Shaping Network Society

It is always good to re-read Kevin Kelly’s Rules for the New Economy (article came out in 1997, the book in 1999). My Tec de Monterrey students will remember that we read it in 2003 as “contemporary political theory.” The following passage is taken from the 1999 book:

A trillion dumb chips connected into a hive mind is the hardware. The software that runs through it is the network economy. A planet covered with hyperlinked chips is shrouded with waves of sensibility. Millions of moisture sensors in the fields of farmers shoot up data, hundreds of weather satellites beam down digitized images, thousands of cash registers spit out bit streams, myriad hospital bedside monitors trickle out signals, millions of web sites tally attention, and tens of millions of vehicles transmit their location code; all of this swirls into the web. That matrix of signals is the net.

The following film done by the IBM a-smarter-planet crowd interprets this idea in 2010:

The net is not just humans typing at one another on AOL, although that is a part of it and will be as long as seduction and flaming are enjoyable. Rather, the net is the total collective interaction of a trillion objects and living beings, linked together through air and glass.

… The network economy is already expanding to include new participants: agents, bots, objects, and servers, as well as several billion more humans. We won’t wait for AI to make intelligent systems; we’ll do it with the swarm power of ubiquitous computing and pervasive connections.

The surest way to smartness is through massive dumbness.

The surest way to advance massive connectionism is to exploit decentralized forces—to link the distributed bottom. How do you build a better bridge? Let the parts talk to one another. How do you improve lettuce farming? Let the soil speak to the farmer’s tractors. How do you make aircraft safe? Let the airplanes communicate among themselves and pick their own flight paths. This decentralized approach, known as “free flight,” is a system the FAA is now trying to institute to increase safety and reduce air-traffic bottlenecks at airports.

Kevin Kelly argues that technology is deterministic, but we have choices about how to shape it. And we find out about these choices by using technologies… Kevin Kelly is famous for reframing how we think about the web, the economy, and humanity. So make a cup of coffee and enjoy!

…and while you are at it, if you have not seen it, watch his TED talk on the next 5000 days of the Internet. And if you are missing the soundtrack to your day: listen to Ortholf’s remixes of Edelschwarz’s postmodern interpretations of alpine-punk/turbo-polka.

This is a guest article by Sebastian Haselbeck.

Feedback, to someone my age, is everything, whether we are aware of it or not. Everything we do on the web has instant repercussions, creates immediate reaction, which prompts counter-reaction, back-pedalling or refinement: there is a feedback loop in most things we do on the web. We are used to friends commenting on what we post on Facebook, we assume that emails are replied to within a certain number of hours, we get a rating for our transaction on Ebay, and all this spoils us (The Economist calls us feedback junkies). We grow up in a world where we increasingly expect actions to produce immediate reactions. These expectations are translated into how we see our society at work and what we expect from services in the real world, we want them to work like our Facebook walls. This does not just apply to Fixmystreet.com or Recovery.gov, it applies to a wider change in thinking, and it might explain our disillusionment with politics, because failure to immediately deliver is much worse in today’s society than in the decades before. The standards we apply to the public sector are higher today. Everybody knows what is possible, because we use interactive software, gadgets and technology every day that show us how. A culture of feedback means that the citizens’ expectations need to be a) managed by politics and b) translated into proper governance mechanisms. At this purely theoretical level this has nothing to do with deliberative democracy yet. What we need to wrap our heads around is that we are no longer recipients of societal or public sector action, we are part of a feedback loop. We want feedback for our actions (elections, opinions, our participation in consultation platforms, etc.), and we expect politicians and administrations to appreciate and make use of feedback as well. And in that sense, please comment, I want feedback, please!

Sebastian Haselbeck is a graduate student at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy and webmaster of the Center for Public Management and Governance. He is currently doing an internship at Intellitics Inc., an early e-participation start-up based in San Jose, CA.

Alex Schellong and I wrote down a longer conversation we have been having over the years and published it in the Harvard International Review:

The evolution of modern society is marked by continuous rise of government size, obligations and market interactions. According to Juergen Habermas, the expansion of the state into more and more private affairs led to a slow demise of the public debates over ideas and conflicts—the expression varying with context, history, and technology. Citizen-government interaction is reduced to election periods, interest groups and media-spin.

However, there was opposition to this development. Henry David Thoreau argued in his essay “Civil Disobedience” in the late 18th century, “government is best which governs least.” It implies a government reduced to the minimum in size accountable to its people. Because American government in the 18th century was already on its way to assemble the contrary, Thoreau suggested that if as many people as possible join peaceful protests, their actions would “clog the machinery of the state”, eventually leading to change. However, he did not succeed. And over the next 200 years, the state developed as the most successful organization form, an “imagined community” that structured the lives of most people on this planet. Today, however, with the advent of new network-based social platforms, Thoreau might have been more successful with his attempt to let his voice be heard and activate others for his cause.

In the 21st Century the ‘network’ has transcended the academic context and entered the wider field of the political discourse. Policy networks, networked governance, peer production, massive collaboration, open government, and radical transparency have become part of our political vocabulary that we rely on to legitimize why and how we act collectively. With web technologies and social media, such as interchangeable data-formats, wikis, transparency, and social networking, network society has become part of the mainstream global public policy discourse.

The early 21st Century evoke a Machiavellian time—a time when new technologies and new forms of thinking and governance emerged. So, if we are living in times of transformative change, where Internet technologies and an understanding of society as a network of inclusive, some-how like-minded, outcome-oriented, collaborators emerges we need to ask, what the logic of network society is, to be able to explain our world and predict future developments. Dave Clark, one of the original architects of the Internet, argued in 1971: We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code…

Read more on Macchiavelli 2.0 – Fundamentals of Network Society at the Harvard International Review.

Martin Reeves and his team at the Boston Consulting Group Strategy Institute have been working hard to regain BCG’s position as the world’s foremost strategic thinkers. A tough nut to crack in a time of uncertainty (world economic crisis) and a time of radical transformation (moving from contract to network society).

If strategy is about optimizing choice in situations of strategic interdependence, how do you strategize in and against constantly changing environments? In New Bases of Competitive Advantage, they came up with the concept of adaptive advantage which addresses the challenge by taking strategy to the meta level:

We believe that companies can renew and sharpen their quest for sustainable competitive advantage by pursuing adaptive advantage. Organizations with adaptive advantage recognize the unpredictability of today’s environment and the limits of deductive analysis. They seek to develop the most favorable organizational context in which new approaches to new problems can continually emerge. Adaptive advantage thus enables them to unite reflection with execution and to balance deduction with experimentation.

The meta strategies they outline are: Signal Advantage (detect, capture, and exploit pattern advantage), Systems Advantage (Shape and manage business systems for advantage), People Advantage (leverage human resources beyond the firms boundaries), Social Advantage (leverage new social and ecological expectations for advantage), and Simulation Advantage (simulate for advantage). Read up on their ideas and reflect and discuss what they might mean for your business, brand, and lifeworld.

over the last 20 years, we have internalized Marshall McLuhan’s insight “the medium is the message:”  whenever somebody comes up with something, we jump on the bandwagon and reduce our thinking to 140-character-aphorisms, even as, cultural critics are lamenting the demise of traditional media such the newspaper or the pop album, and the demise of the occident more generally.

The media-realists in us know that function follows form and that the media industries need to adapt. It has become conventional wisdom that if new media allow for disruptive modes of production, discovery, search, or distribution and existing media will wither away. Friedrich Kittler developed the framework to reflect this interrelationship between modes of production and text in his seminal work, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks1800/1900). In later texts he predicts that in network society all forms of texting will converge into a general repository of knowledge. But will that happen?

Even as the google books settlement is making its way through the courts and the Ipad is seen as the savior technology for media industries in general there is a certain discursive silence about the withering away of the book, our all-time favorite medium:

Google, in contrast, tackles them head on, but not before reiterating its big-picture take on the settlement: its digitization efforts are the only thing preventing another Library of Alexandria-style tragedy, and making the results available is a public good that should override petty concerns raised by its competitors. “Approval of the settlement will open the virtual doors to the greatest library in history, without costing authors a dime they now receive or are likely to receive if the settlement is not approved,” Google’s filing reads. “Nor does anyone seriously dispute, though few objectors admit, that to deny the settlement will keep those library doors locked while inviting costly, fragmented litigation that could clog dockets around the country for years.”

Book writing and reading is special. Even bloggers admit to writing just to get the potential book deal. So we need to think the book not as a physical thing, but as a an event. Our respect of the “platonic” idea of a book forces to slow down our thinking to a level where we actually reflect on what we write, when we write. And reading a book is about as close to experiencing flying in second life.

Therefore, it is time to re-brand books as experiences not hold on to the idea of books as products of the “Gutenberg Galaxy.” This change of perspective will allow us to think in terms of unconventional business models. And Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance (there is not one attribute that you find in all games or metaphorically speaking, the rope that holds the boat is not connected by one very long fiber) reminds us that these business models will be different for different books. What does the book mean to you? How do we frame it beyond its material instantiation? What are viable business models for the book of the future?

By: Florian Buhl, Sophie van Huellen, Philipp Müller

Two hours after the polls had closed on June 12, 2009 the re-election of the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was officially announced. Soon thereafter the supporters of Iran’s opposition, especially those of Ahmadinejad’s rival candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, initiated a protest movement in order to get to an inquiry of the election results.

The protests soon were labelled Iran’s “Twitter Revolution” by Western commentators because the demonstrators made use of web technologies, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, in a twofold manner: On the one hand, the online social media, functioned as a tool to organize and coordinate protests. On the other hand, the web technologies played a decisive role in rising awareness for the demonstrations in the international public sphere. Foreign traditional news media had to rely on the information, pictures and videos posted by Iranian protesters on platforms of the social web, because news correspondents and journalists in Iran were deterred to produce their own content by the Iranian regime. Clearly the interplay of web technologies, the global mass media, and politics in the Iranian case are of great interest, therefore, one needs to ask, how can we analyze the interplay between social networking technologies, traditional mass media, and politics?  [...read on]

Please follow the link to our draft paper,  based on our research project on the interplay of social networking technologies, traditional mass media, and revolutionary politics. We are looking forward to your feedback!

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 the Internet for Peace Manifesto states,

We have finally realized that the internet is much more than a network of computers. It is an endless web of people. Men and women from every corner of the globe are connecting to one another, thanks to the biggest social interface ever known to humanity.Digital culture has laid the foundations for a new kind of society. And this society is advancing dialogue, debate and consensus through communication. Because democracy has always flourished where there is openness, acceptance, discussion and participation. And contact with others has always been the most effective antidote against hatred and conflict.That’s why the internet is a tool for peace. That’s why anyone who uses it can sow the seeds of nonviolence. And that’s why the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to the net. A Nobel for each and every one of us.

Wide-ranging opportunities for peer production, low transaction costs of participation and prominence of non-instrumental and non-material motivations can potentially transform the social world into more creative, collaborative and active (see Lessig 2008, Shirky 2009, Benkler 2006). Due to this interplay of factors the social reality is transformed from a Read-Only world to Read-Write world. In the latter, people shift from being passive consumers to acting as enthusiastic creators. As argued by Shirky, “revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies – it happens when society adopts new behaviors” (2009, p. 160). Technology, however powerful it might be, cannot master the change alone. Technology has to be adopted and used by people, only then it can become ubiquitous and embedded in the everyday reality of society.

Although we witness a plethora of new digital phenomena on a daily basis, we are still lacking an overarching framework to think how these new technologies will transform our cultures, politics, our lives, and even personalities. This understanding and reflection occurs “on the go”, as we are forced to react to change and as we try to craft it. We face numerous questions along the way as technologies shape our lifeworlds and our lifeworlds shape our cultures and politics.

Culture, Lifeworlds, and Politics

Culture is a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. Georg Simmel defined the concept as “the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history.” Lifeworld is the social scientific term that reminds us of the incommensurability between academic description and the human experience social life. It is a term that asks us to think culture not only through the systemic perspective of the outside observer, but to hermeneutically engage with the subjects of our objects of analysis. As Habermas (1984: 117) conceptualizes it,

society is conceived from the perspective of acting subjects as the lifeworld of a social group. In contrast, from the observer’s perspective of someone not involved, society can be conceived only as a system of actions such that each action has a functional significance according to its contribution to the maintenance of the system.

Politics is the concept that deals with questions that are described as questions of choice for collectivities (Bartelson 2001; Anderson 1983). It can be circumscribed by the terms community and authority that can be ostensibly related to the questions “Who is member?” (the question of community or identity) and “who gets to decide?” (the question of authority).

From Read-Write to Read-Only and to Read-Write Reloaded

The concept of Read-Only (RO) and Read-Write (RW) was proposed by Larry Lessig in his book “Remix” (2008). As he suggested, human culture has for many centuries existed in Read-Write format, where one would not only perceive, but also create and change the culture. Culture was read-write ever since homo sapiens discovered her ability to paint, play music, and sculpt figurines such as the Venus of Schelklingen in the Swabian Alb 40.000 years ago. As stated in Wikipedia, the ultimate collaborative project:

The Swabian Alb region has a number of caves that have yielded mammoth ivory artifacts of the Upper Paleolithic period, totalling about twenty-five items to date. These include the lion-headed figure of Hohlenstein-Stadel and an ivory flute found at Geißenklösterle, dated to 36,000 years ago.^[1] This concentration of evidence of full behavioral modernity in the period of 40 to 30 thousand years ago, including figurative art and instrumental music, is unique worldwide and Conard speculates that the bearers of the Aurignacian culture in the Swabian Alb may be credited with the invention, not just of figurative art and music, but possibly, early religion as well.^[2][3] In a distance of 70cm to the Venus figurine Conard’s team found a flute made from a vulture bone.^[4]

It was only the 20^th century that has shifted the paradigm of cultural development to Read Only – a culture, where individuals are only consumers.

There are some technological reasons for the shift to RO that took place in the 20^th century. Such inventions as phonograph, TV, radio, CD, VHS, DVD enabled wide distribution of culture products and established the principle of delivering culture to people packed in copies. A TV provides a copy of a talk-show. A CD provides a copy of a song. A DVD provides a copy of a film. If in the previous centuries culture was distributed freely and cultural products were easily built upon (like fairytales, told by people to each other without being written down and with possibility to add or change details; like folklore music, sang by people in private circles and on holidays, composed by nobody in particular and by everyone in general), the 20^th century technologies have emphasized and boosted up the growth of copyrighted culture, provided in fixed and unchangeable form.

Now, in the 21^st century, the world has the chance to go back to RW culture and creativity (Lessig 2008, p. 252), but on steroids. Read-Write combined with the power of a global broadcasting platform. The logic of active participation renders obsolete the image of an individual, nurtured by the pop culture of the 20^th century: the image of a consumer. The tools for this shift are provided by the new Web, which favors free creation, voluntary project commitment and collaborative effort; where simple users can become active netizens (Zittrain 2008, p. 161). Through its participatory effects, the new Web fosters the reality of active creation, not passive consuming. Today people “are gratified in significant ways by the ability to play an active role in generating content, rather than only passively consuming that which is created for them by others (Harrison and Barthel 2009, p. 157). There is “substantially less dependence on the commercial mass media of the twentieth century” (Benkler 2006, p. 9). As the costs for participation in the new Web fall and as the complexity of  handling technologies decreases, more and more individuals are empowered to become co-creators of our cultures and can have their voice heard. This, however, necessitates also a new way of critical listening.

An Attack on Professionalism

This results in the rise of an amateur culture. In the new Web it is not necessary to pay professors and experts to start an encyclopedia – instead, it is easier to harness the potential of individual knowledge, as Wikipedia did. It is not necessary to pay professional photographers to obtain pictures of a certain event – pictures of nearly everything are available for free and are easily searchable in folksonomies on free photosharing websites like Flickr. It is not necessary to buy expensive machines and spend money on marketing campaigns and personnel to create a newspaper – everyone can be a press outlet of his own with the use of blogging platforms since today “the mass amateurization of publishing undoes the limitations inherent in having a small number of traditional press outlets” (Shirky 2009, p. 65). It is not even necessary to turn on TV to get updates on burning news – livestream of first-hand information is available on Twitter and blogging websites. Similar limitations are destroyed in other spheres.

As a result, professional culture is challenged. A professional is a member of a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, who does not need supervision. Think of doctors or lawyers as classical examples. As a patient, you need to trust your lawyer or doctor, because there can be no absolute proof of her quality, therefore, she needs to convince through secondary attributes (being well-dressed, a fancy office) and/or professional codes of honor. Being member of a profession of course is always exclusive and normally connected to better-than-average incomes. With the democratization of tools of the trade professionalism is under attack.

Firstly, it is not needed in the amount it was needed earlier. As statistics shows, traditional media are suffering losses, laying down the personnel and generally loosing the competition to online media, including the ones run by amateurs (see Keen 2008). Secondly, professionals are not considered as reliable as before. If information, cultural products and meaningful content can be provided in the same (if not bigger) amount, faster and easier than before, there remains little ground for professional culture to preserve its monopoly.The result is the formation of more diverse, more vibrant, more active social universe. Remix culture of improving, changing, sampling, mixing derivative works aspires to replace the culture of permission, that existed before.

Learning to Trust

The new Web stimulates active engagement of people, impacts their lifeworlds and leads to “the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts – peer production of information, knowledge, and culture” (Benkler 2006, p. 5). This active engagement expands the limits of our experience of culture and politics – it changes individuals that participate. Most of us remember the night when we moved from Read-Only to Read-Write, for some it is an experience similar to a first date or to first driving a car -  it might be writing for Wikipedia, posting photos on Flickr or rating links on Digg, with each and every click a person does in the modern Web, he or she is adding value to the community. Voluntary entries in Wikipedia have helped to build the world’s most consulted encyclopedia within a very short time span. Ratings of goods on Amazon.com help other consumers to select products and learn about items in categories they are interested in. Tagging photos on Flickr or music on Last.fm helps other people to find what they are looking for.

Distributed Leadership

It has to be acknowledged that this type of production is not dramatically new, since people were getting together to produce collectively since primordial times. However, only Internet technologies have made the work flow of this type of collective action easily manageable and allow cooperation across both space and time. It means we need different leadership skills,  leaders that have the ability of “convincing people who care a little to care more” (Shirky 2009, p. 181), leaders who can design open processes and engage distributed collaborators to contribute little pieces to bigger projects. Web technologies enable the  decrease of transaction costs of production and participation. Humans make them happen.

Just in time for the EU minsterial conference in Malmö, John Gotze brought together some of the most prominent thought leaders, including Don Tapscott, Tim O’Reilly and Lawrence Lessig, in the emerging field of Government 2.0 (“thinking government as a platform”) in the book State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards, which is available for free download.

In my chapter (p. 275-282), Open Value Creation as a Strategic Management Approach, I argue that

[...] The 
idea 
of 
government
 (or 
business)
 as 
a 
platform
 necessitates 
an
 open
 value
 creation
 process. 
Open 
Value 
Creation 
consists 
of 
Open
 Policy Making 
(participation) 

and 
an 
Open
 Value 
Chain (collaboration). 
The
 distinction
 is 
slightly 
arbitrary
 but 
useful. 
It 
allows
 us 
to differentiate
 between
 coming
 up
 with
 a
 value
 generating
 process
 (policy) 
and
 repeatedly
 creating 
the value 
(value
chain).

Open
 policy
 making aims
 to
 open
 all
 aspects
 of
 the
 policy process
 (initiation,
 formulation,
 implementation,
 evaluation)
to
outside
inputs
and
scrutiny.
It
assumes
 that
 this 
allows
 better
 informed
 policy
making
 that 
is 
more 
legitimate and 
less 
costly.

The
 open
 value
 chain opens
 the
 implementation
 process
 (inputs, 
process,
 outputs, 
impact, 
outcome) 
to 
outside 
contributions
 under
 the
 assumption
 that
 a
 co‐produced
 public
 value
 is 
less
 costly
and 
more
 effective. [...]

Enjoy the book and let us start the discussion!

Guest-Blog by Ralf Leiteritz (now an international relations professor at the Universidad de los Andes).

…on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall I’ve come to think about my old country again. Seeing a short compilation of songs about the wall or more precisely its fall in 89, I thought about compiling my personal top 10/11 list of songs from/about East Germany. Not that my generation really listened a lot to East German bands – we were much more in tune with Western (West German, US and UK) music during the late 1980s. However, a few songs still stuck in my mind, mostly from around the time of the Wende (1989/90).

So here goes: 11 songs that bring me back to the GDR (actually Nr. 7 was from a West German artist), accompanied by some comments, plus a bonus track from….New York of all places. Hope you enjoy it!

1. Sandow: Born in the GDR (1990)
(makes – not so friendly – references to the sport star Nr. 1 in East Germany – ice skater Katarina Witt and the concert that Bruce Spingsteen gave 1988 in East Berlin in front of ….160,000 people)

2. City: Am Fenster (1978)
(with an awesome violin solo at the beginning)

3. Karat: Ueber sieben Bruecken musst Du geh’n (?),
(the song was made somewhat more famous in West Germany in a cover version by Peter Maffay)

4. Feeling B: Wir wollen immer artig sein (1990),

(half of today’s Rammstein come from this Nr.1 punk band in East Germany)

5. Electric Beat Crew: Here we come (1989),
(Hip Hop from East Germany!!! Only song from an East German band I know in English)

6. Karusell: Als ich fortging (1988),
(wonderful melody and lyrics written by a local poet – Gisela Steineckert)

7. Udo Lindenberg: Sonderzug nach Pankow (1983),
(in fact, Udo Lindenberg finally did manage to sing in the “Palace of the Republic” in East Berlin in 1987)

8. Nina Hagen: Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (1978),
(who would have had thought that – Nina Hagen grew up in East Berlin; she must have been 18 years old or so when she recorded this song…)

9. Herbst in Peking: Bakschischrepublik (1990),
(the hymn of alternative East German rock during the Wende)

10. Die Skeptiker: Strahlende Zukunft (1990),
(a band labelled the East German “Dead Kennedys” – I think for the (political) quality of their lyrics they’d probably better be described as the equivalent of “The Clash”)

Bonus track:
11. Grandmaster Melle Mel: Beat Street Theme (1986),
(the movie “Beat Street” about life, rap and hip hop music in New York was shown in GDR film theaters in 1986 or 87 and revolutionized the local, unofficial music scene – lots of breakdance groups imitating the moves from the movie sprung up like mushrooms)