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.
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
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
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
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!
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?
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!
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