The EITI and social media

The last few weeks I have been working on a project for the Secretariat of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. The project has been to create a first draft of a "Social Media Strategy", helping the Secretariat begin their journey into the world of hyper-communication and user generated content. You can read the whole summary of this social media strategy on the EITI web site, but I've taken the liberty to publish an excerpt from the summary right here. In this excerpt I've left out the most EITI-specific paragraphs:

The World of Social Media

Social media is quite simply collectively created content, be it knowledge, information, art, or any other forms of media. In can be argued, of course, that social media has existed for a long time. Folk tales, music, and dances can certainly be described as "collectively created content", having been shared and retold across generations. Nevertheless, the term "social media" applies primarily to content created in the digital age. Social media can therefore be seen as an emergent property of the digitalization of communication, and its appearance is coupled to the development of the internet.

The term "social media" thus encompasses everything from jointly authored Wikipedia articles, the republishing of old books through Project Gutenberg, user generated news updates, the blog posts of an anonymous women from a rooftop in Teheran, the first picture of the Hudson River plane crash tweeted by a guy with a camera phone, the contributions to the NASA Clickworker project, to the mashup videos on YouTube by people like Kutiman and Norwegian Recycling, as well as all the pictures and illustrations uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons with Creative Commons licenses.

The essence of social media can therefore be summarized in the words *participation*, *leveling*, *sharing*, and *personal presence*. First of all, the essence of social media is participation. Instead of increasing the degree to which we are amusing ourselves to death, in the words of Neil Postman, we are increasing our level of participation in the continual recreation of our own culture and our own society.

However, this outburst of participation does not belie the fact that the social hierarchy we already know is rather closely duplicated on the internet. Indeed, most celebrities have millions of followers on Twitter. The internet is still far from being equal. But the participation introduced by social media is leveling the playing field, because it enables a much wider array of people to participate. One example is how the internet gives you the opportunity to publish without the approval of a publisher. After all, as the old New Yorker cartoon cleverly has it, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog".





To enable this leveling of the playing field, the participation social media entails is dependent upon sharing. Actually, it is impossible to participate without sharing. Sharing is the essence of participation. By sharing content, however, we also enable other people to build on top of what we have created. Neither the creation of information, knowledge, or art has ever been a single-person venture. We have always climbed up and stood on other people's shoulders.

Last, but not least, is personal presence. Social media is characterized by the high level of personal presence. While traditional media resembles a production line where content is created by few to be consumed by many, social media resembles a conversation. Indeed, social media can be said to be the content that is created while people are conversing online.

[...]

The EITI and Social Media

Covering the parliamentary election in Norway, newspapers quoted a poll saying that the typical voter did not care much about Twitter and social media. Only a fraction of the respondents had changed their minds because of Twitter. Framing the question like this misses the bigger picture, however. The value of social media is not measured in how many people have changed their minds based on tweets. The value of social media lies in the improvement in the quality of the public debate. With an increase in the use of social media, politicians will make better decisions because they are able to discuss the issues more directly with people. Moreover, the voters will know more about the actual positions of different politicians as their opinions are not diffused through a reinterpretation of a journalist. In addition to this, the civil society will be better informed and more engaged due to the empowering nature of social media.

The simplest and most straightforward reason an organization like the EITI should get involved in social media is the fact that content creation, discussion and communication has shifted away from traditional media toward social media. The goal of a basic social media strategy should simply be to mimic this shift.

To an organization like the EITI, the most relevant aspect of social media is the way it enables and empowers people to participate in the public debate and the EITI conversations. Keeping in mind the fact that the main objective of the EITI initiative is to empower people to talk about transparency and corruption in extractive industries by creating a greater public awareness about revenues and taxes, the appearance of social media has created large opportunities for the initiative.

It has therefore been my recommendation that the EITI Secretariat utilize the enormous potential that lies in social media, and create accounts on web sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, SlideShare, and YouTube. The EITI should take this opportunity to participate in the public debate on transparency in extractive industries, both the digitalized and the traditional, by sharing their information, knowledge, and expertise.

A record of a society's mundane progress

In the November 2009 issue of Harper's Magazine, Richard Rodriguez has a piece on the "Twilight of the American Newspaper". In a rather pessimistic mood, he concludes by writing that "we already live in the America of USA Today, which appears, unsolicited, in a plastic chrysalis suspended from your doorknob at a Nebraska Holiday inn or a Maine Marriot". And, moreover, that "we will end up with one and a half cities in America---Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between "conservatives" and "liberals." We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels." To Rodriguez, the "American newspaper" is gone, only to be replaced by a single-edition bulletin outlining the most recent news from Celebrity City.

So what is really a newspaper? Does it have to have news? Editorials? Classifieds? What characterizes the "American newspaper"? Rodriguez:

The day after I was born in San Francisco, my tiny existential fact was noted in several of the papers that were barked through the downtown streets. In truth, the noun "newspaper" is something of a misnomer. More than purveyors only of news, American newspapers were entrusted to be keepers of public record---papers were daily or weekly cumulative almanacs of tabular information. A newspaper's morgue was scrutable evidence of the existence of a city. Newspapers published obituaries and they published birth announcements. They published wedding announcements and bankruptcy notices. They published weather forecasts (even in San Francisco, where on most days the weather is optimistic and unremarkable - fog clearing by noon). They published the fire department's log and high school basketball scores. In a port city like San Francisco, there were listings of the arrivals and departures of ships.

Rodriguez finishes the passage eloquently, by writing: "None of this constituted news exactly; it was a record of a city's mundane progress." I cannot read this, however, without thinking about Facebook and Twitter. What are social networks, if not a «record of a society's mundane progress»?

The gloomy mood in Rodriguez' essay could just as well have been a hopeful and optimistic discussion of the replacement of some part of the newspaper by social media web sites. Today, social networks are about to be "entrusted to be keepers of public record"; they are "cumulative almanacs of tabular information". The databases of Facebook and Twitter are becoming "scrutable evidence of the existence of a [society]".

Even the narcissism is similar. Social media, and especially Twitter, has been accused of being a meat marked for social publicity and self-marketing. On newspapers in the 19th century, Rodriguez writes:

Men, usually men, who assumed the sole proprietorships of newspapers in the nineteenth century were the sort of men to be attracted by the way a newspaper could magnify an already fatted ego.

Even so, newspapers have become some of the most important elements of our democratic societies. What will the new social networks be like in ten or twenty years?

Prisoner number 175113

The widely acclaimed «Maus: A Survivor's Tale» is about Vladek Spiegelman, Auschwitz prisoner number 175113. Maus was created by Vladek's son, Art Spiegelman, and features not just Vladeks experiences during the Second World War, but also the relationship between Vladek and Art in the 1970s and early 1980s. A newspaper from Pomerania, Germany wrote the following in the mid-1930s:

Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed....Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal....Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!

Trying to depict the Holocaust in a comics book is probably not easy, and Art Spiegelman spent more than a decade drawing it. The result, however, was one of very few comics that should be on the curriculum for «Living in a society 101».

No News Day

News are supposed to be news, so everything static and unchanging is mostly left out. In the case of poverty and hunger, this principle implies that it has to be devastating hunger, as opposed to «normal» hunger, before it's «news».

However, this doesn't affect growing, at least not when the thing growing is a polar bear. When polar bears «change» from being cute, small cubs into man-eating carnivores, it's «news». Even though the fact that cubs and puppies ends up being adult animals has been common knowledge for at least as long as I can remember.

Therefore, the fact that what we usually refer to as «growing» also - shockingly - has had an effect on the polar bear Canoute, and that the «cute cub has become a bloodthirsty predator». The «news» article about juvenile growth in polar bears is the most read article at Dagbladet.no for the last 24 hours, with the title: «Here Canoute tries to take a bite of a three-year-old».

(The Canoute picture is a facsimile from Dagbladet.no)

Sisyphean storytelling

In Narration and Knowledge, professor of philosophy Arthur C. Danto contends that the task of the historian is to find meaning in history by mapping or describing the relationship between events. Danto calls these descriptions narratives. Without these narratives, these stories connecting the dots of history, we'd never be able to find any meaning at all. As such, narratives are to events what generalisations are to objects.

Without generalisations, everything would be particulars. That is, there wouldn't exist any trees, just a lot of similar-looking thick, brown trunks covered by a collection of green leaves. Or. Without generalisations, there wouldn't be trunks and leaves either, or colours. So instead of trees, we would have a lot of objects it would be hard to understand.

One example are leaves in the fall. Say that I owned a tree, and the leaves suddenly started falling off. I would probably be heartbroken because my tree was dying. Also, seeing that the exact same thing happened to other trees wouldn't help a bit, because I didn't know all the other trees were the same species and that it was perfectly natural for trees to loose their leaves each fall.

Danto continues his theory of narratives by claiming that as time goes by, previous events will have to be continually redescribed in a way that incorporates all the new events. The reason is that new events never can be fully understood without knowing what preceded them, while old events never can be fully understood without knowing what followed them.

Now, it should be said that this redescription is not only a task of historians, it is a task of everyone. This is because every new thing that doesn't fit into an old narrative giving it meaning, has to be put inside a new narrative before we can understand it. Naomi Klein writes about this in The Shock Doctrine:

[I]n North America, the September 11 attacks were, at first, pure event, raw reality, unprocessed by story, narrative of anything that could bridge he gap between reality and understanding. Without a story, we are, as many of us were after September 11, intensely vulnerable to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a new narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented and the world begins to make sense once again.

At the same time, the narratives we have can be wrong. For example, my tree could be an evergreen, and its «leaves» falling could really be because it was dying. In that case, believing the narrative that trees drop their leaves in the fall would have led me astray. Furthermore, the frightening narrative of 9/11 being the «Pearl Harbour» of a «huntingtonian» Clash of Civilizations was wrong, and has been proven so over the last few years as, with Klein's words, the «shock wore off».

Two-thousand-and-eighty

The Ultimate Guide to getting the book «Two-thousand-and-eighty»

1. Buy «Nineteen-eighty-four» by George Orwell
2. Strike out all occurences of the number «1984»
3. Replace with 2080

And here we go again. The orwellian future is still not past.

(If you know Norwegian, you can read about it at this page.)

Wikipedia Advertisement Day

The Canadian magazine Adbuster is the main promoter of the Buy Nothing Day, which is a «24 hour moratorium on consumer spending - participating by not participating». The Buy Nothing Days is usually in the end of November.

A similar one-day-concept is the Norwegian TV-channel TV2's free-ads-for-non-profits-day, which is usually at Christmas day and sometime at easter, either Maundy Thursday, Good Friday or Easter Day. On these days non-profit organizations gets to show their commercials on TV2 for free.

Turning things around, I'd like to put forward the idea that Wikipedia could have one advertisement day each year. We could call it the «Wikipedia Advertisement Day». If Wikipedia were ever about to run out of money, this would be an interesting remedy. It would remind all the users that Wikipedia is actually free, and at the same time it would not (necessarily) «commercialize» Wikipedia beyond return (which I'm afraid ads year-round would do...).