Charlie Leadbeater (Part 2) (013)
View the rush: Charles Leadbeater
Charles Leadbeater, author and consultant , discusses mass collaboration and government.
Transcript:
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Q. For the good of everyone their jobs, surely they stand the most to gain from all of this?
A. You would think.
Q. You don't think they do?
A. They should do, yes. There should be a huge opportunity to use all this stuff the web for public and social good to allow people to collaborate in new ways to solve problems, whether it is to learn in different ways from people or to provide health advice and support or network together people for social care or use resources more efficiently to reduce the environmental impact. I think we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible, to use the web to connect to people in new ways, to allow them to govern themselves, to share in new ways, to solve problems and that is going to take quite a long time to work out how best to do that. But in principle it could be a huge infusion of engergy and dynamism into the social and public sector and indeed possibly into democratic politics.
Q. So what is possible, what is the opportunity available to us, if you can define that? What is available?
A. The opportunity is that in education and health more people could become participants in working out what their own health needs are and helping one another and collaborating to provide solutions rather than always depending or turning to professionals so I think we will always have teachers, we will always have doctors, we will always have hospitals and some form of schools but you could imagine --
(Interruption)
Q. What is the potential for the transformation of politics and democracy?
A. The potential for transforming democracy is huge. People are leaving the democratic realm in their droves because they have little purchase on it, it doesn't seem to respond to them, they don't have a voice in it, it is not talking about what they are talking about. In contrast the web allows people to have conversations with other people, to voice their views, to meet, to share and mobilise and so all through the world you see now new forms of political mobilisation, whether they are very, very local campaigns about traffic or noise, to global campaigns about the environment and poverty enabled and organised by the web. So the web is a really powerful tool for mobilising people around things they share and they care about and that should have and does seem have the effect of re-energising democracy and, of course, in the developing world, in authoritian regimes, the web is the only place where democratic debate takes place. So the big contests about democracy in China, in Vietnam, in Burma, the web is the place where democratic debate is taking place. It is the best hope for promoting democracy in any of these places.
Q. It is it not a truer form of democracy in some way -- more people participating more regularly that reinvigorate it in --
(Interruption)
Q. (4.06) Once every four years -- is that not hundred of years old and based on technology where it is impossible to drag people in from fields -- don't we now have the tools of technology, the ability, now to make a system?
A. Yes. Basically, I think a lot of people are fed up with politics because they feel it leaves them passive and out of the loop and a lot of mass media does that to people -- it treats them just as viewers or readers. This technology, the web, allows people to participate to voice their views and to find a space in which they can participate and take part in that democratic debate and it has lowered the cost of organising so you can organise a campaign now and get people together at much lower cost. All of this that should be really good for democracy because democracy is about people getting together, freedom of association debating, sharing views, arguing and deciding together. The web should be a really good tool for all of that to happen which is why it has such huge democratic potential and why in the United States for instance, now online campaigning has become absolutely an essential part of mainstream politics but it is also reinvigorating all sorts of other sorts of campaigning activities.
Q. So what does government become then? Everyone is online and able to to participate as much as they would like to, the community would like them to -- what is the role of government with this?
A. The role of government would then become not just to serve people but to engage and to allow and courage encourage people to participate and to take more responsibility for decisions rather than treating people in this rather top down, hierarchical way. I mean, basically, modern politics is, in this country anyway, a 19th century invention for a 21st century economy and society. It is basically an industrial era media, which is in decline like so many other things we have inherited from the 19th century because it is slow moving, top down and seems to many people quite elitist and doesn't give them a role. The web, by contrast, seems much more open and participative, gives people many more opportunities to take part.
Q. Politicians now think of things to do, persuade people that this is the best thing to do and then spend loads of time forcing them to do it --
A. 6.43) I do not think -- the state is not going to go away and we are not going to do away with taxes. It is not going to become purely volunteer political social but unless government learn how to like all organisation -- is not going to become purely voluntary but, unless government, like all big organisations, learns how to interact with and mobilise and work with this power to participate and to collaborate, then our governmental intuitions will look increasingly anachronistic and increasingly out of kilter with society and sort of bereft really, bereft of all this stuff going on around it. So if you look at the future of what a modern library would be, a library would have to engage people beyond it. A hospital would have to engage with patients in completely different ways and because they find information in different ways. People will be able to learn in different ways. If state and public institutions don't engage with that, they will be missing some huge opportunity and my worry is that the public sector is way too slow and too conservative to really take to on those opportunities and so, as a result, we need a kind of wave of new social entrepreneurs and new civic and political entrepreneurs to really use the web in innovative ways for public purposes.
Q. Is that not what we are seeing when you talk to people like mumsnet and they say what is the point, I am getting what I need from these other people. Are these citizens doing government out of a job?
A. I do not think citizens are going to do government out of a job but there is going to be a new balance of power that people can organise themselves now in new ways and they can find some of the solutions for themselves and they can mobilise much more easily to put pressure on organisations and so in health in the future you will find many more organisations, amongst patients and users and carers who will be a sort of advice and support as well as doctors in hospitals. So people will have more options of where to go to get more advice.
So the sensible approach by government and professionals will be to work with that and help develop it and use it and see it as a support rather than a challenge.
Q. All these things together is a massive change in thinking or is it a flash in the pan everyone was saying the internet was when it first came out?
A. Are you all right? I think there has been a tipping point, a flicking of the switch. So for most of the 20th century we were taught and encouraged to be consumers, workers and citizens of representative democracy where we could have a vote every five years. Now I think more people would could see themselves as participants. They will want take part, have their say, be listened to and they will find other people to collaborate with and share with outside formal institutional structures and that means that their notion of citizenship will be much more to do with their ability to complain, to voice, to argue, to mobilise themselves. Their notion of themselves as consumers will be much more participative, taking part, shaping and adding ideas and people's sense of themselves as workers will have to involve much more agency. So many of the assumptions of the 20th century -- you are a worker by day and a consumer by night and weekends and a citizen once every five years -- that is all going to break down and people will play quite different roles and see themselves in quite different ways in their relationship to information, to authority will change as a result, over not just a flash in the pan but over the next 10 to 20 years.
Q. But this is also our only chance. We don't have any other sort of ideologies that can sort out any of the enormous problems that we have got into through the thinking that we are saying is now out of date.
A. (10.57) I think the kind of hopes that get invested in the net are a kind of yearning for doing something better, more effective, for more collaborative and for recovering a sense of common purposes and a sense of hope about the future that politics has completely lost. So the hope we are investing in these communities is a reflection of a kind of despair at the other options available to us but it is all also a reflection that they bring back to life for people the things that they value: they value the common, they value things that our shared, they want to be participants, they want to collaborate with other people, they want to achieve things together and these are things often that they find difficult in big organisations. So in many ways the hopes that invest in it are filling the void that the collapse of politics has left behind.
Q. Why are you doing this? What are you working towards? What are you trying to achieve?
A. What I am working towards is I think these technologies have huge potential to allow people to play different roles in life and in work and in society and to create a more participative, more collaborative culture in which more people get the experience of being creative, of being agents, of being in control but also of sharing in finding out with other people and I think those are really basic things which make societies stronger and make them innovative, more democratic, more equal and give more people a sense of freedom. That is why it is important in the long run. It is not about how many friends you have on a social network site. It is not about sharing music. It is fundamentally about whether it makes more people free, whether it gives more people a voice in democracy and whether it makes society more equal and I think, on those counts, the web is probably our best hope in many ways for creating a society which can achieve those things.
