by msweeks
Sydney-based IBSG Director, heading up the IBSG public sector team in Asia Pacific for Cisco. Co-author of the Connected Republic 2.0 More about msweeks
eFestival of Ideas
A week-long eFestival of Ideas is currently on hosted by Sydney-based youth organisation Vibewire. I'm contributing to a forum on "eParticipation: Fad or Future", which Cisco is sponsoring.
Come and have a look at the debate and join in.
http://www.vibewire.net/forum/view_topic?topic_id=86
One of the other guest contributors, Mark Pesce, had this to say in a recent blog. It will give you a flavour for the debate we're enjoying:
"The institution finds itself caught in a paradox: aggregation makes it powerful, but takes away its voice. When power was important, the institution prospered. Now that the cultural balance is shifting toward hyperempowered individuals engaging in conversation, the institution is under threat. It is being disempowered in a way that it can not adapt to without a fundamental restructuring of its organizational behavior. This is something that governments are only slowly coming to recognize, but educators (and, in particular, educational administrators) are already well aware that their students are more empowered than the educational institutions they attend. The desynchronization between the scope of institutional power and the chaos of unconstrained and unconstrainable conversational hyperempowerment presents a challenge that will transform the institution – or kill it."
He's right, I think - one of the dimensions of the current contest between government and the Web 2.0 world is a largely unspoken struggle between individuals and institutions. If Pesce is on the right track, we can expect much more unhappiness and resistance from government in the face of the rise and rise of hyperempowerment. Unless, of course, you think Pesce is talking through his bottom...
Comments
Ewan McIntosh said: You may find the quotes in this post of use in your arguments on the 'fad' of the net:
http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2008/04/the-net-its-all.html
posted over 3 years ago
Terry Ansari said: To paraphrase another poster over at vibewire, I agree with this completely and I disagree with it completely. There's no doubt in the broadly Western context that the individual is more empowered, at least from a depth and breadth of informed choice point-of-view. Equally Martin, I agree that tension, spurred on by technology, exists and is growing between and across stakeholders.
However, "the chaos of unconstrained and unconstrainable conversational hyperempowerment" implies an extraordinarilly high level of participation by those same hyperempowered individuals. What we've seen so far in the Web2.0 world is certainly a higher level of individual participation, but that doesn't or hasn't translated into those individuals being more "participative" in and around the institutions that they seek to transform...or kill. Further, there's ample proof that whatever the increase in individual participation may be, it's still a long way from being a majority exercise (which I think would be the point). As long as the dialogue revolves around a certain us vs them mentality, this is more electronic tilting at windmills.
At the risk of being branded some kind of apologist (gasp), I think there's a certain unreasonable impatience that runs through the dialogue; the institution isn't "under threat". A phrase I'm not particularly fond of comes to mind; "he who has the gold makes the rules". Unless we're advocating anarchy, then that will remain so, as it relates to "the institution". The phrase as its used here puts me in mind of unionspeak; a company is "the employer", a kind of third-person dissociation...here, "our" or "your government" becomes "the institution"
I also think that the institution actually understands the challenge (to varying degrees), but the ability for the institution to move in what some might think or want as a more timely or purposeful way, presupposes that the institution became what it is today (obscure Reggie Perrin reference) either deliberately or overnight.
Without appropriate analysis, time and leadership (absolutely indisputably aided and abetted by technology), unwinding some of the historically deep complexities inherent in the institution will only lead to ultimately meaningless sops at best or to some ill-advised and irretrievable "choice agenda" or some such that will make us question both why we hurried and what exactly it was we were thinking...
posted over 3 years ago
Paul Johnston said: I tend to agree with Terry (and sadly even got his obscure Reggie Perrin reference). I think there are huge opportunities for citizen empowerment and that some citizens are to some extent much more empowered than they use to be, but I do not think that we are all hyper-empowered now. I have plenty of views of issues from Uk foreign policy to our ant-terrorist laws to how well the road was repaired outside my house one month ago, but I do not have much sense that central or local government wants to listen to my views much less instantly translate them into actions. And, of course, given that there are 60 million or so UK residents with widely differing views it is difficult for government to listen and impossible to act on every view that is expressed. So for me it is about: opening up decision-making, so everything is much more transparent; encouraging feedback and debate on a scale not seen in my part of the world since the ancient Greek city states; and then giving citizens the opportunities to find each other and come together as communities to make their views heard and have an impact. We need citizen empowerment and that can sometimes be a matter of individual choice; but much more we need transparency, feedback and empowered virtual communities.
posted over 3 years ago
Martin Stewart-Weeks said: I'm less sanguine about the resilience of the instiutions of public policy in the face of increasingly restless and effective citizens. Not all of them, true and still in many ways something of a niche group, but the impact remains as potentially corrosive of the foundations of control and authority on which instutions are built even though the assult is being launched by a relatively small group of people.
But Terry's timely realism is an important anti-dote to a certain hysterical romanticism that can sometimes grip the more voluble and articulate spruikers of the wonderful world of hyerconnectivity. Sometimes I think we can be some mesmerised by the astonishing things you can now do in virtual communities and by using these new collaboration platforms that we assume that excitement is the same as efficicacy.
Institutions conserve and control. Individuals (sometimes) test and disagree and seek to redraw the lines that define the interesting space in between. The new tools connection and collaboration are, without doubt, rewriting the rules of engagement in that eternal contest and, in the process, redefining what exactly the right balance is or should be.
What we mean by "empowered" also needs some pinning down - making our voices heard, determining policy and decisions, being asked for our opinion?
posted over 3 years ago