Participation(s)

Sorry, foregive a little bit of shameless self-promotion, but a book I co-edited is finally out.

Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis, Ole Dahl Rasmussen & Ole Wæver (eds.) 2007, 10×10, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle (UK). Buy at Politico’s or Amazon. More or from the publisher here.

It is a set of essays about the good books that inspired good social scientists. Contributors include B. Guy Peters, Chantal Mouffe, Elinor Ostrom, James M. Buchanan, Joseph H.H. Weiler, Kenneth Waltz, Richard Katz, and Thomas Hylland Eriksen.

Some people like it [read blurps below]

(more…)

There is a lot of buzz around the idea that technology-enhanced party activists are increasingly important in electoral politics. Zack Exley’s an interesting piece on field organizing in the Obama campaign is just one example.

In one sense, this is a no-brainer. Of course, more activists on the streets are better than fewer. Of course, the proliferation of off-the-shelf web 2.0 solutions has changed the costs of mobilizing.

Another potential question is, however, looming behind the potential new dawn for party political participation. Will those who get involved continue to accept that they are simply foot soldiers acting out a battle plan largely designed in a traditional campaign war room? Or will they, like contemporary net roots and traditional (European) party members, insist on getting influence on actual policy development?

If they do demand influence, will they (a) become a liability for campaigns that also have to address potential voters outside of the core constutiency that presumably provides most of their activists? (b) complicate attempts to stay ’on message’ in relation to traditional mass media? (c) be able to make a policy difference? In other words, will they still be worthwhile for campaigns?

Perhaps more importantly, can they achieve influence? There seems to be considerable transatlantic differences here, where influence in Europe is based on party organization, in the US, it comes mainly in the selection of candidates in primaries (Ned Lamont vs. Joe Lieberman springs to mind).

These issues are negotiated in the daily balance struck between candidates, professionals, and activists who presumably all want to win, make a difference, and do something worthwhile. Though they may not always agree and what those three things amount to.

Together with some colleagues, I’ve started a blog for all those NYC-based people out there who are just desperate to participate in some serious communications research… gentlepeople, let me introduce to you: collective communications campus (ccc).

Two Danish scholars, Klaus Bruhn Jensen & Rasmus Helles, have analyzed a wide sample of websites from NGOs, political parties, private businesses, state agencies, and individuals across several countries, both high-, mid- and low-income.

They report several interesting findings.

1) The participatory potential of websites is more limited than what is often assumed. In effect: ’so much for participatory culture’.

2) Both political parties and NGOs have relatively high interactive potentials, while state agencies and companies have low, with much more emphasis on presentation. So much for ‘from markets to conversations’… And in other words: the entry-points to participation in anything but person-to-person interaction seems to remain the traditional political organizations and social movements.

The text is available here.

Monday the 30th of July, Mirjana Mirosavljevic of the Reconstruction Women’s Fund generously spend an hour explaining to me her view of the intricacies of civil society participation in a Serbia undergoing a difficult political and economic transition.

One particularly interesting thing for me was RWfund’s deliberate attempt to work as a sort of meta-organization, focused on the development of other NGO’s, the strengthening of networks between them, and the training of activists. They raise money from international foundations like George Soros’s Open Society Institute and the Rockerfeller Brothers Fund, donors that smaller, local organizations are unlikely to reach, and work to increase awareness of the issue of women’s rights in Serbia, and Serbian women’s rights amongst internationals working in Serbia.

Also, she pointed out the increasing importance of the Serbian Orthodox Church (though not in a direction that she and her organization appreciates) in a country experiencing a sort of simultaneous relative implosion of both state politics and the kind of civil society politics that contributed to the regime change of 2000. In this kind of ‘vacuum’, there is a room for those with resources, and the church has both money (from remittances) and people, both as actors in their own right, and, I would deduce, as its own kind of meta-organizers for movements with a quite different agenda. There are some clear parallels here, it seems to me, to the role of the church in many other transitional political situations.

Mirosavljevic readily admitted the challenges involved for an organization like RWfund, not only from the immediate political circumstances they operate in, but also from the strategy they have chosen and the practical paths they pursue. Follow the money here. Being mainly dependent on foreign, and predominantly U.S., funding in a country where the ruins left by the NATO airial strikes from 1999 remain very visible is not a PR boon. But resources obviously has to be found if the work is to continue–like the media I also like to write about, activism is far from free, even if it is voluntary, and both foreign funds and domestic enthusiasm has on many areas been on the wane, especially since the assassination of Zoran Djindjić in 2003 and the relative lack of political improvements since. It takes not only romantic dedication, but also cool cash, to try to match the inertia of the world and whatever forces one’s political opponents marshal. Listening to her stories of attempts to work one’s way through international bureaucracy and lack of government recognition of local expertise and even the legitimacy of activism, I can only respect the work done here to attempt to build and maintain a basis infrastructure of participation.

- - - Nerdy Note - - -

After the talk, I had occasion to re-read Karl Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question’. It remains for me an interesting point of reference here, not because I agree with it, but because it so mercilessly probes some of the limits of liberal rights and pluralist struggles for freedom, such as the struggle for women’s rights. Marx’s overall argument is that no minority can seriously pursue freedom on its own, as a minority, but only as part of a majority coalition aiming to transform the social order that made them an unfree minority in the first place. But of course, paroles ‘first class struggle, then gender struggle’ and the like proved to be quite a dead-end.

A travel note to share: After many twists and turns, it was some years ago decided to tear down the Palace of the Republic, an old GDR prestige construction in the center of Berlin. The parliament, city council and whoever else bears the responsibility for all this feel the need to point out that the decision made in a democratic country with its democratic local government is, indeed, also a democratic decision (PBS Frontline has a short doc about the palace and the decision to tear it down here) - at least that’s the title of the posters that inform the curious by-passers of what is going on.

I took some pictures of a nice little information/propaganda wall that has been put up next to the site of the now largely dismantled building (it is even more long-winded online). What is interesting from the perspective of this blog is not so much the glib and highly professional communication on the posters that surround the construction yard, but more how discontents have appropriated the posters as a platform for their own views–question marks, comments, and criticism appear in handwriting next to the printed info. Also interesting is that some of the comments are in English, targeting not only locals, but also tourists like me. Maybe next time they should simply leave space for comments, since these are becoming wall papers anyway?

As usual, the G8 meeting, this time in Heiligendamm, is one giant spectacle for everyone involved. Elected politicians, bureaucrats, police, protesters, and journalists use each other for numerous ends and dead ends. Cameras, recorders, and various forms of wireless communication are ubiquitous. Everything is documented, communicated, mediated, endlessly recycled, repackaged, and reused.

This also counts for the protestors’ tactical repertoire, closely monitored not only by the police and by their fellows around the world, but also by ‘the suits’ on the other side of the many fences.

Adding irony to the hopes and tragedies of these meetings, precisely here, at the front line between those who are trying to take a part they have not been offered, and the forms of obstruction and repression they are met with, numerous new forms of political organization and action are being developed that will, if the historical record is anything to go by, later be appropriated by precisely the state-bound political process of legitimization that the protestors are challenging.

Many of the current buzzwords of participation in state and electoral politics are old news to those who try to take part in Heiligendamm these days—they where using social networking softwares, cell phone based forms of communication, and online video bases like youtube before they became part of the lingo of electoral politics. And they are ahead again—an example: search Flickr for pictures of Heiligendamm + G8, and ask yourself who got the better of whom on that digital front?

Becky Hogge’s comment on ‘Campaigning in Cyberspace’ brought mySociety, a British group, to my attention. They fully deserve it, though these are busy days, so I will not write much

I find them interesting partly because they do the usual stuff well - make information about elected officials available, help people write to their elected official - but mainly because they do a few newer things, things that are not as integral to the informatio-and-transmission-oriented ways in which we have developed online communication.

* They develop tools for peer-to-peer politics, like Pledgebank, helping people commit to common projects, and Neighbourhood Fix-It that help people locate, discuss, and perhaps deal with, practical local problems like pot holes and the like. Both have a nice action-orientation that can operate independently of the state and organized politics. Both can of course also be turned towards more traditional movements or party politics.

* They help people publicize their reasons for, for instance, non-voting. Check out NotApathetic, a site that contains everything from the pathetic, over the obvious (I didn’t vote because I’m only 17), to interesting, nuanced explanations of how some people felt disenchanted and disenfranschised even on the eve of the ‘05 UK election. And debate of those reasons and the platform on which the debate took place too.

Oh, by the way, wouldn’t they have been even lovelier if they where called ‘ourSociety’? Anyway, good, interesting work.

For the Danish-readers out there: I took up the gauntlet thrown by Nikolai Thyssen of Information. Have a look here. I’ll provide a short summary in English later, to boil it down in the extreme, Thyssen doubts the value of the debate that takes place on newspaper sites, I argue they offer readers an outlet for a form of media critique that may not be very valuable for the professional observer, but does publicize the concerns of those active, and gives them an opportunity to slug it out with other actives over questions of bias, factual errors, and what have you. In other words, my basic observation is that commentaries are admittedly not the acme of the media of tomorrow, but still represents a chance for those who want to not only be part of (as readers), but play a small part in (as writers) a mass media site. To be continued…

I went to the above-named event at the New School Friday night, and have been shooting emails left and right since then with questions…

The presentations are available here and at http://fora.tv/new_school/.

Trebor Scholz raised a question that from my vantage point can be reformulated as: how would it be possible to identify the distinction between participation and exploitation on the basis of what people contribute to one process, event, or organization? When are you working to make a difference, when are you working for someone else? This is obviously very important if one is to assess the potential of participatory political campaigns, where the pro and pols’ urge to control has to find a way of co-existing with the less calculated jolts and spouts of activism.

Trebor argued that seen through an updated understanding of work as self-creating performances, a lot of social networking is a something-for-nothing deal, where site-owners make money out of participants’ creative contributions. I have asked him a couple of questions about what would follow from this if one accepts his point, you can see the questions here.

In a sense, the question I send to Ethan Zuckerman is even more fundamental to my interests in participatory politics. Take the context of the United States, and think about the examples of networked politics - recent citizens’ contributions include the 1984-Hilary video and McCain vs. McCain undressing him for his ’straight-talk’ slogan. Both have attracted a lot of attention. Both are activist initiatives. Both are prime examples of the crowdsourcing of negative campaigning, and the one thing we know about negative campaigning is that it drives people away, make them not take part, not vote, not care. Maybe we are looking at a paradox, more citizens ‘negative’ participation will feed the spiral of cynicism and discontent, and breed less participation…? I asked Ethan for examples of ‘positive’ participation through social media, and he named perennial favorite MoveOn.org, a good example. I would add the Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign too - but those seem to be outliers, and especially MoveOn an outlier structured around resistance, not a positive project. On his suggestion, I have forwarded my question to David Weinberger and Dan Gillmor, and hope to return with input from them. While I wait, and think, this cute little video from an Obama meetup in New York will hold up the beacon of hope for a positive participatory politics. It is all volunteer made, every second of it.