Comments on: Social Media and the Networked Public Sphere

By: aTypical Joe: A gay New Yorker living in the rural south.

aTypical Joe: A gay New Yorker living in the rural south. — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 07:52:24 +0000

On Social Media and the Networked Public Sphere

Ulises Ali Mejias provides an excellent summary of the issues surrounding digital publics: Can social media increase and improve civic participation? If so, in what ways? There’s a lot being said and written about the subject these days, but it…

By: james

james — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 16:11:26 +0000

check out this publication: people and participation. Something along similar lines with very well written conceptual structure for this kind of work.
http://www.involving.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=main.viewSection&intSectionID=400

By: Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 19:18:14 +0000

Yes. I agree. Your clarification clarified my clarification. We went back and forth before we got it right — at least to my satisfaction and yours. In that sense, “objectivity” is not some idealized abstraction that may or may not be universal, but constitutes a social agreement achieved through discourse. Which is undoubtedly more civil and less combative than two people who strongly disagree, but is an artifact of this process of posting and commenting. Now isn’t that somewhat closer to the notion of formation of public opinion through critical, rational debate? Certainly this doesn’t mean we are going to influence any elites. But unless you are ready to accept that the democratic process is irredeemably corrupt, simply a potemkin village, do you believe that there is more potential to mobilize a public to influence policy in this way? As opposed to being strictly passive consumers of what we see on TV and read in the newspaper?

Is the issue of the potential of a population, using participatory media, to influence policy already decided? Or is closing the books on the possibility a prematurely self-fulfilling prophecy? I pose these as questions because I don’t claim to have the answer.

I’m not really an optimist. But I choose to think about hope.

By: Ulises

Ulises — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 16:55:43 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Howard. I don't think I got your point wrong but I see now that I only got it partly right, and ended missing an important aspect of it. To the extent that people represent their own POVs in social media such as wikis, I think they only have two choices: to continue to push their POV and engage in an edit war, or to revisit it until they can articulate in a way that their opponents can live with. It is this last instance I had in mind when writing the article. You describe, however, the role of people not representing their own POV but mediating between two different views. These people collect competing views and attempt to "objectively" or neutrally represent them both, and social media makes these dynamics open and transparent. Of course, the problem is that "objectivity" itself can become a contested POV...

By: Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 13:04:40 +0000

Provocative analysis, well worth thinking about, but you got my point wrong: NPOV requires one to state OPPOSING points of view in a way that those who hold those points of view agree with your statement of them. It does not require one to state one’s own point of view to the satisfaction of those who disagree, but it does require a clear articulation of what those disagreements are.

Lanier’s arguments lost legitimacy in my view by his conflation of collectivism (centrally controlled, coercively enforced) and forms of collective action in which control is distributed and participation is voluntary (self election). This is such a monumental conflation (especially when the argument references Maoism — I am always careful when referencing mass murderers to back up my arguments, especially when the connection is thin at best).

By: Ulises

Ulises — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 07:09:01 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Tom. I agree that the beauty of the wiki is what it manages to do in terms of the editorial process with elegant simplicity. But I think Carr’s point is about how we the users manage to override the software’s code with our own codes of social governance. What annoys him, I think, is to see that Wikipedia can evolve into something that contradicts what was assumed to be the very essence of a wiki (editorial openness). These dynamics are nothing new or particular to wikis, so maybe Carr is being a bit naive in his technological determinism. From my perspective, his observations are useful not as a denunciation of an application of social software that allegedly failed to meets its aims, but as a reminder that a ‘new’ public sphere will not materialize simply because we assume the affordances of the technology to be democratic. To paraphrase the NRA: Technology doesn’t kill democracy. People kill democracy.

By: tom

tom — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 21:24:53 +0000

I am very much helped by your framing of these questions. There seem to be very few amid the camps of net visionaries, media apologists, social deconstructionists, anarcho-erisian meta-situationists and whatall who can look dispassionately at the competing claims that are evolving and keep their eye on some useful, if not always easily measurable, sense of value and purpose.

I’m uncomfortable with one thing here – if I’m misunderstanding you please correct me: Carr’s criticism of Wikipedia as creating some new layered bureaucratic world, thereby apparently disappointing his hopes of… what? a more socially “with-it” realm of editorial procedures? To fault Wikipedia for not meeting certain cherished aims of social software advocates seems not unlike criticizing machine code for its lack of rhetorical embellishment — it’s not about that.

If Wikipedia seems relevant to your main line of reasoning, (and it does), I think it’s more to do with how it is attempting, on a large scale, a transmutation of unvetted, random, atomized, massified informational detritus into an articulated, peered, constantly revised public reference tool. This is an editorial challenge that few would even think to undertake, and its social efficacity, or lack thereof, would seem to be beside the point. It may develop some blind alleys as it goes along. It’s doing something for which there may be no useful existing map.

We might learn something from Wikipedia that says more about the nature of public vs. mass than it does about sociality. Mass is, among other things, a grave attractor of every sort of phantasm. The discipline required to establish a publicly accepted critical tool for shared intelligence is neither small nor necessarily terribly charming. Tantae molis erat…

By: Christopher D. Sessums

Christopher D. Sessums — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 17:26:07 +0000

Ulises,
You cover a lot of interesting ground here. The points raised by Carr, “social media experiments are bound to result in un-innovative forms of social action” and Wikipedia as a form of “emergent bureaucracy,” made me think about what I will call American Idol-ocracy. What if we replaced state legislators and federal representation with people carrying cell phones? Instead of having representatives decide on bills and legislation, we, the people, simply cast our votes from our phone? We could have a host who introduces each bill or amendment, a select group of judges representing left, right, and something in between, offering their opinions on matters. We tune in each week and then text message our votes. I realize this replaces one form of bureaucracy with another, but it sure would be entertaining. Perhaps even innovative!

-cs