Shaping Network Society

As we are watching the global stimulus packages being implemented, it makes sense to step back and reflect on comparable interventions. Germany has invested around 4% of its GDP every year since 1990 into the reconstruction of former East Germany. This amounts to around $ 2 trillion a number comparable to the $ 5 trillion that countries worldwide pledged in their stimulus packages. Peter Gumbel develops the analogy in Time Magazine,

In the past year, as the world economy has plunged into recession, governments have pledged to spend as much as $5 trillion of taxpayers’ money to ward off a prolonged slump. For the most part, these massive programs are based on little more than theory: nobody advocating them has experienced a downturn as dramatic as this one. But Dagmar Szabados has seen such spending before — she knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a gigantic fiscal infusion. Szabados, a chemist by training, is the mayor of Halle, a mid-sized town in the middle of what used to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the formerly communist eastern part of Germany. Since the Berlin Wall fell, the old GDR has been showered with money. Overall, some $2 trillion has been pumped in — the equivalent of about 4% of Germany’s economic output every year.

What do you think of it? Was it a success? I live in Erfurt, a stunningly beautiful medieval city in the East that clearly profited from the process, but what does that mean? What answer would satisfy such a question?

in May 2009 many of “us” are getting social media and do believe that “web 2.0″ has the potential to be a game changer. However, the critique of the new way of organizing collective action is to be taken seriously. Some of the points policy makers from Austria, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, and the United States have voiced to me in the last weeks are:

- in my country/company, labor laws do not allow government officials to work at 10 pm at night and if the write an email from home, we have a serious problem.

- in my country/company, journalists do not get social media, so we had to buy them 100 copies of Clay Shirky’s Here comes everybody (2008) so that they would understand our politicians point.

- in my country/company, maneuvering the tension between privacy and transparency is so complicated, we would not be able to profit of increased transparency.

- in my country/company the politicians do not get what they could gain from increased transparency, collaboration, and participation.

What are the main objections you have heard in the last months? What are your counter-arguments? What will happen?