Twitterstorms
October 31, 2009
Unashamedly focussed on a single news article this one, but it is very close to my heart and my area of academic interest.
Read this link to a story at The Guardian, think about it then get back to this blog if you want to.
OK. So we understand the concept. A technologically and socially adept set of first adopters have a tool that is globally visible, but exclusionary since not everyone can use it and not everyone can read or write meaning in 140 characters. What the article doesn’t mention is that twitter is also socially exclusionary since not everyone can use their phones at work, not everyone can afford to access it, some people sleep at different times and it is language specific (discourse is in the local language).
Right now, as the article correctly identifies, the twitterati are dominated by younger, liberal-minded, outward looking, technically and media savvy people. There is not a full representation of political and social diversity. You have to pay your way into the scene by learning ‘the language’ and buying the service and, of course, spending time interacting.
I’ve tried it, same as I tried Facebook and MySpace. They all take a great deal of effort to maintain at a level where you gain credibility (or friends or followers or disciples or whatever) outside your existing social circle. Whats different with micro-blogging is the speed and fluidity that the few million users can jump on and off emotive topics and the willingness that they have to transfer those emotions to offline actions.
Don’t have any delusions about the changing of minds happening within the twittersphere. No sane person changes an opinion that is already formed based upon a 140 character message or two. However what it could motivate is action on extant opinion.
Like the guy at the pub who suggests the curry. We all like curry, we’re all hungry after a few pints, we just hadn’t considered a curry tonight, but it sounds like a good idea. Lets do it.
Of course there could be downsides to this rapid response. To stretch the curry analogy; we’d be £20 lighter the next morning (we have spent time, money and effort participating in the twitterstorm) and may have a bad stomach (the results of the twitterstorm may not be what we personally wanted).
So there are risks attached to crowd-sourced actions based upon reactions to events. In that it is similar to democracy, but it is a very skewed democracy where information access is asymmetrical and the demos is selected.
Most times in a democracy the group takes collective responsibility for collective action until such time as it is no longer immediately relevant who suggested that action. If we can find out who initiated an action within a day or an hour of that action, what does that say for the quality and breadth of debate in such a speedy ‘democracy’ ?
I like to think about actions which I know will have consequences for others before I take them. I am analytical and make no apologies for that, but in the blink of an eye a twitterstorm seems to be able to effect superficial change. What does that say to me as someone who prefers to think for a day or two before I act ? Are my opinions irrelevant ? Is analysis dead and the wisdom of the crowd the only way forward ? Do we really believe that only emotion-led opinions are worthy of action ?
Hyperbolae of course. No-one is suggesting that everyone be given a twitterset and asked to opine on every option their elected government has, you’d be completely overloaded. As an individual in such a society you’d have to automate the routine decisions to reflect your already formed opinion, or tacitly approve through abstention.
We’re rapidly approaching the point where that automation is possible, but what about the opinion ? Do we set it through software user preferences ? Do we let a program learn our opinions by watching our real-world actions ? How would we sanction a program that failed to express our true opinion ?
I’ll leave you with this. I already automate my news gathering through an RSS aggregation tool. Its the only way that I can keep on top of the international scale topics that I look at. But that means that it excludes other news without consulting me. Am I forming my opinion ?
Politics and Journalism – Journalism and Politics
June 5, 2009
Are we seeing journalism and politics undergoing, what amounts to the same issue – changing models of accountability to their funders ?
Journalism, for the most part, has been funded by the sale of advertising space accompanying the content. As advertisers move their business to the internet, the drop in revenues has brought the newspaper industry to its knees in the US. In other words advertisers are no longer confident that they will benefit from funding journalism.
Is there a parallel in the crisis in UK politics ? The customers (voters) have lost confidence that Parliament will provide the government that they pay for. Putting it in cruelly economic terms – the meta-activity of politics is supported by the real activity of government, just as the meta-activity of journalism is supported by the real activity of advertising. The difference being that there is no current alternative to Parliament, where advertisers can readily jump ship to a ‘better’ ie cheaper solution.
We could argue about cause and effect, since the internet came before the crash in advertising revenues, whereas the crisis of confidence in British politics has gathered pace, arguably, as a result of several exogenous factors. But where journalism is struggling to find a new paradigm, British politicians are still in the throws of a fit of peek at the collapse of their glamour of invulnerability. The endless talk of parliamentary reform over the last few decades has not borne fruit. The scary thing about that is that now that ‘The Crunch’ is upon us, bad ideas hove into view. Parliamentary reform should not be crisis management.
Politics is useful. Journalism is useful. The models of accountability to their respective funders are both changing.
Restructuring Parliament – MPs without portfolio
May 30, 2009
The UK’s political parties are all a-quiver about parliamentary reform so I’m going to suggest MPs without portfolio. We’ve had ministers without portfolio, why not MPs to represent those with little by way of interest in local issues but lots to say on the bigger picture or who have cross-boundary issues.
You’d have a limited number of elected seats that are not geographically tied in order to represent people who live online, those who can’t get to MPs surgeries, those whose problems are not to do with local issues (for example online privacy) and those who generally don’t have much to say on local constituency issues.
If you want reform why not reform along the lines that society is working. My life isn’t limited to a 40 square mile block with 30,000 people. Is yours ?
Update – try as I might I cannot find anyone to suggest this to. No 10 doesn’t have a suggestions box (for obvious reasons), my local MP is a LibDem (so already has an agenda set on this), the parliamentary reform commitee doesn’t even have an e-mail address. How the hell do I actually get the suggestion into the system ? Answers on a post card please.
PhD Place
May 28, 2009
I’ve just heard that I have a place to do my doctorate, to start this September.
My research question is about how information flows between individuals (such as you and I) interacting online (as we are doing now) are translated into actions in face space.
I won’t bore you with the whole text, but I’ll be using the debate around energy, how its ‘won’, distributed and used, to explore how directly what is said here online relates to the actuality.
Around that are issues of subjective and objective truth, leadership, social network formation and evolution and the formation of social norms within those social networks. In a wider context there are applications within future political debates and engagement, cross-boundary politics, establishment of new social norms, assessment of online veracity and even interpretation of citizen journalism.
I’m looking forward to it. I just need to find a few extra quid to make sure that I don’t go hungry doing it 
The Truth Catches Up With a Closed Society
May 27, 2009
In the time between my last post on the potential for radical truth and the need for independent verification of ‘facts’ the UK’s political elite has gone into melt-down, all because they did not embrace this type of change.
In the space of a month the majority of Members of Parliament have gone from opposing the application of the Freedom of Information Act as it applies to their expenses claims to publishing their own claims on party and individual websites. Some obviously had reasons to oppose this glasnost and in time those MPs who were stretching the definitions of expenses “wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred when staying overnight away from their main UK residence (referred to below as their main home) for the purpose of performing Parliamentary duties” will pay with their credibility or their jobs, or more likely both.
What we, as a body politic, must ensure is that the execution of Gorbachev’s reforms to Russian politics is not the model that we end up following, where the openness (glasnost) and restructuring (peristroika) meant that the quick and the ruthless gained most at the expense of those who are supposed to be served by the state. There is an opportunity to change the UK’s politics for the better, but there is also the opportunity for those with loud voices to set it on a path that negates any positives that come out of this debacle.
