Dipping once again into the BlogSchmog draft vault, I find a number of relevant articles on political connections. Together, they suggest the potential value of online political engagement is tied to facilitating empathy.
Technology allows us to re-think governance
In a 2005 First Monday paper, Beth Noveck examined the benefit of collaboration in political decision-making. She claimed technology helped with “collective visualization,” in particular, of a big picture of ideas. This drives a new understanding of the assets, issues, dissent, and coordination around political topics. In rejecting the arguments of anti-group advocates, Noveck suggests that technology has afforded us the opportunity to re-think where the center of power is situated. By adjusting law to support a lower level of decision-making and self-governance.
Regardless of what one views as the causes, there is general agreement that there are problems. Our legislative decision–making processes suffer from what Carl Schmitt termed the “motorization of law.†Slow institutions, designed for a different temporal reality, rush to keep up with the pace of modernity.
The past pushes for e-democracy are designed to make current systems more efficient, rather than re-thinking how technology can innovate how we conceive of governance. Specifically, Noveck suggests “a model of consociational democracy premised on the collective action of small groups working on a scale enabled by technology.” A few years ago, Noveck described a wiki government filled with experimentation and X-Prize kinds of challenges to bring innovation to citizen feedback and policy making.
Expertise is part of diversity
Cary Coglianese noted, however, that access to information and participation is not sufficient for good governance. In discussing the role of information, Cary points out:
One of these barriers is the specialized knowledge needed to participate meaningfully in the often highly technical decisions raised by rulemaking. Improving the accessibility of regulatory information on the Internet provides no guarantee that a significantly greater number of citizens will actually be able to process that information well.
This is one of the insights that came out of the “Wisdom of Crowds” research that examined the ability for groups to accurately predict the future, describe the unknown, and make good decisions. Some of the agents have to be able to bring their expertise into the equation to make the collective sufficiently diverse, and thus smart. For politics, this means not only that existing leaders have to engage in these kinds of communal brainstorming, but that the improved reach needs to bring in other experts with the goal of raising everyone’s ability to understand the nuances of policy-making around a given issue.
Behavior change requires social reinforcement
Network size and diversity clearly impact the spread and direction of information flow, but what is good for information isn’t always good for behavior. Although there is evidence that political action is helped by the political activity of your social network, work has also been done to distinguish between the advantage small-world networks give to information and what is required from a network to spread changes in behavior. The threshold for behavioral change requires multiple sources of social affirmation. As the connectedness of the world increases, the level of local social reinforcement decreases: Social clustering is as important to political change as long-range ties to information.
Having a few things in common triggers empathy
This tension between weak-tie information and strong-tie behavior becomes more interesting when considering a recent study on the development of empathy in strangers. In experiments conducted by Stanford psychologists, 70 women were asked questions about their birthplace and favorite things (like books and movies). Under the pretense of meeting a fellow participant in the study, each woman chatted with a confederate of the research team, dropping references to a variable number of things mentioned in the initial questionnaire. In addition, the confederate described a stressful situation. After the conversation, the participating women were debriefed to gauge their own stress levels. Another version of the experiment included men and women, and replaced the stress trigger with one of physical exertion (i.e., running in place while the participants watched).
The researchers demonstrated that those with at least three things in common showed elevated levels of stress and physical signs of exertion, even though they were not the ones put in those situations. This is interesting for political networks because it suggest that empathy—a key element of relationships—doesn’t take much in common to be triggered. Systems that facilitate ways to find some commonality among diverse members might benefit from both increased information flow and behavioral change.