Designing digital publics for participatory parity

Designing Digital Publics for

Participatory Parity Sebastian Benthall

UC Berkeley I School

The talk

● A model for how inequality and social influence are related

● Public sphere -> publics -> networked public● Inequality of social network formation● Hacking social network formation with a

cool Twitter bot● Invitation to shape design with GitHub

tickets

Equality:we like it*

* assumed for this talk

A theory of inequality

● Everyone’s talking about how unequal U.S. society is

● Everyone’s talking about what the “real cause” of inequality is

● Claim: Inequality is complex.

Money

Representation

Beauty

Leisure

Social Status

Influence

Education

Brains

Organization

A theory of inequality

● Lots of ways power and privilege reinforce each other

● We can dispute the details but…● ...it’s worth trying to make an impact by

targeting one piece at a time

We can build an equitable

public sphere

A story (from Habermas, 1962)

● Absolutist monarchal states overthrown by capitalists - the bourgeoisie

● They communicated freely and came to rational agreement that guided politics… The public sphere. It was great.

● Until consumerism makes advertising more important than politics, so media power!

A critique (from Fraser, 1992)

● Ok yeah bourgeois men did that● The people they excluded (e.g. women,

working class) got together to agree on different politics -- counterpublics

● The public sphere is not equalizing common ground, but a nexus of unequal publics

Network publics (boyd, 2010)

● Social network sites are publics● Mediated by the network technology

the uneven shape of social networks

Kurakin, 2004 http://www.alexeikurakin.org/main/lecture4Ext.html

Hong, http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~shhong/scalefree.htm

from Barabasi, Linked

preferential attachment

the rich get richer

Networked power (Castells,2009)

● In networked society, our communication networks are the channels of power

● Power based on position within a network is networked power

● Unless designed otherwise, networked publics will be highly unequal!

agenda setting

reframing

In networked publics,networked power

succeedsmedia power

This will reinforce existing power

dynamics

Money

Representation

Beauty

Leisure

Social Status

Influence

Education

Brains

Organization

So what can we do?Influence

So what can we do?Influence

Money

Representation

Beauty

Leisure

Social Status

Education

Brains

Organization

Influence

Money

Representation

Beauty

Leisure

Social Status

Education

Brains

Organization

Influence

Money

Representation

Beauty

Leisure

Social Status

Education

Brains

Organization

Influence

Money

Representation

Beauty

Leisure

Social Status

Education

Brains

Organization

Influence

Money

Representation

Beauty

Leisure

Social Status

Education

Brains

Organization

Influence

culture hackInfluence

Algorithms

● Networked publics use relevance algorithms (Gillespie, 2012) to direct information

● Building alternative infrastructure for political reasons -- infrastructure-based activism (Sauter, 2013)

● Could we reverse this process with something else… an irrelevance algorithm?

sure we can

Designing for parity

Example: The Listserve

● NYU ITP project by Begley et al.● An “email lottery” -- once a day a subscriber

is chosen to write the rest of the list● ~25k members and great parity properties!

@TheTweetserve

@TheTweetserve v0.1

● Periodically, find all the users who both○ mentioned @TheTweetserve recently○ follow @TheTweetserve

● Retweet the most recent status of one of them at random

#revolutionary?!?!

An invitation

● This is just a proof of concept● The real point is an invitation to praxis● If you have ideas about how it could be

better, please file a ticket on GitHub● GitHub is like a networked public of people

that build your networked publics

fork-friendly andpatches welcome!

Thanks!

Questions?

Contact me @sbenthall or sb@ischool.berkeley.edu