Vi ses igen, nätokrater!

Jag medverkar med en artikel i det senaste numret av socialdemokratiska studentförbundets tidskrift Libertas (4-5/09. Det är ett temanummer om "Twittersamhället" och jag skriver under rubriken "Vi ses igen, nätokrater" om att man bör använda sociala medier för att mobilisera aktivister, inte för att "nå ut till väljarna". Länk här.

Uppdaterad 2010-01-25: nu ligger texten uppe!

New publication: This Time it's Personal

I'm contributing with a chapter in a new anthology on online culture. As proud as I am over this my first academic publication, I would like to add that this is an e-book based on conference presentations, and that a hard-copy version with a substantially altered version of my text will be out some time next year. A link to the book is provided below.

Gustafsson, Nils, 2009. "This Time it's Personal. Social Networks, Viral Politics and Identity Management" in Riha, Daniel & Maj, Anna (eds) The Real and the Virtual. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Social media is important, but not the way you think it is

I attended the "Preconference for the EU 5th Ministerial eGovernment Conference. eGovernment Research and Innovation: Empowering Citizens through Government Services across Sectors and Borders" in Malmö on Wednesday this week. I had the pleasure of doing a co-presentation with Sofie and Johan from PWC, who had crafted a study on youth involvement in politics via social media - partly based on a draft version of a book chapter I wrote soon to appear in print. The presentation is here.

The report is getting at least some media attention in Sweden, so I'll put my comments here, as delivered on 18th November. The text is based on my notes.

I have four points to make.

1) Cultural differences

It is important to remember that when interpreting results from nation-based surveys of this kind, you have to take cultural differerences into account. You could actually take Sweden as a most-likely case for youth involvement online. High penetration rates of social media and traditionally high involvement of citizens in civil society, high levels of social trust and high electoral turnout make Sweden a special country.

2) The online-offline divide is pointless

I also believe that we should regard the Internet and social media not as an arena seperate from other channels of communication or life in general. We are talking about a seamless stream of interactions taking place on a number of platforms, but relations, attitudes and interests for individuals are stable over these platforms. This conference should not be about "eGovernment" and "eParticipation" - it should be about GOVERNMENT and PARTICIPATION!

People frequently underrate "new" forms of involvement, but that does not mean that they are right. A woman I interviewed told me that the political mobilisation attempts in Facebook were of no use. "So I got this invitation to join a group to condemn the local transport agency for selling ad space to religious conservatives, but that wouldn't make any difference, so I called them in person to speak my mind." And with that, she was in effect stating the importance of Facebook mibilisation.

3) Identity management might have indirect effects on political behaviour

Also, expressing political views on social network sites is regarded by most people as shrewd identity management, but in making politics and political views a part of your public identity, you come to view yourself as a politically engaged person. And that might mean something.

4) "Young people" are not a homogeneous group

Finally, we cannot view "young people" or "citizens" as a homogeneous group. Individuals have different backgrounds, motives, interests, skills and so on.

Everything we know about political participation tells us that education, age, and socio-economic status are much more important factors determining whether you will engage - not whether you have a Facebook account or not. In order to foster widespread participation among young people we need to start with providing equal opportunities for engagement - and that means providing good education and well-paid, inspiring jobs for all.

Thank you.

Vill du doktorera?

[For int'l readers: this post is about being admitted to a doctoral programme and how you should prepare while an undergrad. I might translate it some time.]

Som doktorand får man då och då frågor från hoppfulla statsvetarstudenter om hur det är att doktorera och hur man ska göra för att bli antagen till forskarutbildningen. Nedanstående skrev jag som ett svar på en sådan fråga från en student. Kanske det kan vara till glädje för någon. Kommentera gärna! Jag har förmodligen fel i allt.

Söktrycket på doktorandtjänster i statsvetenskap vid de svenska universiteten är väldigt högt - i Lund utlyste vi två platser inför HT09 och fick över 100 ansökningar från hela världen. Det säger sig självt att det finns ett inslag av slump som avgör vem som till slut får tjänsten.

Men när man sitter med hundra ansökningar måste man sålla ganska summariskt. Då blir betyg naturligtvis viktiga. En student som inte fått högsta betyg på sina uppsatser faller vanligen bort i första sållningen. Samma för övriga betyg - om man har flera kurser med låga betyg drar det ner helhetsintrycket. Att bli klar i tid, dvs inte lämna in uppsatser för sent eller liknande, är allmänt en bra idé.

Sen är det uppsatserna man går på, så det är viktigt att skriva mycket bra uppsatser. Metodologisk stringens är extra viktigt. Och att teorin funkar ihop med metoden.

Vad gäller arbetslivserfarenhet och liknande är det inte helt ovanligt att personer som varit anställda som forskningsassistenter eller liknande antas som doktorander, så det är en bra idé att hålla utkik efter sådana erbjudanden. Utlandserfarenhet brukar vara uppskattat, gärna en examen eller åtminstone några terminer vid ett prestigefyllt universitet. Arbetslivserfarenhet som är kopplat till statsvetenskap kan vara bra, t ex om man konsultat eller liknande.

Det är fortfarande vanligt (alltför vanligt enligt min mening) att doktorander också har läst grundutbildningen vid ett och samma universitet. Det gjorde jag själv också. Traditionellt har det delvis haft att göra med att ens handledare och lärare kan pusha ens namn i antagningsprocessen, men det verkar inte vara lika hårt som tidigare - i Lund har vi många som har läst vid andra högskolor. Det har också att göra med att duktiga sökande ofta blir högt erbjudna platser på flera universitet, och då väljer de oftast sitt hemuniversitet.

Lite beroende på vad du vill göra kan det dock vara en idé att läsa din master vid ett stort universitet. Men jag känner duktiga statsvetardoktorander från Södertörn också, även om de är antagna i Stockholm och Uppsala.

Vad är du intresserad av för fält? Vilket universitet ligger närmast? Är det val- eller förvaltningsforskning i Göteborg eller internationella relationer eller klimatpolitik i Lund? Kolla vad som är på tapeten på dessa institutioner, det kan ge en vägledning om vad som är gångbart. Brasklappen är att institutionerna också är ute efter förnyelse.

När det är dags att söka - sök till flera universitet! Många universitet har fasta ansökningstider för fakultetsfinansierade doktorander. Kolla upp i god tid vilka krav på utformning av ansökan som finna vid olika institutioner. Var dock uppmärksam på att det kan dyka upp externfinansierade tjänster när som helst under året. Skillnaden är att med fakultetsfinansierade tjänster får man välja vad man vill göra, medan det är ganska hårt styrt om man ska ingå i ett projekt. Och om du misslyckas i första omgången, försök igen! Det är många som har kommit in först efter flera försök.

Det sista och viktigaste tipset är att man måste älska forskning, och inte dölja att man gör det. Det måste man dessutom göra för att stå ut.

Gammal artikel i Mahskara

Intervjuades i Malmö högskolas studentkårs tidning Mahskara för ganska länge sedan om sociala medier kontra parlamentarisk politik. För fullständighetens skull, har inte funnits på nätet innan.

Citeras i ST-Press

Mest bara för att hålla koll själv: citerades i ST-press om myndigheter och sociala medier.

Collegial Consultation with Bernie Hogan

(Bernie in action at the OIISDP 2009. Photo: Eric Cook)

I'm back at the office after a couple of months on the go. In July, I spent two glorious weeks at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme, in Brisbane, Australia. One of the very productive discussions I had there was a "collegial consultation" session with Bernie Hogan of the OII. I liked it so much that I decided to record it, transcribe it, and (with Bernie's blessings) publish it here. I realise that it might not be the best of reads, but for people in my field (political participation and social media) there are some really good suggestions. Rock and scroll!

TRANSCRIPT (I've cleaned it up a little):

Bernie Hogan (B): [commenting on the fact that I started recording our conversation]…make that cleavage between that which is now and that which happens that’s not now and that which stays secret, which is worse. But Jeff Boase, and his report is about the strength of Internet ties, and that’s a Pew Report, so it uses U.S. data.

Now, also in the social network world, there is work by Nicole Ellison, and her contemporaries at Michigan State, Charles Steinfield and Cliff Lampe, and they show that people who are bidding on social network sites have larger networks. The issue there is one of causation that they don’t really address, the same with Jeff, it’s also an issue of causation, one that he doesn’t really address that the people who have a propensity to be online might themselves be very social individuals. The idea that there is a difference in space on this…

Nils Gustafsson (N): I mean people, people before social network sites, you would have people who would be very social but they, the possibilities wouldn’t be there. I mean, you could take like people in the 50s and try to see…

B: But people in the 50s, the ones who were very prone to communicate would probably find an avenue to do it. The problem is that we’re dealing with things that are not static.

N: Yeah.

B: So, in my view, I think that one thing that we lose from offline interaction, in this new networked world which is the world of Adam Greenfield’s, you know, going from browsing to searching and what not, is, and this is my comment that I made there about rhythms and habits: one thing that I’ve discovered is that people with the largest networks were, and I never published this anywhere, I’ll just let this through this once, people who organise their lives around regular meetings ended up having a very large number of weak ties, and it was a much stronger finding than e-mail. But the data is sort of shitty so I didn't. I dug deeper in the data and it did make a lot of sense. If you go to church on Sunday, you’re not just going into a place where there is a priest talking and you sit by yourself as an isolate and then you leave and then you go home. After church – now I remember this from when I went to church –

N: You mingle.

B: Yeah. You mingle.

N: But I’m not talking about either church or social network sites, I’m talking about church and then the added value of social network sites.

B: But what I’m suggesting is that those social network sites end up competing with regular rhythms.

N: But in what way?

B: The way that they…

N: You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t-

B:…strife with our attention.

N: Yeah?

B: So when Adam starts to talk about how people start remobilising and micro-coordinating, the fact that they are micro-coordinating means that “I’m not going to go to church because I’ve got something better to do on Sunday and I might meet with those people here and I might some people later elsewhere.” What we’re doing in the process of adding all this communication media on, is imposing an ideology that it’s better to have this very high risk networking…

N: Mmmm.

B: …scenarios where you find just the right people to engage with at just the right time instead of finding the sufficient group of a very large number of people and mingle with them. And going from place to place to place to place rather than everyone converging at the one place at the one time. And it is the difference between, like, a public space where everybody knows that 11 o’clock in Italy you’d go to the, you know in Udine they all sort of converge in front of this museum and they all just knew to be there. And they didn’t need cell phones to do this. Cell phones did have this added value.

And so I was initially persuaded to focus on the added value of these ICTs, but the more I studied this, the more I realised that what these ICTs were doing was getting rid of the norms of communication and replacing them with interpersonal rapports. I mean rapports, r-a-p-p-o-r-t. A rapport is replacing a norm. So the networks of people which is either very active in communication, they might have very large networks, but they are doing so because they are able to sustain all of these different threads, but most people actually find it very complicated to keep up. You’re just watching Nancy and Jeremy try to constantly be on a Twitter stream, and on e-mail, and on the Etherpad, and..I mean, I tried to do that, but then I forget what’s going on in the lecture. And you know I sort of only partially tune in to what’s happening.

N: Yeah, but that is they way THEY are using the media – that’s not the mode, that’s the extreme. Then you’ve got the regular users…

B: So what the regular users are doing, in this regard, I suspect, is not – exactly! The regular users are not gradually getting more ties but are in fact dealing with some people who are overwhelmingly active. And most people are trying to keep up: should I be on an e-mail list? should I be on Facebook? should I be on Twitter? should I pay any attention to this? leading to a sort of social paralysis, because it used to be, “don’t fuck it, we’re in class, we’re in class now, 5 o’clock we’ll all be in the pub, and we’ll chat and we’ll hang out there” and it was lower coordination costs but also a more normative sense of community.

This goes back to Durkheim's idea of sacred and profane sites. Sacred and profane sites were not just a place, not just a church but a place in time, let’s say locus of activity. And we’ve sort of gotten rid of those…sacred sites. Now, Durkheim talks of it not just in terms of religion but that these reflect community values. And without these sort of sacred place-times, it’s hard to say that we have the same you know shared community. But I know this is not exactly what you were expecting to hear, you know I think that there is…

N: I find it fascinating, but, well, an empirical question.

B: But it is an empirical question. I think that it tells to a decent lane to frame this [?] now, the reason that I framed it this way was also sort of a way to challenge the work of my supervisor and some other people in the area who have a reasonably techno-utopian view that new technology creates more social capital.

N: Mmmm…

B: What I’m thinking about is how – again, I’m drawing back to Adam’s talk is you know, every extension is also an amputation – that’s mean old classic McLuhan. Not a big fan of McLuhan, I’m not really sure he calls himself a social scientist, but I mean he’s an interesting person, an interesting guy and you know.

N: Radio: It’s hot!

B: Yeah, sure, that stuff, you could debate about it all day, but you know, McLuhan is like “that’s a bad idea, I don’t really care, I’ll get more ideas”, I mean, he didn’t take himself very seriously, so I don’t know why other people should. But nevertheless…I mean extension-amputation, it’s just good to think about, you know how new technologies, so Barry would say “Oh, people who use e-mail: more social capital!” And I’m thinking well, what are they giving up in the process? What are we losing? And some of the things we are losing are these sort of convergent spaces. These third spaces where everybody knew your name.

N: Do you really think that they are going away? I mean, if you are in party politics, you go to the conventions, and you meet up and then it’s election time and you, it’s the same if you’re in an interest group...

B: Yeah.

N: ...and I mean, if you’re religious, you will still go to church and have a chat afterwards, and it doesn’t go away really.

B: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. I know that religious attendance is some places up, some places down. Hard to say. So, are these going up or going down?

N: Empirical questions.

B: Again, it’s an empirical question, but the empirical question is not merely “do the ICTs lead to, you know, more successful political participation for some individuals”, but also, do they lead to less successful political participation for others? That’s a…it’s not merely the convention anymore, because some people will realise there’s all this extra stuff going down...

N: Yeah. Yeah.

B: ...in the mean time.

N: That would be my take.

B: Even during the convention.

N: Yeah, some people will communicate and other people will just sort of sit around and...

B: ...figuring that we would just sort of mill around and shake hands and say “Hi!” and that was how we were gonna do this. But the norms have changed.

N: I just got some brilliant ideas. Yeah.

B: Yeah. The norms have changed so that some people could be at the convention completely still-

N: Social network analysis might be not the method for studying that. Maybe some sort of participant observation or interviews or…

B: I think that, you might, because I think you are studying networking, not networks?

N: Yeah.

B: I think that the structure of the networks – what might be interesting, and I do think that social network analysis would do it, the problem with social network analysis in this case is the methodological difficulties in gathering the edges between alters in the personal networks. If you have a group population, if you can find a group, I would definitely, unambiguously do networks. I think you would be at a loss not to.

N: Yeah. Like "liberals". Or "conservatives". Or-

B: But I mean like a smaller group, a manageable group of like, like this, like SDP is a group. Like a set of individuals. And I’m talking about trying to get that complete set. If you can get a complete set of individuals-

N: Local party branch.

B: Exactly. Now, why complete sets? Because missing data in networks skews it really badly. And what you would list with is who do you communicate with and by what media? And then you could draw multi-media networks maps. You know one map that shows the communication ecology by e-mail, one by IM, one by blogs, one by Twitter and then just stack all together and then do that sort of map.

If you can’t do that, if you can’t find a group, if you’re going to the level of personal networks and finding out who’s in their relational structure, don’t waste your time worrying about the edges between people. Don’t say, because we often spend too much time in, you know, do a name generator, do the “Who are the people you talk to?”, list those names, “How do you talk to each of those people”, list those names, but don’t worry about asking the respondents to report on the friends and how those friends link to each other. It’s methodologically a nuisance.

I think the network analysis works here, but I’m not necessarily convinced you will need to, not necessarily convinced you will need to create graph pictures. I think you want to have a sense of the social context, to the relational context and that is a media relational context. So you might look at who are the players, now, or the players from one location and another location and compare their media use, but not their media use in terms of time, their media use in terms of relations, and that means, that is networks, because you will have to get people listing off their ties, and then for each of those ties listing off the media they use.

And that’s why, if you have a group, you can take all that data as one person means to my friends that’s one row, the next person then to them friends is another row and create that matrix that requires the network. But if you don’t have a group, then, you know, you won’t really have a network because you will have you know some people from here, some people from there, one person from here, one person from there, and it’s not necessarily the case that the people I mention are gonna be the people you mention, or that the people we mention are gonna be a complete set. If we’re only mentioning the sum total of all of us, you know, 10-20-30 % of all the political players, then the network you show will be completely biased. And it will look radically different from what it is in “reality”. Ok? So-

N: Thanks for the share. (?)

B: I think I gotta stop for there. And I’ve been doing 20 minutes a time. I think I have to go and get a cigarette.

N: Thank you.

B: No problem.

N: I really enjoyed that.

B: Yeah.

[The conversation took place on July 17th, 2009, at Creative Industries at QUT, Brisbane, Australia.]