[p2p-research] Some Speculations About the Future of Digital Citizenship

[Michel Bauwens]

(will appear in the blog on the 16th)



by David Bollier



*So how might the digital citizen, working through self-organized commons,
transform society over the long term?  Michel Bauwens asked me to prepare a
sort of coda to the last chapter of my book, Viral Spiral.  Below, I
speculate on some of the sweeping changes that the empowered "netizen" may
catalyze.*



At this early, embryonic stage of digital citizenship, it is risky to make
specific predictions about how online social collectives will reconfigure
power relationships and institutional behavior.  But it is clear that they
will.  They already are.  Which is why we must remain alert to the shifting
dynamics of power so that the commoners can take advantage of the fluid
circumstances, and introduce new institutional innovations.



The future of serious journalism is a growing concern, for example.  In the
United States, the newspaper industry is experiencing unprecedented declines
in advertising revenue and subscribers.  News aggregators and blogs have
begun to turn news into a commodity and even a "free" resource.  The Web is
also providing fresh competition for local daily newspapers, most of which
have been enjoyed local monopolies and impressive profits.  But now
Craigslist is undercutting the inherent inefficiencies of newspapers by
offering free classified ads.  Bbloggers and various websites are offering a
more satisfying and specialized "news experience" than printed newspapers.



As the traditional business models for newspapers begin to crumble, the
search is on for more promising alternatives.  Walter Isaacson suggested in
his recent *Time *magazine cover story that micro-payments may be the way to
go.  But such desperate ideas avoid the deeper truth.  Internet users have
not just become accustomed to "free" news; they want a different, more
participatory and transparent relationship with their news providers.  They
do not want to "consume" the news, even through micro-payments.  They want
to engage in a dialogue with news organs and fellow citizens, and even
contribute their own expertise and reportage.  But unpaid bloggers and
enthusiasts will never be able to supplant the kinds of well-reported
enterprise journalism that newspapers have historically paid for.



Which is why new revenue models need to be developed.  I like the idea of
endowed trusts as an alternative, non-market host for serious news.  The St.
Petersburg (Florida) *Times* functions as an endowed trust, an arrangement
that has allowed it to generate much higher-quality and independent
journalism than its corporate peers.



The citizen-journalism movement is experimenting with new models that may
yield results.  One example is NewAssignment.net, which is mixing
professional journalists with amateur contributions.  Another example is
Spot.us, which invites people to make pledges to help finance the reporting
of specific stories in the San Francisco area.  Whatever new archetypes
emerge, they are not likely to replicate the producer/consumer model that
has defined commercial journalism to date.  They will be more open and
collaborative.



The empowered digital citizen is also transforming corporate organization
and strategy.  We have already seen how Internet companies like Google,
Amazon and eBay save enormous costs by leveraging the collective
intelligence of their customers.  By using the social recommendations of
customers about products (Amazon), ratings of sellers (eBay) and statistics
about favorite websites (Google search), companies are both enhancing their
performance and saving money.



Eric von Hippel of MIT has studied businesses that look to active online
communities as sources of research and development.  In *Democratizing
Innovation*, he shows how for-profit enterprises can enter into friendly
collaborations with a commons, and build a business model around it.  In a
pattern played out in many "extreme sports" (skiing, bicycling,
hang-gliding, etc.), a company develops new product innovations in
collaboration with communities of athletes.  The communities, in turn, enjoy
easier access to well-designed, specialized equipment.  This may be a
paradigm for new sorts of collaboration between companies and commoners.



It may be too early to theorize about the best "open business models," but
the future is likely to belong to companies that are able to perform well on
open platforms.  By relying less on proprietary code and copyrighted
content, they will attract engaged and stable user bases.  (Whether such
companies will be more lucrative than current businesses may be another
question entirely.)  Newcomer companies that develop symbiotic relationships
with their customers are more likely to out-compete conventional companies
over the long term.  This is because the newcomers can leverage social trust
and loyalty – and thus sales revenues – more efficiently than larger, less
responsive companies.  Large, centralized corporate empires are typically
burdened with expensive overhead costs that require government subsidies and
regulatory privileges to maintain.



The commons itself is increasingly becoming a source of competition, as
Yochai Benkler and others have described.  Social collectives are providing
for themselves, without the use of cash or contracts, and in more efficient,
socially satisfying ways than the market.   Academics are bypassing
commercial journals by developing their own open-access journals.  Scores of
wikis now enable communities with special interests to come together without
commercial hosts.  Craigslist provides a mostly free venue for effecting
private barters or sales.  And so on.  These trends are likely to intensify
in the years ahead because they are more economically attractive and
socially congenial.



A big, unresolved question that will become more salient in coming years:  How
shall markets and commons negotiate mutually respectful terms of competition
and cooperation?  Can traditional market players learn to respect the social
and ethical norms of the people formerly known as "customers"?



If the past is any guide, many market players will continue to try to
enclose the commons.  But the commoners are no longer defenseless.  Many are
now empowered with their own free software platforms and legal licenses, not
to mention a robust community ethic.  People have choices.  Consider how
MySpace users howled when the site prohibited the use of outside software
widgets, or how Facebook users resisted new features that they considered
privacy violations.



Digital citizenship is likely to bring huge changes to politics.  While
there were many singular aspects to Barack Obama presidential race, the use
of social networking technologies and other tools of self-organization will
persist and expand.  If only because of its proven fundraising potential,
the "netroots" will become a more powerful player in political campaigns.  It
will raise more money and confer greater social credibility and legitimacy
on campaigns than old-style campaigning.



Like companies and their customers, politicians and their supporters will
enter into more of a "conversation."  It won't center on just a one-off
transaction, voting on election day.  (It is dismaying to see the Democratic
National Committee short-sighted commitment to treat the people on Obama's
massive email list as Pavlovian automatons rather than as a social community
with its own capacity for deliberation and political agency.)



Governance, too, is going to become more of a fluid conversation with the
general public, rather than a privileged backroom negotiation among anointed
insiders.  The Internet is opening up governance by making it more
transparent, accessible and instantaneous.  Citizens can now review draft
legislation in its raw forms before it is enacted, and agitate publicly for
changes.  Special-interest earmarks are being identified and publicized,
with predictable shaming effects on their sponsors.  Although some critics
like law professor Cass Sunstein worry that the immediacy of Internet
culture will short-circuit thoughtful deliberation, the quality of
deliberation that occurs now is not especially impressive.  I think the
transparency of Internet culture will greatly enhance democratic
accountability in the future.  (The screaming you hear are the special
interests whose politically rigged deals can no longer be carried out under
the cover of darkness.)



Government itself will experience new pressures as decentralized commons
challenge the competence of centralized bureaucracies.  It is a secular
trend across modern societies:  large, centralized institutions tend to be
inept, inflexible and unable to craft situational solutions.  Smaller,
decentralized and networked organizations tend to be closer to reliable,
on-the-ground information, and have the capacity to respond more nimbly and
effectively.  A big question for the future is how the regularities and
predictability of government institutions can be integrated with online
commons, which tend to be more socially responsive and flexible.



A final speculation that almost seems self-evident:  politics and culture
are likely to become more trans-national than they already are.  This is a
kind of counterpoint to the economic globalization that is well underway.  A
new kind of global communion among digital citizens is being facilitated by
a proliferating array of cheap and versatile platforms -- Skype, social
networking, blogs, Twitter, and more.  Online communities with niche
political or cultural interests are arising and traversing national
boundaries, despite the repressions of authoritarian governments.  Some of
the most robust trans-national communities include free software, free
culture, indie music and ethnic diaspora communities.  As such virtual
communities grow in influence, many governments and multinational
corporations will likely push back against them.  But it would be foolish to
try to ban or restrict such passionate, diversified insurgencies.  They
represent the seeds of a future polity struggling to be born.


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