Geert Lovink, in his book ‘Zero Comments’ (2007), argued that blogs were the cause of a “decay of traditional broadcast media” … exhibiting “a ‘nihilist impulse’ to empty out established meaning structures.” In a network based on reciprocal linking and peer-recognition, he wrote that the “lowest rung of the new Internet hierarchy are those blogs and sites that receive no user feedback or ‘zero comments’.”

Zero Comments is something that I know about….

The report MPs online: Connecting with constituents published today by the Hansard Society touches on the decay of traditional media in its investigation into the attitudes of our Parliamentarians towards ‘new media’, it’s use and its value to them in political communications.

The internet creates “an opportunity to restructure communication between MPs and their constituents” writes Andy Williamson in the Background to the report. ” This has,” he writes, “led to both an increase in opportunity and, in some cases, motivation for MPs to communicate online.” He continues

“It is not just the volume and immediacy of communication that is changed by the internet, new network technologies change the very nature of communication, conversation and engagement and this is clearly visible across the wider online world.”

While the use of ICT has increased year on year, much of the experimentation with internet based communications by political parties, elected representatives, government departments and other bodies such as local Councils tends to miss opportunities for modifying the practices of communication away from vertical, uni-directional marketing and message propagation. Frequently we see not ‘zero comments’ but actually no comments at all. Where the experiment is with a ’social networking website, some corporate bodies have ‘zero friends’ (although Stockport Council has a few friends now, following an ‘OLD media’ source printing a story about it).

Andy Williamson concludes that

The internet has had a demonstrable impact on parliamentary communication. Most MPs are now communicating online and many have websites, some blogs and a handful maintain a presence on social networking sites. Although the internet does clearly support MPs to become more independent, the primary paradigm remains rooted in the party model. The foregoing suggests that the internet is a tool to communicate outwards, self-promote for the purposes of re-election and to gauge opinion and it is not seen as a tool to aid representation or to enhance engagement: internet-based communication by MPs is largely about delivery and devoid of strategies for engagement.

(MPs online: Connecting with constituents, 2009, p. 6)

It’s published.

A new Hansard Society report, sponsored by Microsoft, MPs Online: Connecting with Constituents, reveals that MPs are using the internet primarily to inform their constituents rather than engage with them. The most widely used digital media are those which are mainly passive in nature, such as website. Interactive forms of media which could be used by MPs to develop a two-way dialogue with their constituents, such as blogs and social networking, are used less commonly. Where these tools are used, it is often in passive ’send’ mode with few MPs exploiting their full interactive potential.

Sponsored by M$? Since when did M$ make any ’social media’ tools?

Just digging around the Hansard Society website for a copy of the report on MPs online, published by the e-democracy unit and I found the blurb for this event, The Online Campaign, in late March.

The use of online strategies is becoming increasingly important, encouraging grass-roots activism and enabling mass mobilisation. But there is no guarantee that the cooption of online strategies will guarantee electoral success or promote healthy dialogue between politicians and citizens.

Chair: Dr Laura Miller (Hansard Society eDemocracy programme)
Speakers: Derek Draper (LabourList.org), Mark Pack (libdemvoice.org), Jonathan Isaby (ConservativeHome.blogs.com)

Tuesday 24 March, 10am, House of Commons, Westminster.

I wonder if the new Director of Digital Engagement will be in post by then and if that person will attend this event.

Just been listening to the Toady programme on R4 and heard in the news report at 8am that the Hansard Society had published a report on MPs online. According to the Societies’ website, this “research attempts to understand how MPs themselves feel the internet affects the way that they work and communicate with their constituents. The research includes a survey of MPs and a focus group of MPs and their office staff.”

I’d love to share more with you, but the report is not yet available online for downloading or purchasing.

I’ve recently been following Tony Curzon-Price’s essay The Liberty of the Networked (and part 2 and part 3) published over at the excellent openDemocracy.net to coincide in with The Convention on Modern Liberty to be held in London and across the UK on February 28th. Tony’s paper considers the social role of technology with regards to political thought and activity, comparing the liberty of the Ancients with the liberty of the Moderns to discover the liberty of the Networked.

With regard to TCPs use of  Nozic’s Anarchy, State, Utopia to interrogate the hyper-individualised networked society I had this to say (emphasis added):

Amongst the libertarian Nozick’s many failures in Anarchy, State, Utopia is his failure to properly deal with conflict between his ahistorical individuals. It is the abstraction of the individual and the social order in Nozick’s work dislocates individuals from themselves, from the choices they make and the communities they form that is the source of conflict. What the neo-Kantian Nozick fails to recognise in demanding the priority of individual rights over the common good is that this “can only exist in a certain type of society with specific institutions and that it is a consequence of the democratic revolution.” (Chantelle Mouffe, 2005, The Return of the Political, p.65) That is to say that neo-Kantian liberals fail to recognise the historicity of liberalism, for some reason missing the very context of the emergence of liberal political theory from the struggle against arbitrary and absolute authority.

So what then of politics in our liberal age? Do we really have to choose between the liberty of the Ancients and the liberty of the Moderns? No. We do not have to accept a false dichotomy between individual liberty and rights, i.e. the choice of the neo-Kantians, or between civic activity and a strong political community. As Mouffe argues “Our choice is not only one between an aggregate of individuals without a common public concern and a pre-modern community organized around a single substantive idea of the common good. To envisage the modern democratic political community outside of this dichotomy is the crucial challenge” (ibid).

The project of the networked liberal is then to defend extend and deepen the liberty of the networked and to democratically build meaningful institutions to articulate and resolve conflict.

The problematic of what sort of institutions - through which claims, of rights or otherwise, can be articulated and conflict mediated - would work in a networked society is often underthorised at the expense of an over-emphasis on the negative spectres of Orwell, Kafka and other writers on totalitarian politics. I’m not trying to play down the dangers to our socio-political relationships, threatened by the database state or the surveillance state. I’m simply more interested in the challenge from Mouffe (2005) to find meaningful frameworks beyond the institutions of modern liberal democracy. These are themes continued in Dean, Anderson and Lovink (2006) ‘Reformatting Politics’; a collection of papers on the notion of post-democracy, information technology and global civil society.

I’m going to post again on this topic with regard to the current fluttering around ideas of new localism in the UKs political settlement as the themes of liberty, democracy and the nature of politics in network society remain open and contested: hackable. Investigating the positive possibilities rather than imagining dark nightmares is my contribution to the Convention and to civil society.