1

Collective Intelligence: Advancing and Challenging the Crisis Response Paradigm

Ouejdane MejriPolitecnico di Milano,

Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria

2

XXIst century dictatorship

The dictatorial regime of Ben Ali has deployed for 23 years a «Disciplinary Machinery»“The eye of the dictatorship is watching you, controls you wherever you go, whatever you do, transforms you, and tries to drag you in his own perversion”(Hagi, Mejri 2013)

Control, terror and punishment

The modality of control implies uninterrupted, constant surveillance, Terror was the method to make people

«adhere» to the disciplinary machinery While we were aware that the surveillance

was continuous and total, one could not guess when the punishment would come

3

How they see you and how you perceive yourself: individuation

Massive use of police, with its techniques of “proximity” Spying increasingly

widespread due to capillary action of the cells of the party

«Divide et impera»

The presence of civil «informers» through civil encouraged delation Systematic "dividing and individualizing"

approach Leads to fragmentation and atomization of

the society : rupture of the social link

4

Social graphs during Ben Ali’s regime

Groups of the regime

Population structure

Censorship : second after Cuba (2010)

5

Use of Web technologies (Dictatorship)

«Virtual» social networks in Tunisia during Ben Ali’s regime

Groups of the regime

6

Thinking in communion

What Jürgen Habermas calls "public sphere" in Tunisia could not exist. A "rational” public opinion could not even emerge => the result of the exchange of believes, free conversations and communion of ideas.

The freedom to think, as Kant wrote, go hand in hand with the freedom to communicate, to interact.

“We usually say: the supreme power can take away the freedom to speak and write but not the freedom to think. But to what extent and with what accuracy, we would know how to think if we don’t think in communion with

others which we communicate our thoughts and that communicate their to us? "

«Traditional» use of facebook

7

1.800.000 tunisians on facebook (December 2010)1.950.000 (first 2 weeks January 2011)

New configuration : “Revolutionary actions”

8

Integration of technologies: “Revolutionary actions”

“We have gone from virtual to material and non from material to virtual”

“The web re-materializes the things that were virtual: you can follow now,

affiliations, exchanges of ideas, you can draw things that were not traceable, and then you could repeat the question about what it means to have a political position

and take a stand”Bruno Latour (November 20, 2009)

9

New structural configuration in the network

10

New behavioral configuration in the network

Society of networks

The revolutionary action happens in what we call a “crisis moment” or catastrophe During this moment the "society of networks"

as defined by Gauchet, is no longer conditioned by the technology that defines and dictates the social relations, but the latter structure and enforce new terms to technological devices.

11

Political crisis and Collective intelligence

The ICT platform becomes an «other space» that amplifies the information sharing (what), enhancing the velocity of information spreading (when) crossing the geographical boundaries (where) and catalyzing the contamination (how)

New challenges for crisis management

Transformation of communication paradigms Information management through an a self

adaptive model (unexpected ?) New engagement frameworks among

stakeholders