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In networked publics, power based on network positionality replaces media power. How can we design networked publics to improve parity? I present @TheTweetserve, a prototype solution.
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Designing Digital Publics for
Participatory Parity Sebastian Benthall
UC Berkeley I School
The talk
● A model for how inequality and social influence are related
● Public sphere -> publics -> networked public● Inequality of social network formation● Hacking social network formation with a
cool Twitter bot● Invitation to shape design with GitHub
tickets
Equality:we like it*
* assumed for this talk
A theory of inequality
● Everyone’s talking about how unequal U.S. society is
● Everyone’s talking about what the “real cause” of inequality is
● Claim: Inequality is complex.
Money
Representation
Beauty
Leisure
Social Status
Influence
Education
Brains
Organization
A theory of inequality
● Lots of ways power and privilege reinforce each other
● We can dispute the details but…● ...it’s worth trying to make an impact by
targeting one piece at a time
We can build an equitable
public sphere
A story (from Habermas, 1962)
● Absolutist monarchal states overthrown by capitalists - the bourgeoisie
● They communicated freely and came to rational agreement that guided politics… The public sphere. It was great.
● Until consumerism makes advertising more important than politics, so media power!
A critique (from Fraser, 1992)
● Ok yeah bourgeois men did that● The people they excluded (e.g. women,
working class) got together to agree on different politics -- counterpublics
● The public sphere is not equalizing common ground, but a nexus of unequal publics
Network publics (boyd, 2010)
● Social network sites are publics● Mediated by the network technology
the uneven shape of social networks
Kurakin, 2004 http://www.alexeikurakin.org/main/lecture4Ext.html
Hong, http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~shhong/scalefree.htm
from Barabasi, Linked
preferential attachment
the rich get richer
Networked power (Castells,2009)
● In networked society, our communication networks are the channels of power
● Power based on position within a network is networked power
● Unless designed otherwise, networked publics will be highly unequal!
agenda setting
reframing
In networked publics,networked power
succeedsmedia power
This will reinforce existing power
dynamics
Money
Representation
Beauty
Leisure
Social Status
Influence
Education
Brains
Organization
So what can we do?Influence
So what can we do?Influence
Money
Representation
Beauty
Leisure
Social Status
Education
Brains
Organization
Influence
Money
Representation
Beauty
Leisure
Social Status
Education
Brains
Organization
Influence
Money
Representation
Beauty
Leisure
Social Status
Education
Brains
Organization
Influence
Money
Representation
Beauty
Leisure
Social Status
Education
Brains
Organization
Influence
Money
Representation
Beauty
Leisure
Social Status
Education
Brains
Organization
Influence
culture hackInfluence
Algorithms
● Networked publics use relevance algorithms (Gillespie, 2012) to direct information
● Building alternative infrastructure for political reasons -- infrastructure-based activism (Sauter, 2013)
● Could we reverse this process with something else… an irrelevance algorithm?
sure we can
Designing for parity
Example: The Listserve
● NYU ITP project by Begley et al.● An “email lottery” -- once a day a subscriber
is chosen to write the rest of the list● ~25k members and great parity properties!
@TheTweetserve
@TheTweetserve v0.1
● Periodically, find all the users who both○ mentioned @TheTweetserve recently○ follow @TheTweetserve
● Retweet the most recent status of one of them at random
#revolutionary?!?!
An invitation
● This is just a proof of concept● The real point is an invitation to praxis● If you have ideas about how it could be
better, please file a ticket on GitHub● GitHub is like a networked public of people
that build your networked publics
fork-friendly andpatches welcome!
