Designing digital publics for participatory parity
•
0 likes•682 views
In networked publics, power based on network positionality replaces media power. How can we design networked publics to improve parity? I present @TheTweetserve, a prototype solution.
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (19)
Similar to Designing digital publics for participatory parity
Similar to Designing digital publics for participatory parity (20)
More from Sebastian Benthall
More from Sebastian Benthall (8)
Designing digital publics for participatory parity
- 1. Designing Digital Publics for Participatory Parity Sebastian Benthall UC Berkeley I School
- 2. The talk ● A model for how inequality and social influence are related ● Public sphere -> publics -> networked public ● Inequality of social network formation ● Hacking social network formation with a cool Twitter bot ● Invitation to shape design with GitHub tickets
- 3. Equality: we like it* * assumed for this talk
- 4. A theory of inequality ● Everyone’s talking about how unequal U.S. society is ● Everyone’s talking about what the “real cause” of inequality is ● Claim: Inequality is complex.
- 6. A theory of inequality ● Lots of ways power and privilege reinforce each other ● We can dispute the details but… ● ...it’s worth trying to make an impact by targeting one piece at a time
- 7. We can build an equitable public sphere
- 8. A story (from Habermas, 1962) ● Absolutist monarchal states overthrown by capitalists - the bourgeoisie ● They communicated freely and came to rational agreement that guided politics… The public sphere. It was great. ● Until consumerism makes advertising more important than politics, so media power!
- 9. A critique (from Fraser, 1992) ● Ok yeah bourgeois men did that ● The people they excluded (e.g. women, working class) got together to agree on different politics -- counterpublics ● The public sphere is not equalizing common ground, but a nexus of unequal publics
- 10. Network publics (boyd, 2010) ● Social network sites are publics ● Mediated by the network technology
- 11. the uneven shape of social networks
- 15. preferential attachment the rich get richer
- 16. Networked power (Castells,2009) ● In networked society, our communication networks are the channels of power ● Power based on position within a network is networked power ● Unless designed otherwise, networked publics will be highly unequal!
- 17. agenda setting
- 18. reframing
- 19. In networked publics, networked power succeeds media power
- 20. This will reinforce existing power dynamics
- 22. So what can we do? Influence
- 23. So what can we do? Influence
- 30. Algorithms ● Networked publics use relevance algorithms (Gillespie, 2012) to direct information ● Building alternative infrastructure for political reasons -- infrastructure-based activism (Sauter, 2013) ● Could we reverse this process with something else… an irrelevance algorithm?
- 31. sure we can
- 33. Example: The Listserve ● NYU ITP project by Begley et al. ● An “email lottery” -- once a day a subscriber is chosen to write the rest of the list ● ~25k members and great parity properties!
- 34. @TheTweetserve
- 35. @TheTweetserve v0.1 ● Periodically, find all the users who both ○ mentioned @TheTweetserve recently ○ follow @TheTweetserve ● Retweet the most recent status of one of them at random
- 37. An invitation ● This is just a proof of concept ● The real point is an invitation to praxis ● If you have ideas about how it could be better, please file a ticket on GitHub ● GitHub is like a networked public of people that build your networked publics
- 42. Thanks! Questions? Contact me @sbenthall or sb@ischool.berkeley.edu