Mental Map of Online Participation

I was going through my files and came across a mental map I did a few months ago about factors involved in online participation and social media, particularly related to participation in politics and government.

Crowdsourcing Concertos

Over the years, I've encountered many instances of online crowdsourcing - from encyclopedias, books, news, reviews, t-shirts, design, videos, software, mapping, government, business plans, and inventions. But I had not heard of a crowdsourced symphony before.

That is until a friend at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) told me about a new project they sponsored with Tod Machover, a music composer and professor at MIT Media Lab. They wanted to create a symphony not only about Toronto but by Torontonians. The music director of the TSO, Peter Oundjian, describes the motivation for this project:

We live in a great hub of creativity, diversity and innovation, and this is the right time to reflect the endless colours and sounds of the city through orchestral instruments.

To capture the many facets and soundscapes of the city, Machover used many methods - on and offline. Collaboration was done via blog, email, Skype, web applications, audio streaming, smartphones, and face-to-face sessions. Machover also traversed the city and recorded various characteristics sounds of the city.

What makes the project even more incredible though is tools Machover and MIT Media Lab built to facilitate online participatory music composition.

My music education ended after grade 7 and 8 when a dour, dull music teacher that had the class spend two years focusing on pitch-perfect singing and nothing else. So I never had the opportunity - or desire (thanks to that teacher) - to make or create music.

That is until today, when I tried the online tools that were created for this project. Through web-based interactive tools, called Media Scores and Constellation, users can work with existing or original sounds and tracks and play around with them through visual methods to create their own mini-compositions. Users can then upload them for Machover to listen to and incorporate into the final symphony.

The tools are still online for people to use - so start composing. It's really fun!

Here's more info, from the TSO's website, on the tools MIT created for this project:

• Media Sores – will allow you to help complete the Finale section ("Toronto Dances") of the piece, contribute to the accompaniment "texture" of the work’s virtuosic "City Soaring movement, and experiment with other sections of the composition to build your own unique blend and personalized musical narrative.
• Constellation - uses composed and collected sounds and lets you mix them into your own collages, textures and pieces, just by experimenting with moving the mouse and combining these things.
• City Soaring - literally lets you paint the quality of a melody. Grab one of the four "brush" icons in the top right-hand corner of the app window – weight, complexity, texture and intensity – and paint over the line with it. You'll immediately see the change in color and texture and will hear the changes when you play back the melody.

Machover comments on this novel process and the final results:

The idea of collaborating with Torontonians to create a symphony interested me both because I thought it would lead to a diverse and timely musical portrait of this wonderful city, and also because I felt that it would propose a new model for people with diverse musical backgrounds and experience to work together towards a common goal. We embarked on an adventure that has led me to new sounds, new friendships, new discoveries about Toronto, and new ideas about musical storytelling.  When I started the project, my hope was to convey how the incredible diversity of Toronto is wrapped in a beautiful and unified connectivity. Having just finished the piece, I think we have achieved that and I can’t wait to share it with Toronto.

The premier performance of the work, A Toronto Symphony: Concerto for Composer and City, is Saturday, March 9, 2013 at 8:00 pm at Roy Thomson Hall.  I bought my tickets today and tickets are still available.

If you can't attend the performance and you're in Toronto, you can view a customized light show on the CN Tower, which will be synced to the music.

For more about this project and Machover's work, visit the TSO's website or read an article from Toronto Life.

Participation Points

Recent studies have come out that present a sobering look at celebratory claims that online activities are an effective means of participatory democracy.

1) Pew’s study this month, The Internet and Civic Engagement,  finds that predominantly the people that participate in online political activity are largely the same people that participate offline. The Internet is not mobilizing any new people – except for a trend of more young people participating than before. As the study authors state “the internet is not changing the fundamental socio-economic character of civic engagement in America".

2) A July 2009 study, “Building an Architecture of Participation? Political Parties and Web 2.0 in Britain” by  Jackson and Lilleker found that most political parties in the UK had constructed online methods of participation but then civic leaders were largely not participating. The authors fear this veneer of participation actually will encourage greater political apathy.

3) An article by Jodie Dean “Communicative Capitism: Circulation and Foreclosure of Politics” (in Digital Media and Democracy, Boler, ed.) is critical of our culture’s technology fetish and that our seeming acts of online participation “enable us to go about the rest of our lives relieved of the guilt that we might not be doing our part and secure in the belief that we are all informed, engaged citizens”.  Dean is critical that online participation becomes an act in itself, and does not lead people to do the work that actually provokes change.

This led me to wonder whether the Canadian online political scene is more reciprocally participatory. I checked out the two sources I figured would be most apt to make good use of social media, Mayor of Toronto David Miller and the Green Party of Canada. This is an unscientific study, just quick observations.

I follow Miller on Twitter and Facebook.  He posts regularly but I haven’t noticed him reply, debate, or frankly participate. I do like his posts because they clearly come from him and not an aid who is doing the posting to make Miller look hip, get more votes, etc.

I checked out the Green Party's website figuring they would be more open to online political participation. I was hoping for a policy wiki, online polls, something to solicit participation in a strong way. All there is are some blogs. Elizabeth May has a blog, but in a quick review of it, she does not appear to reply to comments.

They are both using new digital media in an old analog way: to broadcast. I believe Miller or May could respond (or more often than rarely, if they do) to show that they are listening at the very least.

Granted, at least they are broadcasting where increasingly more people are, particularly young people (see Pew). I also acknowledge that Facebook and Twitter have different norms and rules (140 characters) that may make "serious" political debate a challenge. An example of this are posts by trolls, possibly political opponents in disguise, that dominate or degenerate conversation.

Why aren’t civic leaders interacting more? Are civic leaders really just too busy to participate? Are they worried, or not allowed, that they’ll stray from the party line?

If Dean is correct that online participation is a distraction from the real work, then what steps are needed to make online participatory democracy vital, effective, inclusive, and democratic?