Social Dialogue and Designing for Choice

Ok, everyone.  I'm still looking for ideas on finding some wisdom.  Getting some wise thoughts, or even better a wise person that we can all sit down and listen to..  ( Diogenes said it takes a wise man to find a wise man, but didn't talk about the wisdom of me, ie. the guy who's looking for the wise man to find the wise man. )

When I fall short in my web walk for wisdom, I end up on Ribbonfarm.com and today's article reviews 'legibility':

ribbonfarm.com article

The article talks about the failure of sweeping authoritarian plans to improve peoples' lives - which is described by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,:

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.  Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, particularly blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people.

It's pretty clear what he's describing but it seems to me, though, that there needs to be a state of readiness for legibility to be undertaken.  Even for public choices to be designed, there need to be some options being discussed.  If you want to pave the cow paths, then there have to be cow paths to being with.

If there is a need for some direction, but we don't have even paths yet - don't we need to have somebody architect those choices for us ?  To plan a space for discussions to occur ?  

Maybe our directions will be clearer once people start talking about the failures in dialogue - lack of public fora, no tools to build consensus, mass one-to-many communication rather than public discussion.  And to talk in a progressive and constructive way requires design - not the authoritative design that Scott describes, but design that iterates on and enhances humans' natural social and problem-solving needs.

There are examples, after all, where social tools were designed as such - I'm thinking of money as an example here.

I think the question of choice architecture is an interesting one, but in terms of public discussion, we don't even have a path or an open square today, far from a home.

Big Media Pays the Bills

http://canadalandshow.com/rex-murphy-paid-oil-sands-cbc-wont-disclose-discuss/ 

I wanted to jump on this item quickly, as it's from a podcast recently done by Jesse Brown at Canadaland wherein he regularly talks about Canadian writing, bloging and mainstream journalism.

As television news dies, the value of their weatherbeaten icons soars, kind of like the maidenhead on a sinking ship where you look for anything that floats.  Murphy's bleats about Neil Young's responsibility have turned out to be poorly mirrored in the CBC's approach to the ethics in this case. Incredibly, Canadaland reports that CBC even refused to acknowledge that Murphy works on The National.

Google this to find out some facts about the lack of mainstream coverage and kudos to Canadaland for this piece of citizen journalism.

Share and discuss.

The Moral Case for Participation in Government

I'm taking a break from discussing philosophers, media theorists and other societal therapists to call attention to Canada's participation in the Open Data Partnership.  Specifically, Canada's participation in the ODP seems to be headed towards providing "the" public with killer apps, rather than access and participation.




Teresa Scassa blogs that ...

The review, carried out by Carleton University Professor Mary Francoli, does note, however, that a number of the government’s other commitments are less ambitious and less directly relevant to the goals of the OGP. This does not mean that they are not worth doing, just that they are less impactful. One issue, therefore, would seem to be whether the government’s plan has struck the right balance between ambitious and significant goals and low hanging fruit.

A further concern is that the broad commitment to open government has been channelled primarily into developments around open data. While open data is important, and while developments in this area have been meaningful, open access and open participation are crucial components of open government and are essential to realizing its objectives. Indeed, one of the recommendations in the review document relates to the need for the government to broaden its focus so as to give more attention to open access and participation.

This topic seems so cold and academic at times, but after reading Christie Blatchford's recent column questioning the utility of inquests this week, I was reminded of the inquest as an audit of government's failure to help people.   Here is a list of inquests scheduled for the Province of Ontario.  So many lives lost.  I went from that list to a list of past inquests , wondering the whole time whether there's any way to follow-up on the recommendations.

So, picking an inquest randomly off the list, I Googled the inquest on the death of Jordan Heikamp.  Were these recommendations followed ?  The search results produced many pages of media and academic discussion, but I only found one official page in the top 3 pages of Google searches - a response from the City of Toronto Medical Officer of Health. 

So - ARE such recommendations followed up ?  Is there a way for us to look into what the operations are, and whether changes have been made and how they're impacting the welfare of those who use the services ?  There may be, but Ontario doesn't make it easy for a public to access and participate in the recommendations about our social services.

If there isn't a way for us to monitor these things directly, are we supposed to rely on the press to notify a fickle and bored mass of people what is happening ? If we as a public don't care, then who will ?

In These * Times

On this blog I've been advocating for MetaDiscussion - ie. talking about talking about things - as a way for us to move forward, based on an assumption that we're in a period of extreme change, with attendant feelings of confusion, fear, indirection and so on.  

But it occurred to me today that I haven't fully validated my starting position on this path, so I thought I'd try to use Google as a social thermometer by searching for the words: "In these * times".  (The * is what is called a "wild card". Google will return anything that matches the other words around the asterisk exactly, allowing any word to appear the middle of that phrase.)

What I found in the top 10 Google results where an interim word was added was this:

Tough (2)
Hard (2)
Uncertain (2)
Difficult
Changing
Troubled
Turbulent

(Methodology: I did a Google Search for 'In These * Times'  and removed 'cold' from my results, which appeared in the results from a maple syrup ad.  (I live in Canada.)) 

If Google is to be believed, then we do indeed have troubles on us today.  I've been blogging about our need for societal therapists, so I wondered if Google could help with that too.

I searched "Source of wisdom" and the results of the search were telling: many pages of religious offerings, and a brand of jeans (?).  I was doubtful that God or new pants could help our troubles, so I paged forward through the results until I found this gem: 

What the dead lack in currency they make up for in depth. Accessing their work is an automatic exercise in editing: for it to have survived at all, beyond the championing of their living energies, it must have been unusually robust. 

The hot metal of their ideas will have been tempered into the steel of their finished intellectual constructs by the force of sustained peer critique and exacting editorial standards. 

Certainly, re-reading the closely-argued theories of, say, Erving Goffman or Denis Diderot feels qualitatively different from browsing the inchoate ideas that pour forth from even strong thinkers in a world forever in Beta. 

http://martinweigel.org/2013/03/03/why-the-dead-might-be-our-best-source-of-wisdom/
http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/opinion/1172305/Helen-Edwards-wisdom-dead-versus-living

A world forever in Beta !  What a great diagnosis of our current mental state by Helen Edwards, who is ... let's see... I assume she is a philosopher and a social theorist... no wait.. let's see here...

"Helen Edwards has a PhD in marketing, an MBA from London Business School and is a partner at Passionbrand. "

Discouraging.  Not to disparage Ms. Edwards' career choices too much, it seems to me that despite our clear need for societal therapy in these * times, there's so little demand for wisdom that we are redeploying our talented thinkers and social commentators as marketers.

Finding A Good Therapist

I talked about MetaDiscussion in my last blog, and about why I think that "we", ie. our world, needs some therapy, or at least a bracing jolt of wisdom to wake us up from the current neurotic sleepwalk.

Who, though, are the wise ones to help us ? Elvis Costello asked that: Where are the strong ?  Who are the trusted ?  Where is the harmony ?  We are in times of deep and unfathomable change now, so we need to tap into essential wisdoms to help us understand and help talk us through what is happening.  

But pure wisdom on its own isn't enough either: it's not social.  There always have been vaults of philosophical thought out there describing how societies and publics function.  As we learned from the online Climate Science wars, professorial wisdom often suffers outside the domain of the university lecture and the old bearded wizard.  If the message isn't sociable, then it won't spread off campus.

Wouldn't it be swell if there were relevant and appealing thought leaders who could speak to the circumstances of today using the media of today and - AND - with an understanding of history and philosophy.  How would that look ?  And would you share it on Facebook ?  Click to share !

That is: please comment here with links any such people: social theorists, philosophers, even bloggers.  I'm finding these sites one by one, such as...  Ribbonfarm.  It was started by Venkatesh Rao in 2007.

Ribbonfarm

"The name ribbonfarm refers to the ribbon farms of 18th century Detroit — strips of lands 2-3 miles long, each with 2-300 yards along the Detroit river waterfront — that the then French governor used to resolve water disputes. I thought it was a great metaphor for a blog trying to get its thin slice of attention from the great river of eyeballs that is the Web. "

It's replete with philosophy, reflection, wisdom, Metadiscussion.  Like the latest, an interesting article on how the West vs the East look at organisms, government and society:  

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/01/28/technical-debt-of-the-west/

Thought leaders such as these will be our collective therapists; we need to share their wisdom on Facebook and elsewhere.  It's on us to start building new publics - new audiences that will entertain broader views, deeper reflection and more wholesome dialogue.

Next blog, we'll keep looking for therapists and thought leaders to guide us through the MetaDiscussion.

MetaDiscussion: How We Deny Our Collective Mental Illness

If a person is sick, they will seek medical help.  A sore elbow, leg, or headache will prompt them to seek the appropriate specialist to make things feel better.  Mental and emotional problems, though, are a different sort of problem and not just because these ailments are so stigmatized.

There's something in us that trusts our brains and our perspective over all else - even reality.  It just doesn't occur to a paranoiac that their reality is skewed.  We innately bind ourselves to these cerebral control systems we have, so that we discount and dismiss emotional problems and mental problems even when it's obvious that there is something wrong.  And this is also how we behave as a society.

Our social central nervous system is the set of systems of governance, discussion and feedback we use to discuss things.  Government, the press, public debate - that is our collective mind: our way of perceiving issues thinking about them, and acting.  It moves us forward towards solving problems, and hopefully past them to paths of material and physical growth.  

I would say that such systems are in such disarray today that we can't trust our group psyche.  There is no unity, there is only indecision.   We're mentally ill, and in denial of it.  We may even have aboulomania:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboulomania

"Aboulomania (from Greek a–, meaning "without", and boulē, meaning "will") is a mental disorder in which the patient weakened willpower or pathological indecisiveness. It is typically associated with anxiety, stress, depression, and mental anguish, and can severely affect one’s ability to function socially."

Our problems appear to be everywhere: environmental, economic and even social. But we can't seem to agree on a  way forward.   We can't even agree on what is a fact anymore.  Far from not trusting politicians to lead the discussions, we no longer even trust media, scientists or academics.  

This is why MetaDiscussion is needed today. That is, we need to talk about the discussion itself. Our group brain, our way of making decisions, our public forums are broken. They're based on decaying old manifestations of the 'press' (itself an archaic term) that are dying and not coming back.
 
We need to find a way align our new digital publics to our social institutions as our old ways of discussion (newspapers and television) crumble and wither.  We need to digitize our dissent, so that our leaders can cut a way through the darkness, to negotiate, take risks, make decisions and lead us as past leaders had to do.

Otherwise, we will continue in our unhealthy psychosis and its attendant self-denial and inner conflict.  In my next blog, I will recommend some group therapists.

MetaDiscussion: Grantland's Sports Guy Talks about Talking About It

Link to Grantland article 

Bill Simmons talks about the differences in public and private discussions on performance enhancing drugs.  This is a great example of MetaDiscussion even if he doesn't quite try to realign the 'old' distinctions between public and private dialogue with digital media:

If you're a public figure who says something offensive, we're going to rake you over the coals until you apologize … but if you make that same offensive comment under the protection of anonymity, whether it's on YouTube's comment section, Reddit, a message board or whatever, that's totally acceptable. What are we? Where are we?  ... Anyone with a public forum should feel a certain responsibility to the greater good, whether you have a blog, a column, a podcast, a radio show or a steady TV gig. 

People will naturally be more responsible for opinions given under their name but 'anonymous graffiti' posting has its place too.  Some common morality will coagulate in a society, through the high pronouncements of authorities as well as through back-door finger wagging gossip and sniping.

Chaning modes of communication such as those we are living through today will tend to shake up social foundations and 'loosen' morality in some cases.  McLuhan has anecdotes about these things, such as when radio was introduced to Bedouin tribes and nobody seemed to mind that the broadcasters told stories that would be inappropriate in mixed company.

Ultimately, though, a common morality serves a purpose so it will be there again in the digital age.  If we start talking about the discussion itself, as Grantland has done, then that's a first step to understanding what is happening to us IMO.