I’m glad that Bear vs Shark helped Chris (and others, based on emails I received at the time) to think through how we can balance “data entry” with “story telling”. The reason why this is important embodies one of my concerns about the web in general: that it has a mediating effect, distancing us from the world of the actual. You may not share that concern, but my own experience suggests that this mediation undermines the sense of solidarity that lies behind the humanitarian impulse – or indeed civic responsibility of any kind.
Another of my concerns is the ideology that is smuggled in with social media, or at least with a lot of the rhetoric about social media. I don’t use Facebook for anything other than maintaining a register of my extended network and opening up lines of communication, because (as many people have started to notice) Facebook is not neutral. Embedded in its design is a particular view of the world – this is true of all social media – and it’s not a world that I necessarily want to live in.1
Like fish in the sea, most people are blind to this, and so discussion focuses entirely on the cool things these tools do rather than the social values that they embody. This discourse is highly valued by companies that wish to distract you from the fact that what they really want to do is sell you something, and Clay Shirky is the undisputed heavyweight master of this theatre of misdirection. While he pretends to insight into how social media is changing the world, what he’s really doing is telling the over-mediated bourgeoisie that we’ll become the revolutionary vanguard when we buy an iPhone app.
Obviously, we won’t.
For me, crowdsourcing brings together both of these concerns in a single package wrapped up in that rhetoric. That doesn’t mean that I think crowdsourcing heralds the end of civilisation as we know it, or even that I oppose crowdsourcing as a useful tool for all kinds of tasks. The reason I wrote about crowdsourcing in the last year is simply because I think the humanitarian enterprise is in dire straits, and I don’t think technology will fix that. In fact, technology can be a distraction from the real problems if it isn’t handled well.
If you read what I’ve written about crowdsourcing in the past, most of my frustrations have not been with the concept of crowdsourcing, but with the rhetoric around it:
- The Crisis Category Error: the pretence that “crisis” is a meaningful category when it’s used to bring together complex social phenomena that are completely unrelated.2
- The If All You Have Is A Hammer Fallacy: the claim that because crowdsourcing as a tool has a perceived utility in event type A, that utility is generalizable to event type B.
- The Year Zero Expert Syndrome: the pronouncement that crowdsourcing has / is / will revolutionize a sector, made by people with little to no actual experience of that sector.
- The Unstructured Use Case Error: the obfuscation of crowdsourcing as a way for communities to help themselves, crowdsourcing as a way to improve efficiencies in the humanitarian sector, and crowdsourcing as a way for outsiders to feel like they’re helping communities.
Now while you might disagree with my frustrations – and you’re welcome to do so – none of them are about the concept of crowdsourcing per se.3 That crowdsourcing exists, and can be useful, and is worth working on, I have no doubt at all; that it has implications for business as usual in relief and development, I have serious doubts but I’m ready to be persuaded. My problem is the gap between the rhetoric and the reality, and the way in which that gap is exploited to sell crowdsourcing to organisations and individuals for whom it has marginal value.
That MobileActive article did two things: presented a professional opinion (although not according to Robert Munro, who for some mysterious reason believes that experience of actually doing humanitarian coordination somehow disqualifies one from having an opinion on humanitarian coordination) and asked a lay question. So the really interesting issue for me is: Why are attempts to open up serious discussion about crowdsourcing usually painted as hostile opposition; as a futile rearguard action by entrenched vested interests who SIMPLY DON’T UNDERSTAND THE FUTURE?
Luckily, I have the answer to that (it’s one of the few answers I do have), but we need to flash back on Clay Shirky. The over-mediated bourgeoisie (myself included) cry out for a sense of purpose; there are lots of people paid to pander to our quest for purpose (such as Shirky); technology is one of the things that we feel might give us purpose, especially if the marketing material tells us it’s all about “making connections”; and the rhetoric of technocratic utopianism seems like it gives us revolutionary credentials. And if we believe that you’re the revolutionary vanguard, then obviously we need an establishment to set ourselve against. No Tsar, no Bolsheviks, after all.
The reason that I wrote that MobileActive article, and the reason why I took a more aggressive tone in it, was to balance out the sort of rhetoric that I mentioned above. My tone will differ depending on what I’m writing about, where I’m writing and who I’m writing for; I took it for granted that I was addressing an audience that was mature enough to accept and engage with constructive criticism, which is why Chris’ reply is so welcome (as were nearly all of the other comments on the original article). Not least because it has given me an opportunity to write about this much wider issue around technology in the humanitarian sector.
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