>> Hi, everyone. So I think we're going to start a couple of minutes late.
I've been tasked with introducing the speakers for today's MLTalk. I'm
Yves-Alexander de Montjoye, research scientist at the MIT Media Lab.
So the first speaker is coming from the UK. Helen Margetts is the
director of the famous Oxford Internet Institute at the University of
Oxford. She's a political scientist by training. And now a professor of
society and the Internet. Published over 100 research papers and
books. The latest one, which she is going to talk about today, and that
was published in 2015 is called "Political Turbulence: How Social
Media Shape Collective Action." And this is going to be the topic for
today's debate. And Ethan, who you all know, directs the Center for
Civic Media here at the MIT Media Lab. Thank you.
>> Thanks so much, Yves. And welcome to Helen. Before we get started,
I just want to talk a little bit about our format here. And then I'm going
to hand it over. This is part of the MLTalks series.
I know that some of you are veterans of this series,
some of you are probably attending your first one. And
Helen is attending her first one. So I'll give the instructions for her as
well as for everybody else. This event is not only those of us here in the
room. It also has people watching the stream online. It also has a large
conversation going on via Twitter on the MLTalks hash-tag. You are
heartily encouraged to do what Nathan Matias was doing. I mean that
in life in general but I do mean it specifically here. Where he is likely to
be tweeting pearls of wisdom from this talk with the MLTalks hash-tag.
And that's a great way to sort of open up a broader conversation. We're
going to start with Helen taking an extremely careful, thoughtful 200-
page book, which she first squeezed down into an hour long talk to
give yesterday over at Harvard, which she's then going to squeeze even
further down to the sort of 20 minute juicy essence of what she's been
working on with her colleagues Peter John, Scott Hale, and Taha Yasseri.
Let me just say, Helen is a really big deal. She runs a group
called the Oxford Internet Institute. This is one of the leading Think
Tanks in the world on the future of the Internet. She is a professor of
society and the Internet. She's a political scientist by training but she's
someone who is doing extremely deep thinking about how people are
using new media for social organization. And we found even just
talking over dinner last night there's a lot that she has to say that may
feel intuitively like, oh, of course it has to work that way. But in many
ways what's so important about her work is she actually has
wonderfully strong quantitative demonstrations and is starting to have
really interesting insights on what it means that political participation
is changing. As far as your participation goes, in this room, everything
is on the record. It is being live streamed. If you dislike being tracked
by the NSA, the Five Eyes, so on and so forth, this would be an
excellent time to exit the room. If you ask a question, we certainly hope
you will, you will be on camera for all of that. So we reserve all rights, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we're going to begin with Helen talking
about her work. I am going to take advantage of the fact that I can then
ask her a few questions. We will open to the room. And then we will
eventually open to questions coming in via Twitter and coming in
online. So with no further ado, Helen Margetts.
>> Thank you very much, Ethan. And it's a really great pleasure to be here.
I'm suffering from extreme building envy. Because -- (Chuckles).
>> The Oxford Internet Institute, which is a department of the university
of Oxford we now have three buildings, if anybody is familiar
with Oxford. Yeah there's no administrative logic to having three sites
. We need something like this. Okay.
Well, so we always tell our PhD students that -- as I'm sure you do,
that you should be able to say anything in either 3 lines or 100,000 words.
Depending on the context. So if any of them are watching, then the
laugh is on them because that's what I'm going to try to do with this book
just in say 15, 20 minutes. So we wrote this book because we
wanted to look at the relationship between collective action
and social media. And we wanted to put some meat on it. I mean,
there's a Verizon widespread generalized feeling across the
news media, across academia, across popular opinion that political
mobilization, political activity, seems to be on the rise. And it seems to
have something to do with social media. And lots of things are
happening. Lots of kind of seemingly unpredictable things are
happening. But it's difficult to put kind of meat on it with the current
social science research tools that we have. To actually work out what's
going on. And if those hunches are, in fact, right. So that's where this
book comes from. A desire to really kind of delve into the relationship
between collective action and social media. It's written by me, Peter
John, another political scientists, professor of political science at UCL
and Scott Hale, and Taha Yasseri, two research fellows at the Oxford I
nternet Institute, one of them a computer scientist and one of them a
physicist. So kind of a familiar multidisciplinary team to people here at
the MIT Media Lab. And so there's the key question I guess, what does
politics, collective action, mobilization, and even more generally kind of
what model of democracy are we moving towards in a changing digital
world? And what kind of techniques can we develop to understand that
relationship? As a political scientist, I'm in a rather continual state of
excitement these days by the new possibilities there are for gathering
data about political behavior. Political science has traditionally lacked
data. We've been completely reliant on opinion surveys and opinion
polls, which are data about what people think they did or think they
might do or believe or prefer. But it's not -- they are not real-time
transactional data about what people really did. And that's what's
exciting about social media and platform -- Internet based platforms of
all kinds is they provide us with new sources of data about the political
world that actually political science as a discipline has never had
before. So I guess the kind of hinge of the book, the kind of key on
which the rest of the argument hinges, is the belief that the most
important thing social media do is they allow micro donations of time
and effort to social and political causes which just weren't possible
before. They allow tiny acts of political participation, sharing
something, liking something, tweeting something, viewing something.
Related to some political cause. All of these are tiny political acts
which in a presocial media age would have been too small to carry out.
The transaction cost versus the participation cost would have been too
great. As the petition's platform of the UK Government, you've got one
here in the U.S., We the People, again, a tiny act of participation,
signing a digital petition, which more and more people are doing. And
of course, if you undertake one of those tiny acts, you can immediately
kind of share it with people. You can encourage other people to do it
with just one click of the button, if you like. And these are tiny -- these
are tiny acts. But they can scale up to very large mobilizations indeed.
Here is Tiananmen Square, a very familiar image to all of you I'm sure.
And of course those people who are on that square are not carrying
out a tiny act. They are carrying out a really huge political act because
they are in danger of their lives. They are at the very opposite end of
the ladder of political participation if you like. But the point is how they
got there. How they had -- those people had enough signals of viability
of that movement that suggested that there were going to be a million
people in the square. That took place on a huge range of -- on a range
of social media, perhaps particularly Facebook and on the Facebook
page, every single like on those pages, single a signal of viability to
other people, creating a whole score of chain reactions adding up to a
mass mobilization. Here in a democratic regime, the movement
Podemos which is now an established force in Spanish politics,
perhaps one of the smaller number of movements which has gone
from being mass demonstration and mobile and unrest, even the
Revolution, towards being kind of a force in mainstream politics,
getting almost a third of the vote in the last Spanish election. And
those kind of mobilizations, these series of chain reactions of tiny acts
of participation, they are affecting whole groups of people in terms of
affecting peoples' individual lives, how many refugees in the refugee
crisis -- continuing refugee crisis of that started last summer in Europe,
how many refugees might have changed their whole course of action,
their whole journey in seeing this photograph shared on social media?
Over 80% of Syrians have a mobile phone. And if you were leaving a
war torn country like Syria, you might well prioritize a mobile phone
over other resources. So it's perfectly plausible that many people were
affected by photographs like this. But also is the question of to what
extent do mobilizations affect public goods? Either from regime
change in autocratic regimes to some kind of policy change in
democratic regimes? This is an example of some of the data that we
use in the book. This is every single signature to every single petition to
the UK Government on the Government platform in the last three or
four years. The heavy red line, a referee of an article we submitted to a
journal -- who may well be here actually with this graph and
commented -- referred to it as the rutco graph (phonetic). But what it
means is that the red -- dark red block at the bottom are all of the
petitions that failed completely and this is an important thing to note is
the terrible selection bias in online mobilization. We see all that
succeed. What we don't see is the huge majority that fail. And now we
have the data available to tell us that. So that shows us that 99.99% of
these petitions failed to get even the -- failed to get 100,000 signatures,
which is what you need for a parliamentary debate. But 96% of them
fail to even get 500 signatures. They disappear completely without
trace. The yellow ones are the successful ones. So most mobilizations
fail. And then a few succeed really dramatically. And there have been
lots of instances of actual policy change due to just this phenomenon
of digital petitions. How do we know? How do we know which ones
succeed and which ones fail? That's quite difficult actually. The three
numbers on there all refer to petitions kind of against the badger cull in
the UK which reduced the spread of bovine TB. All of those petitions --
yay for badgers -- but one of them getting 100,000 signatures a
parliamentary debate widely regarded as kind of being partially
responsible for ending the call. One of them which is 3,000 signatures,
kind of somewhere in the middle but not really making any difference.
And one was less than 10 signatures bombing out completely,
completely insignificant. All similar issues, similar timing. Why does
one succeed and not the other? So what we've got is a very -- as any of
us who deal with data generated from the Internet know -- some kind
of distribution which is distribution non-normal. Red is what would be
normal. The green is what we've got. I.e. a very small number of
extreme events and a very large number of very, very tiny events. What
do we know about the ones that succeed? What we do know is they
develop really fast. They go up straight away in the first few hours. And
here is an example of that. Those are all of the petitions from that
previous set that received more than 10,000 signatures. And you can
see they are going straight up. We see that pattern over and over again.
And it's not what we expected. Political science theory and formal
modelling would suggest to us that the successful ones would kind of
rise in a kind of S shaped pattern rising gradually and then tipping over
into success. We see no S shapes here. This is a very common pattern.
There's the video clip of Neda Agha-Soltan, the face of the Iranian
protest of 2009. Straight up to a million views. Infinitely more
frivolously Obama singing "Call Me Maybe." 40 million views. Again, but
getting a lot of them in the first -- in a matter of just a handful of days.
These are the hash-tags on just to show it's replicated against different
social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook there for several of the
hash-tags of mobilizations against perceived racist policing, you have
Ferguson, Mike Brown, Black Lives Matter, I Can't Breathe, and Hands
Up, Don't Shoot. Sometimes you're seeing two steps. Just because
there's one step when somebody is killed and then another one at
failure to indite the officers involved. I can't talk about politics without
mentioning that name. And here is the UK's modest effort to
participate in the U.S. Presidential debate. There is the petition that we
very -- very popular petition in the UK to block Donald Trump from UK
entry, shooting up -- eventually got nearly half a million signatures I
think. And another one, don't ban Trump from the United Kingdom,
quite a resistance to that idea, also pretty successful. There did have to
be a debate within Parliament about this. Because that is the kind of
promise. And so that was held. And that was our contribution. The flip
side of that, of going up very quickly, is that basically attention decays
very quickly. And this is a pattern that we've modelled and found to be
completely resilient across the UK data. We have the same data for the
U.S., We The People platform have shown -- are shown there, both of
them going up very quickly and going down very quickly. In fact, if you
haven't made it in 10 hours, it's digital dust most likely. That's the moral
of that image. How do we understand then what all of this points to is
unpredictability. It's going to be very difficult to predict things if they
are not S shapes. If they don't go up gradually so that we have some
sort of warning that they are coming. If we can't quite tell why one
succeeds and the other one doesn't. All of this points to predictability.
And of course that's what's we've been seeing in politics all over the
world, unpredictable things happened. Here is our own Bernie Sanders,
who is here. Jeremy Corbyn, a shock election to leadership of the
Labour Party. So what are the dynamics of this unpredictability? What
are the handles that we might get on to be able to understand it. We
largely looked at this in the book for experimentation, either in lab
experiments, field experiments, or in an actual experiment. And they
hinged around these two things which are the kind of forms of social
influence which we believe are most prevalent on social media. Social
information, information about what other people are doing. We have
that all the time. All around us. We have information on social media
about what other people are doing. And that's influencing our own
likelihood of behaving. And we have visibility. The fact that we're visible
to what other people are doing. That it's so much easier now to get
Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame. And that's true over and over again
on social media. And sometimes we do things because they are
visible. The Ice Bucket Challenge was an example of that. Where
people were being made visible having buckets of water poured over
their heads. This was a powerful motivator for them acting. Of course
when they weren't visible, when they were actually donating money,
they were much less likely to do it. Visibility is a powerful driver of
behavior. We know that from decades of social science research.
Another thing we looked at was the question of personality. And that
speaks perhaps to some of the work I know that's going on here on the
relationship between personality and online behavior. If we're talking
about very tiny acts of participation, then resources associated with
demographics, it's traditional predictor of how we behave politically, is
going to be less important. And things like personality may be more
important. That's one of the things we looked at in the book. We looked
at various kind of personality traits. And how they seem to be
influencing how people behave. We had some quite interesting
findings. One of them is that -- is the importance of extroverts. And
that may be replicated, I don't know, in anybody else's work where they
found extrovert people are much less susceptible to social information,
information about what other people are doing. So they are very crucial
to starting a mobilization. Because they don't mind so much about the
signals of viability. That was one thing we found. And I mentioned an
actual experiment. And that's one of the exciting things about new data
sources. That we see natural experiments sort of there hidden in the
data, if we can identify them. That is when a platform changes, then
the effects of that change will be there in the data, if we can model it
before and after the change. We did that with this change to the
Government petitions platform. Here they introduced trending
information. They thought that would be a cool idea. You do it here on the
We the People site. And so they introduced that change. And they
weren't really thinking -- they thought it might make more people sign
petitions. They didn't think it would really have a dramatic effect. In fact
what we found is that it did, indeed, it did, indeed, have an effect. It
concentrated signatures towards the most popular petitions at the
expense of the less popular. It didn't make more people sign petitions.
But it did have this concentrating sort of made the rich richer kind of
effect, which you might predict if you're accustomed to look at online
behavior. But it was not predicted by the people who were running the
platform. Important to run these kind of experiments if you want to
know the effect of change. What I've been saying here then is all
suggesting ways that a lot of people get onto streets. A lot of people
come to act collectively, to undertake collective action, in a digital
world. But an important thing to note is the high possibility that these
kind of mobilizations are unsustainable. That's demonstrations in
Brazil where in 2014 where the President Dilma Rousseff asked to talk
to the leaders of the demonstration. Then was told, no, you can't. There
aren't any. There are no leaders. And this is a phenomenon that we've
seen in all sorts of places. Basically that very large mobilization can
get going without the normal organizational institutional leadership
characteristics of or trackings that we would normally expect to see for
mobilization or particularly a Revolution. And that introduces real
questions of sustainability. And perhaps explains why so many
mobilizations that we've seen actually have been disappointing in the
extent to which they can keep going. It's almost as if we get collective --
we act first and sort of get collective identity later rather than the
other way around in the converse of normal social movement theory.
So just to sum up and I'll stop there, tiny acts of participation, scaling
up to very large scale mobilizations. But nearly all of them failing. Most
tweets are never retweeted. Most Facebook posts are never shared.
That feeling you get when nobody looks at what you put on social
media. Don't worry, you're not alone. That's what mostly happens. The
dynamics of this social information and visibility, the kind of drivers of
behavior in this sort of movement, influenced by platform design.
Afterall platforms vary according to what kind of social information
you get, how visible you are. Who you are visible to, what kind of
network structures emerge and therefore what kinds of friends
networks or acquaintance networks that you're visible to. All of those
things will influence -- if we're right will influence political behavior and
movement formation. Shaped by personality and other measures of
individual difference rather than demographics. Lacking or at least
having the possibility of lacking leaders, institutions, organizations.
Therefore, unstable, unpredictable, and often unsustainable. And what
we are arguing is that all of that is leading to political turbulence. Now,
of course turbulence is in a sense kind of a metaphor, a way of
describing what we seem to perceive going on. The kind of sudden
rising up of movements and mobilizations and possibly the kind of
dying away again without sustainability. But there is another sense in
which we feel this is a kind of -- it's a bit more than a metaphor. What
we're interested in now is developing the matters to put some kind of
beef on to the metaphor, if you like, to work out how we might -- a
turbulent system is of course a chaotic system and how can we work
out some of the methods perhaps borrowing from the natural
sciences, from the physical and life sciences, onto social systems. Can
we model social systems like natural systems? Can we use the tools of
the physical and life sciences to model political behavior. We hoped we
made a start with this book to doing that. But there's
still a way to go. And I'll stop there. Thank you.
>> Thank you so much. (Applause).
>> So Helen, as I understand the argument that you're making,
in many ways this book starts with a challenge to Malcolm Gladwell
and a number of other popular thinkers out there
who have put out essentially this very cynical sarcasti c
view of what the Internet means for politics. And in Gladwell's formulation,
to be an effective actor, to be successful, you have to take personal risk.
You've got to put yourself on the line in a bus boycott or sit at a lunch
counter. You have to risk arrest. You have to perhaps risk
physical harm. That's what activism is all about.
Not all you silly people with this micro level safe clicking
back in your homes. This is pulling you away from what it actually
means. Now, on some levels, you've got a very straight-forward
argument, which is that a lot of little things can add up to something
very powerful. But is there a point from Gladwell, from Morzal (phonetic),
from some of these other folks who are critical about this online
activism that in losing risk, in losing danger, we're actually talking about a very,
very different form of mobilization than we were in years before?
>> Yeah, well, you're certainly right. I don't agree with Gladwell. (Chuckles).
>> And you will find the article, why the Revolution
won't be tweeted, is mentioned a few times in the book. That's right.
And -- but it's not just -- it's not just Gladwell. I mean, actually
that is a very prevalent view in many political cultures,
particularly British political culture actually. In British politics, in it
doesn't hurt, it's not politics. If it doesn't involve some long meeting or
tramping the streets or something that's in some way kind of infringing
on your life and making your life worse in some way or painful, then it's
not politics. And that is a very prevalent view. And it is one that we are
arguing against quite strongly. However, there is another sense in
which Gladwell is not right when he said the Revolution won't be
tweeted. I think the Revolution was tweeted. But the post Revolution
won't be tweeted. You know, I mean, something else has to happen.
Some kind of organizational and institutional catchup. And that was
what over and over we didn't see in the Arab Spring. You didn't see the
emergence of leaders, of parties, of institutions, of civil society, that
was able to kind of take that forward. So I suppose in that sense, you
know, there was a truth in what he's saying. But certainly, we are --
yeah, we are saying that, yes it can. A small act can. A small act
probably leads to another act if it gives you a little tiny bit of what you
want. It's not devalued because it's small.
>> And so, first of all, one of the things when we were talking about
this last night that I really liked that you brought up with this
was the idea that in many ways what's going on is reducing the
cost of participating in activism. That in some ways, in a preDigital Age,
your first sort of easy maybe thin form of activism might
have been going out and going to attend a speech or a rally or
going and purchasing the bumper sticker and put it on your car.
And in the grand scheme of things, actually those require some
mobilization. You've got to figure out where the rally is. You've got to
get yourself out. And get yourself to it. Whereas now pretty much any
time there's a Donald Trump small hands joke, I just retweet it and feel
like I'm doing my part. So on the one hand, we've lowered that
activation energy. I think the fear in some cases is that maybe we have lowered
that activation energy so low that the line between trading
jokes and being engaged in civics begins to blur. Is that a problem? Or is that a good thing?
>> I think so. I think it's drawing people to do things --
you know, most people never did go to the demonstration or the kind
of lumpier things. So it's drawing people in I believe that wouldn't
have participated. It certainly -- it certainly is blurring the line. But jokes
are incredibly important. And have been in the politics of the past. It's
just much easier to share a joke. I wouldn't disagree -- I wouldn't agree
that sharing a joke cannot in some way be counted as a political act. I
think the key thing is that it's drawing people in to politics and sort of
fight against injustice who don't have resources, who are quite often
young. For decades, political scientists have been -- we, political
commentators, have been moaning the fact that young people are not
interested in politics. They are disengaged in politics. They don't do
politics. And now they are doing things like voting for Jeremy Corbyn,
quite an old member of the -- you know, a mainstream political party, to
be leader of Labour Party. So I think we have
to say that there's something positive there.
>> And walk me through the argument between retweeting
and how this gets us up to electing Jeremy Corbyn which I'm still trying
to get my heads around because it seems like a very remarkably unlikely
thing to happen. But we seem to be in the politics of the remarkably
unlikely right now. What is it about that ability to very
inexpensively make and spread media and particularly the responsibility
to take these sort of micro acts of civic participation, how does it make
apparently outsider, apparently almost counter institutional or counter
cultural figures, why does it make them so powerful at the moment?
>> Well, I suppose because before there would have been no way
that they could garner support without having those institutional
mechanisms. And now it is possible. So you know
Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, you know, they made a good
campaign on social media. They managed to get it spread around
in a way that the other candidates just didn't. And that is something
that wouldn't have been possible before. So -- and it's having a
cumulative effect. One -- we also talked about this last night.
And it would be impossible to measure. But it's giving people the feeling
that the extraordinary can happen. And we saw there might have been
some of that in the Arab Spring, the kind of, gosh, look what happened in
Tunisia, it can happen. You know, things that seem impossible can
happen. Figures from outside the mainstream can become leader. And I
think that's why we are seeing a cumulative process, as well. That's
having a kind of pervasive effect on what people feel about politics. They
have a feeling that something outside the establishment can happen.
>> That notion that the unlikely can happen seems to me to be very
well supported by the theory that -- or an aspect
of the theory that you're putting forward. So a good bit of
the argument of your book deals with these sort of large-scale
social mobilizations that many of us were so fascinated by with the
Arab Spring having watched the Arab Spring unfold. There was
a sense in which there was first the experience of Tunisians in
Tunis watching really for the first time Tunisians in this little village
of Sidi Bouzid standing up and protesting and not getting arrested
or gunned down and suddenly having this thought of, oh, maybe we
could do this, too. And then as all of Tunisia came together and finally
got rid of Ben Ali who had been in power for more than 30 years, that
was clearly pretty inspiring to Egyptians living under Mubarak and there
was a lot of very direct discussion. Is this another case where you argue
that 99.99% of these mobilizations fail. And that maybe we shouldn't be
surprised that the Arab Spring fails in Bahrain and Libya and Syria and
Yemen and Sudan and all of these other places where people tried it.
How do we deal with this ideal of success bias? We can talk about all of
these different stories. And we sort of remember that social media
seemed to play a key area here. How do we understand better that
question of the 99.99% that don't make it?
>> Yeah, I mean, I think that is the exciting thing about new sources of data.
That's why I'm excited about -- I mean, if you are able to see a
petition as a mini mobilization, you know, a complete dataset,
it's an N equals all dataset, does allow you to do that kind of analysis.
And I think really for the first time, I don't think we've ever been able --
if you look at books about political participation and collective action
from the preInternet, there will either be political economy
or economics books with no evidence at all, just formal models and
that's great. But you know, I mean, part of the idea of doing this was, as
I said, to put some kind of meat on some of those. Or a survey, which
is inevitably -- it can't be systematic. Or it is just -- it's narrative in stories,
which is good. But we can't get a sense of the failures from that. So for
the first time, we can look at that. But that's a very exciting dataset.
There's all sorts of other datasets that I wish we had, which we don't.
And I think that's a challenge, you know, from whichever discipline or
from whatever sector or perspective we are looking at this from, the lack
of availability of data like that is a challenge to looking at this kind of
thing. You know, Facebook data, for example. Most people don't have Facebook data.
>> Sure.
>> So, yeah, we're not there yet. But that's what we need to be looking toward.
>> Some of this stuff gets very interesting. So I'm really struck by your
badgers example. This idea that there's three separate petitions that come
up on Her Majesty's Government site. One gets fewer than 10 signatures.
One gets a few hundred. One ends up with 150,000. And suddenly
badgers are discussed in Parliament. And you sort of imply
in some ways that they are basically the same petition.
And obviously one of the arguments on this is probably someone did
some really strong work beating the bushes on social media. And I'm
guessing that's the one with 150,000 rather than 1 with 10. Is there a
possibility that if you could sort of synchronize your research with
someone like Deb Roy here who tracks the spread of ideas on Twitter, is
it possible that there's another factor which basically says, okay, now we
can figure out whose petition is going to get the 100,000, whose is going
to get the 10. We can actually get close to making some of that
determination. Or do you feel that that's just -- at the end of the day that
that's going to be very, very difficult to predict?
>> It is -- it could well be part of the story. And we were quite alike to that.
We do have some Twitter data. Not as much as Deb Roy, though.
It would be wonderful to do -- yes, it would be wonderful to do that.
We did have some Twitter -- we follow all of the petitions on Twitter.
So we did have some Twitter data. And we could say something
about that. We did, also, have Twitter data for a number of campaigns
where we looked for evidence of that kind of thing.
We looked for evidence of some kind of large organization or celebrities.
We thought maybe it's some Justin Bieber or PewDiePie
effect or something like that. We didn't find evidence for that. And that's in common with other recent research which has been that, you know,
there's a lot of individuals just playing a kind of role in sending the
petition from one part to another. We couldn't -- even if Justin Bieber, you
know, does sign -- retweet something, it doesn't mean that something
succeeds. It's probably some of the story. It's difficult to research
because you don't know when somebody sets up a petition if they are an
organization. Because they are not -- they are supposed to do it as a
citizen. But it's definitely not the whole story.
And it may only be a small part of the story.
>> But even with that big celebrity burst, there's still enough uncertainty
that it's very hard to tell whether a social media activity is really
going to go viral or not. There's no --
>> Yeah, and I think, you know, we will --
some of it must be down to luck actually. I mean, because it happens
so quickly. And the way that social media platforms
like Twitter or Facebook are designed, I mean, you see it. And if you don't
see it, then you won't ever see it unless you go back and look for it.
>> Right.
>> And most people don't. So there must be a lot of coming together
of the right people seeing it, perhaps extrovert people, for example,
in the early points. And that would be very difficult to model that.
But not necessarily impossible.
>> And when you were talking about the importance of extroverts and introverts,
your observation there, I just want to make sure that I understand,
is that extroverts are actually less sensitive to this sort of
social pressure than introverts. They are just better adjusted than we are?
Or I spend so much time listening to the voices in my head that when
I Joi tells me something to do, I just sort of jump up and do it?
Or what's the explanation there for this sort of extrovert resilience against social pressure?
>> Yeah, it's that they are more likely to do something,
yeah, when nobody else has done it. When there's very low numbers
of other people who have done it. Yeah, they are more kind of independent
I suppose. It's complicated, though. We expected to find --
we did -- but much weaker that effect for people who have a high internal
locus of control. So people who kind of feel like they are the master
of their fate. I thought that was what would be the driver. But it wasn't.
It wasn't nearly as strong as extroversion. You may be a very --
and you are, a very agreeable person. And agreeable people go later.
>> Oh, interesting. (Chuckles).
>> They wait until there's lots of people.
>> So you need introverted contrarians to start a movement?
>> Extrovert; extrovert.
>> We need to convert the extrovert. But we need ones that don't want to go with the pack.
>> Yeah.
>> And they have a more powerful sort of activation energy that goes within this?
>> Yeah.
>> We also found that with visibility we kind of that pro self or individualist social --
people with an individualist social value orientation,
they seemed much more susceptible to visibility than cooperative or
prosocial people. So you made them visible. And they were all
contributing more to public good -- in public goods games.
>> So I want to open this up in just a moment or two.
But I wanted to ask you the question that I didn't get to ask you
over dinner last night. Which really had to do with the question
of the viability of these movements. So what you have argued in many
ways is that people can participate in ways that are much easier.
They can take these much smaller acts. You can have much lower
activation energy. People can see each other's actions. And by seeing
each other's actions, people can start figuring out how to coordinate,
they can start making decisions about what they should do.
This can actually turn into very rapid, very powerful mobilization. Except
that mostly it doesn't. And it's actually very hard to predict when it's
going to happen. It's not a very simple as we'll get Justin Bieber to
retweet me. What I want to know is what happens when we build these
new social movements. And here I want to sort of tell a story that Zainab
(inaudible) at the University of North Carolina tells. And Zainab talks
about her experiences in Gezi Park in Istanbul. And this is a massive
movement. It's a bit of an unusual social movement in that it's an anti-Erdogan
movement. Erdogan is actually very popular within Turkey. What
happens is pretty much everyone who has a bone to pick with Erdogan
comes out into the streets over the issue of Gezi Park. And you have the
world's least likely political essentially collaboration. You have groups
that normally won't be seen in each other's presence. You have gay and
lesbian Turks and ultra Nationalists, ultra religious Turks, marching
together. Because they are both interested in the same sort of counter
power. They are both interested in mobilizing against Erdogan. But at a
certain point when they have to decide what to do together, there's no
goodwill. There's no work that's been done ahead of time. You actually
end up with a very fragile movement. Because it's really a movement of
individuals who made their own choices rather than a movement of
groups that sort of worked it out together and said, hey, you know what,
we hate Erdogan, you hate Erdogan. Let's put aside the fact of the
moment that you think we should be damned to hell and we think you're
horrible and repressive. Let's actually work through our differences. That
doesn't seem to happen here. Do you think this new form of mobilization
where you could get these very individualistic very potentially brittle
social movements, is this a good thing, Helen?
>> Well, that's a really good point. And I mean, it's related to the point
I was making about collective identity. I mean, in a
social movement theory, you get collective identity. And then you
get collective action. And here you're getting it the other way around.
Sort of act first, identify afterwards. And that's more -- it's more difficult
to do that. There's all sorts of reasons why that is more difficult.
I mean, so, no. In a way. (Chuckles).
>> But on the other hand, you have seen examples where --
I mean, I think you might have said the same of the indignados in Spain.
A lot of dissatisfaction with everything. But no very clear --
not agreement on what the dissatisfaction -- lots of different dissatisfactions.
And certainly not a kind of plan or a kind of coming together
exactly of people. And you have seen that turn around.
You've seen Podemos emerge as a force in Spanish politics. The
mainstream of Spanish politics is still very unable to kind of
accommodate it. But it's definitely there. And making a difference and
getting a third of the vote in the election. So it can happen. It's part of the
way. But yeah, it's also kind of a rocky road. And there's things that can
go wrong. I mean, political sociology will tell us that when you get kind of
cross cutting cleavages, you're probably going to get unstability. And
where you've got this lack of identity and
this kind of just the action, micro action at that.
>> So last question from me and then we're going to open it up to the room
and then open it up online. I think you and I would sort of agree that this
looks like an unusual moment in civics. It looks like a highly
participatory moment. It looks like a moment where a lot of
people who haven't been involved previously are getting involved, where
the nature of movement building itself has changed. This notion, as you
just put it, that we have collective action, then maybe, possibly, collective
identity, rather than what's traditionally been the case which is collective
identity and then the decision to move to collective action. Is this about
changes in technology? Or is it about something else? And I'm going to
put up a rival theory. I am worried that we're starting to suffer a really
interesting disease of democracy, which is to say that we know an awful
lot about the institutions in our society right now. We have an awful lot of
insight into the ways in which they are failing and are broken. And in
some cases just seem doomed or destined to fail. I wonder if this is
more a reaction to a moment of very, very high mistrust in institutions of
all sorts, whether that's governments, whether that's parliaments,
whether that's businesses, whether that sort of shift in public attitude is
the key actor here. Or whether the tech is the key actor. Do you want to
make a claim that the tech is really the key figure in this space at this point?
>> Oh, I can't -- well, I'm a social scientist. I can't espouse such a determinist
viewpoint. But I would maintain the fact that -- the fact that
it's become easier is a factor. The widespread availability of the tools of
kind of mobilization and protest I do believe is a factor. The question of
trust, I mean, in a way, though, that could also be related to widespread
use of social media. In that we have got some sort of greater transparency.
>> Sure.
>> More access. And I mean, I think in the past we've always looked at --
you know, transparency was always supposed to be such a good thing.
And it is a good thing. But it does not necessarily lead to
greater trust. I mean, quite the other way around. There have been
some very interesting experiments which have shown that it's much
more likely to be the other way around. The more we know about
our institutions and how they work the less we trust them. So
obviously part of the kind of institutional catchup would have to be
working at things from that end.
>> Sure.
>> There's no way we're going to get sustained democratic change just from one side.
>> So I need my mic runners at this point.
We're going to open up to the audience. And we would love to take some questions.
For people who are watching along on the livestream,
I have my phone here. If you tweet out to the hash-tag MLTalks,
I will see your question. I'll try to bring it into the conversation, as well.
But I would love some hands up. And otherwise, I'm just going to call on
people who should be asking good questions. That means you, Nathan.
Followed by Topper. (Chuckles)
>> Very democratic.
>> Fair enough; fair enough. Nathan is just going to try
to get a whole transcript of this down. Questions from the audience?
Topper, what do you make of this, you have been involved with social
change out in the real world for more than 40 years through the process
of making media but not making little media. Making big media.
>> Yeah.
>> You make big meaty films. How do you react to this?
>> I'm very curious about the possibility of building a new kind of
Civil Rights' Movement. And how -- you know, these possibilities
can contribute to that. And interested in how that could be done
on a sustainable basis. So it's a big curious question to me. I'm glad
to be here. Because it's a question that's at the very front of my mind
at this moment in time. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about that.
>> About building a sustainable --
>> Building a new kind of Civil Rights' Movement.
>> Yeah; yeah. Well, it's definitely -- I mean, I don't know is the answer. I don't have --
>> I don't, either. (Chuckles).
>> I don't have a recipe book for a Civil Rights' Movement.
But I do think that in terms of any response, sort of institutional
response through any of this, we have to -- we or you or anybody
seeking change of that kind, would have to go kind of
with this rather than kind of trying to introduce something
over there or somewhere else.
>> Yeah.
>> Social media are -- the Internet more generally. But perhaps social media,
the first kind of applications and technologies that citizens
have domesticated and innovated with faster than governments
or other organizations. And so we don't know that much about what's --
what happens. But it's no good creating something else and expecting --
you see a lot of that in academic research or kind of proposals
to the European Commission. You know, we're going to build this
tool or this platform. And we're going to get everybody participating.
And we're going to consult everyone. Direct democracy.
Some kind of mass consultation. That's not going to work in my view.
It can't be like that. It has to go with this. It has to be some imaginative
way of kind of working on peoples' willingness to engage.
I mean, what we're seeing here on a mass scale is peoples'
willingness to engage with the political world and the policy world. And
we have to work out ways of capitalizing on that. I think not expecting to
take them somewhere else.
>> But your inversion, which I really like, of basically building participation
in a movement. And then building an identity, actually in some ways
seems to be very much what's happening in the United States right now.
We've had people taking to the streets in protest of Michael Brown's death.
We've had people taking to the streets in the Baltimore uprising in protest
to Freddie Gray's death, Eric Garner's death. Somewhere in the process
of this largely leaderless Black Lives Matter movement led by
three gay women of color but who are not the people pushing everyone
into the streets for those different movements, people started attaching
themselves to that identity almost as a way of sort of talking about their
desire to be part of this larger mobilization. And so mobilization
that in many ways started as a set of mobilizations against police violence
now seems to be turning into an identity.
And the possibility of a new Civil Rights' Movement.
>> Yeah.
>> I guess part of what I'm curious about as a political scientist,
put some of the data away for a moment here, are there other moments
where we have seen this happen. Where we see people taking
action and then sort of saying, wow, I just took that action,
I wonder what that means about me. I wonder what I'm part of now.
>> Yeah, I mean, I think that's very exciting. That's a very good example.
That's why one of the kind of resistances to these kind of ideas,
particularly in the UK I think, is kind of oh, social media, none of that
makes any difference. And there you have uncontrovertedly
an example where it really has made a difference. I hope someone is
doing a really good study of that. Is someone? Are you? Is somebody here?
>> We're doing some work on it. But I actually hadn't got in that notion
of inverting participation and then identity until you said it a couple of
minutes ago. So that was my price of admission here. This is now my
afternoon well spent. (Chuckles).
>> But I'm going to shut up and let other people ask questions.
Now that I've put Nathan completely on the spot, let's put a microphone
in front of him.
>> So I'm curious. In some ways the conversation
you're just having is one about movements maybe versus movement
organizations. Where we would think about like resource mobilization
theories of social movement saying that if you have existing organizations
with the resources and networks and capacity to negotiate
and lobby, they can mobilize people towards various things.
And what you're describing are cases where movements are coming
together. Sometimes with very limited participation or support
of what we might think of as classic movement organizations who
can do that negotiation and more classic politics work. And I wonder --
my Computer Science colleagues, as you describe, are often trying to
break down the work of politics into ever tinier and tinier things so that
more of that work can be turned into the like casual small participation.
But I'm curious to hear your thoughts about how like movement
organizations might need to adapt in order to better interface with or remake
themselves to better interface with these rapidly emerging chaotic movements.
>> You mean kind of a civil society organization?
>> Sure.
>> Yeah; yeah. Well, it comes back to this question of kind of going with
what's going on and working out ways of kind of -- well, harnessing it
is perhaps the wrong word. But kind of building on things that have
worked like Black Lives Matter or those examples. I mean,
being imaginative, I mean, there are some examples of pressure
groups which kind of have been creative in this sense. But have tended
to be -- tend to be -- well, I mean that's not fair actually. There are
enormous numbers of voluntary sector organizations which have been
very creative here. One of them in the UK, which is not so sort of
fashionable is the Organization 38 Degrees, which has sort of acted as
an umbrella thing for lots of different issues. They are actually originally
disaffected liberal Democrats but they came together in this pressure
group. And then they hold kind of ballots to see what their members --
and a member is just someone who has ever had any interaction with
them. So they have gone with a redefinition of membership. Which I
believe is long overdue. People just don't belong to things in the same
way they used to. So that kind of thing has been a way of kind of being a
mediator in some form, in some kind of democratic way of deciding
what to campaign on. And I think there's probably quite a lot of examples
of that. One of the challenges, though, I think is going to be resources.
And you and I have been talking about this earlier. But in the whole big
data -- data science Revolution, I think voluntary organizations and NGOs
can feel very kind of out of it because they lack the expertise
and resources to kind of analyze even the data they have. So in a day
where big political parties are completely kind of data driven and are using
tools to work out what people are doing in a rather kind of -- in a very non-participatory
sort of way. I think it can be very difficult for civil society
organizations to play that game, if you like. Not that I'm
suggesting they should be. But there are things that they could be doing with data.
>> It's interesting to think about this relationship to data and to mobilization
with civil society. Because obviously there are professional political
organizations that are doing very detailed analysis of data. And then
taking action on it. Although, often it seems to have this almost
synthetic feel to it. You can often feel an institutional voice behind the
scenes. You have these small NGOs that are in many ways sort of terrified
of this space. They know they don't know it. And it ends up being like your
grandmother on Facebook. It's inherently awkward. Because this is
someone who simply doesn't work within the medium. It feels to me
maybe sort of going to Nathan's question a little bit that it's a medium
right now that is really biased towards the individual and individual action.
Do you think that institutions, organizations, whether they are small
pressure groups or NGOs as we would say here or whether it's political
parties or larger entities, are they going to be able to master this same
sort of vocabulary? Are they going to be able to master this same sort of
virility that's able to make some of these movements very sharply spike?
>> Yeah, well, I think to survive they are going to have to actually. Because
it's like people say about a connected car is a pile of data and algorithms,
you know. A pressure group, also, will be a pile of data and algorithms. So
if they want to do something in this space, they will have to -- I mean,
there might be -- there are things that -- this might seem an unfashionable
view perhaps. But there might be things governments can do. Actually I
think petitions platforms quite a good example of that. They get a lot of
knock petitions. Oh it's just people complaining and being negative and
it's not really politics and all that kind of thing. But actually it is a
massively popular -- and that's just the Government ones. We haven't
talked about (inaudible) or any of a number of huge other ones. But they
are a source of engagement and mobilization and they are different
according to the platform design. Sorry; I'm losing my voice. So for
example, the UK Government one doesn't put people in touch with each
other. But it could. It could do. And that would change the sort of
engagement that emerged from the platform. Lots of governments don't
have petition platforms. But they could. Lots of them like the U.S.
Government, doesn't put any resources into it. As far as I know, last time I
went to see the We the People platform, I think there was one guy kind of
responsible for coordinating all of the Government responses. What if
your guy is on holiday or something? We need to think about these things
seriously. Because they are democratic institutions. And they are shaping
the sort of engagement we get between citizens and Government. And
there might be loads of other things that could be done of a similar nature
if it was prioritized. But things like petition platforms are notoriously
underresourced and underprioritized. And I think we're missing the trick there.
>> The -- so the first thing -- the good thing with petition platforms in the
United States, since we don't take holiday, that's not an issue. We just
wait for people to die from overwork and then we try to figure out how
to replace the code they were running. The other thing is what we have
basically just done here with our petition platform is every time it looks
like it might actually lead towards interesting conversation or substantive
change, we just change the ceiling so that many, many more responses
have to come to sort of open a conversation. But putting that to a side, I
want to go onto Twitter for a moment. I'm going to try to unpack 140
characters into actual questions for you. So Blake Annaburg asks, what's
the best way -- have you found sort of a best practice for the use of new
media and mobilization of politics? He's curious whether videos are
particularly strong, whether it's sort of short media or long media, whether
it's textual stories, whether interviews with people. Do you have any sense
from the work you've done about what's particularly powerful in this sort
of mobilizing space?
>> That's a really hard thing to be able to do.
Because it would involve comparing things. Yeah. It's an interesting idea.
Because afterall, there are some images which have been so influential.
The photograph of the drowned Syrian boy which was circulated across
European social media and possibly U.S. ones last year, why was that so
incredibly -- people say oh because it was such a shocking and
distressing image. But as many people pointed out, there have been
hundreds of thousands of distressing, shocking images and they didn't go
anywhere. So yeah that's a kind of next book. I would have to think about that. (Chuckles).
>> But I mean, yeah. It's a good point. Image is certainly -- we know
that it seems that images seem -- if you can associate an image with
something like a petition, and that is perhaps something you
could look at, if you can associate an image with them.
>> And I think image would be particularly fascinating.
We could start with something like a news wire, like the Associated Press,
or something along those lines, Reuters, and essentially say,
here are collections of images that get put out into public visibility
every single day. And as with other forms of mobilization, 99.99%
don't really cause a stir. Some do. And pictures like the picture
of the dead Syrian boy end up having enormous political
weight associated with them. And it would be very interesting to sort of
think about, again, as one of the commenters pointed out, is it all about
timing? Is it something about the structure of the image? Is it something
about how it was promoted or where it went? For us in the U.S., one of the
mobilization stories that we sort of always come back to as both a
cautionary tale as well as a very exciting tale is the Kony 2012 story.
Where you had these very, very successful movement building
organizations. They were a very classic movement building organization
in that they wanted you to be identity first, then mobilization. Managed
using a half hour long video to have incredible mobilization within a
particular sector of youth online. So they somehow really latched in to this
one particular audience. Unfortunately, in some ways, the fact that they
had a half hour video expensively produced gave fuel for nasty
argumentative cynics like me to pick apart the argument and essentially
make the case that it was essentially colonialist absurdism that nobody
should support. So it both harmed and helped itself simultaneously
because that backlash came. So I hope you will consider writing that. But
Natalie you had a hand up and then Saul. So let's bring a mic over to
Natalie. Let's take that question. And after Helen has had a chance to
answer, let's go to Saul. And then we'll see if we have space for more one
online. If we can make Natalie's mic live, please.
>> So this would be an interesting sort of small discussion
to have between the two of you. Because a lot of Ethan's
work has focused on the limitations of our social circles and our
networks in terms of access to a greater variety of information,
to diverse perspectives, to diverse viewpoints, and access to
conversations in social media that are so-called outside of the scope of
our particular networks. So in the model that you researched, because
participation comes from and the potential for kind of collective
identification comes after, is that a solution to Ethan's issue where you're
unable to be a part of conversations that are outside of your circle if these
movements are outside of the scope of circles in general?
>> Yeah. Well, we haven't talked about -- it's possible we might disagree
about that. (Chuckles).
>> Cool.
>> I mean, our feeling was that when people -- and this is why I particularly
thought Malcolm Gladwell was wrong. Because I think when people are
campaigning about public goods, that the influences come probably
from outside their network. And so if people are, I don't know,
considering whether to -- whether to vote or not, and are possibly influenced
by the Facebook I voted today button, I think it's not going to make a
difference if they are kind of right on the edges of your network or close
in your network. And I think that most of the influences here are coming
from a more -- in a more broadcast kind of way really.
That the numbers are driving it. And the numbers -- they don't have
names. They are not your kind of really close friends and acquaintances
which Gladwell argued was necessary to have the Revolution. And that's
why I think he's so wrong. Because I think this doesn't come from your --
yeah, it doesn't come out of your immediate friends at all. In a way that's
kind of what's interesting.
>> Natalie gets points for a bank shot that requires people to have
read both of our books to sort of fully get the question here. (Chuckles).
>> But you're absolutely right. And this notion that movements might get
built by participation rather than by identity does something very interesting.
So if identity is required for participation, movements tend to get isolated
within your own social circles. If your friends and neighbors
are not part of the Black Lives Matter movement, you're not going to
become part of the Black Lives Matter movement. And you're end to end up with --
you're going to end up with movements that will be more homogenous
than movements that essentially say, here is something very low effort
you can do, come take action. And maybe through the process
of iterated action you will find yourself identifying with the movement.
And then part of identifying with the movement may change your identity
over time. So in that sense, I do think it probably gets us out of some of
these eco changes of homophily that I end up working about if in fact
this is the right model for how identity is forming. And I want to think
about that for at least a week or so before I'm ready to pick it up but
I still think it's one of the cooler thoughts that I've thought of recently.
>> I mean, I don't know if you -- if you tweet on the wesha sweshali (phonetic).
I think it's most likely to be because it's trending on Twitter rather than
because one of your friends did it. I mean, I think that's the key.
>> It's the low barrier to participation rather than the social pressure?
>> Yeah, I don't think it's social pressure when you do that. The social pressure
comes from the social information. Everybody is talking about this.
Hey, what's going on? Oh, I can do that, too. I agree with that. I can do that, too.
So it's a question of timing and social information.
Because you have to see it, trending things change very quickly. But I don't
think it's a question of people being close.
>> So let's bring the mic over to Saul.
>> Hi, this is all fascinating. This is really a question about Black Lives Matter.
But I want to start with the Her Majesty's Government petition system,
which is really bolting an online frontend to a legacy political process.
I mean 100,000 people care about badgers and then there's a parliamentary
debate about badgers. You know, Black Lives Matter
is something very different. By many of the normal standards of
measuring the success of a movement, it's achieved nothing. There's no
legislation. I mean, there's nothing tangible. The first Civil Rights' Movement
had civil rights legislation, it had voter registration, et cetera,
Black Lives Matter, which we all sort of intuitively feel is being successful,
hasn't done that. And I think part of it goes to Nathan's point where the --
the normal lobbying organizations of civil rights, the people who would
get down into the halls of Congress and lobby for changes in legislation
don't quite know what to do with it. And I think to some extent the Black
Lives Matter movement doesn't actually care. So my really question is
how do you measure the success of something like Black Lives Matter?
We're talking about it as successful. But I wonder why that actually is.
>> Well, that's a good point of course. And I can't claim that we have done
that. We had to use some kind of measure of success to be able to look
at the difference between success and non-success. But of course actual
success and achieving kind of long-term institutional and political change
is something that takes a long time. I mean, I don't know if you look at the
time horizon of the Civil Rights' Movement and Black Lives Matter, where
are we? I mean, I would be inclined to say that it's been -- surely it's
changed the judicial context. I don't know. Instinctively I feel that there is
some change there. But you're right. Actually quantifying it would be very
hard. But I think there's no way you could use this sort of data and have
some kind of real, true measure of kind of sustained change. You couldn't
do that in a quantitative way I don't think. And I do think that like we were
saying earlier, there is -- there's a task here that needs to be done. Which
we started to try to do. Which I think the failures are important, too. I want
somebody to be looking at the failures. Because I think there's a terrible
selection bias in the way we have looked at this so far. We just tend to
focus on the ones that are successful. You do need some sort of
quantitative analysis to look at the failures, as well, but I agree, there
would be no really good way to do that, to look at the success.
>> So let me give a different answer and let me see if it works for you
or if this is a place where we do genuinely differ.
My response to Saul would be to say looking for legislative change
out of a movement that hasn't been interested in legislative change
is always going to get you failure. That for me
Black Lives Matter is about norms based change. And that at the
heart of the movement is a set of social norms about the idea that people
in color, particularly black men, are dangerous. And that that has to
change. That there's no way for us to keep living in a free society in the
United States with systematic overincarceration of black males,
systematic police violence against black males, based around a
perception that black males are older, more dangerous, more crime
inclined, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that when you see a
movement like Black Lives Matter, what it's actually trying to do is
challenge those norms. And particularly challenge the media patterns that
lead us to those norms. So for me in many ways, the tools I'm building
with things like Media Cloud, are actually what I want to use to essentially
say, how is that race conversation going? And are we starting to talk
about it over time? Moving to Helen's tools in some ways, one of the
questions I would ask is whether tracking things like the petition system
help you with agenda setting. So one that badgers show up 3 times over
time. And it's hard to say whether this is a rising badger movement i
nterest. But there's other things where you could imagine, for instance,
looking for inequality. Or looking for bankers. Or looking for sort of other
issues within a UK context. And looking to see just in the text of the
petitions how well they spread. How much participation. Is there an
agenda-setting effect where you can watch the political agenda shift as
you can see what gets talked about and not talked about within those platforms?
>> Yeah, you could look at that. But what would be hard would be kind of
getting at the causal inference. Wouldn't it? I mean, I totally agree with
you about the norm changing. I do think that it's been
fantastically -- and I feel you ought to be able to prove it. But it would be
difficult to get at the causal inference in terms of the petition. So for
example, we've just had a big event last week in the where the 96 fans
who died in the Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield, you know, campaign of
27 years to get the names of the people who died kind of cleared of kind
of illegal or unruly or violent behavior instead of it being the
mismanagement of the police and other emergency services. I mean,
petitions were really important there. I could have shown you -- with more
time I could have shown you a map of the geographical distribution of
petition signing. And shown you this massive great unexplained kind of
lump, which would be Sheffield in terms of the petitions that there were
against the -- you know, keeping it on the agenda, asking for parliamentary
debate, asking for a retrying, a reopening of the case again and again and
again. I feel -- sorry. I feel sure that that was an important part of it. A
really important part of it. But proving it in quantitative terms, you need an
experiment. And that's a very difficult RCD to design. And morally dubious, as well.
(Chuckles).
>> So I'm going to go online for the last question. I'm going to apologize
that it's the worst type of question for an experimentalist.
Because I'm basically going to ask you to speculate. And answer sort of
normatively. But Marina the TH asked, how can we use big data to build
and bring to power a new political model? What kind of institutions
do we need? Taking some of these ideas that you have, taking
the sort of insights that you're able to draw from looking at very large
scale or small participation but iterated hundreds of thousands of times,
can you think about what sort of new institutions can really take
advantage of peoples' ability to participate this way? Is there a future
vision for democracy that sort of buildings off of these forces and these
powers that you're documenting?
>> Oh, yes. Yes. I can't say exactly what it is. But making use of this kind
of data, not just sort of dismissing it as clicktivism or slacktivism
or whatever it is but taking it is as it is, a willingness to engage,
and using it to feed back into institutions, feed back into policymakers --
making, I mean using it to make better public policy, that's kind of,
I don't know, to change norms, indeed. All these things.
And to building in the possibility of experimentation. Because as I said
before, hidden in this data are all sorts of natural experiments, which
show us what happens when there's a change. And if we can just find
them and get better at finding them and more innovative at sort of finding
those experiments and understanding the effects of platform change, that
could be very exciting democratic development.
>> (Off microphone).
>> Sorry, did we have a comment? No? Good.
I think we're going to wrap there. I thought I heard someone jumping in at the end.
>> Me, too. (Chuckles). >> But Helen, thank you so much
for being with us. A real pleasure. And thank you, all,
for sticking around and for great questions. And thank you, everyone,
who was asking questions online. Obviously this will be posted on the Media Lab
site in the very near future. (Applause). >> And thanks, all, for taking part in
yet another MLTalks performance.
>> Thank you. Thanks very much.