Bernhard Rieder

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Title
Bernhard Rieder Université de Paris VIII -
Vincennes Saint-Denis Laboratoire
Paragraphe Institutionalizing without
Institutions? Self-Organization, Hierarchy, and
Power on the Web IG3T Workshop 4 12 / 6 / 2009
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Basic ideas
There are very different ways to conceive and
examine power on / over / by means of the
Internet / Web.
The debate about the political qualities of the
Internet / Web are part of general political
deliberation.
The debate is part of general political struggles.
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This presentation
Terms and concepts Self-organization and
hierarchy Software as institution The
Internet and democracy
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I - Culture
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal
suspended in webs of significance he himself has
spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the
analysis of it to be therefore not an
experimental science in search of law but an
interpretive one in search of meaning. Geertz
1973, p. 5
Meaning cannot be separated from value. Culture
has a descriptive (cognitive) and a normative
(moral) component.
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I - Moral preprocessing
the Passions of Fear, Love, Hatred,
Admiration, Disdain, and the like, arise
immediately in his Mind upon the Perception of
certain Words, without any Ideas coming between
Berkeley 1734, 20
Political discourse is characterized by moral
preprocessing.
This makes for a particular kind of complexity.
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I - Cockroach vs. Kitten
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I - Definitions Institution and governance
Two meanings of institution a formal
establishment a large organization founded for
a particular purpose, such as a college, bank,
etc. a social mechanism an established law
or custom
Two meanings of governing conduct the policy
and affairs of (a state, organization, or
people) constitute a rule, standard, or
principle
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I - Definitions Power
Power faire faire Latour 1994 and faire
croire
Two understandings of power statutory
power visible, coercive, direct, and
legitimized capillary power opaque,
productive, subtle, and emergent
These distinctions lead to different research
perspectives concerning the organization of power
over / on / by means of the Internet / Web.
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I - Statutory perspective
From the statutory perspective there is a series
of formal organizations that governs the
Internet. Technical (protocols, standards,
formats, etc.) ISOC (IETF, IRTF), W3C, ISO,
etc. Administrative (address spaces, domain
names, bandwidth, etc.) ICANN, ISPs, etc. Legal
(general and purpose-built law) Nation states,
WTO, etc.
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I - Capillary perspective
From the capillary viewpoint, things are more
elusive. What are the processes of
institutionalization (the production of social
mechanisms) at work in the open spaces delimited
by the technical norms, administrative
procedures, and legal rules laid out by
institutions (formal governing bodies)?
An answer would have to include all the human and
social sciences.
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I - Three types of institutions
Scott 1995 distinguishes between tree types
of institutions (social mechanisms) Statutory
perspective Regulative institutions Capillary
perspective Normative institutions Cognitive
-cultural institutions
Descriptive / normative these analytical
perspectives have political and ideological
counterparts.
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II - Shirky
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, 2006 The
narrative in a nutshell The Internet makes it
possible for loosely organized communities to
perform tasks formerly reserved to hierarchic
organizations. The difficulties that kept
self-assembled groups from working together are
shrinking, meaning that the number and kinds of
things groups can get done without financial
motivation or managerial oversight are growing.
Shirky 2006, p. 22
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II - Self-organization 1
Self-organization is a process where the entropy
of a system decreases without the system being
guided or managed by external forces. Casadei
et al. 2007 From cybernetics to social theory
cf. Luhmann 1984 , played a special role in
early Internet ideology.
Self-organization often evokes an optimistically
tinged state of nature narrative, a story about
the good way things would evolve if the
meddling hands of corporations and lawyers and
governments and bureaucracies would just stay
away. Weber 2004, p. 132
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II - Self-organization 2
The Internet does restructure public discourse
in ways that give individuals a greater say in
their governance than the mass media made
possible. Benkler 2006, P. 271 As a
descriptive / normative concept for social
organize, self-organization indicates a turning
away from institutions (social establishments) a
shift from statutory to capillary power
This is how it is and how it should be.
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II - Internet as egalitarian
The self-organization narrative has given rise to
two very different accounts cf. Benkler 2006
1 The Internet as egalitarian platform of
free speech We are creating a world where
anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs,
no matter how singular, without fear of being
coerced into silence or conformity. Barlow
1996 Freedom consists not simply in
preference satisfaction but also in the chance to
have preferences and beliefs formed under decent
conditions in the ability to have preferences
formed after exposure to a sufficient amount of
information, and also to an appropriately wide
and diverse range of options. There can be no
assurance of freedom in a system committed to the
Daily Me. Sunstein 2002, p. 50
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II - Internet as Power laws
2 The Internet as skewed, mass-media like
star-system Cyberspace embodies the ultimate
freedom of speech. Some may be offended, others
may love it, but the content of a Webpage is hard
to censor. Once posted, it is available to
hundreds of millions of people. This unparalleled
license of expression, coupled with diminishing
publishing costs, makes the Web the ultimate
forum of democracy everybody's voice can be
heard with equal opportunity. Or so insist
constitutional lawyers and glossy business
magazines. If the Web where a random network,
they would be right. But it is not. The most
intriguing result of our Web-mapping project was
the complete absence of democracy, fairness, and
egalitarian values on the Web. Barabási 2003,
p. 56
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II - Curve Citations
Frequency of scientific citations cf. De Solla
Price 1965
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II - Curve Technorati
Most popular blogs, ( data Technorati, 11/2007 )
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II - Curve Ryze Tribe
Network centrality in a social network tribe (
data Ryze, 01/2003 )
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II - Social mechanisms
Self-organization is used too often as a
placeholder for an unspecified mechanism. The
term becomes a euphemism for I dont really
understand the mechanism that holds the system
together. Weber 2004, p. 132 Benkler
2006 gives a middle ground explanation for the
political blogosphere based on filtering,
accreditation and synthesis mechanisms.
Setting up social mechanisms without formal
establishments.
Institutionalizing without institutions?
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II - Not one mechanism
There is not one single mechanism of organization.
There are many.
Some have a strong technological component.
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III - Three examples
Three examples Search engines News
filtering Wiki software
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III - Google
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III - PageRank
PageRank is based on recursive link analysis.
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III - Golden triangle
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III - Current guiding principles
Link analysis projects the hypertext graph as a
hierarchical list that strongly favors hubs and
networks of hubs. The logic of preferential
attachment is running in a loop.
The two dominant guiding principles currently
are popularity ( the logic of the hit
) convenience ( personalization )
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III - Link analysis and the logic of the hit
We will have to realize that hierarchies fulfill
a semantic function and that semantic systems are
hierarchic by principle. Winkler 1997
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III - Example reddit
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III - Example digg
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III - Example reddit reach
Source alexa.com
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III - Example reddit vs. Google
Source alexa.com
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III - Example reddit pageviews
Source alexa.com
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III - Example reddit comments
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III - Example reddit comments
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III - Example digg comments
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III - Example digg upcoming
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III - Google News
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III - Example MediaWiki
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III - What do platforms shape?
Software applications offer a set of mediated
functions.
Ways of doing are built into software.
Sorting algorithms produce hierarchies and
categories.
Multi-user applications contain models of
collective governance.
What is communication? What is cooperation? Which
information is valuable? What is decision-making?
What is democracy?
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IV - CITATION Democracy!
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach
for my feather Boa! Allen Ginsberg
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IV - CITATION Web 2.0
The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy.
We now have several examples to prove that
amateurs can surpass professionals, when they
have the right kind of system to channel their
efforts. Another place democracy seems to
win is in deciding what counts as news. I never
look at any news site now except Reddit.
Graham 2005
Amateur journalism trivializes and corrupts
serious debate. It is the greatest nightmare of
political theorists throughout the ages, from
Plato to Aristotle to Edmund Burke and Hannah
Arendt the degeneration of democracy into the
rule of the mob and the rumor mill. Keen 2007
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IV - Democracy as central term
Democracy? Government of the people, by the
people, for the people! The Internet is
democratic! (or destroys democracy!)
The Internet is governed in a democratic fashion.
Certain applications allow for governing certain
functions in a democratic fashion.
The Internet is difficult to censor.
The Internet is a better public sphere than mass
media.
The Internet bypasses cultural elites and
redistributes symbolic capital.
The Internet shifts power from statutory to
capillary.
What is the core of democracy? Deliberation?
Voting? Lawmaking? Collective problem solving?
Fundamental rights? Consensus? Public service?
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IV - Democracy as community
There are (at the very least) two dominant
understandings of democracy 1 Democracy as
community To depend on great thinkers,
authorities, and experts is, it seems to me, a
violation of the spirit of democracy. Democracy
rests on the idea that, except for technical
details for which experts may be useful, the
important decisions of society are within the
capability of ordinary citizens. Not only can
ordinary people make decisions about these
issues, but they ought to, because citizens
understand their own interests more clearly than
any experts. Zinn 2003
Based on the ideal of the New England Town
Meeting. On any moral question, I would rather
have the opinion of Boxboro than of Boston
and New York put together. Thoreau 1854
The hope is that information technology can scale
up the community.
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IV - Democracy as society
2 Democracy as society I believe that a
democratic society is not and cannot be a
community, where by a community I mean a body of
persons united in affirming the same
comprehensive, or partially comprehensive
doctrine. Rawls 2001, p. 3
Governance of large-scale, complex, heterogeneous
societies.
Based on complicated mechanisms. Strong
institutions of governance limited by checks and
balances. Fundamental rights, representation, and
publicness Schudson 1997 . Meritocracy
rather than cultural equality.
Statutory vs. capillary power Naïve vs. cynical
politics
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IV - Drifting apart
We are witnessing permanent clashes between the
giants of flesh and steel and the new home of
mind Barlow 1996 . Examples DMCA, HADOPI,
Internetsperren, etc.
Statutory power seeks to limit capillary
power. Capillary power desists and circumvents.
Behind the curtain, capillary power has scaled up.
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IV - Platform power
Platform power.
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IV - Cockroach vs. Kitten 2
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IV - The Internet is
The Internet is a malleable technology. Its
design changes. The applications it hosts change.
The way people use it changes.
We do not need any final judgments on whether the
Internet democratizes or not, but to untangle
its contradictory trajectories.
We to think about how we want our democracies to
work and make the Internet part of that process.
There will have to be compromise.
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The End
Thank you for your attention. bernhard.rieder_at_uni
v-paris8.fr http//bernhard.rieder.fr http//thepo
liticsofsystems.net