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What does a public realm look like, if it is no longer
oriented around a central state government, with a single
focus for civil society? This essentially is the question
that the left confronts every time it sets about the hazardous
task of decentralising power.
Could a public sphere consist of multiple over-lapping,
but integrated conversations, some local and some non-local?
Could civic engagement be reconceptualised to include the
informal social networks that we organise, as well as the
formal political structures which organise us? Look at the
latest social and civic uses of the internet, and it's clear
that the answer is yes. The internet, we argue, offers both
the mental template and the practical opportunity which
the left sorely needs if it is to make decentralisation
commensurable with its belief in public action.
Part of the problem is that decentralisation was the political
preserve of the right over much of the twentieth century.
The Thatcher governments may have done their best to emasculate
local government, but they also succeeded in devolving many
of the state's responsibilities to the market. Decentralisation
meant privatisation, the flip-side to the neoclassical suspicion
that centralisation equalled socialism. And thus a relatively
simple equation developed for the first two decades of the
post-Keynesian era: 'centralised' was synonymous with 'public',
while 'decentralised' was synonymous with 'private'. This
goes some way to explaining why the traditional left has
felt so uncomfortable with decentralisation, as demonstrated
to full effect in its opposition to Foundation Trust Hospitals.
It struggles to develop a narrative in which ideas of publicness
and citizenship are not intimately tied to the notion of
the state, because it remains deeply - often legitimately
- fearful that a strong and centralised state is the only
effective buffer against the tides of the market.
The ideological battles of the 1970s, '80s and '90s not
only positioned 'public' and 'private' as mutually exclusive,
but often as adversaries to one another. Similarly, the
liberal ideal of equality through fairness seems equally
difficult to uphold unless fundamentally organised around
a single and centralised law-issuing body. Three hundred
and fifty years on, it is difficult to conceive of a philosophical
replacement for Thomas Hobbes's original vision of the modern
state in which its legitimacy resides, at least in part,
in its incontestability (Hobbes, 1996). How can a society
be fair if there are competing centres of power, with potentially
incommensurable notions of fairness? How can there be multiple
sources of authority, and multiple public spheres, without
that risking a ghettoisation of civil society?
These are significant political, economic and philosophical
anxieties, but New Labour is not driven by politics, economics
and philosophy alone. Because, while neo-conservatism, socialism
and liberalism may all be creeds that rely on a clear distinction
between the centre and the populace, sociological and technological
trends over the past thirty years have undermined the veracity
of this distinction, in turn undermining the plausibility
of the 'isms' that rely on it. A correct description of
the sociotechnical forces towards decentralisation may turn
out to be a more useful political route-map than the sort
of Platonist political theory that invariably builds towards
an ideal role for the state.
The influence of sociology over New Labour (and indeed
over its favoured economists) has led to a uniquely pragmatic
era of policy-making, in which evidence of effectiveness
can now rival both fiscal and ideological motivations for
government interventions. 'Localism' and heightened awareness
of social capital are amongst the fruits of this. In the
government's Local Government White Paper of 2001, it was
clear that New Labour's desire to give power away was not
born so much out of hard principle, but out of the considered
view that there may be more than one way to skin a cat.
Moreover, not all of these necessarily involve Whitehall.
Invisible Villages
A more challenging proposition still is whether the pursuit
of our social and ethical goals necessarily involves forms
of government at all, or whether entirely new means of achieving
public co-operation may be emerging. Tony Blair has recently
commented that New Labour intends to push power down below
the level of local government, to neighbourhoods themselves
(The Guardian, 28.11.03). If this is to occur, New Labour
will have to become both more pragmatic and more daring,
while looking to a broader variety of governance systems
and sources of useful co-operation. The challenge, then,
is to develop and defend a model of the public realm that
doesn't place government at its centre, as both socialism
(in which government is there to resist the market) and
liberalism (in which government is there to regulate public
interaction) require.
By being simultaneously public, and yet without centre,
the internet provides both a model and a set of possibilities
for this to happen. The politics of the web are potentially
threatening to traditional political conceptions, but then,
with only half of the electorate bothering to vote in the
last general election, so are the politics of British society.
Political decentralisation is not an ideological attack
on socialism or liberalism, but a necessary reaction to
sociotechnical reality - if an attack has occurred at all,
it has been from society and its most sophisticated tools,
not from theorists or politicians. The question is whether
left-wing political values can be upheld in this new context.
One further consequence of this context is that progressives
and one- nation conservatives often look spookily similar
to one another. When those on the left speak of civic renewal
and community revival, they may seek to position themselves
in the tradition of the early co-ops and mutuals, but often
seem to be appealing to those 'little platoons' that Edmund
Burke placed at the heart of British conservatism. It is
easy but also dangerous to encourage strong cultural traditions
to plug the gap left by a receding state. The project of
the left, by contrast, must continue to focus on the features
of our society which unite us, rather than those cultural
traits which divide us. Fundamentally, it is this that should
make internet-based politics a key part of a left-wing agenda
for communities.
The first thing to do is properly describe and conceptualise
what Manuel Castells has termed 'The Network Society'. Early
on in his iconic trilogy on this theme, Castells asserts
that: 'Our societies are increasingly organised around a
bi-polar opposition between the Net [i.e. networks of one
form or another] and the Self ' (Castells, 1996, p3). To
see a world made up of networks is to see one that lacks
unambiguous sources of authority. The constituents of a
network are not specific units, with specific nuclei, but
extended systems of 'links' and 'nodes'. Some nodes may
be more influential than others, and some may become so
influential as to be described as 'hubs' - individuals,
cities or web sites, for instance, that attain positions
of high strategic importance and connectivity. But the political
character of the Network Society is one of ambiguity, in
which sovereignty is distributed.
The transformations which make this analysis compelling
are part social, part technological.1 Firstly, the various
cultural revolutions that began in the 1960s have resulted
in a vastly more individualised society, in which identity
is increasingly chosen by the individual, rather than bestowed
by the community. The successes of feminism are among the
most obvious manifestations of this. Collectively, this
translates into what Canadian sociologist Barry Wellman
terms 'Networked Individualism', a reorganisation of communities
around a principle of individual sovereignty, meaning that
'community has become embedded in social networks not in
groups' (2001a).
Secondly, the spread and globalisation of sophisticated
technological networks - namely transport and telecommunications
- have enabled social networks to escape the confines of
locality. Add to this the dramatic acceleration and diffusion
of information processing capabilities, and the opportunity
arises for an entirely new model of information gathering
and distribution, that challenges the supremacy of bureaucracies.
Production of goods (e.g. electronics) and services (e.g.
call centres) becomes reliant on complex webs of global
socio-technical relationships. Equally, opportunities for
globally co-ordinated civic activities arise, as for instance
recent anti-war demonstrations have shown. Once information
is no longer scarce, the ability to act on it in a co-ordinated
fashion suddenly comes to matter more than the ability to
store it. Or to use Max Weber's famous distinction, charismatic
legitimacy starts to trump bureaucratic legitimacy.
Political analyses of these socio-technical shifts seem
constantly to focus on an alleged crisis which this heralds
for the nation state. States, along with those excluded
from exclusive networks, are seen to be mournfully anchored
to their geographic identities, while financial capital
and social elites move around the world. Governments and
their less advantaged citizens are local; elites, their
money and their knowledge, are non-local. The fracturing
of society into the mobile and the immobile is a dominant
way of understanding globalisation (see Bauman, 1998).
However, the network society heralds similar shifts on
a less expansive scale, that is, within nations, regions
and cities. The twin forces of individualism and advances
in networked infrastructure lead to a stretching of many
informal social networks over distance, and accelerate the
decline of local identity. 'Non-local community', as Wellman
terms it, is a feature of the network society, whereby individuals
increasingly affiliate in more geographically dispersed
networks.
It is silly to suggest that this spatial agility represents
'the death of distance' or a 'global village', but it nevertheless
raises profound questions as to what 'localism' and geographic
devolution actually mean. For at the most grass-roots level,
'social capital' - the informal networks and norms which
facilitate co-operation without third party intervention
- requires a certain degree of relationships to be locally
based. Despite the pessimism which frequently imbues discussions
of social capital, there is no strong evidence to suggest
that levels of sociability or civic engagement are in decline
in the UK, but there is evidence to suggest that social
networks are becoming less local, and less socio-economically
integrated (see Hall, 2002). This is good news for restaurants,
but bad news for bus shelters.
Mixed tenure housing provides a useful example. Mixing
tenures is hoped to combat social exclusion, open access
to labour markets, and destigmatise certain neighbourhoods.
But these hopes often rest on the presumption that social
networks will expand within the housing estate across socio-economic
divisions, which is not all that realistic. A Demos study
of mixed tenure housing found that while 64 per cent of
people knew more than five people (by name) of the same
tenure on their estate, only 17 per cent of people knew
more than five people of different tenure on their estate
(see Jupp 1999, p38). In general, it appeared that the most
meaningful and useful social ties were those that connected
residents outside of their estate, rather than inside. Again,
in line with Wellman's argument, the pulling away of community
from geography is a defining feature of our times - indeed,
as Giddens has argued, of modernity (1991).
The most significant decentralisations of power, then,
have not been occurring from one place to another - for
instance from London to Brussels - but from places to fluid
networks. At a national and international level, a conventional
political response is to attempt to turn 'spaces' into 'places',
that is, to find ways of attracting and anchoring human
and financial capital to particular locations. The growth
in iconic architecture, for instance, aims to lure business
and people to the likes of Newcastle or Bilbao, to reconnect
the local with the non-local (see 'Landmarks of Hope and
Glory', The Observer, 26.10.03). In such circumstances,
political devolution is not born out of petty cultural nostalgia,
but out of a desperate need to create a new sense of location
in the eyes of global capitalists, because even they need
to locate an office somewhere. But what is the equivalent
at the level of the community or the neighbourhood? After
all, Frank Gehry cannot be brought in to redesign every
park bench. Instead, community renewal can be understood
in one of two ways. Either it can rest on a sociologically
naive and politically regressive appeal to cultural identity,
or it can seek out new and rational bases for cooperation
rooted in cosmopolitanism. The left should not be entertaining
the former, yet it struggles to imagine a viable form of
local publicness that can take forward the latter. On the
evidence of turn-out, local government itself has less legitimacy
in the eyes of voters than central government (a significant
inversion of the situation in the US, from where so much
of New Labour's localist zeal is borrowed).
The starting point must be this: that while locality may
no longer be a rich source of identity, it is still a constant
source of everyday problems which require co-operative solutions.
At the neighbourhood level, it is shared problems that link
'space' to 'place', that relate individuals to local communities.
The Demos study cited above was cautious, but found that
'people will often come together to tackle a problem if
they believe it is genuinely common, serious and immediate.
What they need is some sort of structure which helps them
(Jupp, 1999, p59). Solutions are required that are not private
and informal - as social networks are - nor conventionally
public and formal - as official governmental structures
are - but carve a path between the two.
Web communities?
At first glance it would seem odd to suggest that the internet
can carve this path on behalf of local communities. To many,
the internet and its 'virtual communities' provide the least
local, the least place-based form of social interaction.
If it is technology networks that underpin the growing mobility
of individuals and spatial agility of communities, then
the net must surely be as responsible as any other piece
of infrastructure. Wellman has argued as much: 'The proliferation
of computer networks has facilitated a de-emphasis on group
solidarities at work and in the community and afforded a
turn to networked societies that are loosely bounded and
sparsely knit' (2001b). This is not automatically to say
that the internet is an entirely virtual and parallel world,
although it can be. Instead, Wellman and others stress that
the social connections made on the web overlap with our
real world, face-to-face relationships. Although chat rooms
may offer a surreal escape from conventional day-to-day
community, more dominant social uses of the net involve
people communicating with those who they know through some
real world connection. Studies throughout the 1990s indicated
that the net was most commonly used to support non-local
communities that existed anyway (such as diasporas), rather
than to create new communities altogether (see Meredith
2002).
However, fairly recently, an entirely different attitude
has developed towards the role of the internet in community,
and this is one that carries tremendous promise for location-based
politics. The presumption that the internet will support
long-distance social connections or distribute information
in a global and anonymous fashion is, of course, contingent
on its users, and this is what's changing. Through the 1980s
and most of the 1990s, internet users were so few in number,
and so sparsely spread, that they inevitably found themselves
communicating over great distance. Now that close to 75
per cent of people in Britain are regularly using the net,
a different picture is emerging. As users become denser,
the internet becomes more local. (Thus, for example, Hampton
(2000) explores how a fully integrated broadband network
can improve local social capital.)
But there's a second change which is needed to accompany
this trend, which has only just begun: the opportunities
for different types of online communication are being expanded.
Emailing and web-publishing - the most common ways of using
the internet - have quite traditional socio-political functions.
The former (despite its rising constitutional significance)
approximates a private conversation, usually between people
with some prior offline connection. The latter, meanwhile,
seems modelled on a public broadcast, a way of transmitting
information to the global populace. But think of how many
variations of communication could be possible between these
two conventional models. Consider the opportunity to make
a conversation slightly more public, or to make a broadcast
slightly more private.
The proliferation of new 'social software' is revealing
the web's true social character (see Davies 2003). Like
the society around it, the internet has certain hubs but
it lacks unambiguous sources of authority. Admittedly, there
is a reflexivity here, as the web has done much to undermine
existing bureaucratic expertise, especially in an area like
health care. The decentralised world of the web offers a
vast variety of models for how public spheres can be created
of different sizes, with governance systems to fit.
Prior to the web, there was rarely a middle ground between
informal, private interaction and formal, public engagement
(a church being an obvious exception), but the difference
between the two has always been partly one of scale. Friendship
networks can co-operate very easily, but partly because
only a handful of people are organised at any one time.
Meanwhile, a union of several thousand people can only co-ordinate
itself through rules, and the firm authority of publicly
accountable leaders. What the web enables is a middle ground
between the two, that in some cases is analogous to the
mechanisms of a small village. A village can achieve high
levels of co-operation with little third party interference,
on the basis that is limited to a certain size, and information
is effectively distributed. A village has a form of public
space, but it is unlike urban space - it is quasi-public,
over-lapping with private space. A village is rife with
what two Intel researchers call 'familiar strangers'.2 Local
software projects are capable of creating 'invisible villages'
in cities, ways of illuminating the shared interests of
local people without expecting them to become friends. Early
examples already exist. Upmystreet Conversations creates
a message board organised around post-code (that is, to
the nearest 14 houses), thereby (in the words of its creators)
'mapping cyber to space.3Meanwhile, neighbourhood email
lists and experiments in wired communities such as Tenant
Spin in Liverpool specialise in distributing information
on a very local level. This distribution of information
potentially creates a sense of shared local interest, but
without necessarily requiring more face-to-face interaction
or any stronger cultural identification. What it does is
to shrink the public realm, or expand the private realm,
in such a way that co-operation becomes more rational. An
invisible village may resemble one of Edmund Burke's 'little
platoons', but the members of the platoon are not expected
to be intimate with one another, or especially similar to
one another.
Politics and the Public Realm
There are two important political aspects to this new type
of public realm. Firstly, the decentralised, quasi-public
realm that the internet creates must have appropriately
quasi-official authorities. Social entrepreneurs and those
with some 'hacker' credentials have a better record of using
the web for governance purposes than very large organisations,
and should be encouraged (Crabtree 2003). Governments or
corporations that attempt to use the internet to interact
with the public will fail, unless they can somehow triangulate
that communication via independent, quasi-official third
parties. The public character of online space is not that
it is official, but that it is open, and often it is best
to prioritise the latter at the expense of the former. For
example, Brent Council deliberately do not place their logo
on their community web site, for fear that this will somehow
de-legitimise, rather than legitimise it.4
Secondly, a sliding scale of communication models exists
all the way between a private chat and a public broadcast.
For this reason the web offers some means of reconnecting
informal, bottom-up social interaction with formal, top-down
political bodies. We have to be cautious of exaggerating
its ability to do this, or for misunderstanding what kind
of role central government can have on the web - the ability
to email the prime minister is an unnecessary gimmick. A
more honest model is provided by the BBC's new iCan portal,
in which users are able to communicate with other users
on civic issues which concern them, while also having the
resources to find out about the more formal and official
political structures which they inhabit.5 Decentralised
communication and centralised information provision hover
around one another, while remaining distinct. The proximity
of official information to informal conversations obviously
benefits the latter, but the BBC also hopes the inverse
is true, and that bottom-up, decentralised communication
will come to influence their centralised media activities.
It makes little sense to think of the world wide web as
a global public space, because there is little evidence
of a global public to occupy it. Instead, it is a vast network
of inter-linking public spaces, a model of how we can occupy
multiple public realms, some local, some non-local. But
crucially, the very purpose and essence of the web is towards
inter-communicability and social integration. This is a
decentralised technology, that is incapable of supporting
complete cultural ghettoisation - which is not to say that
it automatically leads to homogeneous globalisation either.
This is a model of decentralised publicness that steers
between parochial nostalgia and neoliberal privatisation,
and it's a model that the left must embrace.
William Davies works on The Work Foundation's iSociety
project, which investigates technology in everyday life
in the UK.
James Crabtree is an associate at the IPPR, and
Director of Voxpolitics. They are coauthors of a New Local
Government Network pamphlet on this topic, to be published
in Spring 2004.
Endnotes
1. Castells is careful not to place primacy either on social
or technological drivers: 'The dilemma of technological
determinism is probably a false problem, since technology
is society, and society cannot be understood or represented
without its technological tools' (1996, p5).
2. See 'The Familiar Stranger Project' at www.berkeley.intel-research.net/paulos/research/
familiarstranger/
3. See www.forums.upmystreet.com/cnv/, and the presentation
given on the topic at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
2004 available at www.plasticbag.org/archives/
2003/04/upmystreet_conversations_mapping_cyber_to_space.shtml
4. See www.brent.gov.uk/brain/welcome.nsf
5. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/
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