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Monday the 30th of July, Mirjana Mirosavljevic of the Reconstruction Women’s Fund generously spend an hour explaining to me her view of the intricacies of civil society participation in a Serbia undergoing a difficult political and economic transition.

One particularly interesting thing for me was RWfund’s deliberate attempt to work as a sort of meta-organization, focused on the development of other NGO’s, the strengthening of networks between them, and the training of activists. They raise money from international foundations like George Soros’s Open Society Institute and the Rockerfeller Brothers Fund, donors that smaller, local organizations are unlikely to reach, and work to increase awareness of the issue of women’s rights in Serbia, and Serbian women’s rights amongst internationals working in Serbia.

Also, she pointed out the increasing importance of the Serbian Orthodox Church (though not in a direction that she and her organization appreciates) in a country experiencing a sort of simultaneous relative implosion of both state politics and the kind of civil society politics that contributed to the regime change of 2000. In this kind of ‘vacuum’, there is a room for those with resources, and the church has both money (from remittances) and people, both as actors in their own right, and, I would deduce, as its own kind of meta-organizers for movements with a quite different agenda. There are some clear parallels here, it seems to me, to the role of the church in many other transitional political situations.

Mirosavljevic readily admitted the challenges involved for an organization like RWfund, not only from the immediate political circumstances they operate in, but also from the strategy they have chosen and the practical paths they pursue. Follow the money here. Being mainly dependent on foreign, and predominantly U.S., funding in a country where the ruins left by the NATO airial strikes from 1999 remain very visible is not a PR boon. But resources obviously has to be found if the work is to continue–like the media I also like to write about, activism is far from free, even if it is voluntary, and both foreign funds and domestic enthusiasm has on many areas been on the wane, especially since the assassination of Zoran Djindjić in 2003 and the relative lack of political improvements since. It takes not only romantic dedication, but also cool cash, to try to match the inertia of the world and whatever forces one’s political opponents marshal. Listening to her stories of attempts to work one’s way through international bureaucracy and lack of government recognition of local expertise and even the legitimacy of activism, I can only respect the work done here to attempt to build and maintain a basis infrastructure of participation.

– – – Nerdy Note – – –

After the talk, I had occasion to re-read Karl Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question’. It remains for me an interesting point of reference here, not because I agree with it, but because it so mercilessly probes some of the limits of liberal rights and pluralist struggles for freedom, such as the struggle for women’s rights. Marx’s overall argument is that no minority can seriously pursue freedom on its own, as a minority, but only as part of a majority coalition aiming to transform the social order that made them an unfree minority in the first place. But of course, paroles ‘first class struggle, then gender struggle’ and the like proved to be quite a dead-end.

A travel note to share: After many twists and turns, it was some years ago decided to tear down the Palace of the Republic, an old GDR prestige construction in the center of Berlin. The parliament, city council and whoever else bears the responsibility for all this feel the need to point out that the decision made in a democratic country with its democratic local government is, indeed, also a democratic decision (PBS Frontline has a short doc about the palace and the decision to tear it down here) – at least that’s the title of the posters that inform the curious by-passers of what is going on.

I took some pictures of a nice little information/propaganda wall that has been put up next to the site of the now largely dismantled building (it is even more long-winded online). What is interesting from the perspective of this blog is not so much the glib and highly professional communication on the posters that surround the construction yard, but more how discontents have appropriated the posters as a platform for their own views–question marks, comments, and criticism appear in handwriting next to the printed info. Also interesting is that some of the comments are in English, targeting not only locals, but also tourists like me. Maybe next time they should simply leave space for comments, since these are becoming wall papers anyway?

As usual, the G8 meeting, this time in Heiligendamm, is one giant spectacle for everyone involved. Elected politicians, bureaucrats, police, protesters, and journalists use each other for numerous ends and dead ends. Cameras, recorders, and various forms of wireless communication are ubiquitous. Everything is documented, communicated, mediated, endlessly recycled, repackaged, and reused.

This also counts for the protestors’ tactical repertoire, closely monitored not only by the police and by their fellows around the world, but also by ‘the suits’ on the other side of the many fences.

Adding irony to the hopes and tragedies of these meetings, precisely here, at the front line between those who are trying to take a part they have not been offered, and the forms of obstruction and repression they are met with, numerous new forms of political organization and action are being developed that will, if the historical record is anything to go by, later be appropriated by precisely the state-bound political process of legitimization that the protestors are challenging.

Many of the current buzzwords of participation in state and electoral politics are old news to those who try to take part in Heiligendamm these days—they where using social networking softwares, cell phone based forms of communication, and online video bases like youtube before they became part of the lingo of electoral politics. And they are ahead again—an example: search Flickr for pictures of Heiligendamm + G8, and ask yourself who got the better of whom on that digital front?

Becky Hogge’s comment on ‘Campaigning in Cyberspace’ brought mySociety, a British group, to my attention. They fully deserve it, though these are busy days, so I will not write much

I find them interesting partly because they do the usual stuff well – make information about elected officials available, help people write to their elected official – but mainly because they do a few newer things, things that are not as integral to the informatio-and-transmission-oriented ways in which we have developed online communication.

* They develop tools for peer-to-peer politics, like Pledgebank, helping people commit to common projects, and Neighbourhood Fix-It that help people locate, discuss, and perhaps deal with, practical local problems like pot holes and the like. Both have a nice action-orientation that can operate independently of the state and organized politics. Both can of course also be turned towards more traditional movements or party politics.

* They help people publicize their reasons for, for instance, non-voting. Check out NotApathetic, a site that contains everything from the pathetic, over the obvious (I didn’t vote because I’m only 17), to interesting, nuanced explanations of how some people felt disenchanted and disenfranschised even on the eve of the ’05 UK election. And debate of those reasons and the platform on which the debate took place too.

Oh, by the way, wouldn’t they have been even lovelier if they where called ‘ourSociety’? Anyway, good, interesting work.

For the Danish-readers out there: I took up the gauntlet thrown by Nikolai Thyssen of Information. Have a look here. I’ll provide a short summary in English later, to boil it down in the extreme, Thyssen doubts the value of the debate that takes place on newspaper sites, I argue they offer readers an outlet for a form of media critique that may not be very valuable for the professional observer, but does publicize the concerns of those active, and gives them an opportunity to slug it out with other actives over questions of bias, factual errors, and what have you. In other words, my basic observation is that commentaries are admittedly not the acme of the media of tomorrow, but still represents a chance for those who want to not only be part of (as readers), but play a small part in (as writers) a mass media site. To be continued…

I went to the above-named event at the New School Friday night, and have been shooting emails left and right since then with questions…

The presentations are available here and at http://fora.tv/new_school/.

Trebor Scholz raised a question that from my vantage point can be reformulated as: how would it be possible to identify the distinction between participation and exploitation on the basis of what people contribute to one process, event, or organization? When are you working to make a difference, when are you working for someone else? This is obviously very important if one is to assess the potential of participatory political campaigns, where the pro and pols’ urge to control has to find a way of co-existing with the less calculated jolts and spouts of activism.

Trebor argued that seen through an updated understanding of work as self-creating performances, a lot of social networking is a something-for-nothing deal, where site-owners make money out of participants’ creative contributions. I have asked him a couple of questions about what would follow from this if one accepts his point, you can see the questions here.

In a sense, the question I send to Ethan Zuckerman is even more fundamental to my interests in participatory politics. Take the context of the United States, and think about the examples of networked politics – recent citizens’ contributions include the 1984-Hilary video and McCain vs. McCain undressing him for his ‘straight-talk’ slogan. Both have attracted a lot of attention. Both are activist initiatives. Both are prime examples of the crowdsourcing of negative campaigning, and the one thing we know about negative campaigning is that it drives people away, make them not take part, not vote, not care. Maybe we are looking at a paradox, more citizens ‘negative’ participation will feed the spiral of cynicism and discontent, and breed less participation…? I asked Ethan for examples of ‘positive’ participation through social media, and he named perennial favorite MoveOn.org, a good example. I would add the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign too – but those seem to be outliers, and especially MoveOn an outlier structured around resistance, not a positive project. On his suggestion, I have forwarded my question to David Weinberger and Dan Gillmor, and hope to return with input from them. While I wait, and think, this cute little video from an Obama meetup in New York will hold up the beacon of hope for a positive participatory politics. It is all volunteer made, every second of it.

Went to NYU’s Center for Communication for a talk inappropriately named ‘Voicing Your Opinion’. Should have been entitled ‘Voicing Their Opinion’. The one blogger and activist invited, Matt Stoller, didn’t show, and the rest of the panel consisted of traditional journalists, at length praising the value of having op-ed columnists, pundits, various spokespersons and officials, and the like populating op-ed pages (on paper or pixels) and going through the motions of a debate they have nothing but their vanity and maybe the difference between a well-paid and an excessively well-paid job at stake in.

Don’t get me wrong, both the speakers and the people they praise are smart. But when Tunku Varadarajan, former op-ed page editor from the Wall Street Journal could simply note in a side-comment that the Journal only prints 2-3 of the 1000-2000 unsolicited letters it receives every week without anyone in the panel reacting or considering even for a second what that says about what the event description called “a powerful forum for public discourse”, you begin to wonder. Perhaps the copy editor just garbled a sentence that should have read “A forum for publicized discourse between powerful people”? Ongoing research of my own suggests something akin to a 1:4 ratio of formal representatives relative to citizens on the letters pages of Danish papers, the Journal, if Varadarajan is right, has something akin to a 23:1 or 35:1 ratio between solicited and unsolicited letters. No big surprise, perhaps, but still, that’s some forum.

Most of the kind comments the panel had to offer for participatory media (they be citizen’s use of new or old media) where defined by a classic journalistic instinct to insist on the professionals’ right to define not only the terms of the conversation, but also the topic, length, and just about everything else you can come to think of. So for these, and, it seems fair to speculate, many other employees at prestigious news outlets, participation is good insofar as it supplements journalism as it is – if it aims to make a difference, effect a change, then it is out of order. Mainstream professional journalism has grown comfortable with ‘news you can use’, probably because it maintains the sender/receiver separation that their profession is based on, but still seems oblivious to the idea of ‘media you can use’.

Here is a quote attributed to a campaign manager: “Why is it better to have more people participating if their level of interest is so low that they can’t even get off their butts to get a stamp and write Washington? Are their opinions really valuable if they can’t afford 33 cents for the opinion? If they will blubber in front of the local TV cameras but not be bothered to actually vote?”

There seems to be some proto-protestant self-flagellation involved in the argument, ‘it has to be hard before it can be good’. I wonder whether this particular campaign manager think we should go back to oral voting anno circa-eighteen hundred, and reduce the number of polls so people can really demonstrate that they care by spending days on trekking back and forth before they earn the right to express their opinion. The printing press and the secret ballot really made it far too easy for all those coach potatoes to express their opinion… It is hard to accept that technological changes making it easier to vote, contact your representatives, and organize politically are somehow in themselves bad, or that the activity they engender are somehow illegitimate relative to ‘good, old, hard work’. It is not exactly as if we have too much engagement.

I needed to make that rather pedestrian point after having finished ‘Deep Democracy, Thin Citizenship: The Impact of Digital Media in Political Campaign Strategy’, an interesting article by Philip N. Howard, a communications scholar from the University of Washington. The quote is from his fieldwork (on page 3, since you ask). He is undoubtedly right to point out how political campaigns, both from parties, political action committees, and social movements, use sophisticated narrowcasting and polling techniques to mobilize small and precisely delineated publics around the specific issues these particular citizens, and those who fund the campaign in question, care about.

This more fine-grained and information-directed approach to mobilization and participation makes up the ‘deeper’ part of his title. But Howard appears critical of the development, worried by what for him as for many others (Cass Sunstein and his Republic.Com springs to mind) looks like a tendency towards fragmentation of what he seems to think was at some point an integrated and ‘general’ public. His worries over a ‘thinner’ citizenship, “thinner in terms of the ease in which people can become politically expressive without being substantively engaged”. I share his interest in the question of when someone can be said to be ‘substantively engaged’, but the notion that partisan mobilization does not constitute such engagement puzzles me. I wonder how mobilization in the tradition of Jacksonian democracy, trade union activism, or religious organization would fare under his critical gaze? And whether we should really think of the era of three strikingly similar TV-networks, a newspaper monopoly for every town, and a highly stratified mass society as a better setting for democratic politics? I would have pointed the barbed comments towards the idea of ‘political consumption’, or ‘life politics’.

But anyway, his article is interesting, and definitely worth a look. I will move on to his book ‘New Media Campaigns and The Managed Citizen’ one of these days, it looks interesting too.

I don’t want to be rude, but despite all its promise, a first look at BBC’s much-vaunted ‘action network‘ suggest it could be renamed the ‘inaction network’.

This is how it describes itself: “Action Network can help you change something in your local area. Get in touch with people who feel the same way and get advice on taking action.”

Great, another initiative to fuel the rest of the world’s BBC-envy. The site is rightly praised by bloggers like j d lasica for its open nature and action-orientation. It contains useful guides to how you can do all sorts of things in Britain.

It:

1) profits from one of the most trusted brands in news, and the institutional, manpower, and financial support that a not-for-profit organization like the BBC can provide.

2) has had about 4 years to grow.

3) does indeed have quite a lot of members and some traffic. Some numbers circulated include 100.000 members including 10.000 regularly active (I have not checked these).

Nonetheless, all that the recently released ‘Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement‘ report from the Center for Citizen Media could point in terms of actual impact is that two guys are bickering about global warming and someone prevented the closure of a community center. And the source is one of the project leaders from BBC herself…

Is it just me, or is this somewhat less than a spectacular success? Would be thrilled to hear some success stories about the action network, as I am quite thrilled by the set-up and idea, and the results seems disheartening.

Though the independence that the action network enjoys seems a valuable chance for mobilization outside the structures of government, I strikes me that the absence of institutional political players will also often be a problem – if the problems people are working to change are things like the environment and local planning issues (and not organizing an independent movement of some sort, something one probably wouldn’t want to do on a Government sponsored site anyway), you may want to actually try to engage decision-makers in debate to try to pin them down on something.

There have been some riots in Copenhagen recently, over the forceful eviction of counter-cultural squatters by the police from a house they had used for about 25 years. I was quite concerned by what to me looked like excessive use of force, documented examples of semi-random imprisonments, also of under-age kids, and several searches conducted without warrants. Being roughly 4000 miles away and by now largely devoid of any meaningful contacts in movements or parties there, I have to admit I resorted to a rather sentimental and therapeutic mean of ‘participation’. I emailed the 15 members of parliament who are on the juridical committee…

So there I was, arguing that they ought to consider an independent investigation into police conduct during that weekend, pursuing a politics of expression, something I have always been incredibly skeptical towards. Two (or their aides, I doesn’t matter much to me) already wrote back (I have to say that I was surprised that I actually got answers from anyone). One from the left, and one from the right, the former to agree with me, the latter actually bothered to express his disagreement with me, and his trust in the police. I am glad he took the time.

Now the left are increasingly pushing for a closer scrutiny of what exactly happened… Obviously, I am not arguing that I, or any other individual email-writer, made that happen. It is impossible to track the traces of any individual communication under circumstances like this. It makes me wonder whether the definition of meaningful participation as something like ‘making a difference’ that I tend to fall back on makes much sense at all – it smacks too much of billiard balls setting each other in motion, or of chains of actions mediated as by a letter-carrying pigeon, ‘A used X to say to B who did Y to C… – but maybe the latter can be used to trace out how I became a part in a network that has one of its more visible tips in those parts of parliament that are now pursuing the possibility of an investigation. Did I take an action that was mainly therapeutical and merely happened to coincide with a wider trust that became the political action of pushing for in investigation? Yes, in a way, and then I and the politics are separated. But the narrative could also be re-construed as: ‘I took action and through that became part of a network that acted to push for an investigation’. Then I am part of the political action. The former is the road to cynicism, the latter to action – but I do not know that I am intellectually convinced by either, or even of their usefulness. The former makes it almost impossible to identify anyone but a few individuals as participants (and that is patently absurd, a form of reactionary romanticism of ‘strong men making history’), the latter makes it impossible to distinguish between action and lack thereof (equally absurd, then everything would not only be potentially political but actually so, and the word political, as well as the word participation, would cease to mean anything in particular). Not exactly thrilling outlooks for someone who makes his living writing, talking, and speculating about politics and participation… Anyway, it made me think. More.