media

The Emergence of a Post-Fact World

Curated on January 13, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Francis Fukuyama in Project Syndicate: “One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a “post-fact” world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance.

The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s was greeted as a moment of liberation and a boon for democracy worldwide. Information constitutes a form of power, and to the extent that information was becoming cheaper and more accessible, democratic publics would be able to participate in domains from which they had been hitherto excluded.

The development of social media in the early 2000s appeared to accelerate this trend, permitting the mass mobilization that fueled various democratic “color revolutions” around the world, from Ukraine to Burma (Myanmar) to Egypt. In a world of peer-to-peer communication, the old gatekeepers of information, largely seen to be oppressive authoritarian states, could now be bypassed.

While there was some truth to this positive narrative, another, darker one was also taking shape. Those old authoritarian forces were responding in dialectical fashion, learning to control the Internet, as in China, with its tens of thousands of censors, or, as in Russia, by recruiting legions of trolls and unleashing bots to flood social media with bad information. These trends all came together in a hugely visible way during 2016, in ways that bridged foreign and domestic politics….

The traditional remedy for bad information, according to freedom-of-information advocates, is simply to put out good information, which in a marketplace of ideas will rise to the top. This solution, unfortunately, works much less well in a social-media world of trolls and bots. There are estimates that as many as a third to a quarter of Twitter users fall into this category. The Internet was supposed to liberate us from gatekeepers; and, indeed, information now comes at us from all possible sources, all with equal credibility. There is no reason to think that good information will win out over bad information….

The inability to agree on the most basic facts is the direct product of an across-the-board assault on democratic institutions – in the US, in Britain, and around the world. And this is where the democracies are headed for trouble. In the US, there has in fact been real institutional decay, whereby powerful interest groups have been able to protect themselves through a system of unlimited campaign finance. The primary locus of this decay is Congress, and the bad behavior is for the most part as legal as it is widespread. So ordinary people are right to be upset.

And yet, the US election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that everything has been rigged or politicized, and that outright bribery is rampant. If the election authorities certify that your favored candidate is not the victor, or if the other candidate seemed to perform better in a debate, it must be the result of an elaborate conspiracy by the other side to corrupt the outcome. The belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust. American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life….(More)”

Rule by the lowest common denominator? It’s baked into democracy’s design

Curated on January 10, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Firmin DeBrabander in The Conversation: “The Trump victory, and the general disaster for Democrats this year, was the victory of ignorance, critics moan.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Georgetown’s Jason Brennan called it “the dance of the dunces” and wrote that “Trump owes his victory to the uninformed.”…

For liberals, Trump’s victory was the triumph of prejudice, bigotry and forces allied against truth and expertise in politics, science and culture at large. Trump brandishes unconcern for traditional political wisdom and protocol – much less facts – like a badge of honor, and his admirers roar with glee. His now famous rallies, the chastened media report, are often scary, sometimes giving way to violence, sometimes threatening to spark broader recriminations and social mayhem. This is a glimpse of how tyrants rise to power, some political minds worry; this is how tyrants enlist the support of rabid masses, and get them to do their bidding.

For the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière, however, the Trump victory provides a useful reminder of the essential nature of democracy – a reminder of what precisely makes it vibrant. And liable to lapse into tyranny at once….

Democracy is rule by the rabble, in Plato’s view. It is the rule by the lowest common denominator. In a democracy, passions are inflamed and proliferate. Certain individuals may take advantage of and channel the storm of ignorance, Plato feared, and consolidate power out of a desire to serve their own interests.

As Rancière explains, there is a “scandal of democracy” for Plato: The best and the high born “must bow before the law of chance” and submit to the rule of the inexpert, the commoner, who knows little about politics or much else.

Merit ought to decide who rules, in Plato’s account. But democracy consigns such logic to the dustbin. The rabble may decide they want to be ruled by one of their own – and electoral conditions may favor them. Democracy makes it possible that someone who has no business ruling lands at the top. His rule may prove treacherous, and risk dooming the state. But, Rancière argues, this is a risk democracies must take. Without it, they lack legitimacy….

Rancière maintains people more happily suffer authority ascribed by chance than authority consigned by birth, merit or expertise. Liberals may be surprised about this last point. According to Rancière, expertise is no reliable, lasting or secure basis for authority. In fact, expertise soon loses authority, and with it, the legitimacy of the state. Why?…(More)”

Could Technology Remove the Politicians From Politics?

Curated on January 3, 2017August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sue Brideshead at Motherboard: “The tech industry has talked long and hard about democratizing industries. Democratizing content, democratizing taxi-cabs, and democratizing bed and breakfasts. But what about democratizing democracy?

Disruption is the word of the moment in Washington, thanks to an incoming president who counts his inexperience in government as an asset. It remains to be seen what kind of disruption Trump will bestow upon the White House, but efforts at disruption from the technology world have refined and chipped at only the topmost layer of inefficiencies. Mark Zuckerberg has poured cash into a broken school district; programmers have toyed with ways to secure digital ballots; and analysts have sought (and failed) to hone the political poll. The team of engineers Barack Obama lured to Washington has been tasked with fixing podunk websites and backend systems. But what they have failed to identify as a problem is the very system that elected their boss. Because beyond the topmost layer of government gunk lies a broad and broken structure: the idea of representation itself. In the era of the internet, the very premise of sending a man to Washington or a woman to city council is badly in need of an upgrade.

The idea of a political representative evolved out of necessity. Townspeople couldn’t afford to take a day off and ride a horse to the capital. They needed to agree upon one guy who would more or less say what they were thinking, and they voted to pick the right guy for the job.

Horses became model T’s became jets flying politicians from their constituencies to the District of Columbia, ostensibly to have an ear to the ground in their home state and a hand to the buzzers on the Senate floor. But travel—and voter awareness—requires cash that drives up the price of running for office.

The Republican President-elect scored votes by calling Washington “corrupt” and “criminal,” “rigged” and “stagnant,” but “quaint” is the first adjective I think of. In the era of the iPhone, sending a man or woman to Washington to “represent” a district back home can feel about as forward-thinking as sending an intern to Amazon headquarters to pick up the new DeLillo. Why do congressional offices read bills in hard-copy, in private, while their constituents draft their work in Google Docs? Why does a senator have to stand on the Senate floor to hear arguments or to vote, when her constituents watch proceedings on C-Span and vote for which Game of Thrones heroine her hair most resembles on BuzzFeed?..

….The price of running for office is now astronomical, literally; a New Hampshire senate race tops the cost of sending your satellite to low earth orbit with SpaceX’s rocket…But the most disturbing fact of our Republic is an upsurge of anti-intellectual rhetoric. An ongoing protest of California’s default direct democracy—its barrage of referendums—is fueled by the disturbing fact that voters are likely to base their decision on a television advertisement. Referendum protesters rightly note that a system reliant on advertising hardly cuts money out of politics or ensures an informed electorate. But the premise of this protest rests on the assumption that a Representative is more informed than a television advertisement; that a Representative makes decisions by speaking with experts, using paid time and expertise…

…Fixing an existing problem with new technology often fuels new and terrifying questions. Displacing power simply raises the same questions of control and ownership in new places. For example, even without the risk of politicians becoming susceptible to lobbyists, voters could still be influenced by special interest groups that can afford to bombard voters with their message. But by distributing the power for change among the electorate, a direct democracy model would effectively make lobbying efforts much more expensive and inefficient….

…What I do know: our system is broken. Voters crave transparency, an end to political photo-ops, an end to the influence of television, of Facebook, a way to flush the lobbyists out of Washington and drag the cash out of politicians’ pockets. As a citizenry, we hold relatively little power to destroy lobbying; to reform pay-to-play; to transform the media industries; re-engineer Facebook, or temper the bad behavior of the wealthy and powerful. But our new technologies also mean that there’s one central component we might have the power to remove from government completely: the politicians. (More)”

Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability

Curated on December 18, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford in New Media and Society: “Models for understanding and holding systems accountable have long rested upon ideals and logics of transparency. Being able to see a system is sometimes equated with being able to know how it works and govern it—a pattern that recurs in recent work about transparency and computational systems. But can “black boxes’ ever be opened, and if so, would that ever be sufficient? In this article, we critically interrogate the ideal of transparency, trace some of its roots in scientific and sociotechnical epistemological cultures, and present 10 limitations to its application. We specifically focus on the inadequacy of transparency for understanding and governing algorithmic systems and sketch an alternative typology of algorithmic accountability grounded in constructive engagements with the limitations of transparency ideals….(More)”

Can you crowdsource water quality data?

Curated on December 16, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Pratibha Mistry at The Water Blog (Worldbank): “The recently released Contextual Framework for Crowdsourcing Water Quality Data lays out a strategy for citizen engagement in decentralized water quality monitoring, enabled by the “mobile revolution.”

According to the WHO, 1.8 billion people lack access to safe drinking water worldwide. Poor source water quality, non-existent or insufficient treatment, and defects in water distribution systems and storage mean these consumers use water that often doesn’t meet the WHO’s Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality.

The crowdsourcing framework develops a strategy to engage citizens in measuring and learning about the quality of their own drinking water. Through their participation, citizens provide utilities and water supply agencies with cost-effective water quality data in near-real time. Following a typical crowdsourcing model: consumers use their mobile phones to report water quality information to a central service. That service receives the information, then repackages and shares it via mobile phone messages, websites, dashboards, and social media. Individual citizens can thus be educated about their water quality, and water management agencies and other stakeholders can use the data to improve water management; it’s a win-win.

*A well-implemented crowdsourcing project both depends on and benefits end users.*Source: Figure modified from Hutchings, M., Dev, A., Palaniappan, M., Srinivasan, V., Ramanathan, N., Taylor, J. 2012. “mWASH: Mobile Phone Applications for the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Sector.” Pacific Institute, Oakland, California. 114 p. (*Link to full text*)

Several groups, from the private sector to academia to non-profits, have taken a recent interest in developing a variety of so-called mWASH apps (mobile phone applications for the water, sanitation, and hygiene WASH sector). A recent academic study analyzed how mobile phones might facilitate the flow of water quality data between water suppliers and public health agencies in Africa. USAID has invested in piloting a mobile application in Tanzania to help consumers test their water for E. coli….(More)”