The Collective Creation of Participatory Democracy
Grassroots Movement Building with Collaborative Publishing and Social Media Tactics
Aaron Friedman
The Collective Creation of Participatory Democracy
Grassroots Movement Building with Collaborative Publishing and Social Media Tactics
There is a massive change occurring in the way that humanity is communicating and exchanging information. Two patterns are emerging, with momentum in opposite directions, and the nature of the educational process is very different in these media systems. One approach to media and communication is hierarchal, and dictates messages across large platforms and audiences, with little encouragement of participation. This system is narrated by a top down editorial system that crafts and delivers messages without the input of the audience. The next evolution is web based, decentralized and participatory. The social media of the internet represents an evolution in the approach to education, civic engagement, and encourages participatory events and campaigns that encourage a diversity of voices and viewpoints. This new media, based on Web 2.0 framework, is collaborative and trending topics and themes spread rapidly on the wave of popularity collectively created by the buzz of the people. A new system of democracy is being born before our eyes and it is extremely powerful. The new popular media system effectively represents a shift from a centralized and controlled hierarchical system to a more participatory framework of inclusivity and co-creation. The new media systems represent the organizational frameworks of participatory democracy that create action and work while utilizing collaborative publishing networks, social media integration, and broadcasting tools to catalyze inclusive and focused campaigns and events to mobilize popular buzz and stories.
Participatory Grassroots Bioregional Democracy Organization and Mobilization
In order to shift away from a top down and hierarchical system towards a more inclusive and participatory framework, we need to alter our relationship to power. There is a fundamental choice whether to control and compete or to share and collaborate. To put is simply, the core difference is in whether a person or organization is willing to listen or not. When there is receptivity and openness to the viewpoints of others, and the communication style is welcoming and flexible, the narrative is a dialogue. When the tone is hierarchical, fascist, or dominating the voice reflects a callousness and control that insists on being right and does not accommodate the viewpoints of others. This narrative is less of a conversation and dialogue and more of a diatribe and lecture or order from the controller.
Participatory democracy can be modeled in the spokes council and affinity group framework. The system of direct democracy encourages collaborative education pedagogy, an Each 1 Teach 1 ethic, and one person one vote process of transparent inclusivity. Furthermore, the goal of such process is to empower its participants in a community discourse that encourages people to take responsibility, personally relating and offering their gifts to the whole. When the invitation is available for individuals to give input and gifts to the collective, the social capital is grown as if everyone was bringing berries to a pie. The pie gets bigger with the more people blessing its making with bounty.
This method is best described by the new organizational framework of Holacracy. Each spoke of the wheel is a working group, task force, or committee charged with a set of responsibilities. According to the Holacracy website, “Holacracy is a comprehensive practice for structuring, governing, and running an organization. It replaces today’s top-down predict-and-control paradigm with a new way of distributing power and achieving control. It is a new “operating system” which instills rapid evolution in the core processes of an organization.”
The team circles or working groups are semi-autonomous to direct the decisions of the work that they are focused on and have taken responsibility for. They report back to the collective on their progress and future decisions, but their direction and action are implemented by the small team.
Ultimately, the way that people organize and make decisions in groups will be reflected in the media campaigns and publicity that they generate. If the responsibility and power is distributed within the organization, there will be more voices and viewpoints welcomed into the operations and directions of the group. This collaborative and inclusive approach is an ethical decision to organize that way, and reflects a reciprocity and receptivity to a multitude of ideas and influence. Like the internet, it is participatory and cooperative. The Tribal Convergence Network has a great organizational model that illustrates this type of council system.
Grassroots Publishing Tactics And Framework
Creative Commons and Open Source Framework
The new participatory democracy is best exemplified by the web 2.0 frameworks of the creative commons and open source platforms. According to the Creative Commons website,
“Our vision is nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.
The idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems don’t always allow that idea to be realized. Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That someone is Creative Commons.”
Stephen Voyce (2011) writes about open source code, “Software programmers first introduced the term open source to describe a model of peer production in which users are free to access, modify, and collaborate on software code.” This open source framework allows for collaboration, and distributive sharing of content and ideas.
Voyce continues, “it is no coincidence that the approximate beginning of artistic modernism is roughly commensurate with a gradual, yet unprecedented, expansion of copyright reform in the United States and abroad.” (408)
The sharing and co-creative process that has followed the form of the internet brings up the issue of intellectual property, and the questions if ideas or concepts can ever truly be owned by individuals. Voyce notes, “Advocates of the free software and open source movements have proposed creative alternatives to the proprietary models controlling their industry. […] Over the past several years, experimental writers have formed comparable organizations, applying open source principles to anthological, distributive, and compositional practices.” (418)
The Blogosphere
These frameworks and models further represent a shift towards participatory democracy and inclusive citizen storytelling. In the last fifteen years creativity and sharing has exploded dramatically with the advent of websites and blogs. Over the past decade the blogosphere has grown from seven thousand blogs in the early 1990’s to more than seventy million blogs in 2012. Platforms and networks like blogger, wordpress, and tumblr each have millions of participants all creating online communities around the content that they share. The authors create resonance with their audiences, and as a result, get syndicated to their reader’s networks when they share it with their friends. In the blogosphere there are rules and codes of conduct. One of the most basic is that common practice allows the rehosting of original content provided it is published in its entirety and includes the biography box at the end that includes a link back to the original author’s blog. This simple rule allows people to set thousands of “backlinks” because when they get syndicated to other people’s blogs, every time they are shared, a backlink is created that has the potential to bring more readers back to their site. Voyce describes this process as “appropriative writing” and states, “The Internet—unsurprisingly—has had much to do with the prevalence of appropriative writing over the past decade. The ease with which network technologies can be used to circulate information via file sharing has expanded the possibilities of an open source aesthetics.” (420)
Viral Tactics and Social Reach
Popularity and trends are set by the networks that create the buzz. This distributive method of storytelling relies on the personal networks of the authors to share an idea. Therefore, the most viral media becomes popular because it resonates with its audience. Comedy, causes, positive and inclusive invitations to participate, and coordinated events in multiple places are often the most shared stories in the web.
Public media is a new type of media that is participatory and crowd sourced. It is described by Zach Vanderveen (2010), “Similarly, new media enthusiasts do not deny that Web 2.0 could have a pivotal role in a more democratic future; universal access to publication, they argue, is exactly what makes new media technologies public. Proponents of traditional, public, and new media define the ends that “public media” should satisfy in drastically different ways: informing the public, convening the public, or providing the public with access to the means of content creation.” (172)
The effect of 100 people telling a story to their networks of 1000 is larger and more effective than one writer at a dominant newspaper or magazine writing to a readership of 100,000. The result of a public media system is that ideas and stories will continued to be shared long after they are written. People will add their comments and perspective to the story, thereby aggregating the context and narrative into something larger than an individual voice. This has the snowball effect, or 100th monkey effect, whereby it is possible to reach a threshold and go viral. Using tactics and established technique, if you can build a buzz to half a million viewers within two weeks, an idea can spread extremely rapidly ultimately reaching one in a hundred million, then one in ten million, and then one in a million.
The New Semantics
The blogosphere, internet, and social media have created a new type of semantics that further encourage participation and collaboration in specific niches and areas of focus. Keywords, the language you type into search engines, can be used to find and follow specific sources related to certain language. Using this tool, people can pinpoint their communities and the most popular and prolific contributors to the culture that they are interested in. You can accurately measure the popularity of search terms, using resources like the Google Keyword Tool. With the knowledge and ability to target certain words, writers can accurately reach their audience.
Search engine optimization strategy is then implemented on people’s blogs and websites that create tags that effectively label pages and posts with the keywords. This indexing of the public domain of information has resulted in niche communities who circulate around specific language. Bloggers can aggregate the information back to their main site to show the headlines of other writers in the network of that focus.
Publishing Systems Represent The Culture And Community
The cumulative effect of compiling multimedia into a website is that a freely accessible source of information and activity is made available to the public. When someone creates a website and then continuously writes new content in a blog, aggregates information from other sites, and curates resources related to a niche, they are creating an online publishing system. These publishers develop a reputation, voices, and audience related to the content they are creating. Then, by way of their articles, photos, videos, audio, and other creative content, they expand their networks when they link to other bloggers or get backlinks from other publishers. So, a network focused on a cause, trend, culture, event, or market can be effectively established by way of the resonance and effectiveness of the information being offered by the publisher. The blog and social media encourages participation and collaborative storytelling and will create vibrant decentralized communities of co creators. Radian 6, an agency that specializes in social media analytics writes about the difference between traditional media and social media, “Traditional media outlets, such as television, radio and print, are mostly one-way forms of communication. The advertiser shares the message and the audience receives the message. There’s no quick and easy way for the audience to respond to this medium. Social media has changed this. Campaigns are now a two-way street. If a business shares a message, the consumer can easily and instantly respond.” (4)
Linking The Blog To Social Media Networks
Web 2.0 Participatory Democracy
As communities are established around trends, movements, organizations, and content networks, more people participate in the conversation. Truth and messages are now offered and then discussed, making the media social. This is a watershed moment, whereby the evolution of human communication is enhanced by leaps and bound. Vanderveen (2010) writes, “There is a new kind of relationship between journalist and public that has often been filled by some kind of organized forum. The public here is understood as a community coming to judgment on matters of concern in which journalists can play a key part, and so this media ideal often relies, implicitly or explicitly, on a participatory model of democracy. (e.g., Barber 1984). (175)
The Community Roundtable, describes a process of community development from hierarchy towards distributed networks. They argue that as communities mature, responsibility and message are distributed to the members of the community, thereby moving from a restrictive culture to a more inclusive one. Their model is a concise and clear look at the difference between top down controlling hierarchies and networks that embody participatory democracy.
Broadcasting and Weaving Back Links
Once a media campaign is written and hosted on a publishing system it needs to be broadcasted towards the social media networks that abound on the internet. There are roughly four hundred existing networks and each has a large community of users and contributors on them. There are management tools like Sendible, Hootsuite, Social Oomph, Hub Spot, Crowd Factory, ping.fm, Friend Feed, and others that will automatically publish content from a central platform to a user’s profiles on many of those social networks. The effect can be rapid and amazing, as one article can be leveraged to set thousands of backlinks in a day. There are many ways to build backlinks and the website webconfs.com writes, “Among the acceptable ways of link building are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories.”
Social Bookmarking and Collaborative Research
One way that ideas are shared among small scale publishers and media users, is by social bookmarking. This is a collaborative process by which content is bookmarked and then shared to networks that are specifically aggregating information about a niche, keyword, community, or trend. One of the most popular social bookmarking sites Delicious describes its service, “Delicious is the place to collect and showcase your passions from across the web. Save what you like – videos, pictures, tweets, blog posts, or articles – on topics you enjoy and compile them into one themed stack for easy sharing.” Authors and media producers can now collectively aggregate and curate information related to their culture. This collaborative research process is powerful as several people can pull together a wider diversity of resources to highlight trends in their culture and movement.
Social Media
The new media is social; it is participatory and inclusive and encourages the viewpoints of many people. The old media is controlled, with messages crafted by powerful editors and owners, with no participatory process for the people experiencing the media. According to Richard Kielbowitz and Clifford Scherer, “Organizational models see the institutional logics guiding mass media operations as influential in the selection and portrayal of news. Also called the “gatekeeper” or “news making approach,” these models account for the ways media actors construct images and compile messages (qtd. in Smith et al.). (1402) This controlling structure exists because there are a handful of people crafting a message that millions will see. Inevitably, media bias will occur, and the effect is more dominant because only one voice was considered when a million people heard it. Smith et al. contributes, “Structural and ideological models of media reporting on social movement activity lead us to expect that most coverage of protest events would favor authorities’ “spin” on those events, and that editors and reporters would rely on sources outside the movements for information about the protest and/or the issues motivating it.” (1406)
By contrast, social media includes the voices across worldwide networks. From decentralized nodes of influence, these people contribute their content to an online community buzz, and the cumulative effect of their participation is trending popularity of collective efforts. Vanderveen writes: “The growth of new media technologies and new forms of citizen or grassroots journalism in the last decade promises a way of avoiding the disagreement between these two accounts of the role of professional journalists in a democracy—their professional norms, practices, or understanding of the public good—by cutting them out of the equation. If people are given the means to express their own experiences—that is, if the public is itself a media producer—only then can everyone be ensured a voice.” (175) Radian 6, an internet marketing company specializing in analytics and listening tools for social media, describe rules of social media etiquette, “Promote others more than you promote yourself. Listen carefully, respond quickly, and share helpful information. Thank everyone who shared your content. Be helpful to your community. Share your content and others’ content. Listen and interact with your community first before delving into industry discussions.” (p. 3) When blogging they recommend. “Read and comment on lots of blogs, both inside and outside of your interest area. Write to share something valuable with others in your community.” (p. 4)
The new media encourages listening, positive sharing and a complementary ethic for the creation of online community and personal voice. As a person, publisher, business, or group participates in the online discussion, they establish credibility and a following because they are representing and creating a culture that is popular and resonant with many people.
So What’s The Message? Synchronized, Decentralized, International
Events and Campaigns Create Movements!
The best media campaigns are open and focused. There is a specific theme and focus that people can relate with. An invitation to participate in a social conversation is inherent and access is freely accessible to all contributors. The conversation can happen across the social media networks in a myriad of forms with a variety of contributors. Usually there are a handful of influential media partners helping to aggregate and propagate the community’s content on a publishing system before resharing it to the social media.
The best buzz is collaboratively curated and based on the theory of social epidemic. Guillermo Armelini writes about the purist model of viral marketing:
“A purist model of viral marketing would assume that a social epidemic begins with a few individuals (seeds), who share a message with, are imitated by, or influence others through word of mouth. With this relatively small number of initiators, an epidemic takes off only if the initial seeds are able to influence a vastly higher number of other consumers and if this rate of influence remains constant or increases over time… A successful viral marketing strategy requires a reproduction rate greater than 1, such that the original seed influences a larger group, which in turn influences a still larger group, and so on. Suppose 1,000 individuals are seeds for a viral campaign, and they influence a new pool of 1,500 customers, who in turn affect 2,250 others. The reproduction rate in this case is 1.5, and the contagious process will continue to grow exponentially.
Best Practices, Most Viral Popular Campaigns And Events
Viral campaigns are very effective communication processes that engage and motivate people to actively participate in the media that they are experiencing. According to Armelini, there are six principles of viral campaigns.
Simple: Prioritize one core idea and exclude other diversions that might confuse the audience.
Unexpected: The best way to get people’s attention is to break a pattern. For ideas to endure, they should generate interest and curiosity by surprising the target audience. Tell or give them something they do not expect.
Concrete: Use analogies based on familiar human behavior and sensory information to connect the message to the target.
Credible: To build their confidence, enable people to test the ideas for themselves.
Emotional: Make people care. Feelings inspire people to act.
Stories: Telling a story helps the audience mentally rehearse their own real experiences, whether from the past or anticipated in the future.
350.org had a global synchronized event on 10/10/10 that was one of the largest and most coordinated events in human history. It was a global work party, and the call to action was to organize local events in relationship to climate change. There were more than 6000 events in 130+ countries on the same day. Millions of people participated and told the story together.
Movements like Transition Towns,
Slow Food, Occupy, The Arab Spring, and others all rely on the distributive and participatory media framework of web 2.0 to create the popular trends that are responsible for challenging centralized hierarchies. The media and participatory discussion embodied by these movements are rooted in a more receptive and open framework for discussion. Many voices are welcomed, and it is the collective will that expresses itself when media campaigns are crafted by a multitude of contributors.
What these movements hold in common is that their main websites are a fusion offering a template and platform for local grassroots organizing, as well as, access to a participatory publishing system in which people can contribute their content and perspective.
Calling All Collaborators
At this point, our best chance for transitioning away from a top down hierarchical system of control and domination exists in the form of the Web 2.0. We the people, networked and engaged in participatory networks of direct democracy have the power to shift and create a new narrative of sharing, peace, and inclusive collaboration. There is a fundamental difference between a pyramid and a web. Pyramids represent top down hierarchy, with the Axum or eye, representing an exclusive, centralized and controlling method of power and education.
Webs have nodal focal points that interrelate and connect with reciprocity and sharing. There is an interconnectivity that encourages a diffusion of responsibility and influence to more people. This participatory framework is absolutely more flexible to the desires and ideas of average people, and the resonance of an idea or theme can be reflected in the traffic of the publishers highlighting that content. The community benefits from the buzz that they create and can share that pool of traffic if they create content that speaks to people’s emotions and needs. The new media and organizational model of the spokescouncil and web 2.0 is exponentially more inclusive and engaging than any of the information and education systems preceding it. This is mostly because the engagement and creativity is sourced from a larger group of people than the traditional media systems of top down hierarchies.
How media is produced is the core distinction between traditional media and the new media. According to Tiziana Terranova in his article “Free Labor” (2000): “There is a continuity, and a break, between older media and new media in terms of their relationship to cultural and affective labor. The continuity seems to lie in their common reliance on their public/users as productive subjects. The difference lies both in the mode of production and in the ways in which power/ knowledge works in the two types. In spite of different national histories (some of which stress public service more than others), the television industry, for example, is relatively conservative: writers, producers, performers, managers, and technicians have definite roles within an industry still run by a few established players” (Terranova, 46) The new media is in the realm of the public and Jay Rosen (1992), one of the public media movement’s most vocal intellectual representative suggests that public journalists “are not merely chroniclers of the political scene, but players in the game who can (and should) try to shape the outcome” (as cited in Vanderveen, 2010, p. 171)
The Effect and Desired Outcome
To leverage the tool of the internet so that society can help engage in a more meaningful and varied discussion will be of paramount importance to the survival of humanity. Terranova (2000) wrote, “Any judgment on the political potential of the Internet, then, is tied not only to its much vaunted capacity to allow decentralized access to information but also to the question of who uses the Internet and how. If the decentralized structure of the Net is to count for anything at all, the argument goes, then we need to know about its constituent population.” (Terranova 40) The organizational process by which we relate in community to address our problems, needs, and goals is either collaborative or competitive. How we educate, tell the story, and create the informative narrative will be determined by how much responsibility we take for civic involvement.
The hope is that many people will embrace their creativity to demand a more participatory and inclusive democratic process. We either help each other by sharing and working together, listening and encourage everyone to find their power, or we end up in isolation and selfishness, alone and afraid. One path leads to democracy and collaborative media and community building. The other leads to debt slavery, institutional fascism, and a controlling society that is unsympathetic to the creative inclinations of its populace. Vanderveen (2010) writes “Similarly, new media enthusiasts do not deny that Web 2.0 could have a pivotal role in a more democratic future; universal access to publication, they argue, is exactly what makes new media technologies public… Certain media uses may be able to help form relationships of trust and information exchanges that provide opportunities for new forms of collective action (181)
The new media systems represent the organizational frameworks of participatory democracy that create action and work while utilizing collaborative publishing networks, social media integration, and broadcasting tools to catalyze inclusive and focused campaigns and events to mobilize popular buzz and stories. When we shift our relationship to power, and are able to embrace a collaborative framework, our organizations and the media they create are powerfully effective at creating buzz and popular discourse. Publishing systems and the way that we create our events and campaigns create the movements that empower change and transformation.
References
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