Your Country Needs You!

February 14th, 2010 by Ville Miettinen

Until recently, the options for citizens to participate in government were few and of arguable impact. Besides signing or organizing the odd petition, joining a protest, attending a town hall meeting, or writing a letter to your Minister of Parliament, influencing leadership was pretty much limited to voting during elections (assuming you are lucky enough to live in a democracy at all).

I say, “Until recently” because the times are a-changing. Technology is allowing citizens to communicate with their officials, and for officials to communicate with (and make interesting use of) the citizenry. While private enterprise tends to lead the way when it comes to technological innovation, it seems our cardigan-sporting civil servants have not missed the opportunity to harness the power of new tools and resources – most notably by channelling the lines of communication on the internet into one giant suggestion box.

Yes We Might!
President Obama’s election campaign was memorable for many things, not least of which its deft use of technology and social media to organize supporters. This technophilia has continued in the new administration. Last year Obama experimented with an interactive townhall meeting – a traditional meeting with a live webcast allowing the online audience to participate by submitting questions. All told, more than 100,000 questions were submitted, which is a promising sign for a democracy where participation can be a problem.

Furthermore, in various States a number of local authorities have created portals for people to give feedback on various initiatives over the web. Some allow comment on specific initiatives while others just put the call out for some good ideas.

Naturally, with many voices comes a good deal of white noise. Every political meeting always seems to have a couple of people yelling out “LEGALIZE IT!“ no matter what the issue du jour happens to be. So moderation becomes crucial: filtering out the salient contributions from the spurious, and organising related comments into themes and threads. Fortunately, this is essentially one of those good problems. When it comes to democracy, a rise in the number of participants can only be positive. The potential is undoubtedly there.

But how fast these innovations can deliver a genuine participatory democracy remains to be seen. Voter apathy and general political disengagement are reasonably prominent in many western democracies. It will likely take some time for a genuine sea change in some places. As everyone who has bought exercise equipment from an infomercial knows – having the tools doesn’t necessarily guarantee they will be used.

Fight Join the Power
Governments are beginning to tap into the power of the crowds in more ways than merely creating online suggestion books. And some of them are more than a little troubling. Allow me to outline a couple of examples that might raise a couple of eyebrows, or even the hairs on the back of your neck.

One of the big news threads to come out of last year’s protested “elections” in Iran, was the protesters’ novel use of technology (social media including Twitter etc) to organize themselves and communicate with the media. Well, it seems two can play at that game. The Iranian regime, unable to arrest everyone, has been trying to harness the power of the people in order to limit the power of the people. The government posted photographs of protesters on the web and offered a cash reward (roughly $15) for information helping to identify the people in the photos. It’s a pretty efficient way to do business, but alarming to anyone with respect for the right to peaceful assembly.

That might seem a little like picking on everyone’s favorite international scapegoat, so here’s an example from the good ol’ USA. Texas border security has opened their CCTV feed to the web, allowing anyone to log on and watch the border and report signs of suspicious activity. If enough people notice the same thing, the border police put on their mirror-shades and go to check it out. No monetary award is offered to these online virtual deputies, just the chance to play cops and robbers for real.

Wait ‘Til I Tell Mom!
These examples have a common thread: basically, people tattling on each other. This essentially makes any number of citizens an extension of the state’s executive power. And this combination of the state’s overwhelming power and the power of the snitching masses will seem a little worrying to anyone who’s ever heard the term Big Brother.

With potent tools such as these the obvious question is how far people will allow the state to intrude upon their civil liberties – which is not an easy question as everyone has their own tipping point in such matters. Many might consider the tattling to be a good thing and what is required of a “responsible citizen” is rarely clear-cut. For example, hopefully most of us would call the cops if we witnessed a murder, but many of us would balk at snitching to the nearest parking warden when we happen upon on tardy meter-feeders. The line falls somewhere in the middle but unfortunately not in the same place for everyone.

Careful What You Wish For…
So government use of technology and crowdsourcing clearly has great potential when it comes to getting citizens involved in democratic processes; but raises some concerns in other areas. It is one thing to ask people what they think and ask them for suggestions, it is another thing entirely to ask them to get involved in executive functions exercising (and potentially, vastly increasing) the state’s power and ability to impinge upon our lives. It will no doubt prove interesting to see the ways (both good and bad) in which these developments unfold.

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