I’m becoming a real fan of Daniel Little’s UnderstandingSociety blog.

Here he considers “how good is deliberative democracy?”:

The approach that starts and ends with voting among alternatives has a major shortcoming: no one gets a chance to make persuasive arguments to other citizens; no one has the opportunity of having his/her own beliefs challenged; no one is exposed to new facts or novel considerations that might make a difference in the choice. In other words, the “vote first” approach simply takes people’s preferences and beliefs as fixed, and looks at the problem of choice as simply one of aggregating these antecedent preferences.

The deliberative approach, by contrast, looks at belief formation as itself a cumulative and reasonable process; one in which the individual needs to have the opportunity to think through the facts and values that surround the choice; and, crucially, one in which exposure to other people’s reasoning is an important part of arriving at a sound conclusion.

I’m going to keep hammering this until people are sick of it: The Mindset of the Future is Process. It’s the key conceptual adjustment we need to make in order to address our current challenges — and to move towards the next generation of new opportunities.

Until now, both individuals and groups operate under assumptions of permanence — “this is the way things are” — until a crisis occurs and people start to say “but now we need to change.”

Our own institutions and ideas unintentionally conspire to fool us to believe that change is the exception when the truth is it’s the rule.

Permanence is not just exceptional, it’s deceptional — it’s mythological…

If you look deeply enough into your opinions and beliefs, you’ll find they aren’t just existing there, they actually depend on your ongoing efforts to reinterpret the world, adapting a supporting cast of ideas to keep your opinions and beliefs in accordance with new facts — like a balancing act.

All of this is background for my aim of digitizing our decision-making processes (which I’d like to get back to before this gets too metaphysical).

Any process needs both hard and soft aspects in order to function, i.e. it needs to have an element of fluidity, as in face-to-face conversations, and an element of solidity, as in putting it in writing.

Digital media does both.

The conversations we have in coffee shops and town hall sessions may generate a lot of energy, but that energy has to be channeled and stored or it dissipates. Everyone goes back to whatever everyone does until the next morning or next month when another batch of energy is generated and wasted all over again.

We also tend to forget (or misremember) exactly what our positions and ideas were. Without objective accounts of our conversations (and even with them) we can be astonishingly self-deceptive about our beliefs and reasons for believing.

Without articulation and objective deliberation (or at least deliberation that aspires to objectivity) we fail to notice inconsistencies in our thinking so we miss most of the best opportunities to learn and improve-by-process-of-correction — we fail to make our ideas and institutions more sustainable.

In other words, by failing to embrace change, we become more vulnerable to it.

No related posts.

Another bit of a ramble (I love where it ends up), starting with this Time Q&A:

TIME: How difficult was it to chart a history of a massive and diverse thing like blogging?
Rosenberg: This is a phenomenon that starts small, then diversifies, then explodes at a certain point. At the small phase, it’s not that difficult to shape the story. The first part of the book is really a series of profiles of people — Justin Hall, Dave Winer, Jorn Barger — who were some of the key figures in pioneering blogging. In the middle of the book, my job became picking out the stories that had the most to teach us about what blogging was all about. At that point, the challenge became figuring out what to leave out.

You seem set on changing some of the popular notions of why people blog.
One thing I’ve become very conscious of is how careful you have to be making generalizations about bloggers. You have millions of people blogging. There are a multitude of answers to any question about what blogging is, who bloggers are or why they do it.

The author is Scott Rosenberg, the book is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. It seems like an opportune time to reflect on where digital media has come from and where it is going. The volume of meta-commentary about the nature and future of blogging has gone up recently. Just about all of the mavens and A-listers wrote something-or-other on the subject last month.

Laura McKenna at 11D generated loads of response after blogging that

blogging has changed a lot in the past six years. It’s still an excellent medium for self-expression and professional networking, but it will no longer make mega-stars. It’s actually a good thing that the hoopla has died down. No one should spend that much time in front of a computer. The expectations were unrealistic. Use your blogs to target particular audiences and have a clear mission, and you’ll get a following. Blogging should be the means to another goal — a rough draft for future articles/books, a way to network with professionals, a place to document your life for your children, a way to have fun. Those are very real and good outcomes of blogging and that’s why I’m continuing to keep at.

To which Ezra Klein lamented

The blogosphere isn’t thrumming with the joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years. And that’s a shame. But the upside is that it’s more careful. It reports and investigates and uncovers. My blog certainly isn’t as fun to write as it used to be. But it’s also a lot better than it used to be. And it certainly pays more. And so it goes. The blogosphere grew up and it got a job, or, to be more specific, lots of jobs. That made it less fun, but, like a frat house legend who now goes to work every morning, probably more useful to society.

I’m not even sure that’s an analogy, as Klein (born in 1984) and more than a few of the other big blog-turned-job stars are at the age when they’d be finishing grad school, coming out of internships, and settling into responsible positions anyways.

No doubt there are a lot of exceptions, and, as Daniel Drezner pointed out:

new bloggers are not exactly neophytes on their subject matter. Johnson was the IMF’s chief economist, for example.

So exactly how much of the professionalization of blogging is inherent in the medium, vs how much of it amounts to the professionalization and maturity of individual bloggers?

I say, don’t worry because more generations of unprofessionals will arrive soon enough.

For perspective, consider that just as Ezra Klein complains the blogosphere lost its “joyous, raucous, weirdness of the early years,” I imagine a number of older hackers and BBS and Usenet users complained that blogging circa 2003 lacked a particular “joyous, raucus, weirdness” of their earlier scenes.

(E.g. Jaron Lanier comes to mind. He made some remarks about blogging in that provocative essay of his, and apparently he still favours the old static HTML for his own site.)

Sort of as the Policy Blogger Class of 2003 co-promoted themselves into professional, respectable positions (read Rob Horning’s reaction), we might also see still-newer classes embracing still-newer platforms which established bloggers don’t see coming… changing the media landscape yet again, and disrupting Ezra Klein et al the same way they disrupted old-school pundits and columnists.

It won’t happen exactly the same way again. All I’m saying is that blogging will be vital for a long time, but certain kinds of blogging won’t necessarily be — because we’ll still have new classes graduating, hungry and irreverent, into a media landscape filled with opportunities that didn’t exist for previous cohorts.

Shortly before the policy bloggers got wound-up on the subject, there were already some high-volume conversations about the nature and future of blogging coming from more technology-oriented mavens.

Steve Rubel left blogging for lifestreaming:

Now that I have been at it for over five years, writing a weblog is starting to feel very slow and antiquated. It’s like a singles tennis player who focuses solely on the baseline game, logging long balls back and forth. The statusphere, on other hand, is like playing doubles – and at the net all the time.

Robert Scoble went the other way (for a bit anyways):

Whew, OK, now that I’m off of FriendFeed and Twitter I can start talking about what I learned while I was addicted to those systems.

One thing is that knowledge is suffering over there. See, here, it is easy to find old blogs. Just go to Google and search. [...]

The other night Jeremiah Owyang told me that thought leaders should avoid spending a lot of time in Twitter or FriendFeed because that time will be mostly wasted. If you want to reach normal people, he argued, they know how to use Google.

Chris Brogan struck a resolving chord:

I get this. I understand the interest in immediacy. The thing is, I think both are required. While I think there are several occasions where the instantaneous experience of the real-time web is compelling, I still think there are plenty of times when a well-considered blog post has some value.

There’s a difference between making a meal and grabbing a snack. Eating only snacks can lead to us getting flabby. It means we spend less time in deliberate contemplation. It means there aren’t as many places to exercise our larger thoughts.

[As long as these basic platform issues are unsettled, there's no telling where things will go...]

Come to think of it, there is a still-rising movement we should identify and try to understand more thoroughly: the general inversion of influence from top-down authority to bottom-up innovation.

Think way beyond media… Journalism is just a beachhead.

I.e. What would the world look like if, by 2015, digital platforms have undermined the foundations of higher education, or government itself, to the same degree the newspapers have been disrupted already?

To be continued…

[Note: I originally had the quotes from Rubel, Scoble, and Brogan before McKenna's. I made the edit moments after publishing.]

Related posts:

1. The Best Disinfectant
2. Contrasting the Perpendicular with the Backwards
3. Reiterating the Focus on Collaboration

This morning I realized I was a little unfair to Glen Pearson in my last post at BrianFrank.ca. I excerpted a bit of his blog as a jumping-off point, but the rest of my post didn’t really have much to do with what he wrote. I kind of left it hanging there as if he didn’t have any more to add to the discussion, and I didn’t do anything to show how his blog, The Parallel Parliament, is a pretty good place to start demonstrating the kind of generative articulation we need more of.

I should’ve excerpted what he wrote in his previous post:

When MPs enter the blogosphere with their demonizing rants, they often get what they deserve. And when media types attempt to sell the public on shallow controversy, they too suffer as a result. Unfortunately, such practices have, more frequently than not, put a saddening distance between the serious thinkers of both camps who would like to have meaningful discussions over the national state. So, we have arrived at the place where reflective MPs don’t blog and serious journalists won’t write on serious issues that just won’t sell. The historical healthy tension between politicians and the media has now become a debilitating arena of national distraction. Things have clearly changed and only serious dialogue, thinking and writing within these two camps can bring us back to a serious national mood. It would be interesting to see what the journalists/delegates at Charlottetown would make of all this.

I genuinely believe there will be tremendous improvements to the quality of blogosphere commentary and conversation in the next year or two as more late adopters (i.e. normal people) get on and balance things out.

I’m even imagining (I mean, dreaming of) a day when all politicians are expected to use blogs (or whatever they’re called in the future) and social media to make their attitudes and convictions fully open, articulate, and honest. I want it to be just as standard & required in the future as conventions and fundraisers [and staged debates] are today.

We need to see exactly where people’s ideas come from. As it is now, I’m not sure too many people know where their own ideas come from. Leaders should be compelled to make a more rigorous account of what they’re supposedly promoting — both in campaigns, and while in office.

There’s a saying that “daylight is the best disinfectant.” By making things more transparent and accountable (I’m talking about more than just money) — open to scrutiny by anyone, i.e. on the web where everything is findable, and forever — the people who have the most to hide (incopetence, sketchy motives) will struggle the most.

Some will argue that the critics and commenters might have sketchy motives too — well I’m sure a lot of them do, but everything they do is open to scrutiny as well. The ones who are just trolling to undermine the discussion won’t get any traction on the mature web.

Now that the web has become an essential part of our political system and our daily lives, most people online don’t have any time to waste on snickering, sneering, and snark. People ultimately want quality — if it’s available. Attention, popularity, and authority will gravitate to those who provide the most relevant and generative value for people.

With a little work, the good guys & gals will win in the end — regardless of which party they represent.

Related posts:

1. Re-Generative Digital Media

Courtesy of Mike Kujawski, here’s a list of books for anyone who needs an introduction to “all the incredible human collaboration occurring right now on a global scale”:

• Wikinomics - Don Tapscott
• Grown Up Digital - Don Tapscott
• Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky
• Groundswell - Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff
• Tribes - Seth Godin
• Naked Conversations - Shel Israel & Robert Scoble
• The Long Tail - Chris Anderson
• The Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowieki
• Join the Conversation - Joseph Jaffe
• Cluetrain Manifesto - Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searles, Dave Weinberger

And I’m going to add

• What Would Google Do? – Jeff Jarvis
• The Future and Its Enemies – Virginia Postrel
• New Rules for the New Economy – Kevin Kelly 

Anybody read all of these? Anything missing?

Related posts:

1. London Beta (#ldnbeta)

This occurred to me last night when I was looking at some of the new Friend Connect gadgets. I wanted to try them but they don’t go along with what I do at brianfrank.ca very well. This site evolved from that.

I started thinking we need someplace to just try stuff. If it works, then great: we can replicate it on our own sites or even develop something more permanent, public, and professional. If it doesn’t work, then that’s ok too: without actually losing anything, we can cross-off a few ideas from the list and move forward to the next few –a little wiser and more experienced than we were before.

This whole idea is like that. It might turn out to be a complete dud. If that’s the case, then fine: on to the next thing.

We don’t know until we try. I’m a believer in the design philosophy, popularized by IDEO, of rapid prototyping:

Prototyping is problem solving. It’s a culture and a language. You can prototype just about anything—a new product or service,or a special promotion. What counts is moving the ball forward, achieving some part of your goal.

Not wasting time.

I’m curious about what can be done with things like WordPress MU and BuddyPress and whatever else is out there (or soon to come). It’s difficult to know until we try.

More importantly, something that worked (or didn’t work) a certain way for one community might turn out differently in London, in a different context, tweaked a little by incremental advances that happened since. 

It would be great to see #ldnbeta concept (or some other iteration) picked up and used to drive the conversation — not just here, but on people’s own blogs, on Twitter, face-to-face, everywhere  – exploring and advocating new opportunities for social media in London.  

Beyond that, it isn’t just about the web: more importantly it’s about what the web can do for civic and community life — offline. My own background is in political science, not IT. I wouldn’t be so energetic about this if I wasn’t convinced that democracy itself is evolving and projects like this are crucial. 

I’m thinking along the same lines as Don Tapscott, writing here on “Democracy 2.0“:

For far too long, we’ve been living in what I’ve called a broadcast democracy. Voters only count during election time. They have little or no influence in between elections, when the lawmakers and influencers are in charge and citizenry is inert. The “you vote, I rule” model was all that was possible, until recently.

What the system has lacked until now are mechanisms enabling government to benefit from the wisdom and insight that a nation can collectively offer — on an ongoing basis. I’m not proposing some kind of direct democracy, where citizens can vote every night on the evening news or Web sites. That would be tantamount to a digital mob.

What I am proposing is a way to allow citizens to contribute ideas to the decision-making process — to get them engaged in public life. When citizens become active, good things can happen. We all learn from each other. Initiatives get catalyzed. People become active in improving their communities, country and the world. This is long overdue. These days, the policy specialists and advisers on the public-sector payroll can barely keep pace with defining the problems, let alone craft the solutions. Government can’t begin to amass the in-house expertise to deal with the myriad challenges that arise. Governments need to create opportunities for sustained dialogue between voters and the elected.

But maybe we’ll leave that grand stuff off to the side for the first little while. We need more practice, we need more experience, we need better tools and platforms, we need more expertise, we need models and prototypes to build from. That’s what I hope to help push.

And remember, technological progress isn’t always good, which is precisely why we need to have an ongoing conversation about how it should or shouldn’t be used — an informed and open conversation.

To sum up, this isn’t the venue for complaining about road repairs and garbage collection. This is for exploring ways to make our blogs and the social media scene in London better… so when you complain about roads and garbage on your own blog it’ll be more effective.

If you see something cool somewhere and you want to try it, but don’t want to risk messing up your own blog — or maybe your blog isn’t the best place to try it (like mine isn’t right for a lot of things), or maybe you don’t know how to make it work (again, like me with almost anything) — leave a comment hear, or mention it in Twitter (#ldnbeta) or FriendFeed via the LdnBeta room and we’ll figure something out together.

Related posts:

1. Reiterating the Focus on Collaboration
2. Developing Open Cities
3. Growing the Conversation