Shaping Network Society

——————— As I am wrapping up my time at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, it is time to write down some of the lessons I learned here at Erfurt University, where Martin Luther developed some of the frameworks for Information Revolution I. The Willy Brandt School is a brave experiment in bringing together [...]

By: Philipp Mueller and Violetta Pleshakova In 2010, it has become a truism that culture, lifeworlds, and our political economies are transforming. It is obvious that the Web is impacting society, bringing in new lifestyles, attitudes, values, work patterns and relationships – it is now even officially (unofficially) nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. As [...]

As we are realizing that network society is contingent on technology, but not on specific technologies (such as email, friendster, myspace, facebook, twitter), we are learning to work and play across and beyond specific social media. For me, the integration of my blog with twitter and facebook has led to a conversation that takes place [...]

Carl Malamud is a public domain advocate heading public.resource.org. His approach is the publication of public domain information from local, state, and federal government agencies. Over the years the publication of governmental data has become a surprisingly lucrative business for niche publishers. The gain of open access to the general public is distributed, while the [...]

Radical transparency is the hottest new management approach in business and government. It has become possible because of open data standards, search, discovery, filtering, and visualization. However, why would you want go “naked” or radically transparent? 1. Transparency increases legitimacy. Because transparency is possible, it is expected, so there will be punishment for non-transparent ventures. [...]

danah boyd has just posted an academic article (under review) on retweeting at her blog: We wanted to explore retweeting as a conversational practice. In doing so, we highlight just how bloody messy retweeting is. Often, folks who are deeply embedded in the culture think that there are uniform syntax conventions, that everyone knows what [...]

The Greek verb κυβερνάω [kubernáo] which means to steer was used for the first time in a metaphorical sense by Plato. As we are moving into network society, we need to ask, what are the conditions of possibility of steering? The simple answer is Larry Lessig’s “code is law” (1998), which argues that governance can [...]

Requests for Comments are the condition of possibility for Internet Politics and today is their 40th Birthday. So do read Stephen Crockers Editorial in the NYTimes. When the R.F.C.’s were born, there wasn’t a World Wide Web. Even by the end of 1969, there was just a rudimentary network linking four computers at four research [...]

I spent all day yesterday in the Residenz in Salzburg, listening to amazingly smart Austrian, Swiss, and German government officials talking about how public administration is transforming. The event was organized by the Austrian Society for Public Administration. If you follow this blog, you know that my assumption is that we are undergoing a radical [...]