I've been slacking on posting here for a couple weeks - I've been writing long sections of a research project that I'll chunk up into smaller posts later (I usually work for the Government of Canada; I'm on interchange to Public Policy Forum for a year). Though my once weekly rhythm seems to be long gone regardless, perhaps for the better. With my apologies for the occasional mammothly long post.
I wrote a project update over on the Forum's Medium channel, if you're curious: Governance in the digital age. There's a lot left out that makes me think "How can I write about this and not mention [thing]?", but a lot had to hit the cutting room floor - my first draft was 11 pages and this is it whittled down to two.
Back in November I wrote a post entitled "Thinking, fast and slow about online public engagement" Today I'm going to push that thinking a deeper, provide some examples and generally expand the premise and reasoning behind the original piece. In so doing I will undoubtedly re-cover the some of the same ground so the original isn't mandatory reading. Oh and heads up this, is a long read.
Thinking, Fast and Slow about Online Public Engagement
Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is from the increasingly popular field of behavioural economics. It was widely read in government circles in Canada and elsewhere, so if you haven't read it yet, you might considering picking it up. If that's not your speed you could sit down for an hour and watch the video below or just read my quick explanation underneath it.
At it's core Kahneman's thesis is that the human mind is made up of two different and competing (metaphorical) systems: System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow).
System 1 operates automatically, intuitively, involuntary, and effortlessly — like when we drive, recognize facial expressions, or remember our name.
System 2 requires conscious effort, deliberating, solving problems, reasoning, computing, focusing, concentrating, considering other data, and not jumping to quick conclusions — like when evaluate a trade-off (cost benefit analysis) or fill out a complicated form.
The problem — according to Kahneman — isn't that people have two systems of thinking, but that they often rely on one system in situations when they should be using the other.
So, what happens if we apply Kahneman's fast and slow thinking to the realm of online public engagement, where -- presumably -- we can citizens to be deliberate and considerate problem solvers?
First, let's look at the technology of participation
Nearly all of the popular (or would-be popular) the technology providers out there are relentlessly focused on design as a means to make things as easy and as intuitive to use as possible, to make things fast, to reduce friction. That's because more online product and/or service providers want to 'conversions' (e.g. want you to take a specific action, such as click, share or purchase). in fact there's a whole field called Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO); here's how the ever popular Shopify describes it (h/t Jason Pearman for the link):
"Your store needs to be designed with your customers in mind.
While boosting your traffic can generate more sales, it’s just as important to focus on turning your current traffic into paying customers.
At every step of your customers’ purchasing journeys, there are new opportunities for you to make their paths shorter, easier, and more enjoyable. Through rigorous experimentation and analysis, you can fine-tune your website to push people closer to making a purchase. This process is called Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO.
Conversion Rate Optimization is a technique for increasing the percentage of your website traffic that makes a purchase, also known as a conversion.
And, on a much smaller scale, conversions are happening all the time leading up to that moment, too.
For instance, a conversion on your homepage might mean having a visitor click through to a product. A conversion on a product page might mean a customer clicking ‘Add to Cart’. Conversions can be entirely dependent on the purpose that a specific part of your website serves.
To optimize your online store for conversions, both big and small, you need to be constantly testing each and every aspect of your website."
To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with the logic of using design to reduce friction and increase conversions if that is your ultimate goal (with perhaps the exception of Dark Patterns, user interfaces which are designed to trick people); businesses need to make money and conversions generate revenue. It's obvious that these firms want you to buy, like, or share as effortlessly as possible. It's why they use browser cookies to keep you logged into their network, why they store your credit card and shipping information, why they offer delightful mobile experiences and single click checkouts. It is clear that the vast majority product and/or service providers purposefully deploy design online in a way that primes them for system 1 thinking; in many cases their entire business model depends on it. Thus it shouldn't come as a surprise that the dominate design discourse is one of ease of use (i.e. ease of conversion) because the discourse itself is being predominately driven by the product and/or service providers themselves. From a public administration perspective, this is inherently problematic for a couple of reasons:
Private sector product and/or service leaders set digital experience expectations for citizens in the public domain
Governments follow private sector leaders and design accordingly, hoping to meet citizen expectations
Ease of use (system 1: fast thinking) may be congruent with some of governments objectives (e.g. reach and amplification) but not others (e.g. deliberate feedback on crunchy policy issues) which may require a more conscious effort (system 2: slow thinking)
Essentially my point here is a little bit of Marshall McLuhan's the medium is the message and/or if you prefer we shape the tools then the tools shape us. In other words, if we use fast tools tools for online consultations then we ought to expect loose answers. Despite what anyone else will tell you Twitter is not a good medium for in-depth, meaningful, and sustained conversation. Sure it can be bent to suit that purpose from time to time but it certainly wasn't designed for it. Twitter chats are a great example of fast rather than slow thinking, the medium (Twitter) shapes the message. Participants have to be brief, reactive, and quick if they are to be a part of the conversation as it happens.
Second, let's look at language of participation
I recently read an interesting and related piece in the Atlantic entitled "The Decay of Twitter" that made a number of related arguments (as is worth reading in its entirety). The article discusses the work of Walter Ong (a student of the aforementioned McLuhan and his scholarly work on "the transition of human society from orality to literacy: "from sharing stories and ideas through spoken language alone, to sharing them through writing, text and printed media". Ong's work catalogued the differences between these two cultures. Noting that orality treats words as sound and action, emphasizes memory and redundancy and stays close to the real life experience while literacy treats words as something that can be looked up, abstracted, and analyzed. Ong's work perfectly illustrates how online communications channels such as Twitter shape the nature of the discourse that happen there on.
As a starting point I would argue that the differences between Ong's conceptualization of orality and literacy are congruent with the differences between Kahneman's fast and slow systems; and the similarities between their analytical frames, apparent. The article goes on to discuss at length the idea that the decay of Twitter has a lot to do with the notion that it blurs the distinction between orality and literacy and thus blends the lightweight nature of ephemeral conversation with the permanence of the declarative/analyzable nature of the Internet.
This blending is where all the faux-societal outrage comes from. Its why a single errant tweet can sink a brand, destroy a career, or make the entire Internet mad for the day:
"In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. Because there’s a kind of sensationalistic value in interpreting someone’s chattiness in partisan terms, tweets “are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers.” Anthropologists who study digital spaces have diagnosed that a common problem of online communication is “context collapse.” This plays with the oral-literate distinction: When you speak face-to-face, you’re always judging what you’re saying by the reaction of the person you’re speaking to. But when you write (or make a video or a podcast) online, what you’re saying can go anywhere, get read by anyone, and suddenly your words are finding audiences you never imagined you were speaking to."
The article goes on to argue that not just that conceptions of orality and literacy are blending online, but also that the public and private blend, the personal and professional, and the subjective and the objective -- to which I would add Kahneman's the fast and the slow. This becomes especially troubling when we realize that the communications technologies we rely on for engagement and consultation are actively creating a disconnect between the what people say and how it is ultimately interpreted or understood (e.g. context collapse).
Third, let's look at the politics of participation
There was a lot of coverage on the confluence of Brexit and the social media ecoystem. It was an inflection point about how much ought we trust algorithms to decide what make it into our information diet. The Guardian ran a particularly interesting piece entitled The truth about Brexit didn’t stand a chance in the online bubble which argued that in the current media landscape the burden of being thoughtful and seeking out opposing views on particular political issue (in this case Brexit) falls predominately on consumers rather than producers of media and/or social networks. It opens:
"In the quaint steam age of Mark Twain it was the case, as the writer allegedly noted, that: “A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”. Owing to significant changes in the media landscape since 1900, the same lie can now circumnavigate the globe, get a million followers on Snapchat and reverse 60 years of political progress while the truth is snoozing in a Xanax-induced coma, eyeshade on, earplugs in.
Modern truth is not just outpaced by fiction, it can be bypassed altogether as part of a sound political strategy or as a central requirement of a media business plan. In an illuminating exchange with the Guardian last week, Arron Banks, the wealthy donor partly responsible for the Brexit campaign, explained leave’s media strategy thus: “The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success."
Again, this is classic fast/slow, orality/literacy playing out online. Success in the the political realm -- in the case of Trump and Brexit -- isn't about being slow or literate (or factually correct) it is about being fast and oral (or sensational). The article continues:
"Politics however is just exploiting an information ecosystem designed for the dissemination of material which gives us feelings rather than information."
And concludes:
"If we tolerate a political system which abandons facts and a media ecosystem which does not filter for truth, then this places a heavy burden on “users” to actively gather and interrogate information from all sides - to understand how they might be affected by the consequences of actions, and to know the origin of information and the integrity of the channels through which it reaches them."
It is clear that the media landscape currently favours fast/oral and thus hyper-partisanship over thoughtful discourse. Expecting citizens to exert more control over their media environment and actively slow themselves down in this environment is unrealistic. Anyone who has ever read the comments on an Ottawa Citizen piece about the government (regardless of political stripe) knows this to be true.
Fourth, let's look at the broader implications of this type of engagement on society
What if being reliant on technologies that prime the wrong system, falling victim to the hybridization of oralilty and literacy online, and the political exploitation of both, is only half the challenge? The half immediately in front of us. What if the net result of those two things coming together has a broader and longer-term impact on society? What if it is eroding the very idea of civic participation by over-simplifying the complex task of participating in governance. To wit -- from In the Clutches of Algorithms (also worth reading in full):
"Apple, with a reputation for simplifying large technological problems, making them manageable for most people. In other words, the company’s software masks the complexity of a task. But rather than helping us understand the task, this kind of simplification helps us ignore the task and instead understand the device. I now communicate with my phone as a surrogate for adjusting the temperature and flipping light switches. Modern living now applies the same obedience principle too often seen in classrooms: Our devices now teach us not how to do things but rather how to comply with their interfaces. We are, as Seymour Papert warns, not programming the machines, but instead being programmed by them."
If you apply the same logic to governance as applied to Apple above, then the question becomes have we allowed our pre-digital understanding of public consultation to be re-programmed (re-imagined, re-understood, re-simplified) in the digital age? And if so, what have we lost in the process and what are the long term implications of that loss on our governing institutions? Who -- if anyone -- is looking at these questions? The closest corollary I can find is Rushkoff's Program or Be Programmed which makes the case that if you don't understand how the program works than you basically beholden to it (i.e. you are being programmed by it); another logical extension of McLuhan.
Moreover, what this does is make it incredibly hard to shift the normative discourse to one that is more thoughtful and civically minded. You simply can't introduce slow issues into fast environments and expect meaningful discourse. A normative fast culture also is anathema to the very discussion of fast versus slow because in order to understand the latter you need to actively engage in it for a moment. In other words, you need to slow down to understand how slowing down could work. The fast pace of the internet is running head long into the slow pace of governance, and while speeding some things up is important (e.g. current service delivery) speeding up others could be counterproductive (e.g. designing future services) if that speed causes them to miss the mark.
Fifth, let's consider what slower, more literate online public engagement could look like
The technology has to be different. It needs to prime people for a slow/literate process rather than a fast/oral one. That means its not likely not something that is already mainstream like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. It is also likely that these companies will not be the birth place of slower more deliberative technologies.It will also need to crack the anonymity nut which exacerbates all of what I have outlined above by removing accountability and the consequences that flow therefrom (Placespeak is a good example in this regard).
The context needs to be clearly articulated. People need background information. They need white papers, videos explaining the problem, and links to additional information. Moreover, the process (and the technology) needs to nudge them into consumption and reflection before it asks solicits their input.
The questions need to be well articulated, specific, directed, and perhaps even technical and/or exclusionary. The truth of the matter is that you for any given engagement the proponent likely doesn't want everyone's input but rather a highly specific subset of it. Failing to narrow the scope of the engagement means receiving input that needs to be 'looked at' (which has a cost) but ultimately goes unconsidered.
All in all
I think the field relatively new, poorly understood, and littered with varying degrees of amateurs. There are a lot of interconnected pieces and insights from complimentary fields (I've strung together but a handful in a cursory way above) that have yet to gel. When this finally happens we will start to have a better sense of how to execute more sophisticated online public engagement, produce better outcomes, and ultimately create more public value and improve our system of governance.
Oh and in case you managed to read your way down this far -- yes, I am perfectly aware that I engaged your fast system with a click-bait title. It was deliberate and hopefully the irony wasn't lost on you.
This quote from South by Southwest was making the rounds yesterday:
Which dovetails with Nick's post last week (see: Dragon's Dens, Hackathons, and Innovation Labs. Nick questioned whether such approaches are being used as innovation band-aids, plastered over more fundamental problems:
If pressed to offer a TL;DR of the problem I would say that the core challenge facing public sector institutions right now is that industrial age organizational models don't jive with digital age cultures and technologies.
We mistake the use of digital technology as evidence that we know how to use digital technology. Really, we're still very much so learning this world and discovering its potential and limits. We absolutely should continue to push the boundaries, but it strikes me that we're undervaluing reflection on what our recent history has meant.
And, for that matter, what it has not meant.
Humans are still human, if not more human than ever. Mid-century economic models assuming rational actors with perfect information have given way to the understanding that humans are not just irrational, but predictably irrational. Face-to-face canvassing impacts voter turnout at 5-8 times the rate that mail or phone calls do. Humans respond to what is meaningful to them, particularly connections to other humans.
With that in mind, here's a heuristic I've been considering. As government representatives and as employees of large organizations, we're faced with many situations in which we want to get feedback from stakeholders and colleagues. When thinking about how to design that interaction, consider how you'd ask a good friend the same question. If the answer is sitting down for coffee, email probably isn't the best approach. It might be the practical approach all things considered, but make sure you're aware of what you're losing in going a particular route.
As Nick asked, it's "What does governance look like in a digital era?" Not, "How do we use digital in governance?" Governance is still the key element of the idea. Some fundamental assumptions about governance have changed; many haven't. In the end, it's still about what people do.
Consider the Sandy Carter quote. Similarly, technology has helped people unearth many, many problems that always existed, but were hard to see. And the inadequacies of many of our solutions.
Technology will not revolutionize government, society, or democracy. But people might. Technology might help them realize that they have to, or help them find the people and tools they need to do it.
I've been on a bit of a rant lately when I see or hear people making claims like "Distance is dead" or "Newspapers are dead". Partially, I'm annoyed that they're stealing from Nietzsche, who coined the phrase "God is dead". The trend is: pick a concept and add "is dead" to the end. We love predictions and there are plenty of folks out there who are happy to oblige.
The catch here is that in Nietzsche's case, he was examining a long history of spirituality vs. science. We, in many cases when it comes to social media and web, do not have such a long history to look at. It is almost as if we are assembling a long list of weak signals and using them as fait accompli predictors of the near future. (Dare I call it the Malcolm Gladwell effect?)
I'm skeptical.
That said, Nicco Mele's The End of Big is compelling. Mele described many instances of the disruptive nature of the Internet that were effectively tearing down systems. However, what caught my attention was the void that followed. The scary thought for me isn't the removal of old systems — it's the lack of knowledge, or complete inability to replace them. Both in real terms and sociological ones.
I think perception also has a role to play in some of the disruption Mele points to, where a group's strength is not found through traditional notions of power, but in their ability to mobilize quickly and be perceived as big. For example, the U.S. Congress backtracked on SOPA in response to 7 million online signatures condemning the bill. Is a petition of 7 million signatures enough in a country of almost 314 million? Should 2% be enough? I don't know the answer to that. But the perception by Congress of the situation was "big" enough to change their mind.
There are plenty more interesting examples that Mele offers and I suggest you take the time to read them. If I hadn't missed the Google Hangout with Mele, my question to him would have been: Are we really seeing the end of big? Or has the Internet just introduced a new way for many people to take on the role of a big, disruptive player on any given field of play?
George Wenzel — "Threats abound in this dystopian future..."
The End of Big gives a far-reaching, albeit bleak, overview of the Internet and its impacts upon the news media, entertainment, government, and business. Nicco Mele's take on the impacts of 'radical connectivity' upon these areas create a comprehensive, albeit bleak, view of how the hyper-connected world is working today and might work in the future.
The book's author joined our discussion and admitted that early drafts were even more dark and bleak, with a draft subtitle describing the 'coming chaos'. Mele's editor wisely suggested a tone-down of the FUD.
Mele paints a picture of a world where individuals can bring down governments, cripple industries, and strike fear into the populace. Threats abound in this dystopian future. Mele gives several examples, but I do not share the author's worry that these events are bellwethers of a coming geek-driven apocalypse.
If you haven't read much about the impacts of technology on the world, this book is a good overview. Kudos go out to Mr. Mele for joining our discussion via Google Hangout and sharing some of his thoughts in a more personal way.
Nick Charney—"... the book made me take a good hard look my propensity to adopt new technologies ..."
Here's the rub according Mele: radical connectivity is radically reshaping society and the tools used to create our culture are coming to define it. If nothing else the book made me take a good hard look my propensity to adopt new technologies even as they erode the very institutions we work for. This isn't to say that one ultimately defeats the other (although that may be implied by Mele's subtitle) but rather that we are just starting to understand the tip of the iceberg; the book is a great introduction for the uninitiated and a solid recap for those following more closely.
Kent Aitken — "...there is no such thing as metaphoric dust settling on the scale of global change..."
"The average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of leading US companies has decreased by more than 50 years in the last century, from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today". (From BBC.)
I agree that the internet is changing our world massively. I'm more hesitant to buy into Mele's title thesis, which is that we've reached The End of Big. There are many amazing and illustrative examples of Davids upending Goliaths, and our assumptions about power should be shaken. But I think there'll be a lot of Big in the future.
I originally wrote "there'll be a lot of Big left when the dust settles," but it struck me that there is no such thing as metaphoric dust settling on the scale of global change. Definitely not anymore.
To be clear: Mele is dead-on about a lot here, and our assumptions about power should change. Governments should be scared into rethinking their role in this world. The principles are the same - manage public goods and services otherwise unfulfilled, nudge general welfare along, uphold laws - but the what (What goods and services? What's welfare? What laws?) may be very different.
Social entrepreneurs are improving public transit environments without government. The classical concept of GDP*, as a rough measure of welfare, ignores the economy of experience, philanthropy, and environmental amenities. And many laws are ill-equipped to deal with, say, the collaborative consumption economy (think AirBNB) or global, internet-based terrorism.
On the more reviewy side of things, it's a solid read. The case studies (for instance: Anonymous, Reddit, 3D printing, citizen journalism, etc.) may be familiar to some, but The End of Big is a great synthesis, and it'd be a good wakeup call for others.
*Prediction: We'll stop caring about and quoting GDP figures within five years.
John Kenney — "...The Internet redistributes power by design..."
In his book, The End of Big: How the internet makes David the new Goliath, Nicco Mele sounds the alarm that "radical connectivity - our breathtaking ability to send vast amounts of data instantly, constantly, and globally - has all but transformed politics, business, and culture, bringing about the upheaval of traditional, "big" institutions and the empowerment of upstarts and renegades."
Radical connectivity presents opportunities and challenges. Ideas and data can be disseminated quickly via networks and social media. People and resources can be mobilized with relative ease to address perceived needs (e.g. fixing a pothole, addressing climate change, or overthrowing a corrupt dictatorship). On the one hand, it opens up opportunities for citizens, governments, private and non-government actors to collectively address issues that in the past only governments typically addressed (see the emergence of the solution economy). This is exciting.
On the other, radical connectivity can be disruptive and unpredictable. "Our twentieth-century institutions, which seem as foundational or ahistorical as hereditary monarchy, are on the cusp of collapse - or, if not, outright collapse, of irrelevancy and anachronism." They are ill-prepared and unable to engage with the connected world effectively. The role of government, accountability for resources and results, ensuring public health, safety and security, and maintaining equitable service standards and equal opportunity are all murky at best, particularly if governments do not adapt.
I found myself pulling a few other books off the shelf while reading The End of Big. Our big political, economic and social institutions have been on the receiving end of constructive criticism well before we became radically connected. For example, in the face what he saw as large-scale, unsustainable and dehumanizing economic systems, E.F. Schumacher proclaimed Small is Beautiful(1973) and extolled the virtues of "technology with a human face." On the education front, Ivan Illich called for Deschooling Society (1971) and, more broadly, the need for Tools of Conviviality (1973). And Samual Bowles and Herbert Gintis argued for more participatory political, economic and social models that reflect democracy as being not just about choosing (i.e. purchasing and voting), but also learning (i.e. how preferences are formed) - see Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought(1983). It appears the inventors of the personal computer read those books too, or at least shared similar philosophies. The Internet redistributes power by design.
I was struck by the common threads running between the authors' recommendations above and Mele's conclusions, including "As individuals and as a society, we need to acknowledge small as our future" and "...we can learn to celebrate the creation of a radical new way of organizing the world, taking steps to align it with democratic values and with our need for social order." Back in the 70s and 80s, the proposed alternatives may have been dismissed as radical, utopian, or both. If Mele's right about the current context, big institutions won't have a choice but to adapt this time around.
I highly recommend it. Both the book and adapting.
Next up: Simpler: The Future of Government by Cass Sunstein. Interested in taking part? Send us an email, leave a comment, send us a tweet. You know the drill.
