Posts Tagged ‘Citizen’

Cesi n’est pas une pipe

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

The National Digital Inclusion Conference 2010 (NDI 10) was a better conference than last year. This was in part due to the involvement of larger numbers of individuals and groups that are engaged in delivery and in part due to the organisation of the event which was much more open than last year. Martha Lane Fox gave a presentation that was a rallying call: keep it simple and don’t become a self perpetuating industry, halve the size of the conference year on year as the need is met. Despite everything, NDI 10 still failed to achieve its potential.

There were emerging gaps that became apparent on day one that by day two were seemingly impossible to cross. On one side the clear Government message that digital inclusion was about efficiency and being able to deliver services to the most vulnerable in society to help tackle disadvantage. On the other side the dedication of the groups and individuals who help the different sections of the communities in which they operate to become digitally engaged. Between the two, there was me,  with a distinct feeling that I was in the wrong place. I wasn’t alone, but I wasn’t where I thought I ought to be.

Finally, I had a Grumpy Old Man moment. It was brief and, I confess, to the point but on reflection it symbolised the space between us. The session on Digital Participation was looking for promises. What simple thing could we promise to deliver that would have an impact on digital inclusion. The suggestion was that we make the registration of school place preferences a compulsory on line exercise and then support parents through the school to do this. This would be such a rewarding experience that parents who were previously disengaged would see the potential and become digitally included.

I had a number of problems with this suggestion. Firstly, it fails to recognise that the school community is the community of the school, it is not the wider community. Secondly, it positions the school as the mediator between an individual and a government service.  Is this why we have schools?  What symbolised the gulf between us most was the unspoken declaration that we could not find a compelling enough reason for individuals and groups to want to use digital channels and so we had decided to resort to compulsion by statute. If the great digitally unwashed couldn’t understand then we would force them, using their children’s education as the blunt instrument, to become digitally clean.

The tipping point was when the Chair of the panel smiled and one by one the members of the panel thought that it was a good idea, one of them, and I won’t name names, even used the word “great”. Whether it was serendipity, or kismet or whether I willed it to happen, the microphone came to me next – and the rest is history.

What happened to empowerment, communities in control, transparency, the use of technology to improve the life chances of citizens? These are the reasons I felt that I was in the wrong place. It was digital inclusion, but not as we know it. It was as if the argument had to be reduced to its most fundamental constituents. Why was this? Was it because we were all considered too simple to understand the wider benefits of digital inclusion? Has the government changed its mind? Is it no longer interested in the use of technology to empower individuals and communities? Has it come down to this: get poor people and old people on line, any way we can, so that we can reduce the cost of delivering services to them?

I believe in the potential for digital technology to contribute to improving life chances. Empowerment enables a voice, that voice can tell life stories and those stories can inform service design. Empowerment can create the conditions for collaboration and through collaboration communities can innovate and deliver some of the services that can no longer be delivered by government. Access to data through technology has the potential to make the function of government transparent and serves to improve the quality of our democracy. It is in these ways that we improve life chances, not by making it cheaper for government to deliver services as they always have.

I know that digital inclusion is not a magic bullet but equally I do not believe that digital inclusion is a means of doing the same thing but doing it for less cost. I know that there needs to be a starting point, I do not believe that the coercion of citizens into participating in centralised service delivery is the right one. People have disengaged, they have done so for a reason; they have created networks of support that reflect their beliefs and meet their needs more appropriately. Re-engaging them with a wider community through digital channels alone will not work. By simply constructing a digital facade over the thing from which people disengaged in the first place we will not create an inclusive society.

NDI 10 seemed to have lost sight of its long term vision, it missed an opportunity to restate that vision and chose instead to focus on a series of promises that will not bridge the gap but will maintain the divide. Will NDI 11 be a smaller conference as Martha Lane Fox suggested? Yes it will, It’s unlikely that I will be there, and I suspect that next year, once again, I will not be alone.

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Silver Bullets

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

lone ranger

Silver bullets have a place in the popular consciousness; a silver bullet used to despatch the bad guys for the Lone Ranger, silver bullets are also useful if you need to dispense with a werewolf and silver bullets probably make great jewellery.  In “Systems Thinking, Systems Practise” Peter Checkland revisits the idea of Weltanschauung or world view. The idea being that before you think about a system make sure you understand your world view and that of the people with whom you are working. Working somewhere between Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP) and Service Delivery Organisations (SDO) can give you an interesting view of the world.

The Digital Inclusion Action Plan  defines digital inclusion as “The best use of digital technology, either directly or indirectly, to improve the lives and life chances of all citizens and the places in which they live”.  With this in mind the irony of Jenni Russell’s Comment piece in the Sunday Times 24/01/2010   wasn’t lost on me.  It described an archetype of a family suffering multiple deprivation then offered a view based on the comments of a social worker that ICT wasn’t helping, in fact it was making the situation worse by tying the Social Worker to the IT system rather than letting them do the job that they’re trained to do. The implication was that the family suffered because of the use of ICT. Where does this leave digital inclusion as a strategy? Jenni Russell identifies the indirect use of digital technology in this context as, at the very least, unhelpful and the direct use of ICT to help tackle social deprivation not worth considering at all. 

While I had to miss both ukgovcamp10  and diunconf in Birmingham I found the discussions that came from both interesting and informative. The discussions continued even three days later which is a testament to the success of both events. What did start to come across, especially post event, was that people naturally enough talk about their experience which is not necessarily a shared experience. This has been noticeable recently following  the announcement of different national initiatives: The £30m for UK Online Centres to get another 1m people on line caused a few caustic comments not least from the older commentators in IDF50 South of the Thames. The laptops for children also raised an eyebrow or two, mine included, on both sides of the argument regarding value for money and ideas of doing “to” and not “with”. Most recently there was some uncomfortable shuffling about when a piece was published on Silver Surfers being well off  . People are focussed on their area of interest, not on the whole, just as in Jenni Russell’s Comment piece.

What does living with multiple deprivation and social exclusion look like, is the archtype that Jenni Russell described good enough? What role does digital play in redressing the balance? If we try to visualise the extent and depth of social and digital exclusion we can start to get a feel for the potential range of situations as visualised statistically. I’ll look at the same situation in a rural area, but consider that separately because it raises other issues, around sparcity, poor infrastructure provision and access to services, that as a rule don’t apply in the urban setting. The DigiTeam has put together a digital inclusion indDI Index explainedex by taking figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) on Deprivation (IMD) at the Local Super Output Area level (LSOA) and mapping these against an index of digital exclusion based on features such as access, take up and usage. By plotting the indices along an x/y axis it is possible to create a high level picture of the pattern of digital exclusion in a local government area. The higher the index of multiple deprivation the higher the level of social exclusion, the higher the digital exclusion index the greater the level of exclusion. An index of x=1 and y=1 would indicate a high level of digital and social exclusion. An index of x=-1 and y=-1 would indicate a high level of social and digital inclusion.

 Using the mapping devised by the Digiteam a high level view of digital exclusion can be represented as follows: in a large urban borough which statistically has moderate levels of deprivation and digital exclusion we can visualise an indices of exclusion where each symbol represents a community in Local Super Output Area. Symbols in the positive quadrant are areas of social and digital exclusion. There are all sorts of value judgments and assumptions here: does access to infrastructure make a group more digitally included? Should we talk in terms of more or less deprivation or is it justified to talk about moderate levels of deprivation; is there an acceptable level of deprivation?  How statistically valid is the analysis? All of these assumptions should be questioned but this is trying to illustrate a point hless prosp lb - circledere about how people view their particular area of digital inclusion work.

 If we enclose as many points of social and digital exclusion as we can, by making a very big assumption we can guess where a digital inclusion initiative might have an impact. Let’s take a silver surfers club, a social media surgery or a first steps back to learning group. Where might the impact boundry lie in the large urban borough with some social exclusion and some digital exclusion?

We could claim to be potentially providing access to digital experience to a dozen or so communities and hitting areas which evidence deprivation. If we are successful we open channels for self expression, we build confidence and we may even move people from first steps to next steps and we start them on the ladder to accessing skills and potentially better paid jobs and so on. This is great, it’s how it’s supposed to work.

In the next visualisation the blue dots in the lower left quadrant represents communities where there is little or no statistical evidence of social exclusion and high levels of digital inclusion. The borough with “moderate levels” of exclusion both digitally and socially is shown in red. The green symbols show an urban city which has communities sufcombined index with circlefering multiple deprivation and extremes of social exclusion and digital exclusion.

Using the same intervention discussed earlier, I’ve positioned the impact boundary roughly around the same communities that show the same statistical profile as the communities in the large urban borough. The intervention may work for those communities in the same way with the same potential benefits. However, the same initiative with the same (ish) communities doesn’t hit the majority of communities showing evidence of social and digital exclusion – where exclusion, both social and digital is deeper it needs a different world view.

We all have a lot of ownership in the projects that we do, rightly so, but I sometimes hear messages about the “answer” to digital inclusion. Project A worked in this deprived area of city B, let’s fund this project in city C and we’ll solve the digital exclusion issues and begin to address social exclusion. What this does is ignore the people who the project doesn’t hit and it ignores the other contributory features of any intervention: the community networks, the local movers and shakers and let’s not forget serendipity, that stroke of good fortune that put the right people in the right place at the right time. The failure to take a holistic view of successful interventions, to understand the world view of both the delivery partners and the beneficiaries means that we miss a lot of potentially important projects and we don’t join up effectively.

What happensrural counties with circle in rural areas? The following shows two rural counties in the West of England which demonstrate the impact of sparse populations on access to services.

The intervention impact shown by the circle represents the same use of resources as in the urban context described earlier. Once again, large numbers of socially and digitally excluded communities are missed by what is, to all intent and purpose, a successful intervention. What is significant here is that the digital exclusion statistics will be skewed by the poor levels of access to infrastructure. In terms of social exclusion it will be skewed by poor access to services. Under these conditions can we be confident that an initiative that was so successful in an urban area of moderate deprivation will have a similar impact here – should the world view have changed? If the answer is yes, and it is my belief that it should, then why do we persist in funding national initiatives based on a single solution and why do we fail, time and time again to acknowledge the spectrum of local factors that make a community project successful in the first place?

Politically, we are looking for a silver bullet and there will always be people who claim to have one because their world view tells them that they have. It’s time we started to understand that there is no silver bullet but there are lots of world views and being more holistic about why things succeed will help us to have a bigger impact when tackling social exclusion through digital inclusion.

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Who are the Neteratti?

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Let me say at the start that I have never owned a Linn hifi. Nor have I, for that matter ever owned a Naim, Accoustic Research, Roksan or any other esoteric brand of equipment. I do own a Quad / Kef combination but it’s quite old and it’s currently in boxes because my current home is just not that big and the Other Half is just not that understanding. I do love music, all sorts of music, Jazz: folk rock, classical, rock and roll. I love it all, and I love it live from the Nantwich Jazz Festival to what’s on at the pub I just love it.

Now, I hear you say, what’s all this got to do with digital anything?

There was a brief item on the BBC News web site this week about CD player production ending at Linn. They have recognised that the future lies in streamed digital media and they are focussing their efforts on Studio Master Quality material for download. If you’ve ever heard a high end Linn system (they can cost up to £100,000) you will understand what they mean by Studio Master Quality. I’ve often bemoaned the success of the iPod. I’ve often bemoaned the success of a lot of MP3. It’s not that it isn’t good, it’s very good but we have sacrificed a lot of quality in our pursuit of cheap, easy to access music. Compressed dynamics, loss of spatial information, over hanging bass lines, screeching vocals that waft about the sound stage, in short, we’ve given up on real quality. I know that’s a Grumpy Old Man thing and it’s the music that counts, but if you’ve never heard a full spec Linn in all of its glory recreating a 3D sound stage with as near to full dynamic range as you can get, then you probably won’t know what I’m on about anyway. Back to my point; the Studio Master Quality material, like video, will use up a lot of bandwidth. People have stopped buying CDs because they can get music cheaply through existing bandwidth and its okay because they’re not concerned about the quality. Music is, almost, disposable. Here today, gone tomorrow and to some extent we’ve lost out emotional attachment to it – it’s become like static – we hear, we like, we buy (or steal, because the Internet is free, isn’t it) and then we throw it away. If we want Studio Quality Material, we will have to have bandwidth which means that it will only be available to people with bandwidth. Storage is cheap; bandwidth is only for those in the Cities.

Now, I hear you say, where’s he going with this? Surely not a rural rant.

Well, I could, but no, this is more about selective markets. I was very grateful for the excellent commentary that came out of the My Public Services Conference on Thursday. I couldn’t go, way too much on, but it was almost as good as being there. What came across strongly, to me at least, was the message that WE are the future of government services. That’s true but nobody seemed to pick up on the point that WE are a very select little group. On the global scale of things we are a self selecting Neteratti, well educated, committed, digitally literate, middle class select little group. We are no different to the people who can afford to buy a full spec Lynn and enjoy the experience.

What was that? Grow the group?

Well yes we could grow the group but that’s not the point. There was a very good piece this week by Stephen Collins from the Centre for Policy Development in Australia.  called “Culture in the New Order “. His view resonated with my own views about the necessity of culture change in government organisations.

  • a lack of a cohesive “whole of government” approach at any level of government
  • a view of accountability that inadequately rewards those responsible for success and innovation
  • inadequate trust and permission models across public sector management
  • a change to openness as a default, including removing reticence to participate or obfuscation of participation
  • a negative-only perception of risk

One of the things that people tend to ignore is that government organisations are not designed to be transformational. They are designed to be process oriented, reliable, auditable and while they serve all of us they are responsible for delivering services to the most vulnerable people in our society. With that as your key driver you don’t suddenly start transforming things just because a load of middle class Neteratti start shouting about it. The implication of this is that the core functions of local government will not change quickly or significantly over a short timescale. What will happen is that certain functions will move outside of government, and we see this happening already, and it will move into the realm of the Neteratti.

Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Yes and no.

The trouble is, as I see it, the Neteratti are a selective little group, privileged like the full spec Linn owners.  Their literacy is like the city’s bandwidth and their knowledge is the Studio Quality Master Material. There were a couple of other things this week that caught my eye. One was a Guardian Article “The Dark Side of the Internet” by Andy Beckett,   which was an excellent précis of Freenet and the implications of its wider use. I noted that someone in the Twitter stream commented that if the Government’s Digital Economy Bill goes through unchanged – and it will – more of us will become Freenet users.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

The non statutory government functions in the hands of a small select group navigating its way around the Internet unseen, non accountable and as for the rest? Excluded? Baileyhillmedia signposted an article by Joe Marchese “Why Facebook Applications will soon be History”. In it he wrote about the use of Facebook Connect APIs to enable applications to run outside of Facebook but using the Facebook Identity. Similar plans are in play for MySpace ID, and Google’s Friend Connect. In a sense it’s not unlike the E-Bay API which enables you to buy on E-Bay when you’re really buying from somebody’s on line catalogue. Brian Solis wrote about this a couple of weeks ago  the impact of portable identity on marketing. In short, when we access services we will do so in an invisible way. For many that might sound like a good thing: Seamless access to services using portable identity and delivered in a personalised, martini fashion.  I believe we run the risk that the people who control those services will also be invisible. For me it’s Gibsonesque! I’ve used that term twice this week and that’s what brought me to this place I suppose. William Gibson wrote a series of books in the 70’s which predicted the Internet of today: Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero, Johnny Mnemonic, The Difference Engine. In his books there was always a ghost in the machine that was the real control, insidious, hidden and self interested. When we shout loudly “WE are the future of government” I think we might take a little time out to understand who WE are and who isn’t there who ought to be and perhaps spend some time getting everybody there so that Gibson’s prophesy doesn’t become self fulfilling.

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Media Literacy

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Have you ever been to one of those workshops which begin with the words “I want you to tell us something about yourself that nobody else in the room would know” I‘m not going to have a grumpy old man moment about my views on this but I will confess to something that not a lot of people know; I used to be a school teacher. Many years ago, admittedly, but I was that teacher. I say this because one of the subjects that was taught way back then was Media Studies. I have deconstructed images, highlighted the sub text, framed the picture, explained a “tracking shot” created that sound effect and recorded the play. This was all about understanding mediation, that the media was not a window on life but a point of view with an underpinning set of values that we somehow felt young people needed to recognise and understand. 

What we didn’t have then was the internet. We witnessed the first micro computers and their development (we really believed that 640k would be enough for anyone), the  9600baud modem, e-mail (we couldn’t imagine what anyone would want to use it for either), networks (so you could share expensive peripherals like NLQ dot matrix printers and high capacity (sic 10 Mb) storage, colour, tcp/ip and then the mosaic browser and with it a sudden dawning of what it all could mean. By that time I had left teaching and the government of the day had declared that media literacy was no longer necessary as a subject. What was important was literacy, numeracy and science. Soon to be added to the list was IT. 

Now, it seems, we have come full circle, as is the way of things, and we have a Digital Participation Consortium under the auspices of Ofcom. 

AOL   Cabinet Office   DC10plus
BBC   Champion for Digital Inclusion (Race Online 2012 Team)   DCMS
Bebo   Change Agency   DCSF
Becta   Channel 4   Digital UK
BIS   Cisco   Digital Unite
British Library   CLG   Directgov
Broadband Stakeholder Group   Community Media Association   e-skills UK
BSkyB   Oxford Internet Institute   Get Safe Online
BT   Portland PR on behalf of Apple   Google
Tate   Post Office   Intel
Timebank   QCDA   ITV
UKCCIS   Research in Motion (BlackBerry)   LearnDirect
UK online centres   Scottish Government   Media Literacy in Scotland
Virgin Media   SkillSet   Media Literacy Task Force
Wales Media Literacy Network   Museums, Libraries and Archives Council   Media Trust/Community Channel
Welsh Assembly Government   Mobile Broadband Group   Microsoft
YouthNet   MySpace   NIACE
Northern Ireland Executive   Northern Ireland Media Literacy Network    

 The big difference between then and now is that then there was a definable media. Big organisations which had vast resources making content for the rest of society. They’re still there and the principles of mediation and the underlying values of large scale producers still apply. These are Charles Leadbeater’s large stones on a beach. What we have now are the small stones, the collaborative, hyperlocal publishers of content.

There has been a tendency to think of hyperlocal as a benign benefit to communities and as a way of broadcasting the community voice, giving it a platform and making it heard. I share that view. However, I would also like to share with you a recent experience that the need for media literacy has never been greater. I was having a light hearted conversation via Twitter with Lewis Shepherd in Washington about whole food and socialism along the lines of “What’s socialist about whole food?” when a re-tweet appeared in the stream: 

“3rd Red Scare? RT @penval @lewisshepherd Socialism apart – what’s not capitalist about whole food?” 

These things appear and disappear all of the time but given that I was thinking about the whole media literacy piece I took time out to investigate a little further. A check on the profile of the sender brought me to this:

 redscarebot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While I usually ignore the automated stuff I was intrigued so I had a look at the web site and found myself here:

Digital Hisory Page

This site is allegedly fronted by the University of Huston. It doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2006 and, if the contact page is to be believed it has been subjected to some vigorous spam attacks. On the face of it this is a factual web site which provides information and worksheets for teachers about American History. Some of it is quite good, I learned things. When you start to dig it becomes somewhat more insidious. Certain groups in the US are labelled, specifically: Italians, Irish and Asians, they are migrants. Other groups are omitted, specifically indigenous Indian tribes. African Americans and the Civil War are a mere footnote in history. Jewish people are “non-Christians”. According to this web site indigenous Americans are white, middle class and Catholic.

 None of this is explicit, it’s all inferred and it’s all supported by “facts”. It’s quite amateurish and you would have to be rather crass not to see the issues that are raised here but it does serve to remind us that there is an element of internet media literacy that we didn’t have to deal with when the “media” was a clearly defined, easy to see, big stone.

The people and organisations who sit on the Ofcom Digital Participation group are as good a representational body as you are likely to get. I wish it well and have faith that they will consider the full impact of the hyperlocal revolution in all of its forms. This is not just about making us all more aware in  a digital world, it’s fundamental. Recently the European Union issued a communication on Media Literacy where it said:

 “Democracy depends on the active participation of citizens to the life of their community and media literacy would provide the skills they need to make sense of the daily flow of information disseminated through new communication technologies.”

COMMISSION RECOMMENDATION 20.8.2009 on media literacy in the digital environment for a more competitive audiovisual and content industry and an inclusive knowledge society

 This, for me, says it all and because this is a sentiment to which we all subscribe I think we should be mindful of the media literacy issues that will arise from our hyperlocal endeavours.

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Citizen Shock

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Citizen – Citizenship is the state of being a citizen of a particular social, political, or national community. – Citizenship status, under social contract theory, carries with it both rights and responsibilities. “Active citizenship” is the philosophy that citizens should work towards the betterment of their community through economic participation, public service, volunteer work and other such efforts to improve life for all citizens. In this vein, schools in some countries provide citizenship education. – Wikipedia

Shock – Acute stress over reaction (also called acute stress disorder, psychological shock, mental shock, or simply, shock) is a psychological condition arising in response to a terrifying event. It should not be confused with the unrelated circulatory condition of shock. – Wikipedia

Two things have prompted me to commit these thoughts to print: the idea that Social Media is nothing more than an enabler for Gov 20 – a comment doing the rounds of #Gov20 last week – and the idea that people have disengaged from politics and need to be somehow re-connected.

There is a fundamental difference between England and much of the free world – we are a subject nation! We are all subjects of the Crown. This can be quite a leveller; just as I’m a subject so the Prime Minister and the Government are all subjects. Of course, some are more subjected than others. When America declared independence it established for itself an important principle:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That self- evident truth is not written down in England. Don’t mistake me, I have more freedom than many people in the world: freedom to speak, and the right to vote  – I value those things, I appreciate the country in which I live, I am a loyal subject – but I have them because they are granted to me, not as an unalienable Right.

The other element to being a subject nation is that everything is undertaken in the name of the Crown. This is an important distinction. The American Constitution begins:

“ We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

That simple phrase, “We the People” is pervasive. In American courts it is The People versus, in England it’s The Crown versus; in America it’s the United States Government, in England it’s Her Majesty’s Government.

These perceptions are so embedded into our National psyche that it’s influencing the way we talk about Gov 20 and the way in which we evaluate the impact of Social Media. To suggest that Social Media is simply an enabler for Gov 20 is to suggest that it has no value outside of engaging and enabling. The current obsession with data and apps is great, raw data presented to citizens in new ways that are useful and enabling. The new openness is great, once hidden documents now as open source wikis brilliant! But it’s not enough! What has happened to our desire for citizen voice, to let people be heard and listened to? Where did the dialogue go? The truth is that it’s not the people who have disengaged from politics, its politics that has disengaged from the people. It’s not we who have to be reconnected, it’s government.

The talk is of transformed government, efficient, accountable and non-interventionist. Services will be personalised and wherever possible localised. The enabling mechanism will be information technology, it will be the delivery mechanism, the organising force and it will be the channel of choice. Government at every level will speak to the citizens through their channels of choice and the citizens will interact with government in a way that is convenient, anytime, anywhere – Martini government.

The vast majority of statutory services (provided by government agencies or private sector partners) are consumed by less than thirty percent of the people. This thirty percent (let’s not argue about definitive figures now) the final third are also those who use technology the least for all sorts of reasons and so the idea of Digital Inclusion was born. There is some amazing work in the field of digital inclusion, work with individuals and work with communities. It is helping to create community cohesion, build social capital, grow innovative, bottom up solutions to local issues; but is it re-connecting the people with politics? Is it giving the people a louder voice? Whether you are in America or in England, or any other country for that matter I would suggest no, it isn’t – because nobody is really listening.

The Politics of Government long ago gave way to the Politics of Power. We are no longer governed by a set of beliefs which we hold to be true and which we put forward to be debated and evolved.  Politics is about keeping power and that has led our establishments to become hierarchical, inward looking, focussed on command and control and outbound messages.

 In hierarchical organisations the direction of the information flow is down, through the organisation. The impact of the command and control mentality is the creation of a series of glass filters. This means that only positive messages get fed upwards and problems are solved or managed at the base of the organisation. Such organisations tend to be inward looking, focussed on self promotion. The impact of being an inward looking organisation is seen in the need to own and to brand the channels of delivery. All messages from a hierarchical organisation will be outbound. They will advertise success. Hierarchical organisations find it hard to be innovative. Ideas flow down the command and control chain and not upwards. Innovations have to be branded and there is no recognition of the individual or group, so why innovate?

Invariably this organisation will want to maintain a status quo so, by definition, it will be protective of itself and its processes. In so doing this approach will reinforce the lack of innovation and focus the organisation in on itself. These organisations are dysfunctional organisations. The inability to change and to transform means that they cannot easily adapt and learn. In these circumstances people disengage and resort to the organisation only when they have to.

The rapid emergence of Social Media technologies over the last two years has given a new channel for the expression of citizen voice. Through the new channels of interaction knowledge can be shared, interest groups can form, quickly and easily. A collective voice can make a louder noise. The citizen voice wants to be heard, but the old hierarchy, focussed as it is on outbound messages and looking in on itself is incapable of listening. The result is Citizen Shock, a growing recognition that the world is not how it is meant to be, a sense of shouting in the wilderness or raging against the storm. There is a disconnect, but it is not of the citizen’s making.

An organisation that has the potential to transform is less hierarchical, it has empowered individuals and groups at every level, it embraces change and it uses continuous, targeted, two way communication; does this sound familiar? The potential of social media amongst citizens is that it creates groups of shared interest, shared knowledge and a common voice that holds the potential to be innovative. Information flows across the loose organisation and ownership is shared amongst the crowd. Groups look outwards, seeking to draw in membership, or to gain new knowledge and insight. Learning organisations hold social capital and social capital supports innovation.

Hindman’s “The Myth of Digital Democracy” and Flichy’s “Is The Internet An Instrument Of Democracy?” (la vie des idees.fr )make for depressing reading. I believe that it is government that has to change, at all levels. It’s not enough to have a presence on “Twitter” or a “Facebook” page when all that is doing is giving an impression of dialogue when in fact it’s a cynical marketing ploy and the messages are still outbound. It’s not the people who need to re-connect, its government, and until it realises that it cannot re-connect and stay the same the people’s voice will be ignored.

The good news is that shock doesn’t last forever.

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