Decrease of distance in the digital age
I mentioned that I’d been to the Truth and Beauty series, and it all started with Pat Kane. (Full disclosure: late 80s / early 90s, I bought every huge Hue and Cry album, so at least part of my motivation for attending Pat’s talk was fanboy.) Pat was floating a discussion around an admittedly vague idea of the Constitute, “an answer to [his] anxiety about being drowned in rich and meaningful connections in the social-media age, and not being able to turn even a small percentage of them into resources for action or enterprise”. I enjoyed the talk, although I always struggle to clear a path through the mental jungle that is continental philosophy.
My only comment at the talk was that the web tools that we have available to us are mainly and increasingly curatorial, and curation is an act of management rather than an act of creation. Since part of Pat’s complaint is that politics has become a managerial exercise, which has taken political processes out of the reach of the citizen and handed it to the technocrat (which I agree with), there seems to be a tension between how much the web can provide a platform for the creativity that’s needed to revitalize those processes. While MyDavidCameron is effing hilarious, it doesn’t add much to the dialogue.
The problem is that communal relationships (of the sort that Pat wants to encourage, document and leverage for action) emerge out of lived experiences: they are praxis. The web tools that we currently use to mediate those experiences create a distance from the relationships themselves, and it’s the distance between experience and relationships that is part of the fundamental problem of politics. The reason why I like TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem is that they seek to decrease that distance a little, at least between citizens and their elected representatives, but they’re not fundamentally creative either.
You might argue that it’s how you use the tools that matters, not the tools themselves – that if Facebook and Twitter aren’t decreasing the distance between experiences and relationships, we only have ourselves to blame. Pat argues that a comment thread on his blog or on Facebook is a Constitute, and that what we need is “to forge a… some guild-like or practice-like behaviours or conventions, that can capture the value of the relentless connecting, conversing and curating we do with our networked devices?” It’s hard to see how to make the leap from connecting, conversing and curating to creating, and that’s inherent to the technology.
As computing becomes increasingly ubiquitous, the distance will diminish until perhaps we won’t even notice it any more. It will always be there, though, and that has implications for the shape we want our politics to be in the future. The answer is surely to focus on developing highly localised politics which revives the local relationships from which our political processes originally developed, and to use web-based tools primarily to network these local polities – aggregating rather than curating. Political action at large scales would then be a question of coordination (the Quaker model, perhaps?) and not just curation – but what sort of web platform would that be?
THis is not helping.
November 20, 2011
4 responses to Decrease of distance in the digital age
interesting stuff picked up from your recent tweet that
‘Key to hyperlocal and hyperconnected is aggregation not curation, but which are the best tools for that?’
i’ve been running a local website for five years now that is actively engaged in local civic issues. we try not to do partisan politics because our readers are clear they don’t want it. not because they are not interested but because they get sick of the noise of local Politics. we don’t encourage and on the whole won’t let through ‘its the libdems/labour/tory fault’ comments.
as a society we are at the very early stages of politicians and people around politics using online tools, but already the noise is deafening. the ubiquity you describe (the old death of distance stuff from the 1990s) will make it much worse.
the word curation puts me off – it always reminds me of labels in display cases at museums. but it often means ‘selecting’ ie throwing loads of stuff away which is what i observe people doing on good local sites
aggregating is much less appealing. there are few hyperlocal sites that are pure ‘aggregators’ the majority curate and most importantly produce original content too. it’s the original content and commentary on other people’s stuff (labels above) that seems to draw the readers.
I agree that aggregating isn’t the best approach at the local level – I was thinking that aggregation is more useful for networking between different localities, and that it’s up to the localities to do their own curation, i.e. select which parts of the aggregated info stream they find useful. The phrase “small pieces, loosely joined” could work as well in politics as it does in technology, if we can develop the political / economic / social mechanisms to make it work.
I think some of those mechanisms are in formation (big fan of Transition Towns), but my worry (in the context of Pat’s talk) is that I don’t see a strong connection between “connecting, conversing and curating” (the three dominant modes of online interaction) to “creating”, which is what most of us want to encourage. The tools that dominate the landscape at the moment are geared towards promoting the former three – possibly at the expense of the latter.
ok i sort of understand there’s a lot of politico theory babble here
the best tool is see for that sort of thing is a very retro deeply unfashionable one, the discussion forum, wher you can ask questions of people who might know where asynchronous instances of he thing you are interested in have taken place .
whilst modern web 2.0 types often sneer at forums they just look stupid in the face of the vast numbers using forums in say moneysaving expert, sheffield forum, rightsnet, thestudentroom, countless product support fora etc
trad forums have the advantage of being ownable by a community of interest too – unlike other third party platforms
if you can integrate facebook connect to log in then you can get some crossover into that huge audience
I completely agree that the humble discussion forum has a place – it’s the right combination of notice board and water cooler (although I have to admit that I haven’t contributed to any of my old haunts for a long time).
However I’m still reaching towards the idea of creativity – the generation and development of ideas, I guess, rather than discussion of those ideas post facto (although I also have to admit that the line between the two is blurred).
I continue to be worried that the web just isn’t a conducive environment for creativity, but it’s definitely the best way of spreading the fruits of (some) creativity – so maybe creative action within the community is best done offline, then propagated through the network.