Paul Hirst Memorial Lecture 2014 - Professor Helen Margetts
'Chaotic Pluralism: Collective Action in the Social Media Age' 6-7.30pm, Tuesday 11th February, Birkbeck College, Torrington Place, room B20.
The Paul Hirst Memorial Lecture 2014 will be given by Professor Helen Margetts of the Oxford Internet Institute.
Chaotic Pluralism: Collective Action in the Social Media Age
Increasingly, collective action takes place on social media. The ‘ladder’ of political participation is extended as new ‘micro-donations’ of time and effort are facilitated by social networking, micro-blogging and civic activism platforms. These new tiny acts of participation can scale up to large-scale mobilizations and even revolutions, as in the Arab Spring of 2011. But most of them fail, while those that succeed do so dramatically with dynamics that can be hard to predict, characterized by thresholds, tipping points and power law distributions, gaining momentum without leaders or traditional forms of organization. This lecture puts forward ‘chaotic pluralism’ as a new model for understanding this changed world, developed by Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri in a forthcoming book. We argue that internet-based politics embody pluralist ideas in terms of rebalancing power relationships, blurring organizational boundaries and enabling bottom up dynamism. But the difference is the absence of groups as we know them; for every interest there will be some kind of mobilization – maybe even a whole constellation of mobilizations – but not necessarily an organized group. So a pluralist pattern is emerging, but one that is more disorganized, unstable and chaotic than the early architects of pluralist political systems, or indeed Paul Hirst in Associative Democracy, could anticipate. Social media may also, however, provide new ways to understand contemporary politics, through the use of 'big data' generated from the internet. It may be that the transition of collective action into a hyperconnected world embedded in online social media, with very low costs of participation, could be modeled in similar ways to natural systems, where digital traces left by contemporary collective action help in measuring the real current state of a system more precisely to avoid being surprised by its long term behaviour.
Time: 6-7.30pm, Tuesday 11th February.
Venue: Birkbeck College, Torrington Place, room B20.
All welcome; first come, first seated.
Helen Margetts is the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), a department of the University of Oxford investigating individual, collective and organizational behaviour online. Margetts joined the OII in 2004 as Professor of Society and the Internet, having previously been Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck College, London and Professor of Political Science and Director of the School of Public Policy at University College London.