is more participation better participation?

a few weeks ago, I attended a panel at the IEEE Social Computing conference on "Promoting National Initiatives for Social Networking," which ended up being largely about social software and political participation. panelists included Sandy Pentland of MIT, Jenny Preece of U Maryland, Ben Schneiderman of U Maryland, and Kevin Grandia of Hoggan and Associates. each variously extolled the virtues of political participation and civic engagement, as well as how (information and computational) technologies could be used to support and encourage such participation. Kevin provided a nice bit of counterpoint with several examples demonstrating some of the potential problems associated with these approaches.

there was one question I’d wanted to ask but have the chance: do we really want more participation? that is, is having more people participating in the political processes necessarily better? I don’t intend to be Machiavellian, though I’ll admit to being something of a devil’s advocate here. however, whenever there are fundamental assumptions at work, such as this one that more participation is better, I find examining, questioning, and occasionally problematizing such assumptions beneficial in terms of determining exactly the goals we’re trying to accomplish, as well as considering alternate means of approaching those goals and/or methods of inquiry related to such approaches.

first, let me consider what exactly we mean by participation. in the broadest general sense, democratic participation usually translates to voting. at other times (e.g., in Farrell, Lawrence, and Sides’ definition), it implies activities such as contributing money or time to a political candidate/party/campaign, or attempting to convince others to vote a certain way. in the context of the above mentioned panel, it seemed that participation was framed in terms of civic engagement; involvement with political issues; and participating in deliberative debates about governmental polities, their implications, their results, and alternatives. for example, Sandy Pentland talked about citizen-science-style sensing and census data to determine the impacts of policies intended, e.g., to increase education levels in low-SES neighbors, or to reduce pollution from factories and power plants. this arguments for the benefits seemed two-fold. first, collecting and presenting these data could enable politicians to be held accountable for their policy design and implementation decisions, preventing politicians from making vacuous claims of efficacy in the absence of any concrete evidence. second, making such data readily accessible and comprehensible would involve and engage more people in the political process by lowering the barriers to entry, thereby creating a better democracy.

it’s this second point on which I want to push here. that is, is involving more people more directly in governmental and political processes actually beneficial in terms of creating a better democracy? brief consideration would suggest that, yes, it does; since democracy is about government of, by, and for the people, involving more people in that government will make it more equitable, thereby preventing the abuse of the many by the few. however, one of the central premises of American democracy, as well as that of many other (Western) democratic nations, is representation. that is, rather than being a direct democracy where every member of the state has a direct vote on every policy or governance question, we elect representatives who represent us in such decision processes. in direct democracy, not only does every citizen need significant knowledge of every issue, but so much of citizens’ time is consumed with the political process that they have little time left to live their lives. furthermore, based on the apathy evidenced by low voter turnouts in many elections (at least in this country), getting people engaged with and interested in such issues is a non-trivial problem.

however, I’ve recently become aware of a third option that represents something of a compromise between direct and representative democracy: deliberative democracy (slight caveat: I’ve only recently become aware of the notion of deliberative democracy and, at the time of this post, am still in the process of wrapping my head around it). elected representatives ultimately make the political decisions, but citizens are involved in the decision making, deliberative process. this approach seems to share a certain sensibility with participatory design, but that’s a topic for another time. what I want to consider here is something that seems like a central tenet in deliberative democracy: by involving a large, diverse group of citizens in the political process, there can never be full and complete agreement. that is, there are differences of opinion that, no matter how much deliberation and participation you have, will always be irreconcilable differences. thus, by increasing the amount of participation in political debates, one increases the likelihood of such irreconcilable differences, thereby making it more difficult to reach a compromise or mutually agreeable solution.

I want to ask if, instead of increasing the quantity of participation, we can instead improve the quality of participation? trying to involve every single citizen not only runs up against theoretical problems in terms of irreconcilable deliberation, but it also runs up against practical problems in terms requesting participation from those who are disinterested and/or unmotivated. again, I’m not arguing that a government controlled by the few is better. rather, I’m arguing that those who participate in government (a) should be those who are most interested and motivated to do so and (b) should participate in a deep, meaningful, effective way. while a fully detailed exploration of what might be meant by deep, meaningful, effective participation is probably beyond the current scope, I’ll suggest here three potential ways in which such participation might manifest: consideration of long term impacts, consideration of all parties involved, and consideration underlying assumptions. while I’d like to pursue each of these at length in future posts, it’s much more realistic that to suggest instead that those interested should start a discussion in the comments.

questions about "citizen" journalism and secret journalists

on NPR this morning, someone had written a letter-to-the-editor type comment about a piece on citizen journalism, that is, journalistic-style reporting by non-journalists. I'm really not a fan of the term citizen journalism (or its relative citizen science, for that matter), but that's the subject for another post. here, I want to focus on a comment about the NPR story. one listener said that citizen journalism is potentially problematic when such citizens do not identify themselves as serving a journalist-like function, as people on whom are being reported should be aware that such reporting is taking place. I wonder if that assumption, that the average person off the street is not going to report on your interactions that s/he observes, is really well founded.

I'm not encouraging or endorsing the practice of secret journalism or being intentionally misleading about one's intent to broadly disseminate information. however, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that any act taken in public will not be posted online. I'm thinking in part here of George Allen's macaca debacle. he clearly did not consider, even though he was speaking publicly in front of a largish audience, that his speech and actions would be as public as they became. but I'm also thinking in part about greater trends of watchfulness and sousveillance. it's not necessarily the case that every word you say will show up on the front page of tomorrow's New York Times or Slashdot post, but that possibility definitely exists for your every word.

how do we as a society and as a culture cope with such possibilities? one obvious approach is to assume that pretty much everything you say or do might be available for public consumption. however, I don't think that's really viable, for a number of reasons. normal social interaction depends on a certain degree of deception; plausible deniability is a necessary social gloss in many occasions.

ultimately, I feel like the currently predominant notions of public and private are not really sufficient for talking about or thinking about the ways in which we present and construct our selves, and the ways in which our selves get presented and constructed by others. I'm not quite sure what alternative conceptions might be more useful, but I suspect they would likely focus on identity, how we construct our identity, how others construct our identity for us, and the ways in which we maintain different identities in different contexts.

autoethnovideography

at CSCL today, Ricki Goldman was talking about, among other things, the e-generation. this was the idea that through technologies like blogs, flicrk, YouTube, etc., everyone was becoming an ethnographer. my first reaction was, well, how is this different from previous mass media technologies? certainly, when the printing press was invented, people were able to write their culture in a way not previously possible. I think the technologies she's discussing, though, are not just a change of scale but a qualitative change, as well. a talk (my notes) I saw by Marc Davis echoed similar sentiments along these lines.

however, I also started wondering, perhaps everyone, at least in some sense, is really becoming an ethnographer. to some extent, aren't they writing their own culture? is YouTube effectively something like an autoethnovideography? (there's your neologism of the day, kids) furthermore, with people creating all of these digital cultural artifacts, how do the role and activities of the ethnographer change? meta was recently talking about photos and ethnography, and I wonder if the photos, video, and media a culture produces about itself might affect the way an ethnographer works. I suspect people who are more versed and practiced in ethnography would have more things (and more intelligent things) than I to say about the issue, so I'll stop for now at posing the question and leave the answering to others.

update (2007-07-24): I actually got a chance to chat with Ricki a bit about her thoughts on this topic, i.e., how do things like YouTube, flickr, MySpace, etc. change the roles and activities of the ethnographer? I didn’t take notes or anything, but I’ll try to paraphrase from memory. part of the discussion we had was about how, while people may be massively inscribing their culture in these various digital media, what their doing is not ethnography. while the primary task is writing culture, the ethnography is not, as many have noted, a veridical textual representation of that culture, but rather the culture as seen through the lens of the ethnographer. ethnography is not only a form of reportage, is it fundamentally interpretive (perhaps this ties back to my earlier thoughts on naturalists’ interpretation). generally when people make the sort of digital cultural artifacts that appear on YouTube or flickr, they may be inscribing aspects of their culture, but they are not doing an interpretation of that culture. I think this resonates with Rubikzube's comment below that when he posts photos of his vacation to flickr, he's not really doing ethnography; he's not engaged in a culturally interpretive act. Ricki said that she was interested in encouraging people to be more interpretive (perhaps reflective) in such activities, partially as another way of learning about their own culture and themselves.

she also talked about an interesting experience she had while doing video analysis of some classroom activity. one of the students said to her, “Ricki, you can’t see the classroom.” “what do you mean?” she asked. the student replied, “the teachers are different when you’re here. give me the camera and I’ll show you what the classroom is really like.” this isn’t just a matter of the presence of a researcher affecting the behavior of the teachers (and probably the students, for that matter). it’s a matter of perspective. ethnography is about capturing the emic perspective. what this student was arguing is that, when you give the camera to the members of the culture, that’s when you really get to see the emic perspective. this is what YouTube and flickr do, they capture the emic perspective from the emic perspective. I doubt this means that anthropologists and ethnographers of digital culture will be replaced by autoethnovideographers from within that culture (partly due to the interpretive nature of ethnography mentioned above), but I think it means that these media will become invaluable for ethnographic studies of that culture.