We Are Names Not Numbers 2009 is a new international ‘thought leadership’ Symposium focused on individuality and creativity in business and society. Presenters and participants (who were really one and the same) came from across the media, politics, academia, research, entrepreneurship and business. See the programme and speakers and panelists.

Participants

Paul Miller, Head of Digital Strategy, Cision UK
Jag Singh, Founder, Labourhome and MessageSpace
Zad Rogers, Creative Director, RDF Digital
Nico Macdonald, Writer at Spy
Chair: Derek Wyatt MP, chair of All-Party Group on the Internet

Introduction

As individuals, do we really have power in society? This isn’t borne out by recent history. 

At the We Are Names Not Numbers send-off breakfast Douglas Alexander talked about the “Need to empower citizens”

“We are giving power back to the individual” says Derek Wyatt in the Portmeirion video 

“We are holding government to account. We have the power to effect change. Power is moving to masses” says another speaker in the Portmeirion video

But the reality is that we have been given the opportunity to partake in a small part of society, focused around media and communications. 

This sense of power is enhanced by the lack of confidence of politicians, government and the media. We can push with some success. See the recent online campaign to prevent MPs hiding their expenses, and the examples in Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. 

And because media people confuse media with society: partly legimately as media has taken centre stage. As John Lloyd noted pm Start the Week, BBC Radio 4, Apr 28, 2008 [32m]: “Politicians have really lost... channels of communicating other than the media... The media really are the message bearers of politicians. They have very little choice but to take the media seriously because that is their medium.” [my italics]

But as Dr Andrew Calcutt observed, discussed citizen journalism at the Media Futures Conference I programmed last year: “If anyone were being invited to anything with real power they wouldn’t be invited in”

We have been taken in by depoliticsed Californian radicals who thought technology was a substitute for social change, from Steve Jobs and Bill Joy to Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold. Note also the use of the term social in social media and social networking. It is a sentimenal throwback to the lost ideals of socialism, to which many people in this area cleave. Tony Blair used the term ‘social’ – for instance the ‘social market’ – to imply socialism without having to say the word. 

And empowerment doesn’t come from tools. It comes from the ‘battle if ideas’ about which Alexander spoke. But there is no real debate: see the recent Clay Shirky talk at the LSE at which there were many political people talking only about technology and its effects. Empowerment would at least see us creating new tools. 

The value is in people being able to feel they have been listened to, self-actualisation (see Danah Boyd’s Teen Socialization paper and a recent Paul MacInnes piece in the Guardian), and being able to ‘sound off’ in public. [Left out of talk]

We are not changing society: we are playing. The idea that there is an open debate is misconceived. We have facilitated closed circles of people who create ‘echo chambers’. 

The route to real individualism is not just about ideas and debate. We also need to increase people’s wealth, so they have the time to be an individual. But individuality is also about engaging with and transforming society. This is a question of human agency. And this is not a concept supported by New Labour. (Vis its solution to smoking in public is not to encourage people to negotiate specific solutions but an overall, blanket ban.)

We don’t (yet) have the big ideas we need. And we don’t have a real vision of the individual as an autonomous but collaborative agent. But when do we will be able to leverage these tools amazingly. 

Discussion

Covered Clay Shirky on gin drinking; solutions looking for problems; the danger of undermining public buy-in by using technology to solve problems to which it isn’t appropriate; our culture of being seen to do something rather than actually acting; the danger to privacy of the state vs corporations; the relationship of technology, society and societal change (‘We are spectators, not numbers’); and the law of unintended consequences.