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Bente Kalsnes has raised the issue of why there aren’t more tech-politics attempts in Scandinavia (despite high levels of broadband penetration, widespread use for a variety of other purposes, etc). I think her overview and question is interesting, but also that it exaggerates the absence and should be supplemented to understand what’s going on.

Since that’s what I research, I’ll write only about how political actors use Internet tools here (and leave aside transparency/oversight efforts and e-government), and suggest just three brief points I think apply to Scandinavia in general though they are based on the case of Denmark:

First, “size matters” in a very general sense–when used well, new information and communication technologies like the Internet can reduce many overhead and transaction costs associated with creating niche media and catering to particular constituencies, and this has made many new and exciting enterprises possible. But in small countries with distinct languages, the “base” may be too small to make it worthwhile (or even possible) for entrepreneurs to cater to them–the absence of a DailyKos in Denmark, a MoveOn, a TPM-style news site, or even of older niche endeavours like news magazines or highly specialized cable channels have, I suspect, more to do with the size of the “market” (or constituency), and in politics with the relative lack of a polarized and aggrieved base, than with technology as such. Comparing Denmark (population 5.5 million) with Wisconsin (pop 5.6m) makes more sense than comparing a lilliputian Scandinavian country with the Gulliver of the United States (pop 306m). (this point has wide implications that need to be thought out, I wonder if for instance  many aspects of the “Wealth of Networks” that Benkler writes about can be realized in small countries)

Secondly, reports of the absence of tech-politics from cold northern Europe are somewhat exaggerated. I would say that political parties in Denmark use tech tools at a level that is roughly comparable to organizations with similar resources in the U.S.–only, one has to keep in mind that those organizations are state parties and smaller state-level campaigns, not the national parties and large federal or state-level campaign organizations. The two largest parties in Denmark (Venstre and Socialdemokraterne) spent, respectively, $6 million (30 million DKK) and $2 million (11 million DKK) on the 2007 national elections, where 3.5 mio people voted. That’s in the region of what a competitive congressional campaign in the U.S. will spend in a district where 350,000 people vote. In the cases where smaller U.S. political actors are clearly more sophisticated than their Danish counterparts (data, fundraising, field), it is usually because they can piggy-back on the infrastructure of tools developed for much more well-financed campaigns (this ties in with critical mass, obviously).

Thirdly, it is important to recognize that political organizations in for instance Denmark have offline means at their disposal that aren’t all that different from what in the U.S. takes the form of online tools. Take the Meetups that generated such excitement during the Dean campaign and were later reincarnated via MyBarackObama. At one level, they really aren’t all that different from what local party committees do on an everyday basis all over a country like Denmark (the difference lies in data capture, where Danish parties certainly have a long way to go, but also less of an interest, since fundraising and field works very differently there). As in other discussions of the use of various tools, it makes sense to start with first principles and wider goals, look at what people are already doing, and only then ask why they aren’t using widget X, instead of simply observing that they aren’t, and then jumping to the conclusion that they are somehow “behind”.

There is certainly room for improvement when it comes to techpolitics in Scandinavia, both in terms of quantity and quality, but I think it would be more useful to try to identify how new tools can solve the particular problems that the Scandinavian countries actually face than compare the efforts there with American efforts to solve American problems, and then find them wanting.

(cross-posted on Personal Democracy Forum)

This report on “Social Media and Advocacy” has generated quite a bit of buzz, with posts on TechPresident and elsewhere. It ranks more than a hundred big trade and advocacy associations on their use of a number of social media tools. Many have adopted very few, and hence score low. Only ten organizations use half or more of the tools discussed.

So far, so good–but what does that mean? It means opportunity, certainly for social media consultants who can help those who want to move “up” the list, and perhaps for the organizations themselves too.

While the survey is a useful overview, very little seems to follow from the rankings, in my view. Several people have pointed out that high scores in the report do not necessarily correlate with high visibility online (see for instance Morningside Analytics‘ take).

Simply plugging “adopt, adopt, adopt” when it comes to social media seems to be like going back to the mindset of the initial corporate adoption of ICTs–just hire a bunch of “those people”, and let them do “whatever it is they do”, without really wondering why. In the long run, it might help, but then again, in the long run, we are all dead.

A trickier question is how social media use square with the various first principles and instrumental strategies of these very diverse big organizations in their day-to-day work–many of the ones ranked are industry lobbies, after all!

How relatively valuable are social media, when the agendas pursued so often are special interests? What do the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America (scored last, using zero of the tools in question) really have to gain from adopting all these new technologies? Visibility? (do they want that?) A way to  engage their constituency? (is there one?) Aren’t they actually better off just plying their trade in relative secrecy, as interest organizations are wont to do? And isn’t it then up to those who might want to fight them to bring them out in the more open terrain created by social media?

Virginia Heffernan’s post about the “Facebook Exodus” on the NYTimes Media Blog has got some attention over the last couple of days (ironically, I saw it posted on Siva Vaidhyanathan‘s Facebook feed).

While not based with hard numbers, the qualitative point, that a significant number of people are migrating from Facebook for various reasons, seems solid enough (even though traffic numbers are still high).

What I would add here is that the same has happened in the past to friendster (remember friendster? It’s still big in Asia!) and myspace, and I think we can be sure it will happen in the future to Twitter too, if it continues to grow at its current rate.

All of these services can be seen as trying to corner a market for social networks online, and, ironically, success here can actually lead to failure. To put it in a rather unsophisticated way, people are (a) tribal, (b) only willing to deal with a certain amount of content, both reach their limits when networks become really, really big.

On the tribal point, the very exclusivity and in-crowd-ness that can attract people to a particular platform at one point in time will be gone by the time their boss, parents, and uncool middle-school friends are also there (an uglier version of this trend is one often noted by danah boyd, namely racial segregation between facebook and myspace).

On the content point, the same way, while Facebook (and friendster, myspace, twitter, whatnot) at one point in time may have facilitated a richer social environment for some users than, say, email or IM alone could, by the time they have to spend considerable amounts of time gatekeep just what feeds from whom of their hundreds of friends appear when on their page, the value has already evaporated-a problem of overload and attention economy that I and others have written about.

Yes, I think I too at some point will abandon my Facebook profile, because it will cease offering my added value. I expect to be able to migrate to another social networking site. And I expect to eventually leave that one too.

The people at Personal Democracy Forum had a nifty thing going during the summer conference, inviting a succession of participants to ask a question to the next (and to them unknown) person would have to respond to. This person would then in turn get a chance to ask a question, and so on, a merry go-around-slash-chain letter kind of conversation.

I happened to be called upon after Beth Noveck had asked her question about how government can turn into “open government”, leveraging useful feedback loops and crowdsourcing and the like. The video is here.

Let’s just say I’m neither as smart or as clear as Beth Noveck, shall we?, and then get on to why I continue to think overload is a real danger when institutions-governmental or other-adopt new technologies and organizational forms oriented towards information-gathering and analysis.

No-one is opposed to the idea of “useful” feedback loops and crowdsourcing, but I continue to believe that both the hype and the technology often continue to run ahead of the people who are supposed to use it.

With feedback loops,think, “what are we going to do with all this data”, i.e. think of the problems the intelligence services have had with the mismatch between their massive technological surveillance programs and relative dearth of human intelligence in the run-up to 9-11.

With crowdsourcing, think, “who exactly is the crowd, again?”, i.e. the fact that many organizations think that if they build it, people will come, and turn out to be wrong. Many supposedly interactive and collaborative platforms do not incorporate a solid consideration of who the users might be and why they would take part (think data.gov, which has yet to become all that it was supposed to become).

I hope I’m just a curmudgeon, and that Beth Noveck is right to be an optimist. She is certainly in a position to practice her optimism, and I look forward to seeing the results.

I’ve spent parts of July and August as a Visiting Student at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, courtesy of Yochai Benkler.

It’s been some productive weeks in Boston, as I’ve interviewed a number of people (who shall remain anonymous) for my research and written a great deal. I also had the opportunity to take part in several events at the Berkman Center, and talk to some interesting people there and elsewhere, including research director Rob Farris and Professor David Lazer of the Kennedy School of Government, both of whom where generous enough to meet with me.

Since the Journalism School at Columbia University is working towards creating the new Tow Center for New Media Journalism, and New York City now aims to create its own Media Lab, both projects directly inspired by predecessors at Harvard and MIT, it has been interesting to see some aspects of both up close. It will be interesting to see how their New York equivalents pan out.

This one is for the Danes–there is an interview with me in Mennesker og Medier that was aired today. It is one of a five-part series about media in America. I recommend part 1 too, with Solana Larsen and Bjarke Myrthu, two young journalists and storytellers actually working in the trenches.

My article “The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication, Miscommunication, and Communicative Overload” is now out in a special issue of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics (Volume 6, Issue 3 & 4, July 2009, pages 267-280).

The abstract goes like this: This article analyzes the use of Internet elements in political activism through a close ethnographic case study of a volunteer group involved in the 2008 U.S. Democratic presidential primary. Whereas the literature on political activism has generally argued that the Internet provides low-cost communication that facilitates collective action, this case highlights the labors that accompany Internet-assisted activism. The analysis, based upon participant-observation, identifies three interrelated problems with which the activists struggled: overcommunication, miscommunication, and communicative overload. Drawing on concepts taken from science and technology studies, the article argues that these problems have sociotechnical roots and arise from the specific affordances of an increasing number of Internet elements. Such elements reduce the up-front costs associated with communication for the sender, but they generate new transaction costs when integrated into heterogeneous assemblages with no shared communication protocol, no clear infrastructure or exostructure, and no significant means of tempering the tendency towards ever greater amounts of communication.

The article is available through Informaworld here for those who have subscription. A video version of a brief presentation at Personal Democracy forum based on the article is available here (after Deanna Zandt’s excellent presentation, and before Tanya Tarr’s equally excellent talk). The issue it was published in was edited by Andrew Chadwick and came out of the conference he organized at Royal Holloway, University of London last year. The whole issue is here.

For the past week, Centro Cultural Tlatelolco in Mexico City was humming with conversation about media and communications, and in particular their relation to human rights, democracy, and social justice as the International Association for Media and Communication Research‘s annual conference played out over four days.

Amongst the many interesting presentations, I’d highlight in particular Melissa Brough and Sasha Costanza-Chock‘s work, dealing with the much larger MacArthur-funded VozMob (Mobile Voices/Voces Moviles) project that they are involved in. It is a piece of participatory community media research, aiming to build a sustainable communications infrastructure for undocumented laborers in the Los Angeles area, and perhaps “export” it to related communities of workers and activists elsewhere. The project is both intellectually interesting and socially and politically important, and I hope to follow it as it develops.

The theme of the conference was human rights and communication, and there were many interesting discussions of the future of communications and the media. One thing I really appreciated about the project that Melissa and Sasha are involved in is that it seems to me to tackle the question of what communication can and should do in a way that has both more immediate and more concrete implications than abstract scholarly (and potentially irrelevant, if I may be so free) discussions of how communications infrastrucutres and media systems “ought” to be configured. I liked Becky Lentz‘s presentation for much the same reason. I suspect that the latter grander and more moral question is of greater intellectual than practical importance.

A video of the panel I was on at Personal Democracy Forum 2009 is available here.

There was too much good stuff at PdF 2009 to do it justice here (Nancy Scola has a good overview of some reactions here, and the twitter stream was, shall we say, lively).

I’ll just highlight a few of the quirkier moments I found more thought-provoking than the various celebrations of the leveling, democratizing, liberating, and what-have-you potentials of new technologies.

* Mayor Bloomberg participated via Skype from downtown–despite everyone’s shared fascination with and belief in technology, Andrew Rasiej still felt a need to apologize that hizzoner couldn’t be with us in the flesh. And of course, in addition to a grainy video stream, there was also the obligatory black-out. At a tech conference. In the Time Warner building.

* Todd Herman, the Republican National Committee’s new New Media Director, asked what I thought was one of the more thoughtful questions in his talk: “how open can a political party be?”, reiterating it later as “how open should a political party be?”, pointing to both the instrumental and the more normative dimensions of this–one thing is how useful it is to build campaigns around participatory platforms (there are pros and cons from various perspectives), another is how susceptible this makes organizations to undue pressures from active minorities (there are pros and cons here too–even keeping in mind that they of course already are, only old-school organized interests rather than newfangled online ones).

* On the last note, on the dilemmas of online organizing (which is of course one of my hobby horses and the topic I spoke on in a panel with Deanna Zandt and Tanya Tarr), Beth Noveck drily pointed out in her discussion of open government that one person’s energized participant is another’s, and I quote her, “loud idiot”, and that both facets of involvement, the force and the friction, are amplified by new technologies. This applies not only when people of different partisan leanings interact (as they may have to do in public spaces), but also when people with similar leanings try to work together, akin to what I’ve written about elsewhere as the “labors” of Internet-assisted collaboration.