Andrea Di MaioYesterday I happened to read an intriguing and contrarian post by Umair Haque on the Harvard Business Review blog. Although certainly controversial, as many of the comments he received pointed out, it is somewhat refreshing, as it challenges the common wisdom that social media are creating value. He suggests that relationships created through social media are shallow:
The “relationships” at the heart of the social bubble aren’t real because they’re not marked by mutual investment . At most, they’re marked by a tiny chunk of information or attention here or there.
and offers five observations supporting his assertion:
- The manyfold increase in number of “friend” has not led to a rise in trust
- Social tools have not replaced intermediaries of all sorts (such as PR agencies, recruiters, etc).
- The social web fuels lots of hate against people, places or subjects
- People self organize into very homogeneous groups and sometimes obsessive and rather narrow common interests
- There is little to no value in relationships created over the Internet, which is proven by the fact that people and advertisers do not pay to enjoy them
He also makes a direct observation about government:
The internet itself isn’t disempowering government by giving voices to the traditionally voiceless; it’s empowering authoritarian states to limit and circumscribe freedom by radically lowering the costs of surveillance and enforcement. So much for direct, unmediated relationships.
One can agree or disagree with Umair’s view, but it is undeniable that, so far, the value of social media is in the eyes of the beholder. Most conversations around government 2.0 or open government are based on the assumption that social networking – as enabled by technology – will revolutionize the way citizens relate to each other and to institutions. I, for one, have been theorizing that the future of government is one where all boundaries blur and quite a few government functions get complemented, altered or replaced by social networks.
Reality is that nobody really knows. We can just observe how behaviors and attitude change, how people formulate their opinions and make their choices under the influence of their social relations, but is this any different from what we were doing before, when we would go to a movie than a real (as opposed to a virtual) friend would recommend, or choose a doctor who has successfully treated a friend of a friend? Social tools give us a greater number of contacts, but isn’t this the triumph of breadth vs depth?
As our research shows, the value of a social network is closely linked to how common and compelling its purpose is for its participants. As Umair says, people self-organize into groups of like for like. An interesting example of this is politics. I am currently following a number of discussion groups in Facebook, as we have local elections in Italy, and I am impressed with how cohesive certain groups are by self-reinforcing their positions and rejecting – often quite violently – opinions offered by others. I do remember greater openness to dialogue in the late seventies, when left and right wing supporters would hit each other in the streets but also listen to each other positions at school meetings. Social networks seem to have made extreme positions even more extreme, which supports Umair’s point about “hate”.
As governments plan their engagement strategies, it is important to look at the dark as well as at the bright side of social networking. To what extent does this constitute a new phenomenon that allows more effective citizen engagement and to what extent it just exaggerates some traits of citizen-to-government relationships, making engagement more rather than less difficult?
In my research I have said many times that it is important for governments to listen and be open to what people are doing with social networks, in order to leverage he value of social networking and connect with social initiatives. But how can they determine whether those initiatives are the expression of a bi-partisan desire to solve real problems, rather than hiding the agenda of few (or many) individuals who want to profit from changes in government service delivery, policies and operations?
One could argue that such a problem would not occur on social channels created and administered by government agencies themselves. I do not believe this is the case either, since the way smart people (or reckless or motivated or both) can manipulate the dynamics of social networking in ways that the average government employee (and the average citizen) cannot detect or contrast.
This rather negative view would suggest that it is better to keep looking at social media with skepticism, accepting that most relationships will remain shallow, and that government should focus on re-asserting its single version of the truth (when it comes to data or services) and actively challenge the trust that citizens may be putting in those social networks.
But is this a sustainable position to take? Not really, because the erosion of the truth vs trust equation is already happening. Citizens as well as government employees are already exposed to multiple social networks and – irrespective of whether this is a bubble or not – their behaviors are changing and put increasing faith for increasingly critical decision into those shallow relationships that Umair dismisses.
We are all together on a rather steep learning curve to understand the answer to the very question posed by Umair’s post: how can we determine the value (as well as the risks) of social networking?
As usual, there won’t be a single answer, nor any best practice, as it will depend on many different elements (demographics, domain, jurisdiction, political context, and so forth). There will be cases where social networks will make government more effective, efficient, flexible, participative; as well as cases where they will make government operations more difficult and expensive; and other cases where they will be on a collision course with the very concept of government and the principles of democracy. There won’t be a single way to deal with them, to categorize them and to anticipate their impact and evolution.
We all have to accept that we are on a journey together and we have to watch out for each other to extract value for us and society as a whole, as well as to shield us and those we care about (be they real or virtual relationships) from its inevitable risks.
Category: social networks in government Tags: government 2.0
14 responses so far ↓
1 Alan W. Silberberg March 25, 2010 at 4:48 am
Andrea,
This is an interesting take. I will point out some different perspectives.
Social media is evolving. So is Government 2.0. So What is Social Media teaching us about how best to utilize these tools for implementation of “Gov 2.0″ or Government 2.0?
1. Social media tools, when used correctly ie, in a two way conversational framework develop an engaged group of “followers” versus the one way “broadcast framework” that simply builds a list of names.
2. Governments are all about people. It is the people who use these tools, it is people making decisions, and it is people who learn from outside applications of these tools to activate in the new environment.
3. The “bubble” of social media is more a problem of Bubbles within National and State Capitols caused by a group of people who feel no one else should know their business. The Bubble of social media actually provides light and transparency into those closed bubbles, even when the closed bubbles are burst, while kicking and screaming the whole way.
4. There is inherent inertia against change within most Governments. Your points above seem to support those seeking not to change.
Alan W. Silberberg
Founder, CEO, You2Gov
Founder, Gov20LA
2 Andrea Di Maio March 25, 2010 at 4:59 am
@Alan, thanks for yor insight. I knew I would get a comment like your point (4). Let me take your observations one by one:
1. I do agree and I have made this point many times speaking about the “asymmetry of gov 2.0″ that is perpetrated by many government agencies
2. Indeed, but I would argue that it is a bit early to claim that new aggregations of people can replace institutions that are democratically elected and work according to a constitution and a body of laws. Many years from now it is very possible that we will see very different forms of government, but for the time being government is what it is.
3. I only partially agree. I would argue that the bubble is also fueled by those who make a business out of transparency (also covered in previous post). This is indeed one of the areas where the question about “value for people” should be asked more frequently and answered more convincingly by the “usual suspects” of 2.0
4. You are right and I have been discussing this with clients who were working on gov 2.0 strategies and did not want to even mention “risks” because they said this would give additional ammo to those who like the status quo. My point is that this is a change that can’t be resisted. So it is much better to understand what the risks are upfront, and manage them, rather than being caught off guard and witness a pushback when it’s way too late
3 Natasha Khramtsovsky March 25, 2010 at 5:33 am
Alan W. Silberberg wrote: “There is inherent inertia against change within most Governments”
Actually, any stable system has this “inertia”, and in moderation it is necessary and useful. It prevents innovations from being too swift and too stupid
Remove this inertia, and you may get instability both in government and in the society.
4 uberVU - social comments March 25, 2010 at 6:07 am
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by AndreaDiMaio: Government 2.0 and the Social Media Bubble – http://bit.ly/aSNvin #gov20…
5 Carl Haggerty March 25, 2010 at 7:15 am
Very Interesting and i think that you could have written this post without even talking about social technologies as it has to some degree just replicated and amplified what already exists in society.
In terms of Government and social technologies, as mentioned by Alan, this is still very new to Government and because of its potential to fundamentally change the way the “system” operates we will inevitably focus on the dark side instead of the positives. Plus we don’t seem to have the same coverage of “good stories” over “bad stories”.
The challenge is not with the technology but with people, organisations and leaders. The dark side is only a reflection of how society works now, so we are only acknowledging the issues of extreme and marginalised groups anyway. But isn’t this what democracy is supposed to be about?
The opportunity of these tools needs to be explored in the right context and in the right way to ensure sustained participation and engagement. We will always struggle to fight for peoples “participation bandwidth” (ref: Engagement Economy) regardless of whether we use technology or not.
6 Craig Thomler March 25, 2010 at 7:17 am
Hi Andrea,
As your post is reflecting on Umair Haque’s statements I thought I should address his first.
He stated that “The “relationships” at the heart of the social bubble aren’t real because they’re not marked by mutual investment”.
I’m interested at how he drew this conclusion as the social networks I participate in, watch, analyse and hear discussed are all based on groups of people sharing their time, creative ability and individual knowledge and expertise for mutual benefit. There’s a great deal of investment that goes on. It may not be an investment that Humair values, but it’s an investment that the participants value.
In my experience if there is no mutual investment there is no mutual return, and the social group falls apart quickly. So every long-lived social group is long-lived due to some form of shared value transaction taking place.
As to his five points, again they stem from a very shallow understanding of what is ‘going on’ online.
His first point, around more friends not leading to more trust – well firstly, how does he come to the conclusion that more friends must increase trust levels, and secondly how is he empirically measuring a qualitative human quality such as trust. People don’t necessarily connect to more friends to increase trust levels – it can be for many reasons, to feel more connected to others, to provide a level of support in difficult circumstances, to compete (more friends than you) and for many other reasons. Trust doesn’t have to be a factor at all.
His second point about social tools not having replaced intermediaries is also a furfy. Why should they replace them if the intermediaries offer genuine value or have strong relationships with clients? I am definitely seeing greater use of social networks for recruitment, but this doesn’t necessarily mean discarding existing recruiters – who bring many skills to the table (such as critical assessment and saving organisations staff time). Just like the evolution of humans doesn’t automatically lead to the extinction of all other lifeforms, the evolution of social services (such as social recruitment) doesn’t lead to the automatic extinction of traditional recruitment. However their habitat may shrink somewhat.
His third point, about social networks ‘fueling hate’ is a clear misunderstanding of cause and effect. Social networks do not ‘fuel’ hate, they simply make it more visible and distributed. Just as the internet accelerates communication and awareness of positive news, it accelerates these things for negativity as well. The internet is a neutral technology, it has no feelings or mind. It is people who breed joy and hate. What the internet does do is allow people who hate to find and reinforce each other, concentrating their views. This is like organisations who wear white sheets, but distributed globally rather than locally or nationally. So all the hatred we see on the internet is real hatred that exists in real people today. We may not like to see it, but at least being able to see it gives us an ability to address it in socially acceptable manners. Previously, when it remained hidden, the atrocities that were perpetrated were less understood and were harder to stop.
Regarding self-organisation. Here is the only accurate statement made by Umair (though he draws the wrong conclusion). Yes people seek out those who are like them. Like it or not people are tribal, as Seth Godin might say. However on the internet we are able to see into each others’ tribes and live alongside each other with less friction as we don’t compete for resources in quite the same way as in the real world. Google Groups and Facebook are not zero-sum equations. If one group forms, it steals no oxygen, food or energy from another. On this basis the internet can enable homogeneous communities to form and interact without the same pressures that tribes faced in the real world. There is less fear of ‘the other’ and greater capacity to learn and share. So while we still group into our tribes, our tribes experience a surge of improvements in understanding and interaction. We even see Star Trek and Star Wars fans getting along!
Finally, Umair’s last point was that there is little to no value to relationships created over the internet – evidenced by lack of payment by people or advertisers. Evidently Umair is unaware of the level of spending on advertising in social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, or the money individuals spend on match-making sites. He also doesn’t consider that ‘payment’ isn’t necessarily in the form of money. Time is more valuable to many people – hence the way people often forgo money to spend time in community activities – building schools, helping children read, raising funds for charity or investing it in strengthening their online communities.
Umair is no contrarian – he’s simply someone who views the world through particular filters, ones that do not allow him to really understand what is occurring online – people being people. Social media would not be used by millions if it did not provide them with something they wanted or needed. We all have too many demands on our time to choose to hang out in personally unfulfilling places with virtual strangers. People use social media because it enriches their lives, makes them feel better about themselves and others, provides them with windows on the world that they wish to look through and allows them to share their knowledge and experience with people who care enough to read or view their creations.
Looking at how internet social networks impact government, again the internet is neutral in disposition – it can be used for good, for evil and for the mundane.
Social networks provide alternative and more effective methods for self-organisation by lobby groups, citizen bodies and unions. They permit knowledge to spread faster – as well as untruths.
Government needs to plug itself into social networks – be part of the mindstream – so that it can inject information useful for citizens and hear their views directly. So it can use social networks to perform some of the organisational heavy lifting and problem solving that traditionally groups of bureaucrats are not effective at and share responsibilities that are better suited to direct, rather than representational democracy.
It will be messy, we are all learning together and there’s a long way to go on this journey (with perhaps no actual destination, just periodic rebalancings of the scales of power between government and people), however it is a valuable and worthwhile path that has already demonstrates how an empowered and informed population (even if only 1% really care and engage) can improve the public good for entire nations.
Cheers,
Craig
7 Social Media in Isolation is Useless to Government, to Business, and to You | Cheeky Fresh March 25, 2010 at 7:50 am
[...] a lot of chatter (including a government-oriented post by Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio called Government 2.0 and the Social Media Bubble), thus making it worth commenting [...]
8 Tweets that mention Government 2.0 and the Social Media Bubble -- Topsy.com March 25, 2010 at 9:46 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by John Moore, govwiki, govwiki, Cutter Consortium, CraigThomler and others. CraigThomler said: @AndreaDiMaio: You spelt Umair's name wrong – and then in my reply to your post, so did I
http://bit.ly/aSNvin [...]
9 Jay Heiser March 25, 2010 at 10:33 am
If your source is true, then we have to expand our understanding of what constitutes an ‘authoritarian state’. Social media has certainly lowered the cost of surveillance in the USA and the EU, and I’m sure that this has happened in many other jurisdications whose citizens don’t conceptualize their country as being ‘authoritarian’.
A number of US politicians have received death threats this week. I’m sure that the federal authorities are investigating social media at this very moment in an attempt to track down these individuals and protect the politicians.
What happens if in some future election, the people making the death threats are voted into power? What use would they make of this week’s heated Facebook discussions about health care reform and political parties? Presumably, all of that material will be stored away in FB’s cloud.
10 Andrea Di Maio March 25, 2010 at 11:17 am
@Carl – Agreed, most of this has little to do withe technology. What technology does is to exacerbate certain issues that are (to some extent) manageable with more tradition barriers of time, place and role.
IMHO, the most disruption and the most value will come from government employees blending into communities, join those they work for.
This is a different level of transparency, participation and collaboration, and challenges most of the tenets in the machinery of government (accountability, single version of the truth, privacy and confidentiality).
I believe we have just scratched the surface and by maintaining a somewhat artificial between them (the citizens) and us (government institutions and employees), government organizations will widen rather than narrow the engagement gap.
So my take on what you say is that the right context is one where employees are empowered to actively experiment with and use this tools to reach out to those they serve and those they need to work with. Unfortunately I have seen too few cases where this is the case.
11 Andrea Di Maio March 25, 2010 at 12:25 pm
@Craig – Interesting take about Umair’s position. I guess this is not the place to have a debate for his positions and it would be useful to make your points on his blog too (unless you have already done so).
What I am particularly interested in is what this means to governments trying to engage with citizens through social networks.
In my view the point about trust is an important one. Will people trust opinions from their peers about the quality of schools or hospitals over the official ratings? Will people trust open data from government (e.g. aerial picture) more or less than amateur pictures on Flickr or Google Maps? and so forth.
The point on intermediaries intrigues me. I do not have data to say whether there has already been a decline in the role of intermediaries, but – although I theorize that this will be the case – the impact is not proportional to the hype. From what you say you seem to agree that there will be an impact, and many would expect that to be huge, but we have not seen enough signs yet.
I disagree on your observations about homogeneity. As you point out, social networking requires investment, so I am not sure about your point on communities not being zero-sum games. I do not see the political debate become any less hatred and extreme than it was before social media.
Finally I am thorn about the value angle. Again in theory there is a lot hat is possible, but I am with Umair when he says that there has not been yet a huge capitalization of such value. Probably it is just a matter of time, and one more area where maturity is not at par with hype levels. On the downside, I suspect that many participants in social networks suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder and they may get bored, move on or move out before value is accrued. This is part of the unpredictable dynamics of social networks that I alluded to in my post.
I am not dismissive of Umair’s position and – to be honest – I do not care about how grounded in data and deep analysis his points are: most of the excitement around gov 2.0 and social network is on equally shaky ground, often an act of faith or result of intuition rather than anything vaguely resembling a strategy or a plan.
I am 100% with you about the need for governments to take these risks, but they have to be informed (and somewhat calculated) risks, not just acts of faith. Incidentally, while it is true that great things can happen even if only 1% of the population gets engaged, I am very worried about the spin democracy takes if those 1% get a louder voice. On a smaller scale, this is what I already see with the “usual suspects” and “activitsts” riding the open government wave.
12 Paul Nash March 25, 2010 at 4:07 pm
Once again, on the whole, I agree. This is getting to be a bad habit. My own view is that in looking towards the relationship between government and the people we’re looking in the wrong place. The internet deck is stacked against a genuine political engagement and as your piece identifies, the issues of who is sending the messages haven’t been adressed, identitiy is and will be for some time, a problem. In addition there is a problem with the understanding of what constitutes statutory function and what is political oversight. While that confusion remains the conversation between government and the people will continue to be impaired. The power of social media today lies in its ability to help groups self organise – yes, groups of similar values – this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In a time when service delivery faces savage cuts it’s a case of asking not what can government do for you but what you can do for government. The only barriers are excluded groups and the desire of government to own the solution.
There are a significant number of non critical services that communities can deliver for themselves – they only need to organise – and the potential for social media to be an enabler is undeniable.
13 Wilson Zorn March 25, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Craig Thomler, I think, put it well in most regards. To me, the view expressed which kicked this off lacks not only in any sort of quantitative qualification (to be fair, that is difficult) but moreso, as it does rest on qualitative analysis, still fails to really qualify that and fails to in particular state the comparative aspect of “what if without/outside of social media”? Yes, of course people “form homogenous groups” … that’s what people do, generally, the question is whether they do more so or less so in the physical world?
I’m also suspicious of the declaration of the beginning of this article, re the “common wisdom” around social media. Is it really a common wisdom that social media promotes less shallow interactions ? I doubt that, I don’t see a “common” wisdom here although some proponents hope while other proponents (like me) see that as not the point or strength of social media. Is it a common wisdom that social media groups are less homogeneous/more heterogeneous for some reason? Again, some HOPE that will occur and some have voiced it but I would argue that it’s not even the point anyway.
There’s a difference between depth and trust. Trust is not born of “depth” of relationship, rather it precedes it. Trust is born from transparency – and that transparency and rapid distribution of information is the *heart* of social media and I believe there’s more common wisdom around at least this than these other points.
Of course, I’m not sure there’s so much “common wisdom” anyway yet around social media as it is still growing so rapidly!
Anyway, I do think a lot of these points aren’t so relevant. Transparency, rapidity, and communication I think are primary relevance points. So, too, are “crowd wisdom” in the sense of popular sentiment direction and the like.
14 Andrea Di Maio March 26, 2010 at 7:35 am
@Wilson – We can of course agree to disagree. But let me clarify what I meant by “common wisdom”: the sentence was broken (and I have now corrected it), and should read “the common wisdom that social networks are creating value”.
Thanks for flagging this