book – Page 94 – The Living Library

China is recruiting 20,000 people to write its own Wikipedia

Curated on May 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

David Gilbert at VICE News: “The Chinese government is recruiting 20,000 people to create an online encyclopedia that will be the country’s own, China-centric version of Wikipedia, or as one official put it, like “a Great Wall of culture.”

Known as the “Chinese Encyclopedia,” the country’s national encyclopedia will go online for the first time in 2018, and the government has employed tens of thousands of scholars from universities and research institutes who will contribute articles in more than 100 disciplines. The end result will be a knowledge base with more than 300,000 entries, each of which will be about 1,000 words long.

“The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture,” Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project and the chairman of the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, said. He added that China was under pressure from the international community to produce an encyclopedia that will “guide and lead the public and society.”

The need for an online reference encyclopedia is in part a result of the Chinese government blocking access to Wikipedia. Chinese internet companies like Baidu and Qihoo 360 operate their own online encyclopedias, but none are capable of matching Wikipedia in terms of scale and breadth of information.

The aim of the new version of the Chinese encyclopedia is to showcase China’s latest science and technology developments, promote historical heritage, increase cultural soft power, and strengthen the core values of socialism, according to Yang, who stressed that the goal isn’t to mimic Wikipedia: “We have the biggest, most high-quality author team in the world. Our goal is not to catch up, but overtake.”…(More)”

Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America

Curated on May 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Sonia E. Alvarez, Jeffrey W. Rubin, Millie Thayer, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, and Agustín Laó-Montes: “The contributors to Beyond Civil Society argue that the conventional distinction between civic and uncivic protest, and between activism in institutions and in the streets, does not accurately describe the complex interactions of forms and locations of activism characteristic of twenty-first-century Latin America. They show that most contemporary political activism in the region relies upon both confrontational collective action and civic participation at different moments. Operating within fluid, dynamic, and heterogeneous fields of contestation, activists have not been contained by governments or conventional political categories, but rather have overflowed their boundaries, opening new democratic spaces or extending existing ones in the process. These essays offer fresh insight into how the politics of activism, participation, and protest are manifest in Latin America today while providing a new conceptual language and an interpretive framework for examining issues that are critical for the future of the region and beyond. (Read the foreword by Arturo Escobar and introduction)…(More)”

Beyond Bureaucracy: Towards Sustainable Governance Informatisation

Curated on April 29, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Alois A. Paulin, Leonidas G. Anthopoulos and Christopher Reddick: “… examines the role of bureaucracy in modern technologically advanced societies, the traditional models of governance, and the potential of information technology to fundamentally change and improve governance. In the area of public-domain governance, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have empowered public agencies to improve their activities and to strengthen the efficiency of their operations. Technology has enabled optimized transfer of knowledge and information between government agencies, more efficient supervision and control of relationships with citizens, and higher efficiency in law enforcement through better access to information. Throughout the last decades, technology has been used to strengthen the role of state bureaucracies and the relationship between the civil service and the citizens. We have witnessed the transformative powers of ICTs in private-sector enterprises in well-structured technological landscapes, which has produced new ecosystems comprised of software developers, providers, and consumers who provide and consume new products and services in ecosystems that are based on clear technological standards and shared modular generic artefacts, which allow for distributed peer production. ICTs will shape cultural and civic discourse and create products, services and tools, relying on the open toolsets, technologies and exchange of knowledge between peers. This book will be of particular interest to government CIOs, IT/IS managers, researchers, students, and practitioners in technical sciences, public administration, business management, public policy and IS management….(More)”.

How Your Digital Helper May Undermine Your Welfare, and Our Democracy

Curated on April 26, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi: “All you need to do is say,” a recent article proclaimed, “’I want a beer’ and Alexa will oblige. The future is now.” Advances in technology have seemingly increased our choices and opened markets to competition. As we migrate from brick-and-mortar shops to online commerce, we seemingly are getting more of what we desire at better prices and quality. And yet, behind the competitive façade, a more complex reality exists. We explore in our book “Virtual Competition” several emerging threats, namely algorithmic collusion, behavioural discrimination and abuses by dominant super-platforms. But the harm is not just economic. The potential anticompetitive consequences go beyond our pocketbooks. The toll will likely be on our privacy, well-being and democracy.

To see why, this Essay examines the emerging frontier of digital personal assistants. These helpers are being developed by the leading online platforms: Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Facebook’s M, and Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo. These super-platforms are heavily investing to improve their offerings. For those of us who grew up watching The Jetsons, the prospect of our own personal helper might seem marvelous. And yet, despite their promise, can personalized digital assistants actually reduce our welfare? Might their rise reduce the number of gateways to the digital world, increase the market power of a few firms, and limit competition? And if so, what are the potential social, political, and economic concerns?

Our Essay seeks to address these questions. We show how network effects, big data and big analytics will likely undermine attempts to curtail a digital assistant’s power, and will likely allow it to operate below the regulatory and antitrust radar screens. As a result, rather than advance our overall welfare, these digital assistants – if left to their own devices – can undermine our welfare….(More)”

Conditional Citizens: Rethinking Children and Young People’s Participation

Curated on April 25, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Catherine Hartung: “This book challenges readers to recognise the conditions that underpin popular approaches to children and young people’s participation, as well as the key processes and institutions that have enabled its rise as a global force of social change in new times. The book draws on the vast international literature, as well as interviews with key practitioners, policy-makers, activists, delegates and academics from Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Nicaragua, Australia, the United Kingdom, Finland, the United States and Italy to examine the emergence of the young citizen as a key global priority in the work of the UN, NGOs, government and academia. In so doing, the book engages contemporary and interdisciplinary debates around citizenship, rights, childhood and youth to examine the complex conditions through which children and young people are governed and invited to govern themselves.

The book argues that much of what is considered ‘children and young people’s participation’ today is part of a wider neoliberal project that emphasises an ideal young citizen who is responsible and rational while simultaneously downplaying the role of systemic inequality and potentially reinforcing rather than overcoming children and young people’s subjugation. Yet the book also moves beyond mere critique and offers suggestive ways to broaden our understanding of children and young people’s participation by drawing on 15 international examples of empirical research from around the world, including the Philippines, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, North America, Finland, South Africa, Australia and Latin America. These examples provoke practitioners, policy-makers and academics to think differently about children and young people and the possibilities for their participatory citizenship beyond that which serves the political agendas of dominant interest groups…(More)”.

Can Democracy Survive the Internet?

Curated on April 23, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nathaniel Persily in the Journal of Democracy: “…The actual story of the 2016 digital campaign is, of course, quite different, and we are only beginning to come to grips with what it might mean for campaigns going forward. Whereas the stories of the last two campaigns focused on the use of new tools, most of the 2016 story revolves around the online explosion of campaign-relevant communication from all corners of cyberspace. Fake news, social-media bots (automated accounts that can exist on all types of platforms), and propaganda from inside and outside the United States—alongside revolutionary uses of new media by the winning campaign—combined to upset established paradigms of how to run for president.

Indeed, the 2016 campaign broke down all the established distinctions that observers had used to describe campaigns: between insiders and outsiders, earned media and advertising, media and nonmedia, legacy media and new media, news and entertainment, and even foreign and domestic sources of campaign communication. How does one characterize a campaign, for example, in which the chief strategist is also the chairman of a media website (Breitbart) that is the campaign’s chief promoter and whose articles the candidate retweets to tens of millions of his followers, with those tweets then picked up and rebroadcast on cable-television news channels, including one (RT, formerly known as Russia Today) that is funded by a foreign government?

The 2016 election represents the latest chapter in the disintegration of the legacy institutions that had set bounds for U.S. politics in the postwar era. It is tempting (and in many ways correct) to view the Donald Trump campaign as unprecedented in its breaking of established norms of politics. Yet this type of campaign could only be successful because established institutions—especially the mainstream media and politicalparty organizations—had already lost most of their power, both in the United States and around the world….(More)”

Too Much of a Good Thing? Frequent Flyers and the Implications for the Coproduction of Public Service Delivery

Curated on April 22, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Benjamin Y. Clark and Jeffrey L. Brudney: “The attention on coproduction and specifically technology-enabled coproduction has grown substantially. This attention had provided findings that highlight the benefits for citizens and governments. Previous research on technologically-enabled coproduction (Internet, smartphones, and centralized non-emergency municipal call centers), show that these technologies have brought coproduction within reach of citizens (Meijer 2011; Kim and Lee 2012; Norris and Reddick 2013; Clark, Brudney, and Jang 2013; Linders 2012; Clark et al. 2016; Clark and Shurik 2016) and have the potential to improve perceptions of government performance (Clark and Shurik 2016). The advent of technologically-enabled coproduction has also made it possible for some residents to participate at levels not previously possible. These high volume coproducers, now known as “frequent flyers,” have the potential to become pseudo-bureaucrats. This chapter seeks to understand if we need to be concerned about this development. Additionally, we seek to understand what individual & neighborhood characteristics affect the intensity of coproduction of public services and if there are diffusion effects of frequent flyers.

To address these questions, we use surveys of San Francisco, California, residents conducted in 2011, 2013, and 2015. Our results suggest that the frequent flyers are largely representative of their communities. Our study finds some evidence that racial and ethnic minorities might be more likely to be a part of this group than the white majority. And perhaps most interestingly we find that neighbors appear to be learning from one another — the more frequent flyers that live in a neighborhood, the more likely it is that you are going to be a frequent flyer….(More)”

What Is an Event?

Curated on April 21, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Robin Wagner-Pacifici: “We live in a world of breaking news, where at almost any moment our everyday routine can be interrupted by a faraway event. Events are central to the way that individuals and societies experience life. Even life’s inevitable moments—birth, death, love, and war—are almost always a surprise. Inspired by the cataclysmic events of September 11, Robin Wagner-Pacifici presents here a tour de force, an analysis of how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday life, and how they then move across time and landscape.

What Is an Event? ranges across several disciplines, systematically analyzing the ways that events emerge, take shape, gain momentum, flow, and even get bogged down. As an exploration of how events are constructed out of ruptures, it provides a mechanism for understanding eventful forms and flows, from the micro-level of individual life events to the macro-level of historical revolutions, contemporary terrorist attacks, and financial crises. Wagner-Pacifici takes a close look at a number of cases, both real and imagined, through the reports, personal narratives, paintings, iconic images, political posters, sculptures, and novels they generate and through which they live on. What is ultimately at stake for individuals and societies in events, Wagner-Pacifici argues, are identities, loyalties, social relationships, and our very experiences of time and space. What Is an Event? provides a way for us all—as social and political beings living through events, and as analysts reflecting upon them—to better understand what is at stake in the formations and flows of the events that mark and shape our lives….(More)”

Can The Internet Strengthen Democracy?

Curated on April 21, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephen Coleman: “From its inception as a public communication network, the Internet was regarded by many people as a potential means of escaping from the stranglehold of top-down, stage-managed politics. If hundreds of millions of people could be the producers as well as receivers of political messages, could that invigorate democracy? If political elites fail to respond to such energy, where will it leave them?

In this short book, internationally renowned scholar of political communication, Stephen Coleman, argues that the best way to strengthen democracy is to re-invent it for the twenty-first century. Governments and global institutions have failed to seize the opportunity to democratise their ways of operating, but online citizens are ahead of them, developing practices that could revolutionise the exercise of political power…(More)”