Has The Internet Enabled Local Government To Replace Nation-States?

Rutgers University Political Science Professor Benjamin Barber has written a provocative book, “If Mayors Ruled The World”, which is scheduled to be available this November.  

His thesis, as described on his website, is that:

The issues dominating our headlines – global warming, terrorism, economic inequality – do not stop at national borders. Nonetheless, our chief means of addressing them remains the nation-state, a 17th century framework constitutionally unable, and temperamentally unwilling, to collaborate across frontiers in order to solve common problems. What is to be done? Let cities, through a global “Parliament of Mayors,” run the world. …

[Cities] are unburdened with the issues of borders and sovereignty which hobble the capacity of nation-states to work with one another.

… regardless of city size or political affiliation, local executives exhibit a non-partisan and pragmatic style of governance that is lacking in national and international halls of power. … Through these qualities of leadership mayors have retained the trust of citizens in their office, helped cities become beacons of good governance, and spearheaded city-to-city collaborations in order to better address shared problems.

For more, you can see him present his ideas at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BJgmV7GRVc and http://www.booktv.org/Program/14242/If+Mayors+Ruled+the+World.aspx .

Indeed, there is no doubt that mayors can collaborate in ways that were impossible before the Internet.  Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and former Policy Director for the US State Department (arguably one of the most prominent institutions which defends the concept of the nation-state), wrote “A New World Order” in 2004.  That book describes all kinds of examples of cross-border collaboration in everything from judicial opinions to environmental action.

Others, from former Vice President Al Gore to Professor Joseph Nye, have also pointed out the various ways that the power of the nation-state seems to be in relative decline.

Since the global communications network makes possible connections even among local areas that are not geographically near, there is also the potential for networks of local governments or regions to develop without regard to national boundaries – virtual metroplexes. For example, it may be that two cities separated by thousands of miles – for example New York and London – have more connections and more in common than nearer cities like New York and Syracuse. The global communications network now makes it possible for these two distant metropolises to coalesce as one.

The ability of distant urban areas to work closely together raises questions of governance, even governance issues that cross national borders. However, much of this activity is occurring below “the radar” of nation-states; they are unaware and cannot keep track of all such interactions. 

I think that Barber’s proposal is too ambitious for cities, given all the problems mayors face doing their jobs now.  It is worth noting that, within the limits of time, mayors do take global positions — such as the more than a thousand mayors who have agreed to a climate change pledge — but that’s not the same thing as running the world.

At the same time, Barber’s view is also a bit old fashioned by viewing cities in the image of the traditional nation-state.  It is curious that he calls for a form of governance – a parliament – associated with the mature nation-state, rather than looking to newer alternatives for collaboration which would run into fewer legal and institutional obstacles.  I would expect a more flexible collaborative approach, a different way of doing public service if the world Barber envisions comes about.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that mayors can collaborate in ways that were impossible before the Internet.  It’s encouraging to see that this topic will be getting more exposure and I look forward to seeing the reaction when the book comes out.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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New Soft Cities

Carl Skelton is my colleague and co-founder of the Gotham Innovation Greenhouse and former director of the Experimental Media Center at NYU/Polytechnic Institute.

He has written a book about the Betaville open source project that enables residents of a city to collaborate and participate in urban design and planning.  But it’s more than just about the history and role of the Betaville project.

The book provides context for urban design in an Internet-enabled era.  As the publisher’s (Springer) summary states:

“the reader can gain a deeper understanding of the potential socio-technical forms of the New Soft Cities: blended virtual-physical worlds, whose public works must ultimately serve and succeed as massively collaborative works of art and infrastructure.”

Hence the title of Carl’s book: “Soft City Culture and Technology”, which will be officially published at the end of this month.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/61587029722/new-soft-cities]

Aspen Institute on Public Libraries

Last month, the Aspen Institute gathered about two dozen leaders and innovators to a workshop on the future of public libraries.  I was honored to be asked to participate.  I will be helping to develop the larger strategy, but I thought I’d share some immediate observations from the discussions and my reflections on them.

As a pre-condition to thinking clearly about the future of libraries, we need to leave behind legacy thinking. The libraries of today cannot be and shouldn’t be the libraries that we fondly remember from our childhood.  A library is no longer a building merely with books.  Even the addition of e-books to printed books is not a fundamental and sufficient change in the traditional library model.  

To escape that old mold, library services can now – and should now – escape the confines of the library building itself.  With the Internet, library services can be everywhere.

At one point in the discussion, someone put up a picture like the one below – which isn’t quite what I have in mind by going beyond the library building 😉

image

The reaction of some people was a feeling that the “little free library” movement built cute little boxes but it is sad that library funding has been so diminished that we are left with such pitiful collections.

My reaction was a bit different.  I said I agreed that this little box was limited, if what you had in it was printed books.  But why not take all the outdoors and other locations which are targeted for “little free libraries” and make the real and much bigger digital library available to people there.  As a portal to the digital library online, the collection can be as large as possible even in this little box.

I also pointed out that our economy has been changing and more people earn a living in digital ways, based on knowledge and innovation.  In such an economy, you would think that libraries should be the key institution and hub of society.  I gave examples of how some libraries are providing support to entrepreneurs.  Another implication of this role for libraries is that the distinctions between public libraries and those labeled as specialized, school or university libraries will be weakening because often an entrepreneur or other innovator needs access to specialized technical knowledge as well as general audience information.

It was clear that the idea that Google and the Internet make librarians unnecessary was weighing on the minds in the room, as elsewhere in the library world.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been an unusually long time user of the Internet, but I’m waiting for help from good librarians.  What most of us face is TMI and TLK – too much information and too little knowledge.

Librarians can be the guide, curator, re-mixer, and knowledge creator for people who are drowning in a sea of information, or worse, swimming in the wrong part of the sea considering what they need to know.

Of course, it was clear from the discussion that many of us realize the users of libraries can also contribute, as in the pro-sumer model where a person is both consumer and producer of information.  So librarians should encourage and make space for people to self-publish.  Going beyond text, libraries should do the same for people making videos, music or even things (through the availability of maker rooms and the like).

Along those lines, there was a bit of discussion about the Douglas County (Colorado) Library model.  That library got fed up with the refusal of four major publishers to sell e-books to them and the tough conditions imposed by the other two big publishers.  So it reached out to many independent publishers to get their e-books in the library.  

A much wider possibility in the future is for the libraries to help authors to publish their works without the traditional publishers. Yes, I know there could be a lot of junk published, but there is no reason why book reviews, peer reviews, and other means couldn’t be used to help identify the junk without the need for editorial approval from the big six publishing companies.  The Public Library of Science (PLOS) has, as an example, established itself as a respectable medium for research using these techniques.

Finally, it seems that each library is trying to create the future itself.  Why can’t librarians and others in the library world work together nationally, enabled by the tools of the Internet.  If there is a librarian in Seattle who is an expert on Eritrea, why can’t she be available all over the US?  Someone described this as the library version of MOOCs.  This kind of federation, perhaps mutual aid pact, is a natural result when librarians realize their services are no longer limited to library buildings.

The Aspen Institute project is asking important questions not only for libraries, but for our country as a whole, so keep track of its efforts.  For more information now, see www.aspeninstitute.org/dialogue-public-libraries

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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Visual Images And Text

Summer is always a good time to catch up on some off-the-usual-track reading.  For me, that means reading a couple of books that look beyond the superficial surface of the Internet and related digital media to the deeper ways that these phenomena have affected people and moved us all to a post-industrial way of thinking and acting.

The books both demonstrate and elaborate on the ways that visual images, rather than text, are the ascendant medium of human communications in this Internet age.

The best of these books is Stephen Apkon’s “The Age Of The Image: Redefining Literacy In A World Of Screens” (2013).  Apkon is the founder and head of the Jacob Burns Film Center, just north of New York City.  The film center has a wide variety of programs, including education of children in visual literacy.  

While just 263 pages, the book describes the history, the language, the business, the techniques and the social and educational impact of visual media.  Apkon’s overall theme is that the dominance of visual media in this century means that all of us (not just children or digital natives) need to become visually literate.

As he states in his introduction:

“The power of visual media has been with us from the beginning of our species … With today’s visual technology, our work lives will be changed forever, and soon it will be as unfathomable not to know how to make a video as it is not to know how to send an e-mail.  The vocabulary of Hollywood is becoming the vocabulary of Main Street.  We must embrace these powerful tools …
“After each revolution, political or cultural, we can look back and see the elements that came together to make it possible and even inevitable.  Those who understand and prepare for these revolutions thrive, and those who don’t are left behind.  We are at one of those moments with regard to the ways in which we participate in society, democracy and the global economy, and visual images and story are at the heart of this historic change.”

A few weeks ago, I was involved in a radio interview with the author that is available on iTunes and also at   

http://wowididntknowthat.com/2013/08/08/the-new-literacy-special-guest-steve-apkon-author-director-jacob-burns-film-center/

A somewhat related book is “The Art of Immersion: How The Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, And The Way We Tell Stories” (2011) by Frank Rose, contributing editor at WIRED Magazine.  The focus of this book is much more on millennials and on the business impact.

Together these books are thought provoking and provide a richly detailed image of the world we now live in.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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