social media.
Eva Schweitzer und Steffen Albrecht (Hrsg.): Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009
Just got news that Eva Schweitzer’s and Steffen Albrecht’s edited volume “Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009” is out. The book collects papers that address different aspects of the internet’s role in the campaign for the German general election of 2009. Pascal Jürgens and I contributed a paper on the use of Twitter during the campaign called “Wahlkampf vom Sofa aus: Twitter im Bundestagswahlkampf 2009″ [SpringerLink] [preprint in German].
The collection offers a broad perspective on the state of political internet use in Germany. It also contains interesting pieces by Steffen Albrecht who writes about blogs, Jesscia Kunert and Jan Schmidt who write about social networking sites, Thorsten Faas and Julia Partheymüller who write on political internet use in Germany, Thomas Roessing and Nicole Podschuweit who focus on political uses of Wikipedia, Christoph Bieber who comments on the role of online tools in the overall party campaigning strategies and Eva Schweitzer who focuses on political websites during the campaign. There are many other interesting articles in this collection so if you are interested in the topic be sure to check it out.
With Pascal Jürgens [@pascal], and Harald Schoen I wrote a short blogpost for “Zweitstimme“, the blog formerly known as “Politik nach Zahlen“, a blog focused on empirical research on elections, hosted by the German newspaper Die Zeit. This time we focused on a phenomenon discussed in a study Pascal and I did on political twittering during the campaign for the federal election in Germany 2009. In “Alle Twitterer sind gleich, aber manche sind gleicher: Neue Gatekeeper und ihre Bedeutung für die Verbreitung von Nachrichten auf Twitter” we show the importance of highly connected users in Twitter conversation networks for the flow of political information through the whole conversation network.
Conversation network of politically interested Twitter users on 9/1/2009
As shown above these highly interconnected individuals are crucial for the information flow through the network of politically interested Twitter users. For a more comprehensive discussion of this idea please see the blogpost or our forthcoming paper Pascal Jürgens and Andreas Jungherr (2011) “Wahlkampf vom Sofa aus: Twitter im Bundestagswahlkampf 2009″, in: Eva Johanna Schweitzer und Steffen Albrecht (Eds.), Das Internet im Wahlkampf: Analysen zur Bundestagswahl 2009, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag (forthcoming).
The Russian news agency Rosbalt recently published an interview with me on the use of social media by political activists. The interview was lead by Yulia Netesova. The original interview can be found here (in Russian). Here follows an English version:
1) How important is the fact that social media became a tool for grassroot-rioting?
Protesters use social media channels for the distribution of information. This information is used internally to organize the protest (for example: Where and when do we meet? Where is the police? What are the reactions of the politicians?) as well as externally to get news and pictures of the protests to an international public. Both these functions are not new. A few years ago protesters used mobile phones to achieve similar goals. The widespread use of social media introduces a new speed and scale to the process. This facilitates the decentralized organization of a protest and increases the international visibility of protesters and the reactions to them by governments. Still, this does not make social media the trigger or reason for the protests.
2) What kind of changes will this bring? Should we get ready for the age of censorship on behalf of the scared governments?
A growing adoption of social media tools by activists will lead to a higher international visibility of their causes. While traditional news media in the West largely ignored the Egyptian protests an international public was kept aware of the daily developments by social media channels. Also the internationally accessible video stream on the website of Al Jazeera was a very important source of documentation. Social media channels lead to a circumvention of news selection biases in the West, which in turn massively increased the visibility of the protests. This phenomenon is likely to increase. Also the use of social media tools allows protesters to document themselves and thus avoid the filter of traditional news organizations. The iconic potential of pictures taken with camera phones during protests was demonstrated during the recent protests in Iran and will likely reassert itself during the ongoing protests in Tunisia, Egypt, India, and Yemen.
The attempt of the Egyptian government to defuse the protests by cutting access to the internet has been largely futile. Thus it probably serves more as an example of the limited effect that censorship attempts by governments hold than as an use case for future events.
3) Are you enthusiastic or skeptic about the instrumentalization of the social media by the revolutionaries?
On the one hand it is inspiring to see how activists are able to use social media tools to organize collective action, on the other hand the widespread use of these tools can also increase the volatility of public opinion and thus negatively effect the stability of states. Right now it is easy to applaud the protests since they address issues in the countries in question that are widely seen as negative (i.e. corruption, authoritarian style of government) but there is no guarantee that these tools will only be used by political actors who follow commonly accepted goals. Social media tools are themselves no agents for good or evil. Their role in stabilizing or destabilizing states will always depend on the goals of the actors who use them.
4) How important were the social media in triggering those events (in Egypt, Tunisia, India, Yemen)? Were the riots spontaneous or orchestrated via social media?
It is to early to answer what the role of social media was in triggering these events. Again, I do not think that social media were the trigger let alone reason for the protests. For those one has to look at the situation in each of the countries in question. It seems likely though that social media tools helped to distribute the news of successful protests in Tunisia to other countries. Egypt, India, and Yemen were also, albeit for different reasons, in a volatile state. So maybe the news of the events in Tunisia helped to inspire activists in those countries to take to the streets and get their country specific demands heard.
5) How justified are the claims that behind the social media are the western powers who use them in order to bring change in authoritarian countries?
Again, it is to early to answer this question. Personally I tend to doubt the claims that Western powers orchestrated social media protest to achieve regime change in authoritarian countries. It seems to me much more likely that the protests are emergent phenomena, that started in each country out of different reasons. The common theme is their successful use of the internet as a communication medium. But this common element should not lead us to underestimate the different reasons and motivations between the protests. To assume Western powers as conductors of these events seems to me an oversimplification of the events.