Tracking the Internet, Human Rights & Social Change
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Disclaimer: These opinions are mine and mine alone. Nothing here can or should be taken to represent the viewpoint of my employer.
Politics 1.0, Web 2.0...?
Such thoughtful and incisive posts (both Dan’s and Andrea’s) are stimulating, and a pleasure to read and reflect on.
I’m one of the folk behind the myPublicServices conference in November, and I work for Patient Opinion in my day job.
I wouldn’t pretend to have any answers here, but it strikes me that there’s no clear “either-or” in the play between politics 1.0, web 2.0, and everything else with a number. The distinction between online and offline started to fade away a while back, and old-school politics has always been on the web as well as off it. Power has always been on the web. So has social class. So has racism, and corporate greed, and all other forms of vested interest and human dissent. Web 2.0 isn’t free of Politics 1.0.
That’s not to say that the web isn’t changing, and won’t continue to change, the institutional forms through which power plays out and dissent and conflict are “managed” (in someone’s interests). Politics – 1.0 or 2.0 – has always been and will always be more than an aggregation issue, BTW. Democracy more than an algorithm for aggregating votes into governments.
I’ll give a big cheer to your last point, that “the bolder win is for people to aggregate and socialize solutions i.e. actual functioning answers to social needs” – if the web does anything it allows voices to emerge, views to be heard, groups to form and – perhaps – action to be taken – at essentially zero cost and in ways that simply weren’t possible before. That’s the vision that drives both Patient Opinion and the myPublicServices event.
But coming back to it not being “either-or”: I don’t believe that, in the foreseeable future, we can do without big, centrally organised, regulated, tax-funded public services and somehow replace them with a bunch of indie web sites. But I do think a bunch of indie web sites can challenge, stimulate, extend, or make more usable those central services in ways which will fundamentally change both the public sector and the “third sector” alike. The future needs to be “both-and”.