I am participating in a two-week long MOOC called “Engagement in a Time of Polarization,” hosted on EdX. It’s related to the Antigonish 2.0 project (you can read Bonnie Stewart‘s May 2017 Educause article for more: “Antigonish 2.0: A Way for Higher Ed to Save the Web.”
The course is broadly about what the title says: how to engage people together when the context around us emphasizes polarization. At least, that’s what I’m getting from the bit I’ve done of the course so far. As Chris Gilliard notes in his post “Power, Polarization, and Tech,” polarization is profitable for social media and many other parts of the web: “Polarization keys engagement, and engagement/attention are the what keep us on platforms.” So how do we engage with one another, create meaningful communities, work together to address issues we face in our local contexts, when our digital lives are influenced by moves towards polarization?
Meaningful participatory communities
Today I watched three videos in the course, from people working on different aspects of creating meaningful communities, of helping to create “participatory public engagement” (in the words of the introductory video for Topic 1 of the course). The Highlander Center in Tennessee, USA, is one group working on such efforts. According to the video interview of two people from the Center, (among other things) they bring people together to learn from each other about issues in their own communities, plan actions to address them, and carry those out. The emphasis here is on people bringing their own experiences, their knowledges and cultural practices, and learning from each other through those.
This sounded like an amazing group (they’ve been at it since the 1930s), and I couldn’t help thinking: okay, so the people involved learn and take action, but what about the next generation? And the next? How do we build something like this into just part of what it means to be living in a society (or at least, a democratic one)? I suppose one can do so through the three levels of the Angtigonish movement: local groups, k-12 and higher education, international networks.
Meaningful participatory communities on the web?
How might online platforms or other aspects of digital life contribute to such communities? Right now, often they don’t. As noted above, much of social media is based on profits that can be made through engagement, for which polarization is an important driver. What other opportunities exist?
I like to think blogs are one option here: they can encourage longer writing, longer reflections, deeper engagement. And then through comments people can connect together. But I’m finding there aren’t that many people commenting lately, whether on my blog or others’ (this is purely anecdotal!), and I wonder if social media is taking its place. Just do a quote-tweet instead and that’s your comment! And maybe doing so can connect more people (the message about the post gets amplified beyond one’s own original message on social media, e.g.). Still, social media posts, while permanent in some ways, can often be hard to find later, whereas blog posts and comments are a bit easier I think. Not to mention that social media platforms can filter what you see, or when you see it.
Find Mastodon logos and stickers through their press kit at http://joinmastodon.org
Another interesting option is social media that isn’t driven by profit. I posted about Mastodon on this course’s discussion board as one such option. The discussion question was about this quote and whether it is correct:
“It’s not that there’s anything particularly healthy about cyberspace in itself, but the way in which cyberspace breaks down barriers. Cyberspace makes person-to-person interaction much more likely in an already fragmented society. The thing that people need desperately is random encounter. That’s what community has.”
– John Perry Barlow, 1995, from http://www.lionsroar.com/bell-hooks-talks-to-john-perry-barlow/
I posted on the discussion board and then realized that that is not visible to people outside the course, and also that it will disappear once the course is finished in two weeks.
So I’m reproducing my post below.
There are probably never any truly random encounters in online spaces, because where you go depends on your past, your current experiences, your desires, etc., and others end up there too because of their context…but I have found that I have been able to reach out beyond my fairly small social bubble online through a new-ish social media platform, Mastodon (http://joinmastodon.org). When I joined in the Fall of 2016 it was a small space with a small number of users, few of whom were from my own, already-established online circles. As soon as I made my first public post someone replied to welcome me, and for awhile there was a culture of welcoming new people with a friendly reply, which I joined in as well. I got to know a number of people in those early days, some of whom are still there and some of whom have moved on. But it felt like a small community of friendly folks that I didn’t meet randomly, but that led to connections I would not have made on my usual social circles online.
Now Mastodon has gotten much bigger, but the nature of how it works still fosters small communities if one wants them. It is a federated social network, which means no one big person or company owns all of it. You join an “instance,” which can be big or small, general or focused on particular interests, and run by one or a group of people. The code is open source and anyone with the tech know-how can spin up an instance (and the helpful thing to do is to contribute to your instance host’s expenses and time with a regular donation such as on Patreon or something like that). Each instance has its own rules and policies; many are much stricter on hate speech and harassment, for example, than what you’ll find on Twitter.
But the beauty of federation is that you can still talk with people on other instances. You can either just see the posts from people on your own instance, or on all instances that yours federates with (usually, if one person follows someone on another instance, then that leads to the instances connecting to each other; but this may differ according to different instances’ rules/practices).
Not random encounters, but expanding circles. the ability to stay in a small community or branch outwards, The ability to be on an instance with policies you agree with and people you want to spend time with. And while there are disagreements and some ugliness at times, it is nowhere near the deep polarization and horror I sometimes see on places like Twitter.
I should also mention that there is even a co-op instance on Mastodon, where the members collectively run the instance, decide on policies, etc.: social.coop
I am not claiming that Mastodon will solve all our social ills…far from it. But I think it’s a move in the right direction because the way it’s structured has the capacity for instances to focus on engagement rather than attention, connection rather than polarization … in a way I don’t see current mainstream social media platforms doing.
And if you don’t want your attention and your data to be the product, be willing to put forward a little money to support your instance host! :)
Hi Christina. I think we first connected via ETMOOC a few years ago. I’m on Mastodon, too and I’ve seen some of your posts there.
I agree with your comment about the potential of blogs to support deeper learning. I’ve been writing mine for over 10 years, with the same overall goal of connecting people and ideas that support the growth of non-school tutor, mentor, learning programs in high poverty areas.
I see three levels of engagement.
1. Current social media, or the stream and flow (Clay Shirky wrote about this). We dip in and out of the stream. We add to it. We draw from it. We ignore much of it. We miss the majority of what’s there due to limited time on-line and limited connections in our networks. It may be that we’re now missing much due to how social media platform algorithms determine who sees our posts and who we see.
2. Blog posts – these enable anyone to comment in greater depth about what they are seeing on social media, traditional media as well as from events and meetings they host or participate in. They allow us to share work we’re doing in real life, in schools, non-school, programs, feeding the hungry, resisting, etc. Using hyperlinks, they enable us to connect our readers to a much deeper and extensive library of information.
3. The world wide library – curated collections. This to me is critically important. While a Google search can lead you to information posted anywhere in the world, you need to know what you’re looking for to find it in the first 10 to 20 links that show up as a search result. Many people may now know what they are looking for. Thus if someone is building a web library with information related to a topic (such as the references posted on articles with the #engageMOOC), then anyone can be pointed to that library at any time via hyperlinks in a blog article or via hypelinks attached to a post on one of the social media platforms.
This means anyone can pick out a video, article, piece of research, blog post, etc. and gather friends, co-workers, etc. to read, reflect, discuss, and over time integrate into their understanding of a situation and ways they might respond to it.
As you wrote above, fewer people seem to be commenting on blog posts. From my Google Analytics, fewer people are viewing these. It may be that no one likes what I’m writing, but I think it’s more the result of so many people posting on different platforms and much fewer people taking time to read and reflect on what other people are writing.
Thus, as we go through #engageMOOC and beyond I look forward to finding ways to draw more people from the stream and into the deep end of learning, and to how that helps us understand and try to solve some of the many complex problems we face in our local-global lives.
Hi Daniel,
Yes, I remember you from ETMOOC! Good points about different levels of engagement. The first two I am familiar with, and I lament the reduction in reading and commenting on blogs posts, though I admit that time and the “stream and flow” of social media have led me to do the same thing sometimes. I have made a kind of pact with myself to do some deeper engagement during this short MOOC (and hopefully that will spur me to do more of it beyond). That is one of the things that led to the ETMOOC experience being so valuable–the chance to spend time to reflect and discuss more deeply with many people.
I am not sure I’m understanding the curated library idea; would it be maybe something like the #engageMOOC contribution hub, but then also somehow collecting tweets in there too or other things that are related to a particular topic? Kind of like what Storify used to do (because you could collect web pages, videos, blog posts, social media posts, etc.)? Are there other ways of creating such libraries?
I’ve been building a library for over 40 years that I’ve used to build and sustain a single volunteer-based tutor/mentor program in Chicago, and that I’ve used to build an intermediary that tries to help similar programs grow in every high poverty neighborhood. I’ve been sharing my library with people in my own organization, and with leaders of other programs in Chicago, via email, print newsletters, web sites, and bi-annual conferences that I hosted in Chicago every six months from May 1994-May 2015.
Here’s a concept map that shows the four sections of the library: http://tinyurl.com/TMI-library
One section is focuses on innovation, collaboration, process improvement, knowledge management, etc. Thus, I’m sharing where I get some of the ideas that I apply in my own efforts.
There are many ways to build libraries like mine, but I did it the hard way. One link added at a time to a web platform. Since 2005 this has been hosted on dot.net.nuke. I have more than 2000 links in the library and at least once a year I open every one to make sure it works, and to remind myself of what it’s about. As I do this I often post on Twitter messages like “here’s one of links I’m looking at ….”. So I’m sharing and hopefully drawing attention to the library.
What’s important is that I focus broadly on one question “what are all the things we need to know and do to help every youth born or living in poverty be starting a job/career by age 25?”
Others who focus on different issues might include different links in their library. Although some of the things I include, like fund-raising/philanthropy challenges, or process improvement, etc. can apply across sectors.
I’ve been trying to share ownership of this work with others for many years with very little success. I don’t know why, since I feel that the more you know about a problem, and about how others are solving that problem in different places, the better you will be at innovating solutions that you can apply in your own place.
Hi Daniel,
Ah, now I understand. Thank you for the further information! What an amazing library of information. It takes a great deal of effort to keep it updated and ensure all the links work, I can only imagine. It would indeed be better if such work can be shared in order to remain sustainable.
I guess I make something like libraries through keeping bookmarks on Pinboard, but those are just lists of URLs that are connected through tags…not nearly as useful!