Shaping Network Society

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?

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 in hyperspace online and offline in lectures, at conferences, and on trails in the Alps. So as an exercise in such intertextual hyper-reflexivity, let me mirror my last 20 tweets (often links to my blog) on my blog and then twitter about it:

1. @zephoria is calling for epistemological open-mindedness when analyzing social networks: http://tinyurl.com/nel2k5 #networksociety2 minutes ago from TwitterFox

2. @chr1sa Will professional journalists become extinct? The Spiegel interviews Chris Anderson with naive indignity: http://tinyurl.com/macgqfabout 21 hours ago from TwitterFox

3. @arenda @rmmdc @tocat @kohenari thank u for ur tweets on socialtheory/socialmedia: http://bit.ly/muSyo need more constitutive theorizing!10:21 AM Jul 25th from web

4. Do social media need political philosophy and social theory? http://tinyurl.com/kmvyk7 #opengov #gov20 #radicaltransparency #socialmedia11:15 PM Jul 24th from TwitterFox

5. @ U Beck’s #Future-of-Modernity Symposium: fine-grained analysis of contemporary society, completely ignoring the social media elephant.9:47 AM Jul 24th from TwitterFox

6. discussing the IDC-Framework (ideation, deliberation, collaboration): http://tinyurl.com/q74b7d #gov20 #social media #ogi #opengov #web2011:19 AM Jul 23rd from TwitterFox

7. Radical Transparency as Management Strategy? http://bit.ly/9Z6e5 #gov20 #opengov #enterprise20 #web20 #transparency #radical transparency4:04 PM Jul 21st from TwitterFox

8. I will address the ESPP Graduates tonight (www.espp.de). What should I tell these future public policy entrepreneurs from over 20 countries?11:57 AM Jul 17th from TwitterFox

9. CDC has a chilling year-by-year visualization of obesity trends from 1985 to 2008: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/…11:11 AM Jul 17th from TwitterFox

10. A necessary reality check on the Government 2.0 Hype by A. Schellong: http://www.iq.harvard.edu/b… #gov20 #opengov via @schellong11:25 AM Jul 14th from TwitterFox

11. Carl Malamud and the struggle for open sourcing the code of law: http://tinyurl.com/leqvxd #opengov #malamud #vivek kundra11:11 AM Jul 14th from TwitterFox

12. When the world is changing, we need to re-learn how to read-write engaging manifestos: http://tinyurl.com/lhavfj #generation m #manifesto8:49 PM Jul 13th from TwitterFox

13. How to structure governmental online deliberation processes: http://tinyurl.com/mthmov #deliberation #collaboration #gov20 #opengov11:17 AM Jul 13th from TwitterFox

14. Learning by Historical Analogy: Lessons from Information Revolution 1.0: http://tinyurl.com/ns63rq #infosociety #web20 #gov2010:48 PM Jul 12th from TwitterFox

15. Reflecting the Rise of the Ideation Platform (with Justus Lenz) http://tinyurl.com/lc8hl2 #opengov #gov203:14 PM Jul 11th from TwitterFox

16. Sofia Elizondo (BCG) on the End of Classical Strategy: http://tinyurl.com/mrwzq4 #enterprise20 #strategy #BCG9:24 PM Jul 7th from TwitterFox

17. Aristotle Reloaded: Beth Noveck challenging representative and deliberative democracy: http://tinyurl.com/neym7u #opengov #gov201:18 PM Jul 7th from TwitterFox

18. Do RSS our family-stream at: http://picasaweb.google.com… and write a guest blog for http://www.shapingnetworkso…8:44 PM Jul 6th from web

19. Will teach gov20 strategy to 70 austrian mayors in 1 hour. Anything specific I should say? #socialmedia #gov203:29 PM Jun 26th from TwitterBerry

20. Is engineering finally permeating governance? http://tinyurl.com/lx79an #gov20 #engineering #governance #techcrunch #auren hoffman12:12 PM Jun 24th from TwitterFox

Is there an added value in such an exercise? Or is this just part of the new recycling game we are playing?

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 they’re doing and agrees on how to do it. We found that this is blatantly untrue. When it comes to retweeting, things get messy.

It’s a must read and reminds us that there is serious grammatological work to do. We need to ask how does Twitter as a system of writing shapes, structure, and delimit our thinking and communication. The simple encoded rule “speak less than 141 characters,” the open question “what are you doing?” and emergent convention “RT, via, retweet, @philippmueller, etc.” allow for surprisingly complex human speech. Time to re-read Friedrich Kittler’s Aufschreibesystem 1800/1900 and Derrida’s Of Grammatology?

In this time and age, where information is shared through new social media and the frameworks to describe collective action change by the minute, it is smart to listen to the first generation of digital natives. On my trip to the East Coast last month, I was impressed by my former students Adriana, Sam, and Sofia in NYC, by Emilene and Katie in Washington DC, who work as strategy re-inventors, sustainability lobbyists, transparency gurus, web 2.0 facilitators, and business re-engineers.

I am constantly learning from the ESPP-class of 2009, who are working on their MPP thesis projects. Topics range from an evaluation of national digital strategies, a focus on sustainability as a core business strategy, to the role of social media in society or  political campaigns. And then there are my 2010 students in peer producing public policy and my undergraduates in network politics: they constantly surprise me and come up with fresh new sources for information and approaches to think about the emerging paradigms. Jenny Miksch came up with a follow-up list to Ines Mergel’s list of who to follow on twitter, so here it is, and join in the debate!

Lessig- is famous for his focus on law and technology
Marshallk – is a VP at ReadWriteWeb
ginatrapani — founder of livehacker.com

Who else are you following that we should know about, so we can move beyond our daily-mes?

by Ines Mergel

I am a Twitter enthusiast and as one of those people who do spend a lot of time online, I noticed that Twitter is one of the information channels, that help me get access to information, that is otherwise not on my radar screen or I would not get access to.

Twitter – for me personally as a Government 2.0 researcher – therefore has the potential to bridge structural holes in the communication and information structure that I have built over the years. In addition, I noticed that it is expanding my attention network of a) topics I should pay attention to, and b) people and their public conversation streams that are interesting to know. In a new information paradigm of the US government to move from a need to know to a need to share strategy, I thought I would share a few interesting people whose information and conversation who might be interesting to listen in to.

Without trying to convince anyone of the power of public conversations happening on Twitter, I put together a list of people and organizations that might have helpful information for anyone interested in Web 2.0 in government:

@timoreilly: Tim O’Reilly is the found and CEO of O’Reilly Media, traditionally known for publishing IT-related books, isnow a supporter of Government 2.0 and hosts conferences on the topic. Definitely worth following -> I learned a LOT!

@mcaffee: Andrew McAffee, a former professor at Harvard Business School, has coined the term Enterprise 2.0. Andy addresses corporate but also general Web 2.0 problems and is asking questions using the hashtag #andyasks -> add the tag to the new search function, so that you can revisit the information purring in every few days.

If you like tweets from space live from the repair team of the Hubble telescope, space astronaut Mike Massimino is tweeting his observations directly from the space shuttle: @Astro_Mike. NASA itself was one of the first twitter users within the US federal government: @NASA:

As the swine flu (H1N1) developed and the threat level has increased to a pandemic disease, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US has adopted a comprehensive Web 2.0 approach to reach potential groups that are at risk at the virtual locations they might be frequenting the most. I posted a blog entry on this on my blog with an overview of tools used. On Twitter: @CDCemergency.

There are tons of government agencies present on Twitter and BearingPoint has put together a huge list that can be found here.

I have selected a few government agencies I am following and find helpful:

• Department of State: Official Blog of the U.S. Department of State @dipnote: http://twitter.com/dipnote

• White House @whitehouse: http://twitter.com/whitehouse

• US Army @USArmy: http://twitter.com/USArmy

• Tweet Congress: Aggregator of tweets from Members of Congress @tweetcongress

• USA.gov – the one-stop shopping portal of the US Government: @usagov

• Transportation Security Administration (TSA):  @tsablogteam

In addition, the tweets of government-related IT publications and organizations might be helpful to learn about ongoing initiatives and news:

• One Laptop Per Child: http://twitter.com/OLPC

• Govdigest [http://twitter.com/govdigest] and DotGov [http://twitter.com/dotgov] are compiling up to date information and are retweeting information from other accounts, spreading the word to their followers and multiplying the attention base.

• UN Secretary general @secgen [http://twitter.com/secgen] is using Twitter to as an online calendar, listing whom he is meeting with each day.

• GovWiki: http://twitter.com/govwiki

• Government Technology Magazine: http://twitter.com/govtechnews

As I am located in the US, this post and my list of favorite Web 2.0 people is very much US-centric. Please leave your suggestions for additional Twitter accounts in the comments!

Following me on Twitter: @inesmergel [http://twitter.com/inesmergel]

Probably we overstretch the metaphor of literacy when we want to talk about what it means to participate in networked societies. However, as the amount of media that we can use explodes (think twitter, facebook, dropbox, wordpress, or typo3), we see the world through the eyes of a toddler. Questions to think about: What are the limits of specific media in doing specific things? What are the limits of our imagination how we can act collaboratively? How much time should we allocate to learn new modes of interaction? What do we do with the people “that just do not get it?” What does this mean for society? Do we need a 19th Century type of literacy/schooling campaign? Howard Rheingold argues,

I see that the use of Twitter to build personal learning networks, communities of practice, tuned information radars involves more than one literacy. The business about tuning and feeding, trust and reciprocity, and social capital is a form of network literacy that we discuss in my classes. Knowing that Twitter is a flow, not a queue like your email inbox, to be sampled judiciously is only one part of the attention literacy I started to blog about  knowing that it takes ten to twenty minutes to regain full focus when returning to a task that requires concentrated attention, learning to recognize what to pluck from the flow right now because it is valuable enough to pay attention to now, what to open in a new tab for later today, what to bookmark and get out of my way, and what to pass over with no more than a glance, are all other aspects of attention literacy that effective use of Twitter requires. My students who learn about the presentation of self and construction of identity in the psychology and sociology literature see the theories they are reading come to life on the Twitter stage every day – an essential foundation for participatory media literacy.

Today, Mark Cuban posed the question “Where does tweet time come from?” and the clear favorite answer was…;)

I spend far less time on Fbook as a result of my Twittering. I trade out of my home office and like having an outlet to the outside world during the day. Comment by Dave — March 11, 2009 @ 2:11 am

I use http://www.twitterfeed.com to RSS my Facebook status to Twitter, 2 birds with 1 stone. Now the real question is, where does Facebook time come from? Although as a telecommuter, it’s not much different from water cooler time in a normal workplace… Comment by Patrick G — March 11, 2009 @ 2:45 am

I pretty much stopped checking/using Facebook, so that freed up some time. Also, I have TwitterBerry on my BlackBerry that I can check during class or while walking/traveling after I check emails. I would imagine a lot of people make use of Twitter on-the-go through a client or SMS. Comment by Geoff — March 11, 2009 @ 7:01 am

Clay Shirky makes a slightly different argument, taking a macro-historical perspective:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society

So the question is, is twitter the gin or the museum?

watching CNN in my hotel rooms in Mexico and at airports worldwide, I was confronted again and again with I-Report, a website for user generated reporting where the ultimate price is being presented on CNN. It took 9 years since the launching of Indymedia, but now the first reflex when a news breaks is to corroborate it on Twitter, and CNN has become comfortable with these feeds and sees its role in vetting and managing information across platforms.

For the longest time, there has been a debate, about what is the next big challenge on the way to “augmented reality” after search. Logically, it should be discovery, but somehow sites like Stumbleupon have not hit the main stream. Over the last year the buzz around twitter has grown stronger and Erick Schonfeld argues on Techcrunch that we are moving into a world, where we can mine the “thought stream” of the world:

What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.

Translated into the frameworks of the venture capitalists, Twitter is an interesting proposition, because it is:

1. Open.  That makes it easy for others to build on top of Twitter and it also makes it searchable.
2. Real time. It is a huge database of what is happening right now.
3. Ubiquitous. You can get to it from just about any device.
4. Scalable. (Don’t laugh)
5. Persistent. It allows for an archive of what is happening and what has happened, which is searchable (see No. 1).