eEverything: What Public Administration Can Learn From Social Media

eEverything
Where things are going
and how to be there

Who am I?
And… who are YOU?..

Alex Gorelik, Ph. D. Twitter: @Doc_G_
Email: Dr.Alex.Gorelik@gmail.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pub/alex-gorelik/52/18/274

Who am I?..
ME: YOU:

 Background in literature, mass  What is your background ???
media and market research

 What I do: teach, direct a  What do you love ???
college Mass Communication
program, consult  What do you hate ???
 What I love: understanding  Where are you going to apply
people, developing new ideas
from old ones, reacting yourselves ???
quickly, finding unexpected
solutions, collaborating

 What I hate: everything long-
term


Why am I here?
And… why are YOU here?..


Cooperation is necessary:

 We are becoming a civilization of hyper-
literacy

 On a macro level, all of society is
affected

 On a micro level, our selves are affected

 Communication is the engine of this
change, public policy will determine its
sign


A civilization
of hyper-
literacy


Literacy changed EVERYTHING
Economy, fashion, politics, leisure, sovereignty, education, culture


Similarly, hyper-literacy is changing EVERYTHING
Economy, fashion, politics, leisure, sovereignty, education, culture

Alex Gorelik, Ph. D. Twitter@Doc_G_

In 2012

… nearly 20 million of the 225 million Twitter users
followed 60 or more Twitter accounts and nearly
2 million follow more than 500 accounts

…more than 800 million users made up
Facebook having spent 700 billion minutes with
the service each month. Facebook users had
uploaded more than 100 billion photos by mid-
2011.

Source: Pew Internet


Source: Olswang Convergence Consumer Survey


―Communication in all forms will be more direct;
fewer of the niceties and supercilious greetings
will exist. Idle conversation skills will be mostly
lost.‖

―Discussions based around internet content will
tend to be pithy, opinion-based, and often only
shared using social media with those who will
buttress—rather than challenge—
political, ideological, or artistic beliefs.‖



―Memories are becoming hyperlinks to
information triggered by keywords and URLs.‖

―We become ‗persistent paleontologists of our
external memories‘.‖



―Long-form cognition and offline contemplative
time will start to be viewed as valuable and will
be re-integrated into social and work life in
interesting and surprising ways.‖



Re-
feudalization
of the public


The practice of instant information consumption
perpetuates the culture of instant gratification.


The notion of property becomes challenged by
―the gift economy‖, attention becomes
payment, democracy becomes a live show.


The shift to hyper-literacy will be as
profound, comprehensive, long lasting and universal, as
the shift from orality to literacy.

Castells (2006)


Mass
self-
communication


Virtual Worlds: Precursors
 Video Gaming

 Social networking


Virtual Worlds: Second Life
Reasons for participation include: (a) exploring the environment, (b) sharing
experiences with others, (c) meeting people and making friends, (d) making
things, and(e) engaging in commercial activities (Graves, 2008).

Profile
• Publicly launched in 2003 by
Linden Labs;
• One resident in 2001, 2.2 million
in 2006;
• Global participation including
residents from the
U.S., France, Germany, U.K., the
Netherlands, Canada etc.

Key features
• Platform for collaborative
creation of shared content;

Castells (2006)
• Ready-made captive
audience for Linden Labs;
• Content is a tradable
commodity (functional
currency exchange
mechanism).


Virtual identity

 What is the relationship between my
real-life identity and my eSelf?

 What is the relationship between
geographical and virtual space?
 How does it change the concept of
sovereignty?
 … the concept of citizen?
 …voter?


Question:

 These are not idle questions!

 In the U.S., we don‘t
know the answers
yet…

How about
Ukraine?


Virtual world identities are becoming indistinguishable
from ―real‖ identities, just as e-commerce became
indistinguishable from commerce.

Adrian (2008)


―There is no inside self‖

Foucault (2080)


Virtual identity

Hyper-
identity: a
mental
A challenge A public
illness
for legal policy
yesterday, a
theory challenge
positive
attribute
today.


Identity and citizenship

 Machiavellian view: citizen as
consumer
 Current technological
deterministic
discourse, from Gates to
Zuckerberg, equate
citizenship with capitalism

 Habermasian view: citizen as
an equal conversation
partner
 We need to critically assess
the tendency to envision e-
citizens as spectators.


Identity and citizenship

 A conceptual distinction
between ―knowledge
economy‖, framed in techno-
economic terms, and
―information society‖, framed in
socio-cultural terms, needs to
be made.

 Despite the articulation of a
broad set of policy goals, the
dominant discourse acts to
structure the debate in such a
way that its economic
parameters become
privileged, at the expense of
social and cultural factors
(Goodwin & Spittle, 2002).


To summarize:
 We are experiencing a civilizational
shift from literacy to hyper-literacy;

 Social computing and communication
is at the core of this shift;

 It, on one hand, produces ―big data‖
and, on the other – relies on it. So will
public policy;

 The subject of the networked e-
democracy (eSelf)will be a
reactive, rather than
reflective, multitasking, rather than
deliberative;

 The discoursive space, surrounding
eSelf should be dominated by
Habermasian notions of deliberative
democracy.


To summarize:

Social computing and Communication are the engine of this
shift. Public policy will determine its sign.

Alone, neither of our fields is prepared. We must collaborate.


Road
Mapping
Theory, Policy, Design


Road Mapping:
Theory


The techno-optimistic view:

 Civic disengagement of
youth:
 Lack of motivation
 Perceived lack of
opportunity for involvement
 Inability to take part in the
civic process

 All cured through
improvements in systems and
procedures of e-democracy!



 The evolution of the socio-
technical tools available for
communication and
involvement have helped to
overcome the causes of
disengagement and may
have contributed to the
overwhelming involvement of
youth voters in the 2008 and
especially 2012 Presidential
elections in the U.S.



Transparency, flexibility, comprehensiveness of
Quality of services
services

Areas of concern:

Equality of access Social inclusion (and exclusion)


The Habermasian view:

Citizenship is a political activity

Citizenship is the praxis of political
engagement

Having empowerment potential, the
Internet is largely used to practice
political action as a solitary activity.



 Area of concern: transition
from culture-debating public
to culture-consuming public

 Area of concern: tele-
democracy and re-
feudalization of the public



 Once the rational-critical
discourse in the public sphere
is replaced by consumption, it
disintegrates into ―acts of
individual reception, however
uniform in mode‖
(Habermas, 1989, p.161).


Question:

 This is happening in the U.S.
with its ―American dream‖

 …and in Russia with its
―national idea‖

Is this happening
in Ukraine?


The Habermasian view (ePublic Sphere):

 Alhquist et al (2010) identified
three key areas of
transformation
 …society
 …local environment
 …economy and business

 …and series of drivers in six
fields



Ahlquist et al (2010)



 ePublic Sphere must satisfy
social and technical
requirements of:
 ―Exchange and critique of
reasoned moral-practical
validity claims‖
 Reflexivity
 Ideal role taking
 Sincerety
 Discursive inclusion, equality
 Autonomy from state and
economic power
Dahlberg (2001)



 There is some empirical
evidence that it may be true
 Example: Bandari, Azur and
Huberman (2012)


Road Mapping
Policy


U.S. Government initiatives:

 Reinventing Government
Initiative (Clinton / Gore)

 Office of Management and
Budget engaged in several
projects guided by the E-
Government Act of 2001
(Bush)

 Obama‘s administration has
pursued a range of open
initiatives guided by the
principles of
transparent, participatory, an
d collaborative leadership

U.S. Government initiatives:

 Public involvement in
government decision
processes;
 Coproduction of
government services;
 Crowdsourced
solutions, through which
Governments seek
innovation through public
knowledge and; and
 Transparency and
accountability.


Examples of US initiatives

 The Veterans Administration established a
presence to interact with veterans on
 Facebook (www.Facebook.
com/VeteransAffairs)
 Youtube (www.youtube.
com/user/DeptVetAffairs)
 Flickr (www.flickr.com
photos/44636446@N04)
 Twitter (www.twitter.
com/DeptVetAffairs)


Examples of US initiatives

 http://petitions.whitehouse.gov—petitions


Question:

 U.S. public policy
documents, such as E-
Government Act of 2002, list
social inclusion, privacy &
security and transparency as
guidelines.

What about
Ukraine?


Road Mapping
Design


In a Habermasian sense, the ―conversation‖ between
the public and the state, occurring in the ePublic
Sphere, will be a co-experience


Co-experience is …

Multimodal

For fun
Creative
(seriously)

Meaning-
making

How to design co-experience?

 Incorporate lessons from systems
engineering and mass communication

 Design with social translucence in mind


Social translucence

Visibility Awareness

Accountability Constraints


Knowledge management
Application example of social translucence


From KM to Knowledge Communities

 Produced socially

 Very little produced in concrete form

 Offers massive opportunities for making
social connections
 Provide connections to the producers
of knowledge
 Provide connections to people who
use, access and interact in the system



 Why would people in a substantial work
of building knowledge communities?
 One possible answer – the network
effect G=f(N)
 Another possible answer – the
principles of
visibility, awareness, accountability
and constraints



Conversation is great
because…
•It is an interaction with the goal of
meaning-making
•It is a social projection of Conversation-based knowledge
self, therefore – a deeply social communities are excellent because
process
of…
•It persists
•… activity support
•… conversation visualization and
restructuring
•…organizational knowledge spaces


To summarize:

Habermas and other media theorists provide valuable
guidelines for exploration of e-democracy. Existing public
policy initiatives, in their early, experimental stages, are
marred by the techno-happy approach, which must be
critically accessed.

Evidence of fruitful cross-disciplinary borrowing exists in social
media initiatives. We must collaborate.


Case in point:
Info Terrorism
How can government agencies adapt
media practices to combat the threat of
info terrorism?


A couple of questions:

 Why ―info terrorism‖ and not
―cyber terrorism‖?

 Why are social media
involved?

 Why bother?


Detection:
Content analysis

Prediction:
Forecasting
relationships

Dissuasion:
Procedures and
policies

Monitoring:
Linking outbursts
to outcomes


Detection

 Content analysis of the (semantic) web
 Example: Sheth & Nagarajan (2011)


Question:

Is this method
useful to you?


Prediction

 …of relationships
 Example: Leskovec et al (2010)


Dissuasion

 Organizational procedures and system-
wide policies
 Example: Radianti & Gonzales (2009)


Monitoring

 Linking emotional outbursts to outcomes
 Example: Zhang et al (2011)


To summarize:

Media organizations (and I
define those as broadly as
humanly possible) can take
part in combatting info-terrorism
by taking part in
detection, prediction, dissuasio
n and monitoring.


Questions?

@Doc_G_

dr.alex.gorelik@gmail.com

Alex Gorelik, Ph. D. Tweeter: @Doc_G_

eEverything: What Public Administration Can Learn From Social Media

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eEverything: What Public Administration Can Learn From Social Media