…what we see in Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring are the results of hundreds of years of evolution in human communication, ideology, and organization. They are also the latest chapter in the story of the complex relationship between humans and technology, and what happens in the realm of intersection of the two.

Despite fears that the internet is alienating us from the world, it is actually giving us the means to re-create the ancient polis, but on a much larger scale. Aristotle argued that “it is necessary for the citizens to be of such a number that they knew each other’s personal qualities and thus can elect their officials and judge their fellows in a court of law sensibly”. Where radio and TV allowed our leaders to address a large number of people instantly, the internet also makes it easier for us to talk to our leaders, but more importantly it allows us to talk to each other across ever-greater distances and timezones.

For the cyborg, technology is no longer a thing you use—rather, it is a thing you are. Technology becomes part of you. Cyborgs are not users of tools; they are, instead, equipped with technology.

In the post quoted above, PJ Rey explains how, as technology becomes more integrated into our lives, it becomes less visible. As McLuhan argued, technology changes us in ways that are irrelevant to content, and personal computers and smart-phones are no different. Their effect on us goes beyond what particular status update or embarrassing photo we put on Facebook.

One of the interesting changes is in the way we observe and participate in politics.

Tony Abbott Looking At Things

Ed Millband repeating things

Cop casually pepper spraying things

Politicians are still trying to work with an old system in which they need to control a message and condense it into a 10 second grab for radio and TV newsbreaks. But the ease with which we can reproduce media, and basically unlimited time and space on the internet, mean we get to see the whole press conference, or rearrange campaign images into a new context in which we can see the patterns, see their technique. Now it’s not just the mass media who have the power to choose how a campaign is presented, it’s all of us.

Most politicians continue to use the old techniques of repeating soundbites and slogans, using Twitter and YouTube as a way of getting journalists to notice them. But some of them are realising the true nature of the technology: it’s not the mass media, it’s not direct mail to every household. It’s a way of reaching “image tribes” and communicating a more complex message to a smaller but more receptive audience. There’s so much potential for political parties, who are more and more thought to be hollow, soulless things, to allow their MPs to show what they actually believe in and engage with people. Soundbites were useful when someone else controlled how much time you had to make your point, but now there’s no limit to how long MPs can spend arguing their case. Parties need to encourage their members to do that, even if that’s at the expense of their focus-grouped campaign slogans. Because it’s happening whether MPs are part of it or not.

Two things strike me about the aftermath of these events.

First, unforeseen interruptions to highly complex systems demonstrate their fragility and lack of resilience. Risk culture, in late modernity, is partly a way of trying to contain such disturbances, and manage them.

Secondly, with peak oil and climate change both looming on the horizon, Eyjafjallajökull makes us reflect on what a world with less air travel might look like.

In that context, I wanted to recommend a very interesting post by Victoria Johnson at the New Economics Foundation:

While the aviation industry morns losses in revenue of over £130 million each day, and discussions emerge about the potential government bailout for an already struggling industry, perhaps this is yet again, a symptom of a system that is on the brink of collapse.

Last week, leading science journal Nature published a paper (subscription required) which highlighted the vulnerability of highly interdependent infrastructure, and argued that we need to consider more ‘mutually dependent’ network properties if we are to design resilient systems. But not only should these systems be resilient, they also need to be low carbon and ensure that societal adaptive capacity is enhanced – so as a species, we are better equipped to deal with the next 50 years of climate change we already committed to.

Our ability to predict the future is limited by a number of factors. Models are limited representations of reality, constrained by our understanding of a complex system and computational power. And, while they may provide information on possible future outcomes, they are not a crystal ball. Second, against the background of larger-scale and long-term trends are ‘surprises’, such as extreme events, tipping points and unknown unknowns. This means that adaptation of society needs to recognise that while some actions can be planned for, the best option is to increase system resilience and reduce vulnerability.

As they say, go read the whole thing.

NB: Previous commentary and discussion on LP here and here.

I’ll have more to say about this soon, as this OLO piece is a spinoff from my talk for the Queensland Writers Centre on the Digital Age and the future of writing. I’m working that up in longer form for publication.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines.

This is not really my field, but the woman herself is quite fascinating – and Catriona has some great links about her life and work at Circulating Library. Continuing the local linking theme, The Memes of Production looks at the representation of female scientists in Isaac Asimov’s fiction, concluding that there’s definitely a need for this sort of celebration!

Harkin is “Director of Talks” at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, which sounds like a fabulous job. He writes regularly for a number of publications – including The Guardian – and Cyburbia is an expansion of his shorter pieces on the history and social significance of the internet. Harkin is also one of the burgeoning tribe of “Big Ideas” interpreters and entrepreneurs. This, combined with his journalistic skills, has both advantages and disadvantages for Cyburbia.

On the positive side of the ledger, Harkin writes well and rather impressively sustains a few themes throughout what might otherwise be a rather discursive and diffuse book. But, less promisingly, his style of pop sociology – like a lot of efforts in this vein (think Hugh Mackay and Bernard Salt, though he’s better than that) – is prone to generalisations unsupported by empirical evidence and unsurprisingly close to the common sense of the commentariat.

Harkin opens with a rather striking parable summoning up the image of people staring at each other from the windows on a suburban street, and attempting to communicate by various forms of signalling. It’s rather creepy, and sexualised, and that’s no doubt intended. This is Cyburbia, where we’ve apparently all moved, and where the medium is the message and the mere act of voyeuristically “communicating” drives out both content and interaction. It’s like poking celebrities on Facebook (and Harkin apparently directed his first ever poke at Christina Ricci), or like random voyeurism on social media sites.

There’s a couple of problems (at least) with this image and this theme. The first is that the analytical frame Harkin adopts is the same one that inspired some of the intellectual and conceptual steps in the development of the internet – cybernetics, systems theory, information theory, social network theory, and so on. All privileged the fact of interaction, if you like, over the content of messages. There’s actually a fascinating story to tell here, which goes far beyond the origins of digital technology in World War II (though that’s interesting too). Harkin tells it well, bringing folks like Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan to life. The sections where he looks beneath the technology to get at the social and human worldview of its pioneers are the best in the book. It’s a bit derivative, and both Charlie Gere’s Digital Culture and N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman are much richer tellings of the same story, but as a popularisation of an intriguing compendium of intellectual history and cultural contexts, it’s very worthwhile.

But therein lies the rub. While he might be having fun slaying some of the more hyperbolic dragons of social network theory (demolishing various versions of the “six degrees of separation” thesis), he’s both ignoring more nuanced articulations of the perspectives he takes aim at and taking the received interpretation at its own estimation. He seems to assume that because the creation of online networks treats people as nodes – an analogy used by no less than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg – that’s what we are when we’re sitting in front of a screen.

But we’re not, or not to the same degree that Harkin thinks we are.

Taking Facebook as a bit of a test case, as Harkin himself does, there’s a growing amount of empirical research on why people do various things at FB, and what motivates them. The consensus of the literature is that Facebook represents a “scaling up” of already existing networks, and that most people don’t make the distinction between “offline” and “online” that almost all the critique assumes as a given. Nor are the majority of users treating Facebook as a huge pond where they can swim around randomly poking or checking out others – it’s actually used far more for “social searching” (ie deepening one’s knowledge of existing connections) than “social browsing” (finding new connections). In addition, it’s increasingly being employed for coordinating everything from social lives to community events and political activism. And for “social distribution” – utilising Facebook as a platform for embedding and sharing content derived from elsewhere, as well as for content creation.

None of this is to suggest that Facebook is perfect or to echo some of the more hyperbolic claims of cyber-utopians. But it does go to the way that that Facebook is becoming something of a term of art for a particular set of practices, much as “googling” has passed into common parlance. The academic research that’s been done shows that social media sites and social networking deepen and extend existing forms of social behaviour, all of which is by definition rich in content and meaning. While Harkin’s book has some not inconsiderable virtues, it’s a real pity that he didn’t go in search of what evidence there is about what people are actually doing when they interact on the internet, rather than flip around some of the assumptions made by its progenitors.

Lapham, playing himself, leads his empty vessels through the streets of Manhattan, counterposing up-scale parties with wait staff slaving for tips. It’s a savvy piece of emotional manipulation designed to guilt the young rich into acknowledging the class structure that, above all else, got them to where they are. In one party scene, the hubris is intoxicating as a tipsy Ivy League cohort prepares, like their parents, to ascend to the heights of commerce, industry and influence.

Of course, this constructed ‘choice’ transcends the personal, reading as an obvious allegory for the nation as a whole. If the American working class has nothing to lose but their chains, Lapham clearly hopes a new generation will hand them the bolt cutters — a naive appeal to altruism perhaps, but one that continues to resonate as the economy tanks. Lapham’s choice is now more pressing, in that conditions have got much worse, and much easier in that elite opinion is again extolling the virtues of public service, always a potent (if submerged) strain of America’s DNA.

Two recent events have confused Lapham’s dichotomy — namely, the collapse of the Wall St investment banks that once promised grads an inside track to power and influence (in the doco, Jack must choose between the now-flailing Goldman Sachs and life as a writer) and the election of the Obama Administration. But perhaps the more important wildcard is the ‘West Wing effect’ where Jeb Bartlett’s passion for public policy collides with the burgeoning mythology around President Obama’s inner circle.

Consider the media frenzy over the past week surrounding the inauguration speech allegedly penned by 27-year old staffer John Favreau, the pain felt by Facebook-addicted staffers held hostage by outdated email-free PCs and the plight of press secretaries confronted by electronic doors — the touchy-feely anecdotes could fill a whole Blackberry. Which of Lapham’s formerly Goldman-bound Yalies could now resist taking the social policy reigns under a svelte 47-year old with a penchant for pickup games of two-on-two?

Add this to calls for a ‘new Keynesianism‘, big government and demands for massive tax hikes and a seachange seems unavoidable. Four years after Lapham’s intervention, the US is witnessing a wholesale rejection of the Patrick Bateman era, demanding personal commitments more in tune with the darkening reality of everyday life. For a nation on its knees, self sacrifice has again become sexy.

But perhaps a more difficult question is whether this new public-spiritedness is pointed in the right direction. The levers of government may be so corroded, and the policy making options of earlier eras so passé as to render the renewed enthusiasm null and void.

For a period in the late 90s and early 00s, progressive forces were searching for new modes of public engagement in the tacit recognition that national governments were no longer able to provide the kind of policy guidance beloved by post-WWII welfare states. In the best examples, domestic social movements crafted global networks that went beyond defensive postures towards what Alain Touraine calls “conflictive participation in the global economy”. Those networks have now become clogged as domestic ‘solutions’ again become fashionable.

What remains of welfarism after its trashing under Bush is still tilted away from the genuinely excluded (think The Wire) towards an illusory middle class receding irretrievably from view. US labor unions are mostly a defensive bulwark against the vagaries of global competition and not an assertive force for social change. Obama’s multi-billion dollar car industry bailout will benefit, first and foremost, Hillary’s white workers and not the forgotten of Detroit’s slums. The multitude of stimulus and bailout packages are an attempt to revive a failed settlement between capital and labour that passed its used-by-date decades ago.

The alternative for the legions of Obama fans is to take a good look at the fluidity that has re-made American society and fashion a conflictive social movement that engages directly with issues of cultural diversity and economic fragmentation. For their part, policy wonks should be looking less at off-the-shelf responses and instead at regulations that protect and extend cultural and economic autonomy — the contours of which will inevitably emerge, with or without the input of a new band of Ivy League do-gooders.

Image of spontaneous street celebrations in Harlem courtesy of matt semel at flickr – reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

No doubt one of the big stories about the US election will be the influence of the blogosphere and the netroots. In many ways, the rise of the intertubes in politics was an unintended consequence of the Rove approach to politics, as Publius perceives:

The bigger story is that this same anger – this same frustration – has led liberals to organize in more numerous and consequential ways. In the last few years, we’ve seen new think tanks. We’ve seen blogs flower. We’ve seen the rise of media sites like TPM and Huffington with real journalistic chops. We’ve seen unprecedented efforts to register and canvass voters.

In short, we’ve seen a new energy driving liberals back to politics.

In an opinion piece at ABC Online, Barry Saunders sums up the changes that net based activism and citizen journalism have wrought:

The impact of social media on this election has been enormous. Whoever takes office will have to deal with widely available factchecking data, embarrassing videos, rabid wingnuts, opinionated bloggers and TV hosts, and a massive number of new voters and donors who feel they have invested in the American political process – as well as two wars and a collapsing economy. Here’s hoping they know what they’re doing.

John Quiggin writes of the “end of the first age of the blogosphere”:

Once the initial euphoria dissipates, and the inevitable mistakes, failures and compromises/sellouts begin to emerge, it’s necessary to strike a balance between criticising what’s being done wrong and reminding yourself how much worse the other side was and would be again. The attitude of constructive critical support is a hard one to maintain, especially given the habits built up over years in opposition.

We’ve already had a look at Michael Bérubé’s thoughts here at LP:

But perhaps the left blogosphere could be of some use in this regard, no? It needn’t be consolidated fully into Obama Enterprises Inc.; it could serve instead as a forum for writers dedicated to things like “hope” and “change” and “arguing that Obama was wrong to cave on FISA and better not do that kind of thing as President.” Of course, it could also serve as a forum for charting and mocking all manner of Ace-of-Confederate-Red-State-Yankeespade wingnuts as they venture into new realms of sheer barking lunacy that even the world’s sheerest barkingest lunatics have hitherto been unable to imagine. That might be fun. And it could do “shorters” and cat blogging and Theory Tuesdays and Friday Random Tens too. It’s a blogosphere. It’s a big place, with many many tubes.

And Possum makes some sharp points comparing the media/punditsphere and online social media:

Data beat punditry, statistics beat navel gazing, demographic analysis beat wishful thinking.

The intertubes were 3 hours ahead of the network coverage, Dick Morris should never show his face in public again if he had an ounce of integrity, and, most importantly, this has been a demonstration that sometimes things dont happen in the same tired old ways they always have before.

There’s one point I’d like to add to all this analysis.

Going back as early as 1976, commentary about US elections focused on the decline in voter involvement and its eclipse by top-down media strategies. We’ve seen a massive revival in citizen participation and activism, something that was recognised by Barack Obama in his victory speech. The future of this re-engagement will be dependent on how Obama governs, but as he correctly says, it will also be dependent on the preparedness of citizens to continue to act publicly and collectively.

All technology is shaped socially. Blogging, YouTube, and other social media have been enablers and not just causes of this invigoration of democracy. I’d like to see some research and analysis focused on the wellsprings of activism we’ve seen bubbling up. I think that would be, in many ways, a more productive frame through which to look at what’s interesting, distinctive and exciting about this campaign than yet another round of “journos v. bloggers” style articles.

Elsewhere: An interesting post from Terry Flew on the role of satire in the campaign, and some suggestions for future analyses of the results.