eEverything: What Public Administration Can Learn From Social Media

eEverythingWhere things are going

and how to be there

Who am I?And… who are YOU?..

Twitter: @Doc_G_ LinkedIn:

www.linkedin.com/pub/alex-gorelik/52/18/274

Alex Gorelik, Ph. D.Email: [email protected]

Who am I?..

ME:

Background in literature, mass media and market research

What I do: teach, direct a college Mass Communication program, consult

What I love: understanding people, developing new ideas from old ones, reacting quickly, finding unexpected solutions, collaborating

What I hate: everything long-term

YOU:

What is your background ???

What do you love ???

What do you hate ???

Where are you going to apply yourselves ???




Why am I here?And… why are YOU here?..




Cooperation is necessary:

We are becoming a civilization of hyper-literacy

On a macro level, all of society is affected

On a micro level, our selves are affected

Communication is the engine of this change, public policy will determine its sign







A civilization of hyper-

literacy

Literacy changed EVERYTHINGEconomy, fashion, politics, leisure, sovereignty, education, culture




Similarly, hyper-literacy is changing EVERYTHINGEconomy, fashion, politics, leisure, sovereignty, education, culture

Twitter@Doc_G_ LinkedIn:






Source: Pew Internet

In 2012

… nearly 20 million of the 225 million Twitter users followed 60 or more Twitter accounts and nearly 2 million follow more than 500 accounts

…more than 800 million users made up Facebook having spent 700 billion minutes with the service each month. Facebook users had uploaded more than 100 billion photos by mid-2011.




Source: Olswang Convergence Consumer Survey




“Communication in all forms will be more direct; fewer of the niceties and supercilious greetings will exist. Idle conversation skills will be mostly lost.”

“Discussions based around internet content will tend to be pithy, opinion-based, and often only shared using social media with those who will buttress—rather than challenge—political, ideological, or artistic beliefs.”









“Memories are becoming hyperlinks to information triggered by keywords and URLs.”

“We become ‘persistent paleontologists of our external memories’.”









“Long-form cognition and offline contemplative time will start to be viewed as valuable and will be re-integrated into social and work life in interesting and surprising ways.”





Re-feudalization of the public




The practice of instant information consumption perpetuates the culture of instant gratification.




The notion of property becomes challenged by “the gift economy”, attention becomes payment, democracy becomes a live show.




The shift to hyper-literacy will be as profound, comprehensive, long lasting and universal, as the shift from orality to literacy.

Castells (2006)




Mass

self-communication

1971

- t

he fi

rst

coin

ope

rate

d

arca

de

1972

- Po

ng is

re

leas

ed19

74

- M

aze

, the

first

net

wor

ked

mul

tipl

ayer

gam

e cr

eate

d19

85

- Th

e te

rm

“ava

tar”

is

coin

ed b

y Chi

p

Mor

ning

star

1985

- T

he W

ell

pave

s th

e w

ay for

onlin

e co

mm

unitie

s

1994

– G

eoCitie

s

show

s ea

rly

spec

tacu

lar

succ

ess

1997

– Si

x

Deg

rees

, the

firs

t

“pro

per”

soc

ial

netw

ork

is

laun

ched

2012

– 1,

000,

000

Face

boo

k us

ers

Virtual Worlds: Precursors

Video Gaming

Social networking




Virtual Worlds: Second LifeReasons for participation include: (a) exploring the environment, (b) sharing experiences with others, (c) meeting people and making friends, (d) making things, and(e) engaging in commercial activities (Graves, 2008).




• Publicly launched in 2003 by Linden Labs;

• One resident in 2001, 2.2 million in 2006;

• Global participation including residents from the U.S., France, Germany, U.K., the Netherlands, Canada etc.




• Platform for collaborative creation of shared content;

• Ready-made captive audience for Linden Labs;

• Content is a tradable commodity (functional currency exchange mechanism).

Key features

Profile

Castells (2006)

Virtual identity

What is the relationship between my real-life identity and my eSelf?

What is the relationship between geographical and virtual space? How does it change the concept of

sovereignty? … the concept of citizen? …voter?




Question:

These are not idle questions!

In the U.S., we don’t know the answers yet…

How about Ukraine?







Virtual world identities are becoming indistinguishable from “real” identities, just as e-commerce became indistinguishable from commerce.

Adrian (2008)




“There is no inside self”

Foucault (2080)

Virtual identity

A challenge for legal theory

A public policy

challenge

Hyper-identity: a

mental illness

yesterday, a positive attribute

today.




Identity and citizenship

Machiavellian view: citizen as consumer Current technological

deterministic discourse, from Gates to Zuckerberg, equate citizenship with capitalism

Habermasian view: citizen as an equal conversation partner We need to critically assess

the tendency to envision e-citizens as spectators.




Identity and citizenship

A conceptual distinction between “knowledge economy”, framed in techno-economic terms, and “information society”, framed in socio-cultural terms, needs to be made.

Despite the articulation of a broad set of policy goals, the dominant discourse acts to structure the debate in such a way that its economic parameters become privileged, at the expense of social and cultural factors (Goodwin & Spittle, 2002).




To summarize:

We are experiencing a civilizational shift from literacy to hyper-literacy;

Social computing and communication is at the core of this shift;

It, on one hand, produces “big data” and, on the other – relies on it. So will public policy;

The subject of the networked e-democracy (eSelf)will be a reactive, rather than reflective, multitasking, rather than deliberative;

The discoursive space, surrounding eSelf should be dominated by Habermasian notions of deliberative democracy.




To summarize:




Social computing and Communication are the engine of this shift. Public policy will determine its sign.

Alone, neither of our fields is prepared. We must collaborate.




Road MappingTheory, Policy, Design

Road Mapping:Theory




The techno-optimistic view:

Civic disengagement of youth: Lack of motivation Perceived lack of

opportunity for involvement

Inability to take part in the civic process

All cured through improvements in systems and procedures of e-democracy!





The evolution of the socio-technical tools available for communication and involvement have helped to overcome the causes of disengagement and may have contributed to the overwhelming involvement of youth voters in the 2008 and especially 2012 Presidential elections in the U.S.





Quality of services

Transparency, flexibility,

comprehensiveness of services

Equality of accessSocial inclusion (and exclusion)

Areas of concern:




The Habermasian view:

Citizenship is a political activity

Citizenship is the praxis of political engagement

Having empowerment potential, the Internet is largely used to practice political action as a

solitary activity.





Area of concern: transition from culture-debating public to culture-consuming public

Area of concern: tele-democracy and re-feudalization of the public





Once the rational-critical discourse in the public sphere is replaced by consumption, it disintegrates into “acts of individual reception, however uniform in mode” (Habermas, 1989, p.161).




Question:

This is happening in the U.S. with its “American dream”

…and in Russia with its “national idea”

Is this happening in Ukraine?




The Habermasian view (ePublic Sphere):

Alhquist et al (2010) identified three key areas of transformation …society …local environment …economy and business

…and series of drivers in six fields








Ahlquist et al (2010)


ePublic Sphere must satisfy social and technical requirements of: “Exchange and critique of

reasoned moral-practical validity claims”

Reflexivity Ideal role taking Sincerety Discursive inclusion, equality Autonomy from state and

economic power




Dahlberg (2001)


There is some empirical evidence that it may be true Example: Bandari, Azur

and Huberman (2012)




Road MappingPolicy




U.S. Government initiatives:

Reinventing Government Initiative (Clinton / Gore)

Office of Management and Budget engaged in several projects guided by the E-Government Act of 2001 (Bush)

Obama’s administration has pursued a range of open initiatives guided by the principles of transparent, participatory, and collaborative leadership




U.S. Government initiatives:

Public involvement in government decision processes;

Coproduction of government services;

Crowdsourced solutions, through which Governments seek innovation through public knowledge and; and

Transparency and accountability.




Examples of US initiatives

The Veterans Administration established a presence to interact with veterans on Facebook

(www.Facebook. com/VeteransAffairs)

Youtube (www.youtube. com/user/DeptVetAffairs)

Flickr (www.flickr.com photos/44636446@N04)

Twitter (www.twitter. com/DeptVetAffairs)




http://www.Facebook/



http://www.youtube/

http://www.youtube/

http://www.youtube/

http://www.flickr.com/



http://www.twitter/

http://www.twitter/

Examples of US initiatives

http://petitions.whitehouse.gov—petitions




https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitions



Question:

U.S. public policy documents, such as E-Government Act of 2002, list social inclusion, privacy & security and transparency as guidelines.

What about Ukraine?




Road MappingDesign







In a Habermasian sense, the “conversation” between the public and the state, occurring in the ePublic Sphere, will be a co-experience

Co-experience is …

Multimodal

Creative

Meaning-making

For fun (seriously)




How to design co-experience?

Incorporate lessons from systems engineering and mass communication

Design with social translucence in mind




Social translucence

Visibility Awareness

Accountability Constraints




Knowledge managementApplication example of social translucence




From KM to Knowledge Communities

Produced socially

Very little produced in concrete form

Offers massive opportunities for making social connections Provide connections to the producers

of knowledge Provide connections to people who

use, access and interact in the system





Why would people in a substantial work of building knowledge communities? One possible answer – the network

effect G=f(N) Another possible answer – the

principles of visibility, awareness, accountability and constraints





Conversation is great because…• It is an interaction with the goal of meaning-making

• It is a social projection of self, therefore – a deeply social process

• It persists

Conversation-based knowledge communities are excellent because of…• … activity support• … conversation visualization and restructuring

• …organizational knowledge spaces




To summarize:




Habermas and other media theorists provide valuable guidelines for exploration of e-democracy. Existing public policy initiatives, in their early, experimental stages, are marred by the techno-happy approach, which must be critically accessed. Evidence of fruitful cross-disciplinary borrowing exists in social media initiatives. We must collaborate.




Case in point:

Info Terrorism

How can government agencies adapt media practices to combat the threat of info terrorism?

A couple of questions:

Why “info terrorism” and not “cyber terrorism”?

Why are social media involved?

Why bother?




Detection: Content analysis

Prediction: Forecasting relationships

Dissuasion: Procedures and

policies

Monitoring: Linking

outbursts to outcomes




Detection

Content analysis of the (semantic) web Example: Sheth & Nagarajan (2011)




Question:

Is this method useful to you?




Prediction

…of relationships Example: Leskovec et al (2010)




Question:





Dissuasion

Organizational procedures and system-wide policies Example: Radianti & Gonzales (2009)




Question:





Monitoring

Linking emotional outbursts to outcomes Example: Zhang et al (2011)




To summarize:

Media organizations (and I define those as broadly as humanly possible) can take part in combatting info-terrorism by taking part in detection, prediction, dissuasion and monitoring.




Questions?

Tweeter: @Doc_G_ LinkedIn:



@Doc_G_

[email protected]

Business

eEverything: What Public Administration Can Learn From Social Media