Centre for Digital Citizenship

Fabro Steibel, one of the CDC members, returned to Brazil and started a blog on Digital Citizenship. To visit the blog (in Portuguese), go to http://culturadigital.br/cidadaniadigital/ . The blog is hosted on a WordPress server supported by the Brazilian government, a platform called “Cultura Digital”. This initiative hosts blogs and networks of those with an interest in discussing public policy online.

This is a reprint of PEW report findings about the US 2010 campaign.

54% of adults used the internet for political purposes in the last cycle, far surpassing the 2006 midterm contest. They hold mixed views about the impact of the internet: It enables extremism, while helping the like-minded find each other. It provides diverse sources, but makes it harder to find truthful sources.

Fully 73% of adult internet users (representing 54% of all US adults) went online to get news or information about the 2010 midterm elections, or to get involved in the campaign in one way or another. We refer to these individuals as “online political users” and our definition includes anyone who did at least one of the following activities in 2010:

• Get political news online – 58% of online adults looked online for news about politics or the 2010 campaigns, and 32% of online adults got most of their 2010 campaign news from online sources.
• Go online to take part in specific political activities, such as watch political videos, share election-related content or “fact check” political claims – 53% of adult internet users did at least one of the eleven online political activities we measured in 2010.
• Use Twitter or social networking sites for political purposes – One in five online adults (22%) used Twitter or a social networking site for political purposes in 2010.

Read the full report The Internet and Campaign 2010 on the Pew Internet & American Life Project Web site.

This week it appears that content as hard data is king again in news around the world due to Wikileaks. Almost every major news site is dominated by stories regarding either the leaked diplomatic cables or profiling the site’s founder, Julian Assange (or the chase for Assange’s whereabouts). However, thus far lost in the rise of Wikileaks seems to be the manner in which newspapers have successfully fulfilled what Castells’ called the role of switcher in his recent book, Communication Power.

The movement from fringe site to mainstream news could not have been managed without the close assistance of The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel. Wikileaks is a uniquely well-funded fringe organization, but its successful ability to takeover the news-cycle in so many spaces seems likely to raise eventual questions about the possible power of citizen journalism writ large. The fact that an amateur news organization has made such a significant impact may eventually be more important than any of the data thus far leaked, and the willingness of newspapers to bring such information to mainstream markets seems a clear sign that the old powers are willing to deal with the new.  Or that they have reached a stage where they have little choice but to deal with organizations such as Wikileaks.

While clearly a prospect unique to-date, I’m curious how much of a potential signifier for future forms of citizen journalism Wikileak’s easy transition to the mainstream press might represent to other observers.

Update December 4th: Here are a couple of more viewpoints on the leaks that might be worth examination and commentary. Dan Gillmor, who heads the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, has a series of questions related to Wikileaks, including some similar thoughts on the involvement of major newspapers. Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society discusses how Wikileaks has shone a light on the manner in which our “public” Internet is corproate owned. Zuckerman’s issue is of course related to the need for a public space for deliberation taken  up recently by Professors Coleman and Blumler of Leeds University in their book The Internet and Democratic Citizenship.

For several years now there has been considerable discussion around the notion of the hyperlocal web. Some have suggested that the web is perfectly adapted to carrying hyperlocal information – only to puzzle over the slowness of the public to respond to the wealth of hyperlocal news sites around. Others fret about the reticence of newspapers to capitalise on this ‘obvious’ route to salvation. Meanwhile, the experiments continue, with varying degrees of success, and varying protagonists – from journalists to commercial search engines to community activists, all have been trying out new ways of configuring information and communication technologies to serve the needs of social networks and communities at a small geographical scale. What’s lacking, however, is much sensitivity to the characteristics of place and scale. In short, everyone means something different by the term ‘hyperlocal’, and this is more than a semantic point because it indicates a lack of reflection on the information and communication needs of communities at different scales. Without this, many initiatives end up trying to bundle together an incoherent or incommensurable offer.

So a promising way to think about designing online tools that would really be useful for local communities is to distinguish between habitual and preferred modes of communication and social interaction at different local scales. We can start by distinguishing the scale of the street or block from that of the settlement, the quarter, the suburb or the neighbourhood. In streets and blocks the form of interaction we’re interested in encouraging is usually described as neighbouring; at the larger scale of the settlement or suburb, we probably want to generate some form of civic engagement (from political participation through involvement in associational life to citizen journalism). These types of social interaction involve quite different communication practices. Neighbouring is a semi-private, semi-public form of communication, the content of which tends to be practical and apolitical – a helping/coping network rather than a network for more political forms of collective action. It’s underpinned by an ethics of sociability. According to the early 20th century sociologist Georg Simmel, sociability breaks down if it transgresses upper or lower sociability thresholds: so participants must not allow their purely personal interests to dictate how and why they communicate, but nor should they not disclose too much about their intimate or emotional selves, or about their political and ideological positions. Civic engagement, on the other hand, involves expressly public and political forms of communication, in which divergent opinions and ideological positions can be freely aired, debated and contested.

read more »

Here is the plenary panel from OD2010 that covered online deliberation in Post-Soviet States. The CdC’s own Yuri Misnikov organized the panel. The video may take a few seconds to load due to size. Please feel free to share your comments below.

The OD2010 conference featured an overview of several online packages for mapping arguments. The video below covers some of the tools presented at the conference. The panel lasted an hour, so the video will take a few seconds to load.

The following video was presented remotely at the conference and offers a close look at the Debategraph tool.

Le 29 Juin dernier, l’Institute of Communications Studies de l’Université de Leeds a eu le plaisir d’accueillir Thierry Vedel pour sa 4ème conférence doctorale sur le thème des nouveaux médias et de l’engagement civique. Chercheur CNRS au CEVIPOF (Centre de recherches politiques) à Paris, Thierry Vedel a ouvert cette conférence avec les premiers résultats d’une étude conduite en France sur les différents médias utilisés par les citoyens français pour s’informer sur la vie politique. L’étude, conduite dans le cadre du projet Mediapolis (Information politique et citoyenneté à l’ère numérique) et basée sur une enquête par sondage téléphonique auprès de 1750 personnes de 15 ans et plus – incluant téléphone fixe et téléphone portable – montre que les français se tournent en premier lieu vers leur famille pour s’informer en matière de politique, viennent ensuite les ‘experts’ politiques présents sur les différents médias comme la télévision ou la radio puis les amis et les journalistes n’arrivent qu’en quatrième position. Thierry Vedel conclut avec une question qui nous taraude tous: qu’en est-il de ces citoyens qui ne sont ni actifs politiquement ni apathiques? Une large majorité des citoyens français se trouvent entre ces deux extrêmes: quelles sont leurs pratiques politiques? Comment s’informent-ils dans cette nouvelle ère digitale? L’étude – toujours en cours – vise à répondre à ces questions qui sont d’une importance primordiale dans des sociétés démocratiques de plus en plus apathiques et où, paradoxalement, les sources d’information ne cessent de se multiplier.

Ont suivi quatre sessions consacrées aux recherches doctorales de quinze étudiants venant d’Espagne, de Lituanie, de Grande Bretagne, du Portugal, du Canada ou encore d’Iran. Des thèmes aussi variés que l’importance des plateformes artistiques en ligne comme lieu d’intervention politique (Ana Barata) ou encore une étude comparative sur l’utilisation des médias communautaires et son impact sur la cohésion sociale et le développement en Europe (Daniel Mutibwa) furent présentés tout au cours de la journée à une salle désireuse de découvrir et de discuter des projets doctoraux captivants et solides méthodologiquement. Stephen Coleman, Professeur en communication politique à l’Université de Leeds, a lui discuter la possibilité et les modalités de connecter ‘le public’ et ‘le politique’ quand il est question de citoyenneté, spécialement dans l’ère digitale.

read more »

With conferences quickly approaching and having the luxury of presenting two different papers, one during the Leeds annual PhD conference and one in Odense, Denmark my thoughts have been focused on the methods or tools that I and others are using.

Gathering a large amount of targeted data was relatively easy – what to do with it and how to draw out conclusions from it – well that is what my two papers try to engage. As well as the usual attempts of using social network analysis while avoiding both technological and organisational determinism I now have this position whereby I need to avoid slipping into ‘network discourse’ or nodocentricism. If an emergent property is not a node in the network then it exercises no influence according to network theory. However, it is the very ‘white space’ in which the network resides that causes the fluctuations of the relationships between the nodes.

A paper (The limits of networks as models for organizing the social) by Mejias has set out the same concern as the paper I am presenting at the 2010 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. The concern is that the use of social network analysis devised from physics and mathematical algorithms has been neglecting the ‘social’ of its title. Mejias argues that the approach of the network researcher – which is essentially descriptive is becoming prescriptive and undermining the possibility for other organisational structures to appear. Therefore, not only does the network theorist deny the ‘white space’ but attempts to conquer it. Surely that is the nature of engineering in itself?

So the paper I will present in Odense analyses not just the hyperlink connections but the textual discourse of an online network or community; and in doing so attempts to highlight certain limitations of using automated data mining and analysis software. Lin, Sundaram, Chi, Tatemura, and Tseng, (2006) referred to the network that I look at as an isolated and distinct network with no theme or focus. In order to get beyond this limited SNA approach I look at the content of the information that appears on the sites over time. What are they talking about? This alters the focus to the themes of the network and hopes to allow the social to play a greater part in the analysis.

The paper I will present in Leeds presents the findings from the analysis of textual data gathered over 15 months, from January 2009 to February 2010. Rather than the single snapshot of Lin et al., above. By looking at the dominant themes and the associated concepts it makes explicit the cognitive structure that the bloggers are operating within and (re)producing.

So, ‘is the Internet creating a public sphere in the Singapore context?  - ‘yes’ but multiple rather than singular – and ‘is the discourse persuasive or manipulative?’  - Its predominantly epistemic and persuasive – but does contain elements of deontic manipulation.

However, with the OD2010 taking place this week – I am sure that the waters will become muddied again and confusion will return.

A key question for me in digital citizenship lies in whether it’s traditional citizenship working via digital means or it’s the formation of original  traditions for a new type of citizenship. Does the Web extend my digital agency as a citizen of my town/region/country/continent/world or does it add a charge that I operate with a civic mindset toward digital spaces?

I lean toward a simple: yes.

More than the easy answer, I believe this instructs us that we must be able to address digital citizenship both as an extension of historical practices now turned digital and as an obligation to define the original and perhaps unique obligations required to ensure civil rights in and through digital spaces, not just duplicate the existing rights of traditional citizenship. While that’s a complicated and long-term obligation, I think we have a few obvious places to start, for example:

• How can digitization (the process of transferring to digital technology) and digital culture (the communicative interactions within digital spaces) influence traditional civic practice?
• Which digital spaces warrant civic involvement and which exist as private property? This begs the question as to what extent digital communities can effectively be private.
• How do we reconcile local and national civic needs on the Internet with competing civic needs on the local, national, and global levels, both on the Internet and off?
• Can civic spaces function along popular distribution models of the Internet, such as the Long Tail, or does mass online distribution carry too much of a burden for citizenship, leading to confusion rather than informed deliberation?

These questions often can source both sides of the digital citizenship equation. For example, the understanding of digital community as property weighs heavily on both traditional civil rights and the original obligations of online spaces. The United States Library of Congress now receives all posts on Twitter for the purpose of preservation. This archival process clearly serves a global audience through a national institution. It also empowers the daily gossip of Twitter users with a historical voice far beyond the daily gossip of non-users. Thus, the blending of national and international goes hand in hand with empowering trivia for no other reason than it occurs in a digital and easily archived format.

It begs the question as to whether Twitter’s civic value might so surpass its largely unknown commercial value that it becomes too big to fail not for its economic investment, but for its social investment. At what point does a private space’s civic value become too great to remain private? These are the types of  civic lessons we should examine well before we have to make the choice.

Update: Only the day after my post and I find that a U.S. congressman wants to stop funding federal payment for all public media in the United States. So the conversation is well underway in the States that, in the name of cost-saving, community should be left to the market. Curious about how people feel with this bullish approach to even community media being seen as a free-wheeling agora?

The Czech general election last weekend produced some interesting results. Most attention, understandably, has gone to the substantial shift in the balance of power between the parties: all the establishment parties took a hammering, notably the People’s Party (Christian Democrats) who failed to win any seats in Parliament for the first time in the history of the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia (aside from the wartime protectorate state). Two new parties, whose priorities are, respectively, deficit reduction and anti-corruption, got into Parliament, and will probably form a coalition with the dominant force on the right since the fall of communism, the Civic Democratic Party, which nevertheless suffered a 15% fall against the 2006 election.
But the results get more interesting when we look at the actual MPs who got elected. Czechs’ disaffection with the political class did not stop with turnover of political parties. Voters also used their power to partially determine who should sit in Parliament for each party. The Czech Republic uses a PR system which allocates seats proportionately to each party that gets over 5% of the national vote within 14 electoral regions. The number of seats each region gets allocated depends on the number of voters who cast their ballot there. Each elector also has the option of giving up to four ‘preferential votes’ to individual candidates for the particular party they vote for. Any candidate who gets 5% or more of the total number of votes cast for his or her party in a given region automatically moves to the top of the party list, no matter where they were placed on the list to begin with (naturally, if several candidates exceed the 5% threshold, their order on the list is determined by who got more preferential votes).
By my calculations, no less than 45 out of 200 MPs were elected on the strength of preferential votes – in other words, they would not have got into Parliament if voters had respected the order in which candidates were ranked by party secretariats. For comparison, in the previous elections in 2006, only six MPs were elected by these means. A word of caution is in order, because a change to the electoral law has made it easier for voters to use the power of preferential votes, by lowering the threshold from 7% to 5% of the regional party vote, and by giving each voter four preferences in place of the previous two. But few had predicted that voters would use their increased influence to this extent.
Arguably the phenomenon of these elections, however, is the success of candidates who were placed at the very bottom of their respective parties’ lists (in the case of larger parties and larger regions, lists may contain 30 or 40 names). This is where an Internet effect seems to have played a part. In the weeks before the election, two relatively well-known civic activists, one a nuclear physicist, the other a novelist, launched an online campaign called Defenestration 2010 – Circle those at the bottom! Operating on a non-partisan basis, they urged voters, whichever party they vote for, to give their preferential votes to the last four names on the list, according to the logic these were the candidates least likely to be embroiled in the ‘machinery of corruption’ that many Czechs feel characterises the whole political establishment. To an extent the campaign seems to have worked, although possibly only when it was publicised in the mass media. Defenestration 2010 has 9,300 Facebook friends, but it received substantial coverage in the daily press, radio and TV.
Ten candidates placed in the bottom four(1) of their party lists were elected to Parliament. In 2006 there were no similar examples. Possibly more importantly, from the campaign’s perspective, there were several high-profile casualties: some MPs tainted by involvement in major scandals failed to get re-elected. It remains to be seen, however, whether all the ‘no-hopers’ will actually take up their seats. Some of them are youngsters, even students, but others include successful business people and local mayors, who were on the lists to demonstrate their support for a party, but who clearly would not have expected to be elected. Pressure is on them now from all sides.

(1) Or in the bottom 8 in larger regions, where the campaign suggested voters who vote on the first day of polling give their preferential votes to the last four candidates, and voters on the second day of polling circle the names ranked 5th to 8th from last.