Review of “Bad for Democracy,” by Professor Dana D. Nelson
August 7, 2008 12:23 amAn Article by:
Russell Cole
Bad for Democracy is scheduled for publication in September of 2008
In order to ascertain the significance of the thesis propounded by Dana D. Nelson in her manuscript, Bad for Democracy, it is useful to first characterize the way in which American democracy is perceived according to the collective representations, instructing the political understandings possessed by the preponderance of Americans.
American mythology instructs us that the composition and ratification of the Constitution serve as historical markers for the solidification of American democracy. According to this narrative, prior to the Revolution, there was a growing democratic fervor. Ultimately, this ground swelling of radical democratic sentiment resulted in a rebellion against Monarchy and colonialism. Following the independence of the American Colonies, the devotion to democratic ideals continued; albeit, in a form that was reckless and unsustainable due to its unmanageability. As a consequence, the Founders of the Nation saw fit to innovate a political structure that both manifested democratic principles as well as a state with a workable governability. From there on, as this orthodox history suggests, the Nation was set along a course leading to the continual improvement of its democratic fixtures.
In contradiction to this grand mythology, Nelson provides us with a concise – although thorough – counter-narrative that expresses aspects to American historicity that run in opposition to the premises underlying the standard master-narrative. Central to her thesis is the recognition that the historical trends in American politics have not conformed to a trajectory headed toward an increasingly enhanced democratic embodiment. As Nelson quite correctly indicates, the practice of radical democracy and the cultural attributes with which it is associated – those behavioral habits that dispose the citizenry so that they take an active role in the ongoing affairs of government – had a more complete expression during the Colonial epoch than in subsequent periods of American history.
With the ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of a centralized office wielding executive powers, a trend was set in motion that is comparable to the political transformation undergone by the Roman Republic during the Roman Revolution. That is, similarly to the Roman Emperor, whose ascendancy to power was associated with popular land reform, the Presidency in American governance has been interpreted as a political mechanism offering representation to the populous. Presidentialism, as Nelson terms it – which is defined as the stature that has been infused into the semiology attached to the conception of the High Office – has been, from its inception, increasingly interpreted as a vehicle for the realization of the popular will in the body of public policy.
Even more, the concept of Presidency has acquired a semantic value, adding to the concept a latent notion of paternalism. We, as citizens, are all too willing to submit to this parental authority; not only during times of uncertainly, peril, and calamity, but during times unmarked by social drama, because we see him as the personification of the democracy that we collectively form as Americans. When the President appears powerful and impacting, we relish his strong paternal presence because we conflate it with our collective contributions, as citizens, to American polity.
However, it is precisely this quality that is assigned to the Presidency – an attribution that causes the Presidential incumbent to be perceived not simply as the outcome of democratic process, but as the carrier of the vitality belonging to the body politic – that contributes to the cultivation of behavioral dispositions, rendering the citizenry democratically disinclined. We confuse our ability to engage in a ritualized affair – where we cast a single vote that infinitesimally affects the outcome of a Presidential Election – with the operations of a functioning democracy. This illusion is propagated by the growing authoritarianism of the Presidency – which reinforces the prejudice that voting in Presidential Elections somehow epitomizes democratic civic engagement.
As Nelson adeptly points out, democracy is more than mere electoral politics. For a political order to be democratic, public policy must be determined through the direct deliberative participation of the citizenry. The Republican Romans, for instance, indeed had elected officials. Furthermore, the aristocrats in the Republic formed the Senate. Nevertheless, only through passage in the House of Plebes could legislation be enacted. Although the Republican Romans possessed intermediaries between the state and the public, such as the Senate who could advise and consent, the commoners, whose votes were organized according to tribes, remained politically empowered through their ability to directly legislate.
Democracy, in order for it to exist in America, must take on similar attributes to those instantiated by the Roman Republic. Americans must learn to acknowledge that the unilateralism of the Presidency is antithetical to democratic organization. Democracy is a messy affair; one that involves an ongoing public dialog conducted in an effort to arrive at new compromises among shifting factions. Democracy is not a political condition whereby a “Decider,” as Nelson mocks, is endowed with solitary authority over pertinent matters of state.
The Populist Party of America has already adopted a platform that calls for political decentralization, with the intention to effect a condition conducive to what we have coined, localized democracy. We realized that through the political empowerment of local communities – a state of affairs that can be hypothetically achieved through the decentralization of government – the political influence of individuals can be amplified; thus, accentuating the motivations of ordinary people to participate in the dealings of their municipal polities.
People will become more politically conscious and politically engaged because, within the context of municipal affairs, their participations can have demonstrable consequences upon the public policies that bare the closest immediacy to the Lifeworlds that they inhabit. In other words, the impact that can be had through participation of people in localized democracy will seem more concrete and more relevant and, therefore, more worthy of their sustained interests and their persisting efforts.
In the prescriptions she lays out for a democratic revival, Nelson appears to have unknowingly joined Populist America’s activist chorus. She recommends political decentralization. Even more, Nelson introduces the verbiage, leaderless democracy, in order to designate an organizational state that is comparable to the networked politics that I had summarized in earlier writings that examined a developing theory of democracy, which has been labeled by members of open source software communities as Extreme Democracy:
http://www.midwest-populistamerica.com/articles/theories-of-extreme-democracy/; http://www.extremedemocracy.com/.
Despite the lack of originality marking the recommendations included under the breadth of the normative section belonging to Nelson’s work, she does provide a valuable survey of the various trends in Computer Mediated Communications that are not only leading to a new paradigm of democratic organization, but to a larger intellectual phenomenon that should be considered a new episteme.
The emergence of social knowledge – facilitated through the device of web based communications – is generally characterized as decentralized modalities of content authoring and editing. Wiki platforms, such as the Wikipedia, are demonstrative of this understanding of knowledge and the processes through which knowledge is most effectively constructed. In the spaces generated by the Wikipedia, anybody can contribute to the creation of content by either authoring original materials or editing the materials already published on the platform.
Although there lacks a sufficient amount of studies to draw generalizations with certainty, preliminary studies, such as the one conducted by Nature, have compared the Wikipedia with traditional reference publications, such as Britannica, and have found the rates of errata between the two respective reference materials closer than one would probably suspect. Additionally, the Wikipedia, in comparison to Britannica, possesses a far greater amount of materials devoted to a broader range of topics. Further, due to its decentralized editing process, it takes less time for the Wikipedia to correct its errata than it does for publications, such as Britannica, that follow a traditional workflow process.
All of these developing social formations fall under the extension of the concept, Web 2.0: web platforms that are devoted to collaborative knowledge building conducted by a community of interlocutors. This new form of sociability suggests that radical democracy – a state that is, oftentimes, embodied by Web 2.0 communities – is not only a deontological ideal – a social condition that we should strive to foster, because it is inherently desirable – but a form of social organization that is pragmatically endowed.
In order to understand why social knowledge produces knowledge constructs on a scale that supersedes in volume and quality the knowledge built from traditional social institutions, such as the Academe, it is illuminative to first explore the precepts that support the epistemic prejudices associated with High Modernity and the Academe:
Political centralization, according to its interpretation under the lens of the new social knowledge understanding of knowledge, is a relic belonging to the social condition marked by industrial capitalism: a myriad of interdependent industrial productions that require homogeneity in order for there to be the predictability that is necessary for the various manufacturing outputs to be interoperable with one another. What is more, industrial capitalism calls for cultural uniformity, in order to effect a state wherein the activities of labor can be integrated into the system of interdependent industrial functions that collectively comprise the modes of production; a social organization that requires social agents, serving a labor, to react in predictable ways when operating as cogs in the machineries constituting the modes of production. Following this logic, organizations must possess an executive authority, under which all other offices and capacities are integrated, in order to ensure their synchrony. In short, they must all fall under a unified command structure.
The paradigm of centralized organization continues to reign dominant in contemporaneity. Nonetheless, this centralized model of social organization is not necessarily the most efficient or effective. Whether we are to compare a starfish to a spider; Native American Apaches to the Aztec or the Incas - decentralized structures are proving to be more resilient and adaptable.
Nelson refers to the popular work, The Starfish and the Spider, authored by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, who point out that leaderless organizations – similarly to the starfish and the Apaches – cannot be destroyed by annihilating a single component of their structures. Contrarily, in a case of spiders and in the case of the Native American empires, the organisms can be killed by simply targeting their central nervous systems – or, specifically in these cases, the head of the spider and the metropolises, belonging respectively to the Aztec and to the Inca.
The challenge for the reader is to understand how these properties, attributable to leaderless organizations, relate to potential democratic reforms enacted upon the American sociopolitical establishment. I would suggest that leaderless organizations – or, in the context of this essay’s ensuing sociopolitical considerations, what I shall call networked politics – possess a dual function:
Initially, networked politics can be used as an instrument of insurrection. The recent success of the popular uprising among the Filipino is evidentiary of the efficacy of networked forms of resistance. The insurgents relied upon a moblog – a server upon which contents derived from wireless gadgets can be published by a decentralized public – in order to coordinate their activities. Therefore, the Filipino revolution was not centralized, falling under a single command structure; rather, it was decentralized and voluntarily associational. Although networked politics have just now emerged as a topic of social scientific research, historical incidents, such as the historically recent Filipino revolution, suggest that they might be the optimal form of political resistance in a world where social actors are increasingly connected via the availability of Internet based forms of communication.
Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, networked politics are more resistant to the consolidation of sociopolitical power under any particular hegemony. If we look to traditional forms of popular insurrection – those that were guided and controlled, to a large measure, by van guards – we see a tendency for the elites, who orchestrated the successful revolution, to simply consolidate power themselves, forming another hegemonic faction in control of the society’s sociopolitical power.
As Orwell so brilliantly depicted in his Animal Farm, the revolutionary elites – which, in the case of Orwell’s short story, were comprised of the van guard pigs on the Farm – following the revolution, simply transform into the role that was assumed by the previous governing class. Consequently, the pigs, after staging the revolution, eventually morphed into an embodiment indistinguishable from the human farmer who had been expelled during the uprising.
However, in the case of network politics, there is no centralization, so there will not necessarily be any faction in a position to install an elitist governing structure, or hegemony, in the post-revolutionary social order. To translate the argument I am making into Nelson’s terms – the expressions she used when constructing an alternative American historicity – the emergent social condition will not possess a unified executive branch, and, therefore, it will be absent of Presidentialism: The cultural condition whereby Americans are disposed to conflate democratic processes with the presence of a strong, paternalistic Executive Authority.
Russell Cole
Tags: activism, constitution, decentralization, democracy, executive powers, government, populist party america, Russell Coles Blog, self governance, Social Change, sociology, sociology web 2.0
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, constitution, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Decentralization, self-governance, Social Change, Sociology, activism, executive powers
No Comments »
Episteme 2.0
A study in the sociology of mass media and the sociology of social movements; both directed upon the emerging venue of mass communications, referenced as the World Wide Web, exploring the transformation of sociopolitical possibilities engendered by the proliferation of a representational space that is largely free from institutional gate-keeping devices and a means of publicity that is easily accessible and obtainable by a vastly greater proportion of the population
Forward to Episteme 2.0
Abstract
The forward of the document will outline the scope of the study - including the relationships of the research to preexisting literature, also devoted to the subjects referenced in the content matter herein. In short, the executive summary will serve as a type of abstract. However, since the document object, abstract, is typically not included in the contents of manuscripts that purport to be more than articles, the deployment of the artifice, forward, is more appropriate in this context; a document object that entails many of the same significations; however, it allows for greater flexibility when it comes to the duration and specificity of the content.
Scope and Objectives
This document expresses an assessment of the prospects for the Human Condition in the emerging epoch termed by Castells as the Network Society. The study is not a foray into futurism; nor, does the document constitute a relapse into the absolutism1 of historicism, and the ideological dogma that it inspires. The document and its flow of contents explores a field of diverse possibilities that are hypothesized to exist and reside in the current social configuration - which, of course, is a material and ideological formation that has connections to the past; a process that currently instantiates a field of potential trajectories that, presumably, can be actualize through the way we orient and posture ourselves in the present in order to react and contend with the contingencies arising from our historical situated-ness; thus shaping the unfolding of the future in the most informed and equipped manner, according to the aesthetics2 most desirable.
Operational Context
For the purposes of this meta-brief - emanating from and referring back onto - the document at hand, I shall attempt to reduce the complexities, which can be derived from a thorough analysis of the current transformations that are refitting society, into two contrasting - although inter-related - patterns embodying thematic qualities; one, which I interpret positively; and, one which I interpret negatively.
Most salient to any considerations concerning the material conditions that are instantiated by the emergence of the Network Society and - to be more precise, referring to the circumstances found in American social formations - are the alterations in the economic institutions forming the relationships between those who dictate the terms of employment and those who are obliged to acquiesce to those terms when procuring employment. The changes undergoing the form assumed by the relationships between firms and employees are significant to the point where is compelled to reconsider the analytics typically attached to the conception of elements - as the concept has been generally understood in the context of industrial capitalism. It is not a stretch to suggest that employment is a term that should be discontinued as a reference to the non-standard terms of employment suffered by skilled laborers in the Informational economy. The socio-grammatical conventions forming the family resemblance of economic institutions that have been spawned by the material conditions in which agents and the aggregates - that they collectively form -who find themselves situated in the information economy - embody characteristics, rendering them qualitatively unique exemplars of sociality. Therefore, the referring expression, virtual employment, will be used as a designator, when signifying instances of this social phenomenon, hence forth.
In order to provide definition to virtual employment, some extended remarks are necessary: The current economic condition - informational capitalism - in its most rudimentary dimensions, instantiates an input to output dynamic that has diverged from the traditional, industrial capitalist relational function, which assumed the form of raw materials transformed into commodities. The information economy - in opposition - can be understood - in the most generic of terms - as a mode of production that involves the input of information and the output of reorganized information; a construct, which can be referred to - for the sake of clarity - as knowledge. It is important, here, to mark a distinction between organization and reorganization, because the former applies to previous designs that exist prior to the latter’s inculcation.
In order to begin to understand this - what is the most basic of representations corresponding to the processes involved in informational capitalism - the precise nature of the function embedded within this relation needs further specification: Reorganization is a transformation that differs from the concrete functions found in industrial capitalism, constituting the mechanisms included in the operations performed upon the input - raw materials - in the sequences involved in the modes of production. The reorganization of information into a form of knowledge involves a transformation that cannot be routinized into the machinery of production - unless one is to reduce the available vocabulary to strictly materialist terminology - because the invention of the mode production qualifies as the production, itself. Therefore, keeping with the distinction declared between information and knowledge, as soon as knowledge has been produced, through the function implied in the input - output relationship of informational capitalism, the reorganized information - which has been transformed into knowledge - is reintegrated into the process as the input variable, and - once again - assumes the form of information. Consequentially, by definition, the mode of production cannot be mechanized because it would lack the properties qualifying as the connotative definition of production, as it is defined in the processes of informational capitalism; namely, the innovation of reorganized information; a definition that excludes standardized procedures, because such mechanics would entail the absence of innovation.
Stepping back from what has been analytically deposited thus far, some relationships between firms and the labor that firms employ become transparent: The modes of production can be understood as the persistent reorganization of the processes embedded in the modes of production, which constitutes the mode of production, per se; consequently, exacerbating the pace of de-skilling - a term that extends, most generally, to developments that render employees obsolete - which creates volatility in the employer market. It should also be mentioned that the reorganization of data additionally includes the implementation of new grammatical schema deployed for purposes of structuring the classifications of document elements; the attributes of the document elements; and the possible values that the attributes can instantiate under varying - (although defined) - circumstances; because the procedure of implementing a new form of information technology necessitates the reorganization of the work flow processes utilized by an organization; thus, such a retrofitting constitutes the reorganization of information; specifically, the information - as it is defined and comes to be defined - within the work flow of the restructured social organization.
Returning to considerations conducted upon the nature of the relationships among firms and the labor they hirer, the conditions necessitating the augmentation of new labor become transient, reflecting the events in an organization’s state of affairs, where it must transition its ordering of information in order to reflect the evolving conditions of information technology. Therefore, the skills that are acquired when augmenting the labor capacities of the firm, as it transitions to a new state of information management.
In order to explain this theme through comparison, one can reference the present trends in Information Technology management, which now relies heavily on the implementation of virtual computing environments, in order to test software compatibility and to leverage available resources performed within spaces of productivity - that demand no institutional restructuring and fail to entail any necessary legacies, which might be incurred if the firm had originally adopted the workers as actual members of the institution; a relationship with the significance of manifesting all of the traditional definitions of expectations and obligations associated with employment.
The more sanguine of the two contrasting themes is the intellectual product of postmodern social theory - as well as, Castells, who might not necessarily fit within this rubric - who have argued for the acknowledgment of an emerging social condition resulting from the proliferation of digitally encoded communicative technologies - the virtual spaces of representation they entail - and the existential freedom to stylize one’s persona provided for within the digital matrix from which virtualism manifest - subsidiaries to Informationalism can be summarized under the slogan, re-enchantment.
The allusion to Weber, in this context, is appropriate, since there there is an empirically contingent subject to processes of confirmation juncture between two states that can be marked as qualitatively distinct from one another, through reference to the following contrasting characteristics: First off, the emphasis placed upon innovation - or creativity - calls for organizational environments structured according to flexibility, allowing for production to occur when inspiration precipitates insight, leading to innovation; a state that offer definition to production in the context of informational capitalism. Industrialism, on the other hand, prioritizes scheduling and efficiency, providing for the synchronization of events - performed by machines and their human appendages. Industrial Capitalism required the orderly sequencing of events in order to successfully enact it processes constituting the modes of production. Such an organization calls for the regimentation of social activity reflecting a synchronous layout of stages included in the operations through which output was generated.
It is too soon to fully address this topic in the context of the document object - executive summary - belonging to the document structure. Nevertheless, since the reference - to which the following brief remarks point - is transparently ostensible, it can be mentioned, without too much disruption, that the flow of time in the Informational Economy instantiates different schematic qualities. In fact, the flow of time can be bannered under: an asynchronous dimension to the relations among digital objects and the relationships they intermediate during interactions among social counterparts. This state of affairs, in the of electronic interchange, through which transactions occur, exchanging information, need not be sequential, and, therefore, the forms of reciprocity that transpire can include objects that are not defined by any linear processed ordering of events. In other words, communications can address data objects in a recursive fashion; an aspect of the distant immediacy that characterizes the flow of events that occur in the virtual spaces engendered by the expansion of Internet infrastructures; or, what can be referred to, using Castells’ terminology, as Informationalism; the technological paradigm related to a pattern of productivity that is defined by exemplars constituting digitized communications.
Returning to the persona that is cultivated and constructed agents assuming a presence within the milieu of the digital matrix - a social object that can be Self stylized in the context of virtual interactions with greater plasticity, options, and allowance of revisions - the existential liberties attributable to the digital matrix are related to the condition in which interactions take place: The digital matrix instantiates a field of agents that interact with one another in a disembodied state. As a result, the physical attributes that entail ascription to a particular social identity are - often in the digital matrix - stripped from the communicative affair, allowing agents to bend their identities and play in the engagements while assuming the identity and role of statuses that they might be barred from in real - according to the traditional sense - interactions. One might liken this hyper-reality to the condition that is typically referred to - in the context of social theory - as carnival.
Associated with the breakdown of social barriers in the spaces, constituting virtual reality, is the more recent development typically designated as Web 2.0. Now is not the place to elaborate in dept upon this complicated empirical phenomenon and the properties that should be extrapolated for instances of Web 2.0 when constructing a corresponding analytic. However, with respect to its relevancy to the state of carnival attributed to many virtual spaces of interaction, it should be remarked that Web 2.0 similarly negates many of the semiotic devices - extant in real spaces - whose conventional interpretation by social agents leads to the labeling of ascribed - although sometimes assumed - social identities. In the context of the interactions occurring within instances of Web 2.0, the negation of many real cultural attributes results in a leveling of the stratifications that mark real social processes of knowledge production. Web 2.0 - the most recognizable exemplar of which is probably the popular Wikipedia - democratize the production of knowledge, rendering the representational spaces in which externalizations of proposed versions of knowledge find publicity.
The emergence of the episteme, Web 2.0, signifies an area of considerable concern for the analysis expressed in this document, due to the possibilities it incurs for sociopolitical movements that have been traditionally marginalized, preventing insurgents challenging the duopoly of the legitimate American sociopolitical infrastructure from achieving only the most modest forms of success. The existing literature pertaining to this topic is sparse. However, two references to sociological subject matters - incidentally related to the problem described in the earlier propositions forming this paragraph - are worthy of mention and will be treated somewhat extensively in the chapters and sections that follow: The agricultural reform movement of the latter part of the 19th Century - referred to as the People’s Party, or Populist Party - achieved substantial reforms; mostly consisting of democratizing more directly some of the electoral processes on a Constitutional level. Most significantly, the movement brought about the popular election of Senators.
More germane to the interests of this paper, however, are the unconventional tactics employed - to certain extents - by the movement in order to actualize some of the conditions defined by its teleology. The formation of collectivities in response to the inaccessibility of capital - a circumstance attributed to the Gold Standard3 of currency evaluation, which had consequences for farmers, preventing them access to necessary sources insurance against the risks involved in the production of agricultural commodities. Specifically, the inclusion of this historical narrative contributes to a theme that appears to be emerging in the sociology of social movements, which has taken a detour from the stock of knowledge - comprising its long established conventional wisdom, which presumed the success of social movements to be the consequent of antecedents including the networking resources though which the movement could affect the decision-making of elites responsible for the formation and administration of public policy - in order to come to terms with developments in Latin America. Although the abandonment of the macro-oriented policy strategies characterizing the neoliberal ideology of global consortium, such as the World Monetary Fund, in pursuit of local, organic initiatives certainly is a recognizable factor operative in the dynamics culminating into the mass electoral mobilization, which lead to the usurpations of legitimate sociolopolitical power by populist socialist movements in Latin America, the ability of the successful social movements to opportunize off of the Social Capital produced by activism conducted at the local level - identically - cannot be ignored4. The social movements - and this might be considered an attribute belonging to the connotative definition expressed in the sociological analytics of social movements - of course, were not social formations with the degrees of institutionalization needed to qualify them as organizations - in the sociological sense of the word - although they certainly did and continue to possess a form of organization - rather, the associations5 among agents contributing to these movements constitute - if anything - instances of networking, which, in these instances, transcended nation-states and their geographical parameters.
In terms of this document, what is of primary significance, is the scope of the extension of the refitted understanding of the conditions that can lead to the success of social movements that lack the networking resources with elites who assume positions of authority in the sociopolitical structures of the legitimate apparatuses of a state. Specifically, in the context of the American state, do the virtual spaces - allowing for the formation of virtual communities - similarly generate the Social Capital necessary to spawn the degree of social mobilization necessary for populist insurrections to achieve success; a state defined by the actualization of the conditions defined in the social movement’s teleology.
The problem, as defined in this document, is relevant to the current activities typically referred to as Net-roots Activism6; a form of networking conducted through the communicative possibilities precipitated by the growth of Informationalism.
Strategy Employed
The problem - can third party sociopolitical movements in the United State exploit the current transformations taking place and reorganizing the representational spaces available for obtaining the publicity associated with mass media - is addressed through empirical studies, consisting of ethnographic field research conducted upon two instances of third party sociopolitical movements: a state Green Party in the Midwest and the Populist Party of America, (located, as a headquarters, in Las Angeles California). Both cases involved what has come to be referred to as virtual ethnography.
Tactics
Although the methodological specification of ethnographic research was originally conceived as grounded theory, the immersion in the virtual spaces of the Internet and their state of disembodied communications, led to the adoption of exploratory testing, which has been taken up by others involved in the investigation of this relatively new area of sociological research.
Deliverables
Review and comparison of these two empirical subject domains has led to insights concerning the fertility of virtual communities for the cultivation of Social Capital. Additionally - through my participation in the Populist Party of America, which evolved into a commitment where I was responsible for consultation on organizational matters pertaining to communicative strategies intended for the advancement of the Populist Party’s agenda - I have been afforded the opportunity to test hypotheses concerning the successful application of the communicative devices provided by Internet infrastructures.
1 An ideological condition that marks - in many instances - the family resemblance of Modernist ideologies, which posit a singular, definitive conception of Truth, which should be ostensible to those who possess reasoning faculties, whose scope extend to all of humanity.
2Aesthetics, in this context expands to encompass as a subsidiary the concept, ethics. Perhaps a controversial partial definition. However, if ethics - which are historically contingent; oftentimes, self-imposed imperatives - are not, on occasion, the manifestation of aesthetics, then ethical considerations involved in the deliberations leading to many decisions could not be accounted for, since some decisions lack motivations related to socially imposed protocol dictating professional behavior - whose transgression would incur negative consequences for the agent.
3This is a reference to the debate that occurred at this period over the evaluation of currency in the United States. The Gold Standard was blamed for a lack of inflation, which would have made capital more accessible to farmers in the Midwest and South. The debate culminated with a famous oratory delivered William Jennings Bryan during the Democrat Convention, where he was nominated. Additionally, he received the nomination of the Populist Party.
4Due to the Marxist ideologies of many of the scholars who contribute to Latin American studies, one must, often, extricate this interpretation from the contents of studies that tend to attempt to dismiss the current regimes - installed through the processes describe - as simply continuations of classist elitism. Additionally, the revised tactic of local, organic initiatives - designed to improve communal economic conditions - as opposed to macro-policies, are simply part of a strategy to disperse the ideological foca of downtrodden classes, preventing the formation of a societal class consciousness; and instead, rendering the lower classes susceptible ideological fragmentation, resulting in scattered, local concerns that fail to conceptualize the larger structural mechanisms responsible for the persistence of poverty and class reproduction.
5Term intended to denote the relationships created through social networking. Thicker than societal relationships, but thinner than communal relationships.
6A term originating from authors who became popularized via the exploitation of the representational spaces provided by the Web. The Daily Kos attracts unique visitors to its domain in the number of hundreds of thousands.
Tags: direct democracy, economics, Farmers, government, history, labor, media, Midwest, politics, populist party, Russell Coles Blog, Social Change, society, sociology, sociology web 2.0, sociopolitical institutions, third parties, web 2.0
Categories: Commentary, Midwest, Economics, Society, Populist Party, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Web 2.0, Politics, Third Parties, Labor, Farmers, Direct Democracy, Social Change, Media, Sociology, History
No Comments »
The Spirit of the Times; defining Web 2.0
November 11, 2006 5:30 pmDefining Web 2.0
The emergence of Web 2.0 has attracted negative commentary by people who do not entirely understand what Web 2.0 is and, consequently, what it entails. Admittedly, there is some truth to the relationship inferred to exist between Web 2.0 and the quantum increases in bandwidth that are primarily being created through the investments of ISP’s. However, the bandwidth improvements are only a requisite for Web 2.0, and they do not constitute one of its defining characteristics. Furthermore, as long as Net Neutrality is maintained, we need not consume ourselves with issues related to the loss of the marginal degree of egalitarianism that current embodies the distribution of bandwidth - which currently provides some measures to ensure that high-speed connections are obtainable to large amounts of the population.
This is not to say that more does not need to be done to improve accessibility of high-speed Internet connections for all segments of the population. Certainly, there exists a gap between the strata in American society who can afford broadband and those who lack private access to this resource. Additionally, and perhaps more pressingly, due to inequalities in education and so forth, there exists vast discrepancies in the distribution of the cultural capital necessary for a social agent to advantageously deploy the communicative technologies engendered by the Information Age and the institutionalization of the Internet. These matters deserve the utmost attention and concern. However, the inequalities stated above do not qualify as potential polemics against Web 2.0, because Web 2.0, itself, certainly does not constitute an antecedent to a present or potential system of stratification, defining the resources available to differing segments of the population.
Web 2.0 is a paradigmatic shift whose inception is rooted in the original innovations of open source software designers who detected patterns emerging in the social activities comprising the software projects in which they were engaged. Communicative inventions, such as the Wiki, which were originally innovated in order to open source programming communities to work more efficiently, were appropriated toward considerations that extended beyond software programming and onto social knowledge production in general.
Web 2.0 involves a flattening of the traditional vertical structures creating a hierarchy of privileges for producing various forms of Truth. Academic knowledge is quickly becoming something not determined by an oligarchy within its respective disciplines. Additionally, technological truth - which can be understood as knowledge that provides a legitimate and marketable product, serviceable to the needs of end-user - is becoming a province not monopolized by dominant corporations. Indeed, the social classifications that have defined the resources available to individuals, assuming various positions in these systems of stratification, are becoming fuzzy, and, in all likelihood, will dissolve and discontinue to inhibit or facilitate Truth-production by individuals and collectivities.
To use the economic sphere of society as an example, the traditional boundaries between manufacturers, distributors, and consumers have blurred. All parties involved in this new configuration of development and distributive practices possess the ability to assume different capacities in the relationships between and among identities within the market. Although, it pains me considerably, there is a semblance of truth to the conditions predicted in the “Army of Davids.”
However, this does not entail – necessarily - the extension of a form of rationalization, hypothesized by early theorists who had detected the changing state of modern societies as they transitioned into a post-industrial state. Increasingly, the type of intellectual work in Technocracy occurs in a state where labors are detached from material conditions, leading to a result where contributions to products are no longer reducible to tangible materials. Consequently, the value of labor defies estimation, according to traditional parameters, which might calculate the value of work according to the labor hours consumed in the production a particular commodity that has value in the market.
Knowledge consumers have been equipped with the necessary serviceable objects needed to transform the informational content provided on servers for all of the public to peruse into forms that reflect their own aesthetics and experiences. Once again, the traditional roles assumed among the many, who have been existentially constrained until now within the social compound of the consumer identity, are no longer as rigid as they were previously. The end-user can now assume the role of a provider, and vice versa. The primary dynamic determining what inventions will take hold is the receptivity to the idea and its manifestation by an inclusionary public of counterparts. I hesitate to use the term, peers, due to its incorporation into the vocabulary of the academy, used by this exclusionary institution to describe its own practices.
The aspects, which Web 2.0 instantiates, are better illuminated through a concrete exemplar, which is provided below. This representation comes from a Webpage belonging to a site currently under development by the Populist Party of America:
House
Senate
About
Contact
impeachcongress.org
Home
Share and Enjoy
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments ‡
Exposing Constitutional Violations by Congress
? Categories
?
Featured Commentary (1)
? Congressional Info
?
Library of Congress
? Third Parties
?
Populist Party
?
Libertarian Party
?
Green Party
?
Constitution Party
? Third Party News
?
Third Party News
?
Third Party Watch
? Archives
?
July 2006
?
congress Constitution Featured Commentary representation senate We the People
impeachcongress.org is a project of The Populist Party of America Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS) .
Podcast Powered by podPress (v6.3)
This is a page from a site that remains in the sandbox. Nevertheless, it continues to be useful as an exemplar of Web 2.0 designs. What is of significance are the direct links for entering the URL into social bookmarking services; a form of social knowledge construction, where the contents of the Internet are discovered and indexed according to the collaborative efforts of a Plebeian, inclusionary public, providing for a search application that generates, according to most, more relevant results than traditional syntactically structured search engines. Although social bookmarking sites continue to rely upon keyword searches, one can expect that these services will become more sophisticated as the Semantic Web begins to take hold. Regardless of their current dependence upon conventional search engine mechanics, the tags entered by contributors are more accurate and detailed, creating a social knowledge forum that continues to grow and continues to increase the relevancy of the results generated from searches. Additionally, there is another dynamic operative within these types of forums, people do not enter into the servers data base any site that they happen to run across. Rather, there is a process of selectivity based upon aesthetics and tested utility. Therefore, results generated from queries conduct in the API’s belonging to Web 2.0 services produce results generated from processes entirely different from the syntactical operations deployed by conventional search engines. The selectivity of links directed toward contents - assumed to possess the highest degrees of relevancy - are a result of organic processes.
The processes - collectively forming what is tantamount to a chaotic system – are not reproducible by the syntactically structured operations embedded in the search engines provided by servers such as Google or MSN. Although the engines, such as Google’s search, can index vastly more contents belonging to domains and their pages - an accomplishment achieved through the deployment of spiders that transverse the links directing the spider to additional contents - it is unlikely that these engines will ever acquire the capacity to retrieve results that are as relevant as those produced by social search engines.
Another salient aspect to the Webpage represented above are the RSS links located on the bottom of the page. RSS in another feature of Web 2.0 that allows for the real time update of content modifications. XML meta-tags are fed through a syndication that is often rendered using an Internet browser or, sometimes, standalone applications. These feeds contain citations of links that allow for an end-user to access a page that he or she infers to have content of interest from the descriptions in the meta-tags. It should be pointed out, once again, the functionality engendered by Really Simple Syndication is considered an instance of Web 2.0; a conclusion based upon its role as a Web component. Additionally, RSS is not comprised of static content, which is an attribute associated with most of Internet 1.0. This consideration brings into the forefront a marked difference between the two paradigms: Web 2.0 is comprised of servers displaying content not authored by the service provider in way that allows for only the original form of the media assuming a static state. Instead, Web 2.0 usually designates electronic media that is in a constant state of flux, typically expansion, most often integration with content initially provided by other servers, and collaboration among the members of the inclusionary public that care to contribute to its refinement, augmentation, and extensibility, which translates into magnified functionality.
The open source project known as WordPress presents an embodiment of all of the aforementioned attributes. Wordpress is a weblog programming project that allows for a community of programmers to add to the extent of its extensibility, rendering it, in a sense, limitless. Some of the ethics preemptive in the Wordpress ethos are parsimony, which allows for the easy comprehension of the programming; thus, facilitating its continued expansion by a diversely trained and aesthetically disposed community of peers; (this pretentious textual contrivance is intended to signified the conventional term, peer, with a modified sense that conveys an entirely voluntary and inclusionary public of counterparts); a distinction that has significance when juxtaposed with the sense peer acquires within the context of discourse emanating from the academy. Also, the Wordpress project is keenly aware of aesthetics. This illuminates another thematic quality that is pervasive within the culture of Web 2.0. Utility and aesthetics are not discontinuous properties. Rather, the two competing spheres of considerations find themselves fused into a unified type of praxis that emphasizes functionality and aesthetics through a single modality of expression. The synthetic conglomeration of intellectual considerations is no longer a dichotomy of competing concerns that requires the partial negation of one to accommodate the other. Instead, the product exists as one in the same, where aesthetics fall under the scope of pragmatics; a conceptualization of design that is congruent with definitions put forth by those responsible for the inception of the philosophy.
Social Knowledge Production
When I first stumbled onto the communicative capacities of the Web when engaged in a bizarre circumstance with a corrupt University, which was attempting to conceal its
negligence, so not to lose a tremendously large grant, I made the precipitous prediction that the Internet and the Blogosphere would dislodge the disciplinarian monopoly of knowledge production. Publicity was no longer the sole propriety of the elevated statuses in society who had acquired the necessary prestige symbols to endow their speech-acts with the property of Truth, or, at the very minimum, the privilege to be subjected to the dialogical mechanisms that adjudicated which externalized speech-acts would be accepted as
objectivity. I saw in this very medium of communication a possibility of circumventing the established institutions of gate-keepers who effectively passed judgment on what discursive contributions would enter into the textual domains that embody the stature of the academy. I went so far as to predict the slow demise of the academy altogether; at least in the sense of the Social Sciences.
The prophecy I was bold enough to render at the time remains in a state of limbo with competing forces vying to shape the communicative possibilities of the Internet in a fashion that either engenders or preserves their vest interests. Undoubtedly, the controversy over the deregulation of Net Neutrality is a part of this conflict. Those who have the material means will be in a position that grants them access to a larger audience, and consumers of the higher strata of services will enjoy content inaccessible to the plebeian class of the
populace. The distribution of the cultural capital will be configured to reflect preexisting inequalities in society, and the hope of democracy once fostered by the Internet will be loss.
We must not lose heart, however, become the verdict is yet to be announced with respect to the future of Information Technology in society. Subversive discourse still finds a home on the Internet, and, indeed, has provided spheres of communication that are robust and argumentative. The Green Party, for instance, and, more particularly, the Green Alliance have formed online chat forums that possess ongoing dialogue covering various concerns, all of which are germane to the Red-Green current of political discourse. What is troubling, however, is the absence of any clear translation from Internet based communication and dialogue and political mobilization. Of course, groups, such as MoveOn.org have built influential advocacy groups with a progressive agenda. Yet, I find this unsatisfactory because it is roughly a top-to-bottom organization, where decisions are rendered by elites in the organization, and, subsequently, the masses who participate in these movements are left with the option of contributing money or signing worthless petitions. A more extreme
example, which is, in fact, laughable, are the Internet mass mailings made by the Democratic Party, conducted under the pretenses of Grass-roots, which only solicit contributions from the members of this robust grass-roots movement.
Other forms of social-knowledge production offer a more penetrating glimpse into the democratic possibilities of the Web. The Wikipedia is the most popular and salient exemplar of this type of deliberative, egalitarian knowledge-building. The are no requisites with
regards to status, which might prohibit one from participating in the generation of contents possessed by the Wikipedia server. In other words, unlike traditional disciplinarian forms of knowledge, there are no status symbols that one must acquire to be considered a legitimate contributor to the particular discourse both forming and emanating from a disciplinary matrix. Knowledge in this sense is democratic and any member of the Demos who possesses the discursive skill need to captivate an audience - regardless of his or her social strata outside of the public sphere of dialogue - can effectively persuade the mob to embrace policies according positions articulated in his sophistries.
For the Athenian form of democracy to persist, civic egalitarianism had to cherished and safe-guarded from potentially corrupting influences. The constant fear of a faction acquiring a disproportionate amount of power was a real concern and precipitated the manifestation of institutions where public servants were selected by lottery as opposed to status symbols that might be conflated with elitism. This is not to say that the Athenians did not have elites, but the term, elite, had a different sense in juxtaposition to the meaning it often acquires during its contemporary usage. An elite, according to the Athenians, was an individual who demonstrated exceptional skills in a variety of contexts. Nonetheless, an elite was not someone who was defined by his or her position of power. In other words, the classification, elite, did not translate into political privilege. Elitism was related to the stylization that defined one’s character, not to a position of power that might be procured by a citizen belonging to the Polis.
Russell Cole
For more work on this subject visit the
Tags: democracy, direct democracy, extreme democracy, midwest alliance populist america, populist party america, Russell Coles Blog, sociology, sociology web 2.0, web 2.0, web 2.0 democracy
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, Russell Cole's Blog, Web 2.0, Extreme Democracy, Sociology
No Comments »
