media

The Discourse of Public Participation Media

Curated on December 11, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Joanna Thornborrow: “The Discourse of Public Participation Media takes a fresh look at what ‘ordinary’ people are doing on air – what they say, and how and where they get to say it.

Using techniques of discourse analysis to explore the construction of participant identities in a range of different public participation genres, Joanna Thornborrow argues that the role of the ‘ordinary’ person in these media environments is frequently anything but.

Tracing the development of discourses of public participation media, the book focusses particularly on the 1990s onwards when broadcasting was expanding rapidly: the rise of the TV talk show, increasing formats for public participation in broadcast debate and discussion, and the explosion of reality TV in the first decade of the 21^st century. During this period, traditional broadcasting has also had to move with the times and incorporate mobile and web-based communication technologies as new platforms for public access and participation – text and email as well as the telephone – and an audience that moves out of the studio and into the online spaces of chat rooms, comment forums and the ‘twitterverse’.

This original study examines the shifting discourses of public engagement and participation resulting from these new forms of communication, making it an ideal companion for students of communication, media and cultural studies, media discourse, broadcast talk and social interaction….(More)”

The Internet’s Loop of Action and Reaction Is Worsening

Curated on December 10, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times: “Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton said this week that we should think about shutting down parts of the Internet to stop terrorist groups from inspiring and recruiting followers in distant lands. Mr. Trump even suggested an expert who’d be perfect for the job: “We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening, and we have to talk to them — maybe, in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way,” he said on Monday in South Carolina.

Many online responded to Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton with jeers, pointing out both constitutional and technical limits to their plans. Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who now spends much of his time on philanthropy, has as much power to close down the Internet as he does to fix Mr. Trump’s hair.

Yet I had a different reaction to Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton’s fantasy of a world in which you could just shut down parts of the Internet that you didn’t like: Sure, it’s impossible, but just imagine if we could do it, just for a bit. Wouldn’t it have been kind of a pleasant dream world, in these overheated last few weeks, to have lived free of social media?

Hear me out. If you’ve logged on to Twitter and Facebook in the waning weeks of 2015, you’ve surely noticed that the Internet now seems to be on constant boil. Your social feed has always been loud, shrill, reflexive and ugly, but this year everything has been turned up to 11. The Islamic State’s use of the Internet is perhaps only the most dangerous manifestation of what, this year, became an inescapable fact of online life: The extremists of all stripes are ascendant, and just about everywhere you look, much of the Internet is terrible.“The academic in me says that discourse norms have shifted,” said Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the director of the Dangerous Speech Project, an effort to study speech that leads to violence. “It’s become so common to figuratively walk through garbage and violent imagery online that people have accepted it in a way. And it’s become so noisy that you have to shout more loudly, and more shockingly, to be heard.”

You might argue that the angst online is merely a reflection of the news. Terrorism, intractable warfare, mass shootings, a hyperpartisan presidential race, police brutality, institutional racism and the protests over it have dominated the headlines. It’s only natural that the Internet would get a little out of control over that barrage.

But there’s also a way in which social networks seem to be feeding a cycle of action and reaction. In just about every news event, the Internet’s reaction to the situation becomes a follow-on part of the story, so that much of the media establishment becomes trapped in escalating, infinite loops of 140-character, knee-jerk insta-reaction.

“Presidential elections have always been pretty nasty, but these days the mudslinging is omnipresent in a way that’s never been the case before,” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of literary studies and writing at Mercer University, who is the author of “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” a study of online “trolling.” “When Donald Trump says something that I would consider insane, it’s not just that it gets reported on by one or two or three outlets, but it becomes this wave of iterative content on top of content on top of content in your feed, taking over everything you see.”

The spiraling feedback loop is exhausting and rarely illuminating. The news brims with instantly produced “hot takes” and a raft of fact-free assertions. Everyone — yours truly included — is always on guard for the next opportunity to meme-ify outrage: What crazy thing did Trump/Obama/The New York Times/The New York Post/Rush Limbaugh/etc. say now, and what clever quip can you fit into a tweet to quickly begin collecting likes?

There is little room for indulging nuance, complexity, or flirting with the middle ground. In every issue, you are either with one aggrieved group or the other, and the more stridently you can express your disdain — short ofhurling profanities at the president on TV, which will earn you a brief suspension — the better reaction you’ll get….(More)”

Crowdvoice: tracking voices of protest

Curated on December 9, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“CrowdVoice.org is an open source service that tracks voices of protest by curating and contextualizing valuable data, such as eyewitness videos, photos, and reports as a means to facilitate awareness regarding current social justice movements worldwide.

Despite what is happening today around the world, little hard-research exists for journalists and academics in terms of archives of diverse media reports. CrowdVoice addresses this by curating a wide range of content pulled from across the web on a dedicated page. Content is initially housed in a moderation queue, where it awaits crowdsourced verification.

As a second step, the platform visually communicates social and political issues through hard facts, statistics, interactive infographics, and timelines, which are organized by tags, specific topics, and relevant citations. These engaging educational resources direct users to an archive of relevant footage and reports. Infographics and interactive timelines are an imperative step in providing a frame of reference to the hundreds of under-reported stories pouring in from across the world, and are crucial to putting together nuanced, comprehensive reports reflecting both hard facts and the human face of the issues.”

Forging Trust Communities: How Technology Changes Politics

Curated on December 4, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Irene S. Wu: “Bloggers in India used social media and wikis to broadcast news and bring humanitarian aid to tsunami victims in South Asia. Terrorist groups like ISIS pour out messages and recruit new members on websites. The Internet is the new public square, bringing to politics a platform on which to create community at both the grassroots and bureaucratic level. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies from more than ten countries, Irene S. Wu’s Forging Trust Communities argues that the Internet, and the technologies that predate it, catalyze political change by creating new opportunities for cooperation. The Internet does not simply enable faster and easier communication, but makes it possible for people around the world to interact closely, reciprocate favors, and build trust. The information and ideas exchanged by members of these cooperative communities become key sources of political power akin to military might and economic strength.

Wu illustrates the rich world history of citizens and leaders exercising political power through communications technology. People in nineteenth-century China, for example, used the telegraph and newspapers to mobilize against the emperor. In 1970, Taiwanese cable television gave voice to a political opposition demanding democracy. Both Qatar (in the 1990s) and Great Britain (in the 1930s) relied on public broadcasters to enhance their influence abroad. Additional case studies from Brazil, Egypt, the United States, Russia, India, the Philippines, and Tunisia reveal how various technologies function to create new political energy, enabling activists to challenge institutions while allowing governments to increase their power at home and abroad.

Forging Trust Communities demonstrates that the way people receive and share information through network communities reveals as much about their political identity as their socioeconomic class, ethnicity, or religion. Scholars and students in political science, public administration, international studies, sociology, and the history of science and technology will find this to be an insightful and indispensable work….(More)”

New frontiers in social innovation research

Curated on December 3, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Geoff Mulgan: “Nesta has published a new book with Palgrave which contains an introduction by me and many important chapters from leading academics around the world. I hope that many people will read it, and think about it, because it challenges, in a highly constructive way, many of the rather tired assumptions of the London media/political elite of both left and right.

The essay is by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, perhaps the world’s most creative and important contemporary intellectual. He is Professor of Law at Harvard (where he taught Obama); a philosopher and political theorist; author of one of the most interesting recent books on religion; co-author of an equally ground-breaking recent book on theoretical physics; and serves as strategy minister in the Brazilian government.

His argument is that a radically different way of thinking about politics, government and social change is emerging, which has either not been noticed by many political leaders, or misinterpreted. The essence of the argument is that practice is moving faster than theory; that systematic experimentation is a faster way to solve problems than clever authorship of pamphlets, white papers and plans; and that societies have the potential to be far more active agents of their own future than we assume.

The argument has implications for many fields. One is think-tanks. Twenty years ago I set up a think-tank, Demos. At that time the dominant model for policy making was to bring together some clever people in a capital city to write pamphlets, white papers and then laws. In the 1950s to 1970s a primary role was played by professors in universities, or royal commissions. Then it shifted to think-tanks. Sometimes teams within governments played a similar role – and I oversaw several of these, including the Strategy Unit in government. All saw policy as an essentially paper-based process, involving a linear transmission from abstract theories and analyses to practical implementation.

There’s still an important role to be played by think-tanks. But an opposite approach has now become common, and is promoted by Unger. In this approach, practice precedes theory. Experiment in the real world drives the development of new ideas – in business, civil society, and on the edges of the public sector. Learning by doing complements, and often leads analysis. The role of the academics and think-tanks shifts from inventing ideas to making sense of what’s emerging, and generalising it. Policies don’t try to specify every detail but rather set out broad directions and then enable a process of experiment and discovery.

As Unger shows, this approach has profound philosophical roots (reaching back to the 19th century pragmatists and beyond), and profound political implications (it’s almost opposite to the classic Marxist view, later adopted by the neoliberal right, in which intellectuals define solutions in theory which are then translated into practice). It also has profound implications for civil society – which he argues should adopt a maximalist rather than a minimalist view of social innovation.

The Unger approach doesn’t work for everything – for example, constitutional reform. But it is a superior method for improving most of the fields where governments have power – from welfare and health, to education and economic policy, and it has worked well for Nesta – evolving new models of healthcare, working with dozens of governments to redesign business policy, testing out new approaches to education.

The several hundred public sector labs and innovation teams around the world – from Chile to China, south Africa to Denmark – share this ethos too, as do many political leaders. Michael Bloomberg has been an exemplar, confident enough to innovate and experiment constantly in his time as New York Mayor. Won Soon Park in Korea is another…..

Unger’s chapter should be required reading for anyone aspiring to play a role in 21st century politics. You don’t have to agree with what he says. But you do need to work out where you disagree and why….(New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research)

For people, by people

Curated on December 3, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Geeta Padmanabhan at the Hindu: “Ippodhu, a mobile app, is all about crowd-sourced civic participation for good governance…Last week, a passer-by noticed how the large hoardings outside Vivekanandar Illam, facing Marina Beach, blocked the view of the iconic building. Enraged, he whipped out his smartphone, logged on to Ippodhu and wrote: “How is this allowed? The banners are in the walking space and we can’t see the historic building!” Ippodhu.com carried the story with pictures.

“On Ippodhu, a community information mobile application, the person complaining has the option to do more,” says Peer Mohamed, the team leader of the app/website. “He could have registered a complaint with the police, the Corporation or a relevant NGO, using the ‘Act’ option. This facility makes Ippodhu a valuable tool for beleaguered citizens to complain and puts it above other social media avenues.”

Users can choose between Tamil and English, and read the latest posts just as they would in a Twitter feed. While posting, your location is geo-tagged automatically; if you find that intrusive, you can post anonymously. There is no word limit and one can enlarge the font, write an essay, a note or a rant and post it under one of 15 categories. I decided to check out the app and created an account. My post went live in less than a minute. Then I moved to Ippodhu’s USP. I clicked‘Act’, chose ‘civic issue’ as the category, and posted a note about flooding in my locality. “It’s on Apple and Android as just text now, but expect picture and video features soon when the circulation hits the target,” says Peer. “My team of 12 journalists curates the feeds 24/7, allowing no commercials, ads or abusive language. We want to keep it non-controversial and people-friendly.” It’s crowd-sourced citizen journalism and civic participation for good governance….(More)”

Decoding the Future for National Security

Curated on December 2, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

George I. Seffers at Signal: “U.S. intelligence agencies are in the business of predicting the future, but no one has systematically evaluated the accuracy of those predictions—until now. The intelligence community’s cutting-edge research and development agency uses a handful of predictive analytics programs to measure and improve the ability to forecast major events, including political upheavals, disease outbreaks, insider threats and cyber attacks.

The Office for Anticipating Surprise at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is a place where crystal balls come in the form of software, tournaments and throngs of people. The office sponsors eight programs designed to improve predictive analytics, which uses a variety of data to forecast events. The programs all focus on incidents outside of the United States, and the information is anonymized to protect privacy. The programs are in different stages, some having recently ended as others are preparing to award contracts.

But they all have one more thing in common: They use tournaments to advance the state of the predictive analytic arts. “We decided to run a series of forecasting tournaments in which people from around the world generate forecasts about, now, thousands of real-world events,” says Jason Matheny, IARPA’s new director. “All of our programs on predictive analytics do use this tournament style of funding and evaluating research.” The Open Source Indicators program used a crowdsourcing technique in which people across the globe offered their predictions on such events as political uprisings, disease outbreaks and elections.

The data analyzed included social media trends, Web search queries and even cancelled dinner reservations—an indication that people are sick. “The methods applied to this were all automated. They used machine learning to comb through billions of pieces of data to look for that signal, that leading indicator, that an event was about to happen,” Matheny explains. “And they made amazing progress. They were able to predict disease outbreaks weeks earlier than traditional reporting.” The recently completed Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) program also used a crowdsourcing competition in which people predicted events, including whether weapons would be tested, treaties would be signed or armed conflict would break out along certain borders. Volunteers were asked to provide information about their own background and what sources they used. IARPA also tested participants’ cognitive reasoning abilities. Volunteers provided their forecasts every day, and IARPA personnel kept score. Interestingly, they discovered the “deep domain” experts were not the best at predicting events. Instead, people with a certain style of thinking came out the winners. “They read a lot, not just from one source, but from multiple sources that come from different viewpoints. They have different sources of data, and they revise their judgments when presented with new information. They don’t stick to their guns,” Matheny reveals. …

The ACE research also contributed to a recently released book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, according to the IARPA director. The book was co-authored, along with Dan Gardner, by Philip Tetlock, the Annenberg University professor of psychology and management at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a principal investigator for the ACE program. Like ACE, the Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation program uses the forecasting tournament format, but it also requires participants to explain and defend their reasoning. The initiative aims to improve analytic thinking by combining structured reasoning techniques with crowdsourcing.

Meanwhile, the Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) program forecasts science and technology breakthroughs….(More)”

Government’s innovative approach to skills sharing

Curated on November 30, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicole Blake Johnson at GovLoop: “For both managers and employees, it often seems there aren’t enough hours in the day to tackle every priority project.

But what if there was another option — a way for federal managers to get the skills they need internally and for employees to work on projects they’re interested in but unaware of?

Maybe you’re the employee who is really into data analytics or social media, but that’s not a part of your regular job duties. What if you had the support of your supervisor to help out on an analytics project down the hall or in a field office across the country?

I’m not making up hypothetical scenarios. These types of initiatives are actually taking shape at federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services and Commerce departments.

Many agencies are in the pilot phase of rolling out their programs, which are versions of a governmentwide initiative called GovConnect. The initiative was inspired by an EPA program called Skills Marketplace that dates back to 2011.(Read more about GovConnect here.)

“We felt like we had something really promising at EPA, and we wanted to share it with other government agencies,” said Noha Gaber, EPA’s Director of Internal Communications. “So we actually pitched it to OPM and several other agencies, and that ended up becoming GovConnect.”

“The goal of GovConnect is to develop federal workforce skills through cross-agency collaboration and teamwork, to enable more agile response to mission demands without being unnecessarily limited by organizational silos,” said Melissa Kline Lee, who serves as Program Manager of GovConnect at the Office of Personnel Management. “As part of the President’s Management Agenda, the Office of Personnel Management and Environmental Protection Agency are using the GovConnect pilot to help agencies test and scale new approaches to workforce development.”…

Managers post projects or tasks in the online marketplace, which was developed using the agency’s existing SharePoint environment. Projects include clear tasks that employees can accomplish using up to 20 percent of their workweek or less. Projects cannot be open-ended and should not exceed one year.

From there, any employee can view the projects, evaluate what skills or competencies are needed and apply for the position. Managers review the applications and conduct interviews before selecting a candidate. Here are the latest stats for Skills Marketplace as of November 2015:

Managers posted 358 projects in the marketplace
Employees submitted 577 applications
More than 750 people have created profiles for the marketplace

Gaber shared one example involving an employee from the Office of Pesticide Programs and staff from the Office of Environmental Information (OEI), which is the main IT office at EPA. The employee brought to the team technical expertise and skills in geographic information systems to support OEI’s Toxic Release Inventory Program, which tracks data on toxic chemicals being produced by different facilities.

The benefits were twofold: The employee established new connections in a different part of the agency, and his home office benefited from the experiences and knowledge he gleaned while working on the project….(More)