title bernhard rieder université de paris viii - vincennes saint-denis laboratoire paragraphe...

Title

Bernhard Rieder

Université de Paris VIII - Vincennes Saint-Denis

Laboratoire Paragraphe

Institutionalizing without Institutions?Self-Organization, Hierarchy, and Power on the Web

IG3T Workshop 4

12 / 6 / 2009

Basic ideas

There are very different ways to conceive and examine power on /

over / by means of the Internet / Web.

The debate about the political qualities of the Internet / Web are part of

general political deliberation.

The debate is part of general political struggles.

This presentation

Terms and concepts

Self-organization and hierarchy

Software as institution

The Internet and democracy

I - Culture

“Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of

significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the

analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but

an interpretive one in search of meaning.” [ Geertz 1973, p. 5 ]

Meaning cannot be separated from value.

Culture has a descriptive (cognitive) and a normative (moral) component.

I - Moral preprocessing

“… the Passions of Fear, Love, Hatred, Admiration, Disdain, and the like,

arise immediately in his Mind upon the Perception of certain Words,

without any Ideas coming between …” [ Berkeley 1734, §20 ]

Political discourse is characterized by “moral preprocessing”.

This makes for a particular kind of complexity.

I - Cockroach vs. Kitten

I - Definitions: Institution and governance

Two meanings of institution

a formal establishment

“a large organization founded for a particular purpose, such as a college, bank, etc.”

a social mechanism

“an established law or custom”

Two meanings of governing

“conduct the policy and affairs of (a state, organization, or people)”

“constitute a rule, standard, or principle”

I - Definitions: Power

Power: “faire faire” [ Latour 1994 ] and “faire croire”

These distinctions lead to different research perspectives concerning the

organization of power over / on / by means of the Internet / Web.

Two understandings of power

statutory power

visible, coercive, direct, and legitimized

capillary power

opaque, productive, subtle, and emergent

I - Statutory perspective

From the statutory perspective there is a series of formal organizations that

governs the Internet.

Technical (protocols, standards, formats, etc.)ISOC (IETF, IRTF), W3C, ISO, etc.

Administrative (address spaces, domain names, bandwidth, etc.)ICANN, ISPs, etc.

Legal (general and purpose-built law)Nation states, WTO, etc.

I - Capillary perspective

From the capillary viewpoint, things are more elusive.

What are the processes of institutionalization (the production of social

mechanisms) at work in the open spaces delimited by the technical norms,

administrative procedures, and legal rules laid out by institutions (formal

governing bodies)?

An answer would have to include all the human and social sciences.

I - Three types of institutions

Scott [ 1995 ] distinguishes between tree types of institutions (social

mechanisms):

Statutory perspective Regulative institutions

Capillary perspective Normative institutions

Cognitive-cultural institutions

Descriptive / normative: these analytical perspectives have political

and ideological counterparts.

II - Shirky

Clay Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody”, 2006

The narrative in a nutshell: The Internet

makes it possible for loosely organized

communities to perform tasks formerly

reserved to hierarchic organizations.

“The difficulties that kept self-assembled

groups from working together are shrinking,

meaning that the number and kinds of things

groups can get done without financial

motivation or managerial oversight are

growing.” [ Shirky 2006, p. 22 ]

II - Self-organization 1

Self-organization is “a process where the entropy of a system decreases

without the system being guided or managed by external forces“.

[ Casadei et al. 2007 ]

From cybernetics to social theory [ cf. Luhmann 1984 ], played a special

role in early Internet ideology.

“Self-organization often evokes an optimistically tinged ‘state of nature’

narrative, a story about the good way things would evolve if the ‘meddling’

hands of corporations and lawyers and governments and bureaucracies

would just stay away.” [ Weber 2004, p. 132 ]

II - Self-organization 2

“The Internet does restructure public discourse in ways that give

individuals a greater say in their governance than the mass media made

possible.” [ Benkler 2006, P. 271 ]

As a descriptive / normative concept for social organize, self-

organization indicatesa turning away from institutions (social establishments)

a shift from statutory to capillary power

This is how it is and how it should be.

II - Internet as egalitarian

The self-organization narrative has given rise to two very different

accounts [ cf. Benkler 2006 ]:

1 The Internet as egalitarian platform of free speech

“We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no

matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

[ Barlow 1996 ]

“Freedom consists not simply in preference satisfaction but also in the chance to have

preferences and beliefs formed under decent conditions – in the ability to have preferences

formed after exposure to a sufficient amount of information, and also to an appropriately

wide and diverse range of options. There can be no assurance of freedom in a system

committed to the ‘Daily Me’.” [ Sunstein 2002, p. 50 ]

II - Internet as Power laws

2 The Internet as skewed, mass-media like star-system

“Cyberspace embodies the ultimate freedom of speech. Some may be offended, others may love

it, but the content of a Webpage is hard to censor. Once posted, it is available to hundreds of

millions of people. This unparalleled license of expression, coupled with diminishing publishing

costs, makes the Web the ultimate forum of democracy; everybody's voice can be heard with

equal opportunity. Or so insist constitutional lawyers and glossy business magazines. If the Web

where a random network, they would be right. But it is not. The most intriguing result of our

Web-mapping project was the complete absence of democracy, fairness, and egalitarian values

on the Web.” [ Barabási 2003, p. 56 ]

II - Curve : Citations

Frequency of scientific citations [ cf. De Solla Price 1965 ]

II - Curve : Technorati

Most popular blogs, ( data : Technorati, 11/2007 )

II - Curve : Ryze Tribe

Network centrality in a social network tribe ( data: Ryze, 01/2003 )

II - Social mechanisms

“Self-organization is used too often as a placeholder for an unspecified

mechanism. The term becomes a euphemism for ‘I don’t really understand

the mechanism that holds the system together.’” [ Weber 2004, p. 132 ]

Benkler [ 2006 ] gives a middle ground explanation for the political

blogosphere based on “filtering, accreditation and synthesis mechanisms”.

Setting up social mechanisms without formal establishments.

Institutionalizing without institutions?

II - Not one mechanism

There is not one single mechanism of organization. There are many.

Some have a strong technological component.

III - Three examples

Three examples:

Search engines

News filtering

Wiki software

III - Google

III - PageRank

PageRank is based on recursive link analysis.

III - Golden triangle

III - Current guiding principles

Link analysis projects the hypertext graph as a hierarchical list that strongly

favors hubs and networks of hubs.

The logic of “preferential attachment” is running in a loop.

The two dominant guiding principles currently are:

popularity ( the logic of the hit )

convenience ( personalization )

III - Link analysis and the logic of the hit

“We will have to realize that hierarchies fulfill a semantic function and

that semantic systems are hierarchic by principle.” [ Winkler 1997 ]

III - Example: reddit

III - Example: digg

III - Example: reddit reach

Source: alexa.com

III - Example: reddit vs. Google

Source: alexa.com

III - Example: reddit pageviews

Source: alexa.com

III - Example: reddit comments

III - Example: reddit comments

III - Example: digg comments

III - Example: digg upcoming

III - Google News

III - Example: MediaWiki

III - What do platforms shape?

What is communication?

What is cooperation?

Which information is valuable?

What is decision-making?

Software applications offer a set of mediated functions.

Ways of doing are built into software.

Sorting algorithms produce hierarchies and categories.

Multi-user applications contain models of collective governance.

What is democracy?

IV - CITATION: Democracy!

“Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!”

[ Allen

Ginsberg ]

IV - CITATION: Web 2.0

“The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several

examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they

have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. [ … ] Another place

democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as news. I never look

at any news site now except Reddit.” [ Graham 2005 ]

“Amateur journalism trivializes and corrupts serious debate. It is the

greatest nightmare of political theorists throughout the ages, from Plato

to Aristotle to Edmund Burke and Hannah Arendt – the degeneration of

democracy into the rule of the mob and the rumor mill.” [ Keen 2007 ]

IV - Democracy as central term

Democracy? “Government of the people, by the people, for the people“!

The Internet is democratic! (or destroys democracy!)

What is the core of democracy?Deliberation? Voting? Lawmaking? Collective problem solving?

Fundamental rights? Consensus? Public service?

The Internet is governed in a democratic fashion.

Certain applications allow for governing certain functions in a democratic fashion.

The Internet shifts power from statutory to capillary.

The Internet is a better public sphere than mass media.

The Internet is difficult to censor.

The Internet bypasses cultural elites and redistributes symbolic capital.

IV - Democracy as community

There are (at the very least) two dominant understandings of democracy:

1 Democracy as community

“To depend on great thinkers, authorities, and experts is, it seems to me, a violation of the

spirit of democracy. Democracy rests on the idea that, except for technical details for which

experts may be useful, the important decisions of society are within the capability of ordinary

citizens. Not only can ordinary people make decisions about these issues, but they ought to,

because citizens understand their own interests more clearly than any experts.” [ Zinn 2003 ]

Based on the ideal of the New England Town Meeting.

“On any moral question, I would rather have the opinion of Boxboro than of Boston and

New York put together.” [ Thoreau 1854 ]

The hope is that information technology can scale up the community.

IV - Democracy as society

Based on complicated mechanisms.

Strong institutions of governance limited by checks and balances.

Fundamental rights, representation, and “publicness” [ Schudson 1997 ].

Meritocracy rather than cultural equality.

2 Democracy as society

“I believe that a democratic society is not and cannot be a community, where by a

community I mean a body of persons united in affirming the same comprehensive, or

partially comprehensive doctrine.” [ Rawls 2001, p. 3 ]

Governance of large-scale, complex, heterogeneous societies.

Statutory vs. capillary power

Naïve vs. cynical politics

IV - Drifting apart

We are witnessing permanent clashes between the “giants of flesh and

steel” and the “new home of mind” [ Barlow 1996 ].

Examples: DMCA, HADOPI, Internetsperren, etc.

Statutory power seeks to limit capillary power.

Capillary power desists and circumvents.

Behind the curtain, capillary power has scaled up.

IV - Platform power

Platform power.

IV - Cockroach vs. Kitten 2

IV - The Internet is …

We do not need any final judgments on whether the Internet “democratizes”

or not, but to untangle its contradictory trajectories.

The Internet is a malleable technology. Its design changes. The

applications it hosts change. The way people use it changes.

We to think about how we want our democracies to work and make

the Internet part of that process.

There will have to be compromise.

The End

Thank you for your attention.

bernhard.rieder@univ-paris8.fr

http://bernhard.rieder.fr

http://thepoliticsofsystems.net