Democracy: Time for an “Update”

In the digital age, we’re all familiar with the “update” function on our smartphone’s applications.  Occasionally, the applications we love no longer have the functionality to deal with consumer’s constantly changing demands, and so, the applications administrators write new code, update functionality to incorporate new desires and get rid of unwanted features.

In the past, software updates weren’t nearly as frequent or responsive as they are today.  We live in a Beta-version world (popularly coined as Web 2.0), where almost all of our applications are constantly being improved, and new methods and features are constantly being experimented.  Every day, major technological companies are trying new features to improve ease of use and the online experience for users.  They are constantly addressing inefficiencies, and improving functions.  In this scenario, it’s not the end-product that’s so important to the user, but the process of constant improvement and constant learning.

However, it wasn’t always this way.  In the past, large software companies organized large releases of their updated operating systems.  The upgrade was costly, and inevitably would introduce a whole new set of unanticipated problems.  Consumers were unhappy and had very few outlets to truly vent that frustration.  The applications worked well enough for their intended purposes, but there was no bridge to the consumer that exists with current Web 2.0 applications.

 

So, how does all of this tech theory connect to democracy?  Well, we’re stuck in a Web 1.0 version of democratic governance.  The rules of the game are stagnant, and enacting any type of change, even small incremental change, requires overcoming some designedly tall barriers.  We all know what’s wrong with certain policies, such as gun policy in America.  Guns, and maybe more significantly, ammo is too easy to obtain, and inevitably ends up in the wrong hands.  The infallibility of the Bill of Rights and the 2nd Amendment more specifically makes it near impossible to enact the common-sense changes we know are necessary without seemingly threatening the rights of a small but vocal minority of gun rights activists.

 

So, where do we go from here? I’m not sure.  But we ought to learn our history.  The system of democracy and governance that we now operate in was designed for a completely different world.  Representatives were needed to speak for constituents who rarely traveled to the next county, much less to a national capital.  The electoral college was instituted as a substitute for a lack of effective transportation and communication infrastructure that would allow proper direct voting by constituents.  So many aspects of the architecture of American democracy were designed for a drastically different reality than the one we live in.

In recognition of that past, we have to then face our future.  We have to understand that, in today’s world, our biggest problem is not too LITTLE opportunity to voice an opinion, but too MANY outlets for too many opinions to be expressed, and not enough fora for actual change and action to occur.  Today, we face the problem of too much noise, and too little movement. We face the problem of too many minorities vocally opposing sensible policies.  The system no longer has the functionality to address problems that are literally upside-down from the ones that the Founding Fathers who designed this system had to overcome.

 

So we ought to carefully consider how to design a system that actually  addresses our more modern needs.  Transportation and communication barriers have collapsed.  But there are very limited filters for true democracy to actually function.  Let this be the beginning of a new debate… How can we best “update” American democracy and step out of the Web 1.0 world and into the Web 2.0 one.

The Gamechanging Power of Nobody in Particular

This summer, it seemed as if the whole world was erupting in spontaneous but widespread bursts of collective action and protests.  Disgruntled citizens took to the streets to express their concern about a whole host of issues.  From imbalanced spending priorities in Brazil, to the glaring lack of a legal infrastructure to deal with rape in India, mass protests have put immense international pressure on governments to respond to citizen’s demands of all types. In Turkey, the issue that mobilized a massive opposition protest had to do with greenspace, a seemingly innocuous issue.  Even right here, in the United States, the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman unleashed a torrent of protests nationwide and provoked a larger national conversation on race that was on nobody’s radar prior to the event.

Clay Shirky’s analysis of the power of social tools explains why.  As he reiterates in chapter after chapter in his book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, social tools have collapsed the costs of sharing information, coordinating groups, and eventually collectively acting to force change.  Social tools allow the average citizen to actively direct their dissatisfaction and frustration with broken institutions to a larger audience, without having to become activists themselves.

Tim O’Reilly’s piece Web 2.0 goes even further in explaining how the social tools themselves are modeled in such a way that they facilitate broad social movements and protests. Facebook and Twitter (two Web 2.0 applications) allow for mass content production and social filtering of what is and isn’t important.  Unlike Web 1.0 programs that attempted to shape and define to the consumer what is important, Web 2.0 allows for humongous amounts of data to be inputted, then uses algorithms to filter up what users themselves consider to be important as expressed through “like”, “share” and “retweet” buttons.

More importantly, Web 2.0 social applications are masterful at harnessing the power of the collective.  Crowdsourcing, tagging, and viral marketing allow not only coordination between disparate groups, but also allow even relatively unengaged individuals to keep abreast of rapidly changing information. That pain-free access to information for consumers can unexpectedly move apathetic individuals to action.  The extremely low barriers to participation afforded by Web 2.0 applications has created an environment ripe for even more protests and collective action movements.

Both Shirky’s and O’Reilly’s analysis seems accurate, but the question of how traditional leaders have adapted to an entirely new world where consumers are armed with powerful social tools still remains unanswered.  Shirky writes a little bit about fame and how the internet reinforces the same imbalances we see in the real world.  But, I wondered throughout the reading how leaders have adapted and probably captured some of this same organizing power and used it to thwart some of this bottom-up collectivism he writes so extensively about.

So my question, remains, how have these same social tools been hijacked by traditional institutions to recapture some of that lost power and influence?

It seems that in leaders like Barack Obama, we are beginning to see how leaders are able to effectively harness this same collective activity facilitated by social tools to their own ends.  But we have also seen many times when leaders are thrown completely off-course by the spontaneous shifting in consumer desires followed by possible collective action.  Shirky spends plenty of time on the latter phenomenon, but I would have liked to see more discussion and analysis on the former.