The other day I had a friend of mine come through Portland for some interviews at local hospitals. He only had a few days to stay, but wanted to see the sights of our fair, but grey, city. When I have guests, I make sure they see a few things before they go- Multnomah Falls, My House, and Powell's City of Books. (I should probably update my tour guide selection, but why mess with success?) I was particularly excited as there was one specific book- Joseph Reagle's 'Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia'- that I wanted to pick up and read, as the topic dealt with issues I find especially relevant to my evolving beliefs regarding the practice and teaching of history. I'm about half-way through reading it, but knew right away this book would speak to me. Check out this quote from Lawrence Lessig, general Internet Culture god and provider of the forward for Reagle's book.
Wikipedia is a community, but one formed through a practice, or a doing- collaboration. That collaboration happens within a culture, or a set of norms, guided by principles that the community accepts and fights about, and through that struggle defines. The collaboration produces a social good that an enormous number of people from around the world rely upon. The project is a generation away from its objective of "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." But it is the first time in ten generations that the aspiration of the Enlightenment seems even possible to anyone but the likes of Jefferson.
We need many academic disciplines- economics, political science, history, even law- to help us understand this phenomenon. But the first rich understanding must come from ethnographies. Only a deep reading of the culture of this community- for it is a community rich with a distinctive culture- can begin to make the important lessons of Wikipedia accessible.
No one ever accused Lessig of espousing lackluster idealistic phrases, especially when it concerns the potential for digital technology to remake knowledge production models, and while some may find his 'pie-in-the-sky' sentiment that Wikipedia brings the Enlightenment quest for universally accessible knowledge tangibly closer, they cannot deny the institution the power it holds and continues to grow within our cultural landscape. So radical are the changes being enacted by continuing wireless mobility (via cell phones and tablets/laptops) and the production of digital culture that almost every sphere of human activity is altered by its very presence. Wikipedia provides only one example. While the average American might marvel at the 'connectedness' social platforms like Facebook or Flickr bring to their personal and professional relationships, the scope of these platforms projected influence in creating, shaping, and furthering public discourse concerns parties across a wide spectrum. Authoritarian regimes along with 'stalwart' democracies express frustration with the potential of social media to disrupt their programs or policies, evidenced, in the former, by China's pre-emptive censoring of news related to the Nobel Peace Prize presented to an absent Liu Xiaobo, and, in the latter, the continuing brew-ha-ha over Wikileaks with American authorities, now issuing subpoenas for Twitter account information of Julian Assange and other supporters of the site.
I wrote a post in November addressing what I termed 'Stakeholder Similarity and the Mobility of Liberalism', part of which dealt with an article written by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on the 'Digital Disruption' capacity inherent in social networking technology of today. Clay Shirky, author of a recent article in Foreign Affairs entitled "The Political Power of Social Media", also engages with the question of potential impacts communication technology could have on the promotion of a vibrant civil sphere in nations where such activity is severely constrained. Clearly, the implications of digital culture possess enormous potential for radical change- yet what shape that change will take, or what path it will trod to make its (grand?) entrance, is little understood. Returning to Shirky's essay, there is a lamentation in the beginning that,
The use of social medial tools- text messaging, e-mail, photo sharing, social networking, and the like- does not have a single preordained outcome. Therefore, attempts to outline their effects on political action are too often reduced to dueling anecdotes… Empirical work on the subject is also hard to come by, in part because these tools are so new and in part because relevant examples are so rare. (29-30, emphasis mine)
However, as I will posit and this essay will argue, there exists a large source of empirical data relevant to the concerns of scholars, such as as Shirky, and business guru's, like Cohen and Schmidt. It exists in the life and activity of a historical group some consider lowly and backward- the nineteenth century Russian peasant. I say some because, as I hope to make clear below, I believe nineteenth century Russian peasants- particularly their behavior regarding use and manipulation of (then) contemporary informations flows- provided a great deal of empirical data the likes of which Shirky, among others, might find interesting. I do not wish to provide an exhaustive review of the potential- I only wish to demonstrate the connections between some common issues encountered by agents of media and politics alike regarding the use of social media and that of the Russian peasant. Much like the 'ethnography' of Wikipedia by Joseph Reagle and praised by Lessig, the 'ethnography' of the Russian peasant can also 'begin to make the important lessons' of the social media experience more 'accessible'.
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| via hunsonisgroovy |
To that end, I propose to visit some texts elaborating concerns journalists and others grapple with in the current digital era. With each example, I want to show how peasant culture and daily life provide foundational understanding into the underlying issue presented. Beginning with Damon Centola's article "The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Network Experiment", I want to show how network behavior evidenced by Centola's data mimics that of peasant behavior in marriage networks. Matt McAllister's recent collected thoughts gathered under the heading of 'Generative Media Networks', the second article in our tour, explains how the circular nature of social media involvement should influence future journalistic endeavors. This narrative was familiar to Russian peasants, whose interaction with media streams, official and otherwise, hinged on a similar circular process discussed by McAllister. Finally, I want to return to Clay Shirky's essay and discuss how his correlation between promotion of social media tools and the development of a vibrant civil society and public sphere echoes similar concerns Russian Imperial rulers held with regard to ruling their largely peasant population.
My hope is that these preliminary examinations might prompt more inclusion of historical humanistic analysis into the current debates on the role and impact of social media practices.
The Spread of Peasant Behavior
Damon Centola, in the 3 September 2010 issue of Science, published a study on user behavior on a health centered social medial community website. Participants, recruited from health-interest websites, received a few 'health buddy' connections (think 'friends on Facebook) upon signing up for the experimental service and were also placed into one of two network-connection models; a clustered lattice network or a random connection network.
Users could not communicate directly with their 'buddies', but did receive information regarding their 'buddies' activity. Those in the lattice network formed dense 'clusters' of interconnectedness, while those in the random network formed more broad connections with less clustering behavior. The article has several graphs and figures to denote information spreading among the two network types- sparing you facts and figures, here is a quote summarizing Centola's findings:
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| Display of Random and Clustered Lattice Networks. Blue nodes represent 'neighbors', or 'health buddies' connected to users. Notice the clustering connectivity of blue nodes on the right, as compared to long blue node connection on left. via Wired |
The results show that network structure has a significant effect on the dynamics of behavioral diffusion. Surprisingly, the topologies with greater clustering and a larger diameter were much more effective for spreading behavior…. I also found that the behavior diffused more quickly in the clustered networks than in the random networks. (1196)
Of course, the study was rather limited in scope; it contained around 1,500 participants and obviously curtailed the social aspect of the network experience by prohibiting personal contact, yet the findings point to some interesting conclusions. Clusters of connections among users generated a higher degree of information spread/acceptance. We might call it the 'Facebook' effect, where you are more prone to accept new information and pass it on if several of your friends also 'like' the same information. (I believe the 'Top News' tab operates in this way- the more 'likes' it has the longer it stays 'top news') For some this may seem like an obvious observation. Yet it is interesting that denser networks, not longer ones, spread information further and quicker. Here is Damon Centola explaining his research findings:
Peasant networks in marriage operated in much the same way. Alexandre Avdeev, Alain Blum, Irina Troitskaia and Heather Juby wrote an article on peasant marriage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries using registers from rural villages around Moscow, during the period of 1815-1918. Three specific villages, Vykhino, Zhulebino and Viazovki, provided the demographic data the researchers used. There were some gaps in the record, but the sources allowed for general conclusions to be made, especially regarding choice of bride. Below is a self-made (hence ugly) copy of the graphic in the article that makes this data (somewhat) more clear:
Peasant networks in marriage operated in much the same way. Alexandre Avdeev, Alain Blum, Irina Troitskaia and Heather Juby wrote an article on peasant marriage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries using registers from rural villages around Moscow, during the period of 1815-1918. Three specific villages, Vykhino, Zhulebino and Viazovki, provided the demographic data the researchers used. There were some gaps in the record, but the sources allowed for general conclusions to be made, especially regarding choice of bride. Below is a self-made (hence ugly) copy of the graphic in the article that makes this data (somewhat) more clear:
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| A bit confusing- it was a quick sketch for note taking. Essentially, ext A, ext B & ext C represent brides found outside the three village system described here. Most brides went from one village (say B, or Vykhino) to another (say C, or Viazovki). Thus BC = 61 means, for the period studied, sixty-one brides traveled from Vykhino to marry men in Viazovki. |
Marriage was constrained by several factors. There were limits imposed by the state and religious authorities, creating prohibitions on marrying blood relations or even the days one could marry. Before emancipation of the peasants in 1861, one's landowner also had a say as far as leaving the estate was concerned. Regulation of movement in order to keep the labor supply adequate was a major concern of landlords in Russia. Marriage could also be complicated by rural community or head of family constraints- the wives traveled to live with their husbands, and because most of Russia practiced communal land holding there was different association between household wealth and size than that encountered in Western Europe.
But, looking at the picture above, we can see that the majority of marriages occurred within the dense clustering of the three villages under examination. The practice of universal marriage and a relatively early age of marriage (around 19) meant that prospective husbands had to move fast to secure a good wife. The couple as a working unit was the basic level of labor organization in the village and failure to marry could jeopardize a young man's ability to have a family and potentially secure his own household separate from that of his father. A young man had to know, or at least have the confidence of someone who did know, about available prospects for marriage; hence the predominance of local sources for brides over those outside of the village system. A peasant may have contacts in far away villages, but when looking for a bride they more often than not stuck to the local area because the 'dense' networks formed there provided more information as to who would be good wife.
Yet the article also makes a very interesting point.
This study suggests that the peasants' limited freedom of choice faced institutional constraints imposed by serfdom. Once removed, they opened the way for a different behavior. Thus, practices that might appear to be socially determined wee only partially so, since they changed in response to modifications in the nature of the circles within which peasants were inserted. (745)
Once the peasants were emancipated, their marriage patterns changed. No longer limited by the locality, some turned to broader horizons to find marriage partners- but many remained local. Of course, larger trends were at play towards the end of the 19th century. Urbanization and loosening of travel restrictions helped to erode the social constraints village elders and heads of households imposed. However, marriage patterns generally remained the same for the period studied. Centola's work on social behavior in online health information networks certainly could have been informed by looking at the demographic data gathered by Avdeev, Blum, Troitskaia and Juby. If you want to spread behavioral change, target dense cluster networks.
Generative Media Networks and Circular Information
Matt McAlister, director of digital strategy at the Guardian Media Group, recently released a collection of thoughts on journalism and the digital media landscape entitled "Generative Media Networks: Fueling Growth Through Action".
He states that those media networks that provide their users with 'more value' out of the content they create will not only encourage more creation of content but also generate a larger user base as well. This represents a shift from the way these platforms operated, even just a few years ago. Here is a quote from McAlister's work:
He states that those media networks that provide their users with 'more value' out of the content they create will not only encourage more creation of content but also generate a larger user base as well. This represents a shift from the way these platforms operated, even just a few years ago. Here is a quote from McAlister's work:
Where media businesses once believed that winning digitally meant attracting eyeballs to web pages today there's a greater understanding about the role of the various platforms around the network and the value of the network itself…Whereas the pre-internet newspaper world looked like a one-way relationship, the new era is one where we grow as others grow, a circular relationship, a self-reinforcing marketplace. (8)
He goes on to elaborate four areas the Generative Media Network model touches upon- things made by the network and used by the people, and ideas shared by the people and evaluated by the networks. In this way, media platforms can not only capitalize on traditional streams of revenue but also ensure that they don't miss out on new opportunities, more and more emerging from the activity of social networks. This is because information behaves in a circular manner, with users taking the presented form provided by journalism outlets and transforming, or mutating, the end result into a new form that potentially extends the life of the original product. McAlister argues that media platforms need to build applications or provide services that allow users to participate in the creation and embellishment of services, as giving one individual a satisfying experience will prompt them to tell others and bring them into the circular process. (McAlister never mentions it, but clearly his own analysis on attracting new users could benefit from looking at Centola's work)
Peasant interaction with information streams of their day involved similar processes highlighted by McAlister. David Moon discussed this peasant capacity for circulation and mutation of officially promulgated edicts or laws in his work titled, 'Russian Peasants and Tsarist Legislation on the Eve of Reform'. Moon, one of the most prominent Russian peasant scholars living today, researched peasant reaction to tsarist edicts as they were transmitted in written and oral form across the vast empire. Once drafted, laws would be distributed to provincial authorities, yet the general condition of roads meant that delivery would be staggered. Some laws were marked for general distribution (others were kept secret from the larger public), in which case they would be read aloud at markets or fairs, but not in small villages. Bureaucrats worried constantly when issuing new laws to peasant populations because, despite large levels of illiteracy, they proved more than able to 'interpret' the code so as to provide viewpoints beneficial to their desires. One general example of information mutation involved what scholars titled 'native monarchism'; if the law presented came across as harmful to their interests (this could include rent hikes or change in labor obligations to the state or lord), peasants would resist implementation by claiming that the tsar, protector of the Russian people, could not possibly have approved of the new law and that the latest measure was nothing more than machinations of the 'evil boyars', or lower level nobles in the service of the state.
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| The Boyar's Wedding by Konstantin Makovsky. via Wikimedia Commons |
Contemporary observers assigned such claims to peasant backwardness or 'willfulness', unwilling to see the larger motivations behind the statement. Later scholars, including Moon, agree that the 'naive monarchism' claim was merely a sophisticated twisting of the tsar's professed responsibilities to the people in order to point out the disconnect between (in their view) what should be done and what is actually done with regards to new laws. Often the staggered reception of laws in the provinces, not to mention the numerous oral readings orchestrated at markets and bazarrs, spurred the spread of various rumors which peasants used to their full effect. When confronting landlords over rent, for example, peasants were quick to use 'rumors' of decreased labor obligations or rent in 'neighboring' villages or districts to press their claims for similar treatment. Rumors proved very difficult for Russian authorities to fight, as peasants often outnumbered visiting officials and used collective defense to intimidate those who arrived to make the governments case. Only the arrival of the Imperial army could persuade peasants to give up their resistance, although some groups pushed conflict into violent terms. Yet these tactics often prompted compromise between lord and peasant, as resistance, even if violently put down, often paved the way for incremental changes in the peasants favor.
Why did this work? The answer lies in the ability of the Russian peasant to interact with the information streams piercing through their daily lives. Use of rumor and the claim of 'naive monarchism' formed prime examples of peasants engaging in the circulatory process described by McAlister and his 'Generative Media Networks'. Laws, produced by the state, were used by the peasants which in turn generated various interpretations of those laws that were finally evaluated by the state as to their efficacy and possibility for compromise. The very transmission of information created mutations that forced the Russian state to, at least temporarily, accept the claims of peasants as legitimate to discuss. While McAlister sees only the collaborative benefits 'Generative Media Networks' provide, Imperial Russian authorities felt the opposite, having seen first hand the kind of dissonance peasant 'rumor networks' created. (Shirky makes this point in our contemporary setting, something I will cover below) Indeed, it would be this issue of information mutability through circulation that plagued not only Imperial Russia but also the Soviet Union.
Return to the Political Power of Social Media
Finally, Clay Shirky in his Foreign Affairs article, quoted above in the introduction, analyzes the potential of social media to lay the groundwork for development of vibrant civil societies in the geo-political landscape. Noting that such changes require years, not days or weeks, to take effect, Shirky advocates a realignment of US foreign policy towards promotion of broad-based social media and citizen access to these tools. Whereas a specific tool- Shirky mentions 'Haystack', a program designed to allow for encrypted web surfing- can be easily targeted and defeated or circumvented, ('Haystack' was designed, in part, to assist Iranian dissidents fight their theocratic governments censorship of the web- yet once tested, it was quickly determined that the program contained 'holes' that could have compromised users) in contrast, broad based social medial tools like Flickr or Facebook are relatively more difficult to censor or shut down as they serve relatively large populations who would no doubt complain, or at least become aware, of government interference in their lives were these services to suddenly go offline.
This is a prime example of the 'conservative dilemma' in action- conservative and authoritarian regimes, by engaging in censorship of social media, risk creating anomalies between the state's 'official' views and those views held by censored citizens. Herein lies the crux of Shirky's argument- social media provides populations the ability to build a 'space' for the development of a civil society, thus when governments censor or restrict social media they risk alienating themselves from the society created by their citizens. As more and more economic and connective ties are fashioned through the implementation of social media (how many businesses in other countries are envious of the success Amazon created out of on-line shopping?) it will become increasingly difficult for governments to circumvent their use, even if such activity foments unrest against the ruling regime. Here is a TED talk Shirky gave discussing the core ideas expressed in his essay:
Of course, one might be quick to point out several governments that possess an uneasy relationship with the Internet and are quite willing to literally 'turn it off' during periods of instability- Iran and China come to mind- and have suffered little perceptible damage to their credibility or ability to rule. This point may be correct- however, one of the more curious observations on an authoritarian regimes capacity to withstand social pressure is that one never knows what level of unrest is necessary to enact real change. Often regimes appear solid until social revolution reveals the extent of 'rot' underlying the bureaucracies hold on power. The same may be true for nations like North Korea, China and Iran. It was certainly true for the Imperial Russian regime, whose problems regarding economic and political reform became inflated over the course of World War I, providing a crucial backdrop for opportunists like Lenin and his Bolshevik party. Yet, looking back to the nineteenth century relations between Russian peasants and the state, one can outline some of the same issues faced by modern states as discussed by Shirky- especially the problem of the 'conservative dilemma'.
Dissonance between the view of the state and the view of the people can clearly be seen in peasant reinterpretations of tsarist edicts, discussed above. Since handing down the edicts and deciding what versions were to be delivered or read to whom created a staggered reception pattern that generated prime conditions for peasants to use rumors against the state, a solution was devised that would supposedly address the issue. In 1837, all provinces of Russia were ordered to publish a district newspaper that would act as a mouthpiece for official proclamations. It was hoped standardization in print would eliminate peasant 'willfulness' in carrying out the tsar's wishes. By simply looking at the record of peasant disturbances, instances where the level of peasant action drew the attention of regional and central authorities (one can assume many minor incidents were not recorded), over the course of the nineteenth century, one can see these hopes ran afoul of peasant manipulation of the new information stream.
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| The vast Russian lands made coordination difficult, a factor peasants seized upon in their claims of resistance. via David Rumsey Map Collection. |
This echoes a major point made by Shirky towards the end of his essay:
Activists in both repressive and democratic regimes will use the Internet and related tools to try to effect change in their countries, but Washington's ability to shape or target these changes is limited. (41)Again, this point was something Imperial Russian rulers and peasants alike would have known very well, although the terms they would have used to describe it would seem, at the least, antiquarian and, at the most, quaint. However, as I attempted to demonstrate with my explorations into Russian peasants interactions with information streams, the new terminology and technology examined by Centola, McAlister and Shirky, among others, provides only a new path for the exercise of old behaviors and strategies. I presented Russian peasants because my study brings their daily life into close study, but I am assured that one could find similar parallels among the diverse and varied configurations of societies both now and in the past.
While incorporating humanistic historical knowledge into the present day discussion on social media will not yield foolproof analysis or prediction, but it can provide a solid, empirical foundation of deep, ethnographic understanding, capable of supporting much more ambitious and informed debates from which we could all learn and benefit.
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