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.

what, panopticon? you don't say!

(via Ars) according to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger from Harvard's School of Government, argues that, due to the ways digital technologies are used to record tons of minutiae about people's daily lives, society is headed towards a Benthamist panopticon. this is not a particularly surprising argument, and others have touched on this theme quite a bit. the suggestion in this "modest proposal" is that technologies be built, by default, to forget. that is, logging technologies, e.g. those on the iTunes music store website that collect customer info, would automatically wipe that info after a legally prescribed period of time, say, a couple years. files created by digital cameras would self-delete after a set time period, where the user of the camera gets to determine the length of that time period. it's true, forgetting is a very important part of the way that our society functions, and plays a role in smoothing over lots of possible awkward social situations. when you stop forgetting, you stop being able to levy plausible deniablility arguments about, say, what you were or weren't doing when your significant other claims to have caught you emailing another lover. furthermore, if everything is remembered, then memories lose their preciousness. it doesn't matter that I remebered your birthday, because I didn't actually remember, my electronic daily planner emailed me to remind me that it was your birthday. I think there are all sorts of aspects of memory that cannot be emulated by digital technologies, especially those parts of memory associated with subjective experience, so I doubt that the preciousness of human memory will ever be totally eroded.

the problem is, I'm just not convinced that what we need is a technological solution to this technology-induced problem. when the technology of writing was introduced, it fundamentally changed the way human memory functions. no longer did we live in an world of fleeting and ephemeral spoken word, but we could capture and preserve that word. print technologies only further reified the word as an object rather than a spoken event, and remembering became less important. were there similar debates when writing came about? indeed, Plato argues through Socrates in Phaedrus that writing, among other things, destroys memory because it allows things to be written down rather than simply remembered, and that writing is inhuman because it does not allow for the natural give-and-take of verbal communication. similarly, with the advent of pocket calculators, teachers and parents argue that children's mathematical abilities would be dulled by their reliance on the calculator as a crutch. in Orality and Literacy, Ong argues that while these things may be true, in the case of writing, by not having to remember everything, humans were able to engage in previously unachievable analytic thought. science, he argues, would not have been possible without writing. Ong goes into a much greater exploration of the subject in his book, as well as making some conjectures about the potential impacts of digital technologies (some of with I quite disagree with). it's worth the read if you're interested in such things.

back to the matter at hand, I'm not arguing that we need to just sit back, accept the fact that everything is remembered, and figure out how as a society we are going to adapt to this change. I would agree that computational systems are fundamentally different than the technologies of writing and printing with respect to memory. namely, writing and print allow us to record things, but digital technologies enable retrieval, and at continually improving speed and accuracy. thus, while we might have been able to remember things externally with books, search-type technologies enable an entirely new form of access to these external memories. essentially, the question becomes, how do we decide what gets remembered, and when do we decide to remember it? Gillian Hayes has done some really interesting work on systems that constantly archive everything, for example social interactions in a public space, but automatically delete the archives after 30 minutes if no one says, I want to remember that. her work is really top notch, and I highly recommend checking it out. while it might not always be possible to know that you want to remember something until after the fact, it certainly has benefits over the common alternative. that is, the approach of archiving everything, but only allowing people to find something specific for which they are looking. this later take leans much more on the side of the panopticon, but you don't run the risk of accidentally not remembering something important. neither approach is perfect, but I think both are better than devices that forcibly, automatically forget after a specified amount of time.