Andrea Di MaioOn my way back to Milan from Brussels, I flew next to a neurologist and we started chatting about neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer or senile dementia. I have an old mother who is still almost fit, but starts showing signs of memory loss and mild cognitive disorders. I asked him what can be done to fight these symptoms and slow down the degenerative process (assuming it is not Alzheimer of course). He said that the key is “active stimulation”. He said that just reading books or doing cross puzzles does not help much, because the subject is passively stimulated, so he or she reads or does what he or she wants to read or do. Active stimulation implies interaction with other people, reacting to their questions, adapting to their environment, and so forth. He also said that this takes a constant effort and needs to be planned in advance, when a person is still relatively young to set the basis for his or her future social life.
I found that this is an interesting metaphor for e-government. Governments say that they want to gather people input through all sorts of e-democracy or e-participation means. However what they mostly do is to read those inputs at a place, at a time and with an approach of their choice: an e-government portal, a government blog, a web survey, and so forth.
But isn’t this like “passive stimulation”? If you want to keep a subject socially active you need to provide him or her with active stimulation. In my metaphor, this means that governments should accept to be engaged by their constituents as opposed to try to engage them. This means that they should play on somebody else’s social networks and not build theirs, they should engage in external blogs and wikis and not maintain theirs, should offer their information and services to be combined with external ones in ways that they do not anticipate.
If they don’t accept to be engaged, their detachment from society will inevitably increase. And, as the neurologist said, at some point in this process there is nothing you can do to reverse, stop or even slow it down.
Category: e-government web 2.0 in government Tags: web 2.0
4 responses so far ↓
1 Philip Allea October 4, 2008 at 4:48 am
It appears that democractic ociety has agreed to a process by which “Active stimulation” can be engaged – the election season. Once elected, a return to a more controlled environment ensues.
The Richstag has a clear roof so that the citizens can always look in to see what their government is doing. Direct participation and engagement alleviates the middleman, the representative of the consituency. Can we all participate? Would we all participate? Would we engage in active stimulation in our political future as was once done in society?
There were arguments in the press in the UK that the personality contest of US politics is the final debasement of a democracy. Active engagement at the level of the citizen is not based upon political discussions of the future of society but upon the personality of the candidate.
I was in Sweden all this week and no one could grasp this idea that one can vote for someone because they “like them”.
Separation of likeability and competency as 2 axes on a matrix would illustrate that the likeable/competent is the preferred person, but the likeable/incompetent is choice 2. Unlikeable/competent is tolerated. Unlikeable/incompetent is ignored. Harvard Business Review published a study on this a few years ago for other purposes. However, it does help explain the simplicity by which voters divide the candidates and then allocate their allegiance, and their vote.
A sad reflection upon the state of democracy if we are only active during election season. And, if at that time we are only willing to debate the likeability of the person rather than policies or platforms the person represents then we will get the results we seem to want – a further and accelerating detachment.
It might be interesting to create a matrix of level of citizen engagement in politics versus level of happiness with their governement. Would disengagement and unhappiness be a match, or not? What would be the attributes of such a government be – their policies, the types of technology used to engage their citizens?
2 Philip Allea October 4, 2008 at 4:51 am
Hmmmm…fast typing and reading results after the fact sees the new term “democratic ociety” crop up in my previous posting. Could that have been an unconcious slip that such a society as described is an “ociety” (e.g., society with the “s”)?
Maybe it was just a slip on the keyboard.
3 Tom Bittman October 9, 2008 at 2:35 am
Andrea, just wanted you to know I sent a link to this blog to our local board of education, dealing with questions of how much to open up tech access in the school, how to engage the students using new technologies, etc. This was perfect. Thanks!
4 Web 2.0 Apps Winners Chosen in D.C. November 13, 2008 at 2:26 pm
[...] Now this is the kind of active stimulation that governments need to understand the difference between aiming to citize-centric and actually becoming citizen-driven (see my earlier post for a neurological analogy). [...]