This little cartoon immediately put a smile on my face and reminded me of one of my favorite quotes on storytelling. A quote which, until recently, I always attributed to the manic mind of screenwriter David Milch:
Every story that works is a story of great distances and starlight which takes place in a moment of mania and is of deep delight.
Milch said this during a seriesoflectureson “TheIdeaoftheWriter” whichheheldoverthe course of five days at the WGA theatre. To me this short quote collects all the pleasures of storytelling, be it as an author or listener.
Little did I know that Milch paraphrased the American poet, novelist and scholar Robert Penn Warren. In his poem “Tell me a Story” Robert Penn Warren wrote:
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
And allthough I do not see starlight just yet, this travel (from a cartoon of blogger Hugh MacLeod in 2010 to the lecture of screenwriter David Milch in 2007 to the poem of Robert Penn Warren in 1969) surely was of deep delight.
This feels a bit like old news. But who says information has a sell-by-date?
In November Christoph Bieber, Martin Eifert, Thomas Groß and Jörn Lamla published the book “Soziale Netze in der digitalen Welt” to which I contributed a chapter on the political uses of Twitter.
My chapter is called “Twitterende Politiker: Zwischem buntem Rauschen und Bürgernähe 2.0”. In that chapter I describe how German politicians use Twitter-Feeds. I also attempt to form preliminary usage-categories. SInce the chapter has been written in April of 2009 some of the examples seem a bit dated. Still it seems the categories hold up quite nicely to the test of time. I’m very much looking forward to early 2010 when Pascal Jürgens and I will quantitavely test these categories on a large data-set. So as always, the best is yet to come.
Colin Delany [@epolitics] gives an interesting perspective on the question whether leading politicians should use Twitter:
But I’d also argue that Twitter is fundamentally a bad match for a Chief Executive, for exactly the same reasons that so many other people are drawn to it. Like the rest of the social media universe, Twitter is effectively unfiltered, with a low wheat-to-chaff ratio even if you’re careful whom you follow. In many ways this is a strength, since part of the fun of the service is that you get access to so much information and opinion coming in from so many directions.
This argument focuses on the value of unfiltered vs filtered information for politicians:
While unfiltered information is valuable for bloggers, journalists and those of us with short attention spans, it’s not usually the best thing with which to fill your time when your actions have real-world consequences for, well, the entire world.
This argument does not address the elements of mediated intimacy, access or public conversations that are quite useful to politicians using Twitter. Still this argument is probably a reason for the social media “glass ceiling” which the Belgian blogger Clo Willaerts [@bnox] identified last month in her talk at the Personal Democracy Forum Europe. Her term describes the phenomenon that even social media savvy politicians stop using social media channels once they reach a certain level of responsibility.
Maybe Delany’s argument will give some pause to the All-Politicians-Online-All-The-Time Pundits.
Colin Delany once again: In this post Delany gives a very useful index of passages that deal with the internet and politics in David Plouffe‘s account of the Obama campaign The Audacity to Win, a book that I’ll address in more detail later this month.
As a nice diversion from politics I’d suggest this interview with Garrison Keillor. In this piece he talks among other things about his writing and editing process:
[…] as you get older, you learn how to throw it out without much thought, without much pity. You look at a piece that you’ve written, and you take those first three paragraphs, and you dump them. You just rip them out. Usually, that’s the part that needs to be thrown out, the big windup, the big introduction. The first page almost always can go. You learn to do that without regret. I edit myself much more quickly and mercilessly now than I ever could have 20, 30 years ago.
Other topics are his show The Prairie Home Companion, the director Robert Altman, public speaking and the durability of sonnets.
While preparing a talk on the role of convergence in the online campaigns of various German parties in the run up to the German Bundestagswahl 2009 I turned once again to the work and blog of Henry Jenkins. There I stumbled on this great talk by Grant McCracken at the Futures of Entertainment 4 Conference. In this presentation McCracken introduces his concept of the Chief Culture Officer and its potential for companies:
Corporations have been notoriously bad at reckoning with culture. They manage the “problem of culture” with ad hocery of many kinds. They call on ad agencies, consultants, gurus and cool hunters and, when all else fails, the intern down the hall. But there is no single person and, worse, there is no senior manager. Even as culture grows ever more dynamic, various, demanding, and participatory. So that’s my argument: there ought to be someone in the C-Suite who’s job it is to reckon with culture and to spot the opportunities and dangers it represents.
It’s been a while since I’m back from the Personal Democracy Forum Europe. For a post-mortem of the conference I suggest these posts by other participants.
Barcelona in November is stunning. Especially if you are flying in fresh from the Amsterdam drizzle. I didn’t find much time for sight-seeing, but there was the time for some photography:
Andreas Jungherr (2009) “Digital channels, the change in community structures and its consequences for social participation”. Paper presented at the ISEA 2009: International Symposium for the Electronic Arts, University of Ulster, Belfast, UK on 23 August – 1 September 2009.
For a short glance at the argument have a look at the presentation. The full paper can be found below.
Digital channels change the structure of communities and thus indirectly influence the political participation of citizens in a society. This paper addresses challenges and opportunities that arise for political participation of citizens through these developments.
The structure of social communities is subject to change. Traditional communities formed around tribal structures. The major integrating factors were shared space and family structures. In the 19th century a new form of community structure developed, this time centred on the concept of a nation. The major integrating factors were a hereditary line belonging to the nation in question and a shared tradition, culture and educational canon (for a more detailed discussion see Gellner 1964, and Gellner 1983). During the last decades increased geographical mobility of individuals, increased specialization in education, a growing income gap and the possibility of pervasive digital communication have disrupted these factors. This led in developed countries yet again to a change in community structures. A decrease in participatory activities in local communities has been substituted by a significant increase of activities in online communities. Communities of tribe, nation or location are increasingly substituted by communities of interest or practice. This has consequences for participation by citizens in social institutions.
The field of social network analysis distinguishes between two types of links between people. Let’s take a hypothetical person and call him Marcus. Links between Marcus and people who are acquaintances of him but who are not likely to socially interact with each other are called weak ties. The other type of link is called strong tie. This applies to links from Marcus to people who in turn are highly likely to interact with each other (Ganovetter 1983: 221ff.). As Mark Granovetter has argued in his classical article, information travels very fast through a social system in which many individuals are interconnected trough are large amount of weak ties (Granovetter 1973). This phenomenon leads to the so-called small world effect. The average distance between social actors in a social system appears surprisingly low, since although people tend to cluster in highly interconnected groups, these groups are connected through individuals with weak ties (for a short overview Granovetter 2003). The small world effect has received considerable attention by sociologists, epidemiologists and marketing practitioners. These studies focus on how information travels through social systems via social ties.
Although it has been shown that weak ties are instrumental in distributing information, they seem to have little effect on collective action. A reason for this might lie in the relatively high opportunity cost collective action brings to participants while the mere forwarding of information rarely carries any meaningful opportunity costs. It seems for collective action to spread communities connected through strong ties are the most fertile ground. Mobilisation and political persuasion still appear to be most effective when groups of highly interconnected people are confronted with issues that appear relevant to all of them. This common truth from Marketing (Earls 2007) and Community Organizing (Alinsky 1971) still holds true in the digital realm. For collective action to occur it is necessary to have a large group of highly interconnected people who share common issues, trust each other and are willing to shoulder the relatively high opportunity costs of collective action. It does not suffice to have a Facebook-Group with 6000 supporters. These supporters may be willing to carry a cause like a fashionable pop-culture-badge. They might even be ready to distribute information about the cause to their social network but this lifestyle-politics alone does not automatically lead to collective action. Why is that?
In classic location based communities the members are connected mainly through strong ties. People tended to live and work in relatively close proximity. There was little mobility. Commitment to a location tended to be long-term. This lead to a lot of shared interests. For example, if I expect to live with my family in a specific neighbourhood for the foreseeable future, I share with my neighbours an interest in the development of said community. For this I might accept the opportunity costs of participating in communal activities, local politics, and if need be even collective action for a relevant issue. The literature shows a marked decline of social participation of that kind (Putnam 2000). This corresponds with a change in society.
Higher job-mobility of people leads to an ever-increasing number of different locations a person is likely to live in. Just because I moved into a house in a neighbourhood does not mean I intend on living there for long. My next move might already be scheduled. So why engage in the local location-based community? Why shoulder the high opportunity costs end engage in local issues, when I know, that I and my family will be gone in five years? Throw ever decreasing costs of communication and travel into the mix and I can finally throw off the dictate of geography.
In the past the group of people I interacted with depended mainly on geography. It was reasonable to work out differences and come to a common understanding since one was likely to be in each other’s company for a while. This is the dictate of geography. This expectation of a shared future led individuals to shoulder opportunity costs and work out differences and maybe even engage in collective action towards a common goal.
Today interaction does not depend on a shared location anymore. I can freely communicate with people all around the world. Our connection can be based on a shared past, a common vocation or interests. These contacts, which are only based on commonalities, do not carry the same opportunity costs of interaction, like the kind where the only common element was a shared location. While this might play towards an individual’s need for homophily and thus increase personal wellbeing, it also has consequences for a social system.
The connections people form via digital channels tend to be weak ties. The gang of dwarfs and knights with whom I roam through the plains of Azeroth is not likely to share all that many interests with my Eastern Standard Tribe (Doctorow 2004) of co-workers who in turn are not very likely to share the passions of my international geocaching community. So while my personal interests are ever more closely matched with that of individuals in my social network, the issues and interests shared by the whole of my social network tend to decrease drastically. Thus this social network loses the ability and interest in common collective action.
This change in the type of connections between community members affects the participatory power of the community in question. People who are connected through strong ties tend to influence each other stronger, share more common interests and are thus more ready for participatory action. People who are connected through weak ties are more likely to distribute information further and faster but are less likely to convince other members of their community of something they do not already believe in.
Still, recent events seem to tell a different story: a candidate for the US presidency manages to successfully enlist cohorts of digital natives and progressives in his bid for office; Moldovans take the streets while twittering; Iran changes after a contested election in a nation of twittering protesters who inspire the support of Twitterers worldwide. These are only three high profile examples of digitally enabled collective action. How do these examples fit in the argument above? Do weak ties enable collective action after all? Let’s have a closer look at one of these examples to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of the success of these movements and to identify what makes them tick.
One of the highly publicised successes of the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama was his use of online campaign communication. Here, two elements of this online campaign shall be discussed further.
First the candidate inspired through his charisma and his message of hope supporters to contribute personal campaign material. They designed images, cut videos and contributed slogans. These in turn were put on the net and distributed to a large community of interest. This is the power of weak ties at work. Information, in this case the links to community relevant material on the web, gets distributed very fast. This distribution is also an evaluation process. Members of the community decide about the quality of an image, spot or slogan before they click the forward button. The aggregate number of clicks or forwards becomes thus an indicator of the collective wisdom of the community. This phenomenon alone does not yet contradict the argument above: Information travels very fast through weak ties. Still, this is not yet collective action in the traditional sense. Just hitting the forward button, does not make me a political activist. This is lifestyle-politics not political activism.
The second aspect of the Obama online-campaign cuts closer to the bone. Through the online-portal my.barackobama.com local supporters were enabled to find likeminded individuals in their vicinity to coordinate and then in turn to collectively organize campaign events. This is exactly what should not happen if the argument above holds true: online communities are connected through weak ties, which do not lend themselves for collective action. Ergo, online communities do not tend to participate in collective action all that much. But if one looks closer, one finds the reason for the success. This element of my.barackobama.com allowed users with a specific portfolio of interests – here political interest and support of Barack Obama – to find likeminded individuals. But instead of connecting a user from Atlanta to an Obama supporter in Greece the site offered the contact information of other Obama supporters in the greater Atlanta region. Thus, the online community allowed users to form location based communities of interest and with it strong ties to other Obama supporters. The community activities online facilitated collective action through the distribution of relevant information and how-to know how, but the collective action itself still depended on the organisers on the ground. This is the prototype for the combination of community structures on- and offline.
This example clearly shows the blueprint for the successful community organizing of the future: the combination of digital communication channels and geographic location. This is already shown in the success of location based services, the beginnings of alternate reality games which mix online profiles with location based cues, and the ever increasing uses of mobile devices. This connection between information distribution via weak ties through digital communication channels and the re-enabling of location-based strong ties is the future for collective action.
Pascal Jürgens and Andreas Jungherr (2009) “Twittering Dissent: Social Web Data Streams as Basis for Agent Based Models of Opinion Dynamics”, in: Martin Welker, Holger Geißler, Lars Kaczmirek, Olaf Wenzel (eds.), 11th General Online Research Conference, GOR 09: Proceedings, Vienna, p. 81.
Due to copyright restrictions I can’t make this paper available on this page. If you are interested you can find the paper in the Proceedings of the 11th General Online Research Conference edited by Martin Welker, Holger Geißler, Lars Kaczmirek and Olaf Wenzel. On his webpage Martin Welker makes a pdf of the proceedings available.
For the gist of the paper have a look at the presentation:
Abstract
The attempt of Web Science to develop a deeper understanding of human behavior on and with the web, as practiced today, struggles to transcend the stage of isolated case studies of individual phenomena with little or no connection to the nature of human behavior as a whole. The authors believe this state can be remedied by a more conscious combination of theoretical concepts of human behavior and empirical work. To this end this paper identifies four key challenges in sound Web Science: A – Providing theoretical context for studies, B – addressing the role of technological design and communication culture, C – dealing with large data sets and D – charting the web so research can be placed within. We then propose a blueprint for research practices which is based on the school of critical rationalism and serves to increase a study’s contribution to the field of web science.
The interplay of theory and observation: a proposition for structured research on human behavior on the web
This is the poster version of the paper The Interplay of Theory and Observation: A Proposition for Structured Research on Human Behavior on the Web which Pascal Jürgens and Benjamin Heitmann presented in early 2009 in rainy Athens at the WebSci’09: Society On-Line.
For the paper have a look at this pdf at the online proceedings of the conference. There you can also take a closer look at the poster itself.
Henry Farrell: Political scientists in public debate
This is a nice conversation starter about the roles political scientists should play in the public discourse about politics.
Joshua-Michele Ross: The Rise Of The Social Nervous System
and
Tim O’Reilly: The Social Nervous System Has More Than One Sense
Joshua-Michele Ross gets the ball rolling by talking about the real-life consequences of the use of social media by large groups of interconnected people. Messages send through internet services to a large community of interest become signals that in turn influence behavior. Tim O’Reilly then picks it up and plays with the possibilities when internet services go beyond text messages. What information will be send by our devices and what signals will be picked up by our community of interest?
Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Clay Shirky once again comments on the future-of-newspaper debate. His take is: we are living through a transition, we don’t know what will work, we therefor have to experiment – a lot. Sounds like just the time for rapid prototyping. His point is, that we have to phrase the question differently. Not, how can we save newspapers. But, how can we provide the functions newspaper provided for society in this new emerging environment.
Steven Berlin Johnson: Old Growth Media and the Future of News
This is the transcript of a speech Steven Berlin Johnson at the SXSW09. What makes his take on the death-of-newspaper-story interesting is his vision of locally relevant news that can be reported and distributed through social media and his idea of traditional media outlets as filters to a plethora of news.
Bruce Sterling: What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09
Sterling’s take on the nature of Web 2.0 and the coming transition makes for great reading for all the self-declared social-media-specialists. Read it. Then read it again, slowly.
Alexander Schellong: Facebook, data and the demographic
A rough guess on the growth of Facebook in terms of server space. Quite a lot of space assuming of course Facebook is still around in 2060.
The German TV-program Elektrischer Reporter just published an episode about online activism. At the end of the program, after comments by among others Richard Rogers and Patrick Meier, you will find a sound bite by yours truly on political activism on the net.
