A hashtag is not a social movement

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Last month we took part in the series of talks ‘The City invites dialogue’ promoted by the Lisbon City Council’s Participatory Budget: the theme was ‘What contribution can technology make to the exercise of democracy’ and the discussion was interesting, as it touches on one of the issues that has most occupied 4Change in the area of citizenship and participation projects.

This internal focus has allowed for action-research in the area of involving young citizens, education for global citizenship and the use of media literacy tools and new literacies – which are nothing more than more holistic approaches to democratic literacy. Holistic here includes the use of tools, both analog (such as non-formal and participatory methodologies) and digital (such as audiovisual production), which make it possible to encourage citizen participation in life, in the community, in the world.

In the debate, 4Change began by pointing out that ICT, the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence and digital media in this globalized ecosystem imply not losing sight of the human and analogue element for democracy 2.0 (or 3, 4, 5.0): they don’t just imply mastering technologies that the new generations can easily reach, but learning new literacies and languages – such as image, video or digital media production, the role of the media in our daily lives. For this, the new essential tools are not the new generation app or the gamification of everything, but knowing how to decode the media ecosystem in which we live immersed, the tsunami of information in which we live. In this sense, citizenship education has to be global, in this world where everything is increasingly connected, scrutinized and revolved.

An example of this is pointed out by Nanjala Nyabola in the book ‘Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics‘: ‘A hashtag is no more a movement than a pencil was prior to the digital age; an online movement without an offline component can often stop at just noise’ / or how a hashtag is not a social movement, no more than a pencil: an online movement without an analog expression can boil down to just… noise! We believe in this idea and are partners in the pilot supported by the Bosch Foundation that investigates the potential of online communities to become civic initiatives – and vice versa, looking for success factors with national case studies.

For Najala Nyabola, ‘fake news’ (well classified by the ERC as disinformation, ‘no news’) is nothing more than a symptom of a populist political ecosystem that increasingly seems to be based on the mechanisms of rumor, hearsay and human weakness. It’s digital being used to level things down, forgetting the potential for rapprochement, dialog and participation that it can bring. When asked at the OP talk whether ‘new technologies encourage participation and dispense with the human element?’, Bernardo Gonçalves from MyPolis acknowledged that education and human intervention in civic processes will always be essential.

Are we then reduced to seeing the human element in confrontation with the new realities of Artificial Intelligence? Here we agree with the half-optimistic, half-apocalyptic vision of the philosopher of digital globalization Evgeni Morozov: we are being sold a cat for a hare, i.e. instead of the wonderful potential that artificial intelligence and data science can bring to the transparency and effectiveness of our democracies, we are being reduced to consumers! To quote author Shoshana Zuboff: “Steve Jobs promised us computers as ‘bicycles for the mind’; what we got instead are assembly lines for the spirit.” The problem? The ‘Big Data’ that Morozov considers to be part of the human heritage is in the hands of a handful of companies, the tech giants like Google or Huawei.

In this sense, João Tremoceiro from the Lisbon Integrated Operational Center stressed that the City Council hopes to actively contribute to the opportunities launched by data science by starting to publish the city’s public data that its department processes. The potential of data science and AI ranges from more efficient resource management to advances in public health.

What is the potential for this situation to lead to a crisis of trust and social cohesion – a polarization of societies, a worsening of political participation in democracies? We want to believe that the key, as always, lies in education and social transformation: in opening up the political system, not through technology, but by using it to create real mechanisms for listening to citizens. In this sense, the Lisbon PB has to use mechanisms to ‘facilitate’ participation – to reach citizens more directly, to talk about the issues that concern them and, very importantly, to communicate results, to say: it’s possible, it’s done!

As in David Buckingham’s study on young people’s civic participation and digital tools: it’s not enough to invent a new mechanism and then criticize citizens if they don’t participate – direct democracy mechanisms need to be effective, they need to listen to the reality of citizens, they need to focus more on the human side. Since the invention of the wheel, technology has never been enough.

(Sandra Oliveira)

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