Director Business Development Public Sector at CSC Germany. Author of "Machiavelli.net". Proud father of three. Welcome to my blog.Tweeting the Revolution
Britta Glennon from the Chicago Policy Review, on our Oxford Internet Policy article:
…Philipp Mueller and Sophie van Huellen, in their article “A Revolution in 140 Characters: Reflecting on the Role of Social Networking Technologies in the 2009 Iranian Post-Election Protests,” attempt to analyze the role and impact of social media in the 2009 Tehran protests. They present two possible hypotheses for what happened: the “power-shift” hypothesis and the “media-shift” hypothesis.
The “power-shift” hypothesis argues that “many-to-many” media such as Facebook and Twitter empowers the masses, changing the power structure in society and resulting, in this case, in widespread protest. Mueller and van Huellen are skeptical of this hypothesis, arguing that social media probably did not reach the mass population within Iran…
Reflecting Recent Readings
The festive season allowed me to reflect on some of the books that I have been reading in 2012.
I have been trying to put my finger on the relationship between our day-to-day experiences and the more fundamental transformations our lifeworlds and societies are going through.
I was particularily fascinated by Stephan Greenblatt’s “The Swerve” (2011), a book on Poggio Bracciolini’s re-discovery of Lucretius’ (Epicurean) poem ‘On the Nature of Things’ in 1417. Greenblatt describes how this poems return to circulation changed the course of history, by influencing the founders of modern thinking. A fantastic perspective on the early days of humanism, even if it is a bit individual-centric (as rightfully pointed out by my mom).
Closer to our reality today is Florian Illies’ “1913″ (2012), a book that defies traditional forms of writing fiction. Illies takes the perspective of an omniscient observer, describing from a neutral stance, chronologically the small and big events that happened to the protagonists of modernity in the months January to December 1913. By choosing his cast carefully, e.g. Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Gottfried Benn, Pablo Picasso, Louis Armstrong, Oskar Kokoshka, and Adolf Hitler play bigger and smaller parts, he paints a continent that struggles with very fundamental questions of meaning, without realizing that the Damocles sword of 1914 is hanging over it.
This argument resonates with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s epistemological manifesto “Antifragile – Things that Gain from Disorder” (2012). This erudite diatribe against main stream social science thinking argues that we are missing most of the important picture, when we ignore that what we do not dare to name: things that get stronger, when under stress. By introducing the term “antifragility” into the debate, he enables us to think about systems that become stronger, when introduced to stress and a certain amounts of randomness. This helps us, both to understand the past and gives us toolsets to think our futures. An important read, especially, for those of us interested in systems integration: His ideas about designing loosely coupled systems that allow a certain amount of randomness offers important advice for anybody building the ‘secure-open’ cloud/big data ecosystems of today/tomorrow. Could the argument be made in less than 850 pages? Probably.
This is what Krallmann/Zapp (eds.) focus on in “Bausteine einer vernetzten Verwaltung” (2012) where the bring together a group of academics, consultants, and policy maker to outline the fundamentals of a networked (Weberian) bureaucracy at the nexus between information sciences, juridical thinking, and administrative process. I was delighted to contribute a chapter on “open statecraft” to the volume, where I argue that we should think of openess as a means and not an end, in order to benefit from the potential of digitally networked systems. Just last week, I finally dared to re-read my own book “Machiavelli.net” (2012) and somehow actually enjoyed.
A book that really changed my thinking about the reality of political processes was Martin Plaut’s and Paul Holden’s “Who rules South Africa” (2012), a contemporary historical perspective on the complex political economy of this beautiful country. It’s very careful analytical approach allows the reader to understand the tension between historically grown centers of power and their cultural/institutional counterparts.
I have the hope that Don Winslow’s “Kings of Cool” (2012) and “Savages” (2010) will play a role in changing our thinking of Mexican-US relations in the long run. Its Californian’ North of the border perspective on the Marihuana trade is a foil to Roberto Bolano’s “2666″ (2004) reflection on the unsolved and ongoing serial murders of Ciudad Juárez (and on post-modern literature in general). An interesting tidbit of an argument in the Kings of Cool was that with the return of Special Forces units from Afghanistan, the Mexican question will take a more prominent role in US policy – something Stratfor only picked up much later in the year.
Mark Owens’ memoir “No Easy Day” (2012) recounting the raid that killed Osama bin Laden was no easy read. My personal take on it was that it does give interesting insights into the bureaucracy/administration of targeted killings and it forces us to address several very hard ethical and legal dilemmas.
Ending on a lighter note, I very much enjoyed Clayton Christensen’s slightly cheesy “How will you measure your life?” (2012), a book based on his 2010 HBS graduation speech. No matter if you fully agree with his moral stance, using such frameworks to evaluate your life, is a meaningful exercise we should all come back to from time to time. It resonated nicely with the gerontologist Karl Pillemer’s “30 Lessons for Living” (2011), advice from more than 100o Americans over the age of 65, which was given to me for my 40th Birthday.
I’d be delighted to hear from you in the comments, what books touched your hearts and made you think this year.
…on my way to Berlin
…this week will be interesting. On Tuesday, I get to speak at Germany’s premier conference on the transformation of public administration, Effizienter Staat 2012 (#estaat12). In the afternoon, I’ll present my new book machiavelli.net – strategy for our open world and in the evening we will present our edited volume “Bausteine für eine vernetzte Verwaltung.” On Wednesday, I get to hang out with Angela Merkel in the Office of the Chancelor, where CSC is teaching high school girls how to progam apps at the Girls’ Day.
#OpenGov in Germany, Quo Vadis?
A complex crossing of historical forces
Nationality, nation-ness, and nationalism are cultural artifacts whose creation toward the end of the 18th C was the spontaneous distillation of a complex ”crossing” of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became ”modular,” capable of being transplanted to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a variety of political and ideological constellations.
The Social Logic of Open Government
Germany as an interesting case
Transparency
Participation
Collaboration
Conclusion
Strategy for the N2N World
as I am preparing my keynote for the opening of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute on Internet and Society kickoff conference, I have been reflecting on the open statecraft research program.
Five years ago, in 2006, O’Reilly (who earlier had coined the term web 2.0) called for government 2.0 or „government as a platform.” In 2009, President Obama published the Memo on Open Government and defined in Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration the taxonomy of legitimate open governmental action. In 2011 the Open Government Partnership was launched at the UN General Assembly and many if not most governments on this planet have started to develop explicit open government policies or have included the vocabulary of open government in their policies.
Government as a platform: or why n2n is different
At its most fundamental level, “government as a platform” alludes to the condition of possibility of governance in n-to-n media. N-to-n can be many-to-many, as posited by Clay Shirky (2008), but also few-to-few, and few-to-many, and many-to-few. However, all are fundamentally different than one-to-many media, the form of communication that we have become accustomed to in the 20th Century and require new forms of governance if their potential is to be realized.
Value Creation in digitally mediated network societies
This is very relevant for our political communities, because today, the conditions of possibility of media play such an important role in structuring possible forms of governance: In the 21st Century all social value creation (including economic production) is mediated through digital networks. Therefore, even the most material aspects of social life is not thinkable independent of digital communication and this in turn amplifies the impact its logical conditions of possibility have on instantiations of forms of governance. This goes way beyond the idea of empowering citizens and thereby increasing the legitimacy of our existing governmental institutions.
The n2n research program: rethinking organization, strategy, and leadership
Technology does not cause societal change. But it changes what we can do. On a n2n platform processes can be structured so that they can make use of contributions across space and time, allow for contributions that are granular and modular, and that can outsource quality control to the community or institutionalize it in algorithmic solutions. We need to rethink:
- organization (moving beyond classical transaction cost economics),
- strategy (moving beyond competitive dynamic),
- leadership (moving beyond transactional models)
A quick note on the state of the art on the art of opening the state
25 years ago, in 1986, Fritz Kratochwil and Gerald Ruggie reminded us of the historicity of the state, by pointing at the hypocrisy of theories of statehood that assumed ontological inter-subjectivism (imagined communities), while at the same time positing epistemological positivism (laws-of-nature). It took 20 years for that realization to sink in, but in the early 21st Century, we (as humanity) got it and started to explore concepts of governance beyond statehood: The global governance discourse, the supranational governance ideas, and the emergence of multi-stakeholder governance processes come to mind.
Five years ago, in 2006, O’Reilly (who earlier had coined the term web 2.0) called for government 2.0 or „government as a platform.” In 2009, President Obama published the Memo on Open Government and defined in Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration the taxonomy of legitimate open governmental action. In 2011 the Open Government Partnership was launched at the UN General Assembly and many if not most governments on this planet have started to develop explicit open government policies or have included the vocabulary of open government in their policies.
“government as a platform” or why many-to-many is different
At its most fundamental level, “government as a platform” alludes to the condition of possibility of governance in n-to-n media. N-to-n can be many-to-many, as posited by Clay Shirky (2008), but also few-to-few, and few-to-many, and many-to-few. However, all are fundamentally different than one-to-many media, the form of communication that we have become accustomed to in the 20th Century and require new forms of governance if their potential is to be realized. On a many-to-many platform processes can be structured so that they can make use of contributions across space and time, allow for contributions that are granular and modular, and that can outsource quality control to the community or institutionalize it in algorithmic solutions.
This is very relevant for our political communities, because today, the conditions of possibility of media play such an important role in structuring possible forms of governance: In the 21st Century all social value creation (including economic production) is mediated through digital networks. Therefore, even the most material aspects of social life is not thinkable independent of digital communication and this in turn amplifies the impact its logical conditions of possibility have on instantiations of forms of governance. This goes way beyond the idea of empowering citizens and thereby increasing the legitimacy of our existing governmental institutions.
It means, we need to rethink organization, strategy, and leadership.
Shaping network society: a quick note on my new job
Most of you know that starting May 1st I moved to CSC, one of the big global IT systems integration and outsourcing players. It has been an amazing first three months and I am looking forward to writing down some of my experiences. It is thrilling and exciting to see the interplay between network technologies, processes, and governance unfold as we try to shape our emerging network societies.
Expect more soon…
Power-Shift or Media-Shift? The Twitter Revolutions in Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt
Are we observing a tectonic change in the Arab world, parallel only to the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe 1990? Are Facebook and Twitter the equivalent of the levee en masse in post-revolutionary France? Or is Egypt’s just-in-time Internet blocking working?
The Egyptian, Tunesian, and Iranian protesters were not the first to utilize social media to organize and amplify their voices. During the French riots in 2005, in the Zimbabwean opposition uprising in 2008, in the Greek protests in late 2008 and during the youth riots in Budapest 2006, social media played important roles. In the Ukrainian 2004 Orange Revolution, flashmobs, organized online, contributed to the revolution’s success. During the Greek riots, Twitter was used massively. And a first reading of the case seems to suggest that the spread of sympathy worldwide among the Internet community triggered protests in many European cities. The impact on the international level has caused scholars to speak about the rise of a new global phenomenon: the “networked protest,” a phenomenon for which the Internet is valued as being crucial for its occurrence. Social networking technologies are involved in many of today’s social movements and seem to transform traditional modes of protest politics. Many-to-many media enable a new form of collective action never observed before.
One-to-Many and Many-to-Many
What makes the decisive difference between traditional mass-media and networked social media is the logic at work. Traditional Western mass media is exclusively broadcast media, i.e., one-to-many media, where direct feedback is impossible. In many-to-many media, the emitter and the recipient coincide. This theoretically allows the empowerment of new social actors. But it is more complicated, as media production in a networked realm is malleable: It can include “information broadcasting,” i.e., sent from one-to-many (e.g., blogging, micro-blogging such as Twitter), it can be a “conversation” between many (a forum or social networking), or it can be a “project” that is collaboratively produced by many only to thereafter be broadcast (Wikipedia, Indymedia, Ushahidi). The difference between “conversations” and “projects” is that socially produced conversations are not purposeful in the sense of generating a common output, while collaborative production concentrates on the output of the collaboration. The latter two are naturally exclusive to many-to-many media, as social actors within the network produce media for other social actors within the network, while broadcasting can take place on many-to-many or one-to-many platforms (television, radio, print).
Does it Change the Powerscape?
What is missing in existing studies of the revolutionary potential of many-to-many is a persuasive framework to describe the interplay between traditional media, social media and power relations in society. In an article under review at Oxford Internet Policy Journal, Sophie van Hüllen and I argue that there are two possible heuristics: The power-shift and the media-shift hypothesis.
The Power-Shift Hypothesis
The power-shift hypothesis assumes that many-to-many media will empower actors successfully utilizing social media. The notion of power itself is, in reference to Max Weber’s definition, understood as the ability of a social actor to enforce her will, even against the will of other actors. To better understand the interaction of many-to-many media and traditional power relations, we differentiate between two relevant power patterns: Coercive power (Weber) and structural power (cf. Foucault’s or Castells’s notion of power through “discourse”). Coercive power is caused by a superiority based on physical or synthetic advantages of one actor over the other. Power can be exercised by either fear or physical violence. Structural power is the fixation of power relations through institutions and culture in which social actors are dominated by others. The construction of institutions and cultures is channeled through communication. The power to influence the meaning and value defining process is labeled as agenda setting power. The ability to control social media, i.e., the construction of meaning, should then lead to changes in agenda-setting and institutional power arrangements as we are possibly seeing in Tunesia and Egypt (not in Iran).
The Media-Shift Hypothesis
The media-shift hypothesis assumes that the Internet and more specifically the mainstreaming of many-to-many media, such as blogging, collaborative editing, and social networking, has changed how we produce and consume information on all levels. However, it is not that many-to-many media is superseding mass media, but rather entering a complex interplay with mass media, where it is substantially impacting the media cycle, but not automatically altering social power relations. The hypothesis assumes that many-to-many media are closely embedded into the traditional channels of mass media. Thus the media-shift hypothesis reminds us that the use of a different media does not automatically entail a power-shift. Web 2.0 technologies introduce a new “mediascape,” but no new “powerscape.”
In Conclusion
Both the power-shift and the media-shift hypotheses are relevant heuristics to understand the impact of social networking technologies on revolutionary politics today. Social media are relevant for agenda setting, organization, coordination, motivation, and the provision of real-time information. Traditional Western mass media, today are dependent on online social media platforms to report about the protests. However, mass-media journalism is not displaced by the network public sphere. Journalistic processing adds value for the audience. Similar configurations likely will be observed in the next years. That is why the development of theories of the public sphere should be promoted in the sense of that coexistence of both mass media and social media with their respective modes of production. Clearly, we are confronted with a complex rearrangement of existing power structures and in need of frameworks that allow us to think these through intelligently. Until we have a fully-developed theory of our networked societies, heuristics such as the power-shift or the media-shift hypothesis can be helpful to describe, explain, and predict collective action. Even if the empirical evidence suggests that today many-to-many media have transformed the mediascape, but not the powerscape, we are shooting at moving targets. We need to carefully develop heuristics that allow us to understand and explain the complex interplay of social media and power politics.
Read the article by clicking here…
Rethinking Copyright for Social Production
In the early 21st Century, social production is starting to play a major role in how we live our lives and create wealth – just like the feudal system was superseded by capitalism, social production is increasing its footprint in our economies and societies.
Social production on a grand scale has become possible because of digitization and network technologies that allow us to collaborate across space and time. However, its success is not technologically determined. Social production needs production processes with interfaces to potential contributors that allow granular and modular contributions, checks and balances that ensure quality control. And process managers that are able to engage outside contributors without relying on the classical ‘modern’ modes of aligning interests, such as contracts, monetary incentives, or force. And a legal framework that fosters it.
Historically, social production has always existed as a mode of collective action, the 17th Century idea of the invisible college is only one example. However, only in the 21st Century have we developed the transaction cost reducing network technologies and the open source mindset that is making social production the default mode of creating value. No new business model is possible in 2010, if it does not at least include a social aspect.Therefore, any strategist today needs to ask, “how do structure the value web or transform my existing value chain so that I leverage the potential of openness?”
Copyright and Social Production
The value added of most products today takes place in the digital realm, therefore result of our processes normally are digital products, covered under existing copyright law. However, our intellectual property rights regimes and organizational cultures have not yet been adapted to facilitate social production and its results. The GPL and other open licensing models are “hacks” to our existing ‘one-person, one-product’ intellectual property rights framework, not a fundamental rethinking that is necessary when confronted with such a fundamental challenge as the incorporation of social production into our network economies and societies.
Therefore, we need to address the following questions:
- How do base metaphors shape the grammar of our normative thinking on creativity and value creation?
- What alternative base metaphors could be imagined as foundational for a value creation framework?
- When talking social production, what is the original position, from which we analyze questions of value creation and distribution of benefits?
- How do we translate these political theory questions into legal principles?
- How do we operationalize legal principles into a functioning system?
- How can we evaluate economic and societal effects of such a counter-factual system?
