Blockchain Papers

Álvaro Luna García, Xabier Barandiarán, Alfonso Unceta Satrústegui

No abstract is available for this record.

Mike Thelwall

SteemIt is a Reddit-like social news site that pays members for posting and curating content. It uses micropayments backed by a tradeable currency, exploiting the Bitcoin cryptocurrency generation model to finance content provision in conjunction with advertising. If successful, this paradigm might change the way in which volunteer-based sites operate. This article investigates 925,092 new members’ first posts for insights into what drives financial success in the site. Initial blog posts on average received US$0.01, although the maximum accrued was US$20,680.83. Longer, more sentiment-rich or more positive comments with personal information received the greatest financial reward in contrast to more informational or topical content. Thus, there is a clear financial value in starting with a friendly introduction rather than immediately attempting to provide useful content, despite the latter being the ultimate site goal. Follow-up posts also tended to be more successful when more personal, suggesting that interpersonal communication rather than quality content provision has driven the site so far. It remains to be seen whether the model of small typical rewards and the possibility that a post might generate substantially more are enough to incentivise long-term participation or a greater focus on informational posts in the long term.

Teógenes Moura, Alexandre De Podestá Gomes

Public elections are one of the basis upon which representative democracy is built. Thus, it is of the utmost importance that governments and organizations are able to successfully hold non-fraudulent representative elections. Several methods are employed in order to allow citizens to cast their votes, such as Ballot-based voting, purely electronic methods, and Electronic Voting Machines, among others. However, we argue that current methods, specially those based on electronic platforms, provide unsatisfactory levels of transparency to voters, thus harming the trust voters have that the vote they cast was the same one counted by election officials, a problem known as voter confidence. Instead of stepping back to traditional and inefficient offline strategies, we suggest the modernization of State structures by the use of emerging technologies. In this research, we explore the possibility of using Blockchain technology to help in solving those transparency and confidence problems. First, we give an overview of Blockchain itself and other uses focused on societal problems and their respective analysis. We then analyze how the adoption of Blockchain into a digital government repertoire can contribute to common e-voting issues and also promote elections transparency, increase auditability, enhance voter confidence and strengthen democracy. By attending to this poster presentation, visitors will have a clear understanding of what is Blockchain and its basic concepts, why are market and researchers so excited about it, how it can help to solve common voting systems issues, who is already using it and the benefits and potential risks of its adoption.

Theodore Georgiou, Amr El Abbadi, Xifeng Yan

Towards the vision of building artificial intelligence systems that can assist with our everyday life, we introduce a proof of concept for a social media privacy "cyborg" which can locally and privately monitor a person's published content and offer advice or warnings when their privacy is at stake. The idea of a cyborg can be more general, as a separate local entity with its own computational resources, that can automatically perform several online tasks on our behalf. For this demonstration, we assume an attacker that can successfully infer user attributes, solely based on what the user has published (topic-based inference). We focus on Social Media privacy and specifically on the issue of exposing sensitive user-attributes, like location, or race, through published content. We built a privacy cyborg that can monitor a user's posted topics and automatically warn them in real time when a sensitive attribute is at risk of being exposed.

Kurki, Marleena

The purpose of this study was to describe social movement meeting organization and to increase the understanding of organized spaces for collective action. This paper contributes to several research streams. Firstly, this study advances a novel research stream conceptualizing social movements as spaces, and particularly as open rather than isolated spaces. Secondly, it raises meetings into the focal point of organizing and offers a multisided examination of meeting organization instead of limiting structure under one label such as network or formal organization. Thirdly, by focusing on organizing based on multiple logics and partial organization this study brings forward the understanding of organizing in the contemporary society as well as organization located in the outskirts of formal organizations. Fourthly, by making a distinction between organizing and mobilizing, this study develops the understanding of how movements can serve as a resource for individual actors and their goals. Finally, the case provides a rare example of a movement born around a nascent digital innovation with possibly considerable impact on society. The research was carried out as a descriptive case study focusing on the meetings of Helsinki Ethereum Meetup, which is a meeting-based organization set up around a nascent blockchain platform, Ethereum. The primary data consisted of eight interviews with the meetup participants. In addition, the case was complemented by an analysis of the group’s social media accounts and membership data retrieved from meetup.com, through which the group was facilitated. The data was analyzed utilizing a dual approach deploying both open coding and theory-based coding techniques. Meetings and their organization were analyzed from three perspectives: a network, an institution and an organization. Furthermore, the case analysis included identifying the ideological, business and political context of the case and the meetup group’s relations to other groups in the field of blockchain technologies. The results of the analysis indicate that the meetings can be described as a hybrid of a norm-based institution, a network hub and a partial organization with less than all elements of a formal organization. In practice, all three perspectives are linked to each other and together complement each other to form one entity. However, this study implies that the specific logics can be regarded as analytically separate to arrive at a more pronounced multilevel analysis of meeting organizing. In addition, the case organization was found to be an example of a pioneer group in its own field being the first and only meetup devoted to Ethereum in Finland at the time of the study. Furthermore, the settings and the organization of the meetup were possibly linked to the group’s position in its field and the nascent developmental state of Ethereum.

Liam Lander, Nichola Cooper

No abstract is available for this record.

Zeynep Tüfekçi

The early Internet witnessed the flourishing of a digitally networked public sphere in which many people, including dissidents who had little to no access to mass media, found a voice as well as a place to connect with one another. As the Internet matures, its initial decentralized form has been increasingly replaced by a small number of ad-financed platforms, such as Facebook and Google, which structure the online experience of billions of people. These platforms often design, control, influence, and “optimize” the user experience according to their own internal values and priorities, sometimes using emergent methods such as algorithmic filtering and computational inference of private traits from computational social science. The shift to a small number of controlling platforms stems from a variety of dynamics, including network effects and the attractions of easier-to-use, closed platforms. This article considers these developments and their consequences for the vitality of the public sphere.

Mary Feeney, Eric W. Welch

Social media comprises a set of new technologies that enable richer data exchange in highly decentralized, dynamic, and loosely structured versatile virtual environments. Social media technology is expected to enhance participation, learning, and knowledge production in government settings, aligning traditional structural and authority boundaries while also challenging them. We examine the extent to which local governments in the United States are coupling social media technology with two types of participative tasks: collaborative work inside the organization and participative interaction with external stakeholders. We also explore how these two technology–task couples are associated with managerial perceptions of the positive and negative outcomes of technology use. We use survey data from five departments—community development, finance, police, mayor’s office, and parks and recreation—in 500 U.S. cities. Findings show that social media and their use for specific tasks have limited impact on either positive or negative perceived outcomes. These non-findings may demonstrate that the implementation cost of social media technologies outweighs the managerial benefits they realize; that technology–task applications substitute for traditional approaches to the same task, but no effect is incurred; or that social media technologies are relatively new to local governments, and efforts to effectively utilize them for internal work tasks and external engagement are in their infancy.

William Cross, Lisa Young

No abstract is available for this record.

Mary Feeney, Eric W. Welch

No abstract is available for this record.

Mayo Fuster Morell

Online Creation Communities (OCCs) can be defined as networks of individuals that communicate, interact and collaborate; in several forms and degrees of participation which are eco-systemically integrated; mainly via a platform of participation on the Internet, on which they depend; and aiming at knowledge-making and sharing. This article analyses the conception of participation and the organizational logic of participation in OCCs. Participation in OCCs does not follow a dichotomize approach, but function more as an eco-system. The more significant characteristic of participation in OCCs are: 1) What is important is that the system is open to participation, but it is not expected that everybody participate and contribute equally; 2) Participation has multiple forms and degrees which are integrated. A critical mass of active developers is essential to initiate the project and maintain the content; weak cooperation enriches the system and facilitates reaching larger fields of information resources; and lurker or non-participants provide value as audience or though unintended participation that improve the system; 3) Participation is decentralized and asynchronous; 4) Participation is in public; 5) Participation is autonomous in the sense that each person decides which level of commitment they want to adopt and on what aspects they want to contribute. 6) Participation is not only deliberation but implementation. To conclude, an analysis of the governance conditions under which the resulting outcome could be defined as a digital commons is included. Furthermore, a reflection on the political implications of CCOs is also provided. The analysis is developed over the case studies of a platform provided by the European Social Forum, Flickr, Wikihow and Wikipedia. The main empirical methods are interviews, virtual ethnography and content analysis.

Dario De Notaris

This paper is focused on the role of main social activities, as creating and sharing personal content. The reason is connected to the raise up, in last ten years, of User Generated Content as a system to allow people to be active on the Web3. In the first paragraph I analyze the Web-population through recent surveys, showing different ways to classify generations. I comment the Jenkins’ “convergence culture” [2006], the push and pull media definition of Negroponte [1995] and the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants [Prensky 2001]. The second paragraph deals with use and consumption of digital media between young and adults from the computer use to mobile-phone and portable gaming device. In particular the mobile-phone seems to be an important medium to be online in every place and every time: it allows people to take and share photos, video, text and so on. This brings us to the third paragraph where I discuss mobility and applications: following Anderson [2010] the desktop is replaced with the webtop or web-applications that do not require a browser to be used. This is particularly evident for recent mobile devices as iPhone and iPad. Convergence and mobility allow people to share content in every time: yet ten years ago people used to share digital information (file-sharing) as video, music and text, by illegal channels such as Napster, without knowing who uploaded that on the Web. The Web 1.0 phase was characterized by an “anonymous dimension”. Instead, the current Web allows people to share information about their own life, publishing on social media, freely, their own photo, video, text, with real name and surname (life-sharing). At the center of the Web is the “ego”, the user. In the fifth chapter I analyze three social media that are currently catching up people’s attention Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – and I try to explain how they make possible to users to share culture and frame of their life. At the end I spent some words about piracy and privacy issue that social media bring up.

Randall M. Livingstone

Although I'm a rich white guy, I'm also a feminist anti-racism activist who fights for the rights of the poor and oppressed. (Carl Kenner)Systemic bias is a scourge to the pillar of neutrality. (Cerejota)Count me in. Let's leave the bias to the mainstream media. (Orcar967)Because this is so important. (CuttingEdge)These are a handful of comments posted by online editors who have banded together in a virtual coalition to combat Western bias on the world’s largest digital encyclopedia, Wikipedia. This collective action by Wikipedians both acknowledges the inherent inequalities of a user-controlled information project like Wikpedia and highlights the potential for progressive change within that same project. These community members are taking the responsibility of social change into their own hands (or more aptly, their own keyboards).In recent years much research has emerged on Wikipedia from varying fields, ranging from computer science, to business and information systems, to the social sciences. While critical at times of Wikipedia’s growth, governance, and influence, most of this work observes with optimism that barriers to improvement are not firmly structural, but rather they are socially constructed, leaving open the possibility of important and lasting change for the better.WikiProject: Countering Systemic Bias (WP:CSB) considers one such collective effort. Close to 350 editors have signed on to the project, which began in 2004 and itself emerged from a similar project named CROSSBOW, or the “Committee Regarding Overcoming Serious Systemic Bias on Wikipedia.” As a WikiProject, the term used for a loose group of editors who collaborate around a particular topic, these editors work within the Wikipedia site and collectively create a social network that is unified around one central aim—representing the un- and underrepresented—and yet they are bound by no particular unified set of interests. The first stage of a multi-method study, this paper looks at a snapshot of WP:CSB’s activity from both content analysis and social network perspectives to discover “who” geographically this coalition of the unrepresented is inserting into the digital annals of Wikipedia.Wikipedia and WikipediansDeveloped in 2001 by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and academic Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is an online collaborative encyclopedia hosting articles in nearly 250 languages (Cohen). The English-language Wikipedia contains over 3.2 million articles, each of which is created, edited, and updated solely by users (Wikipedia “Welcome”). At the time of this study, Alexa, a website tracking organisation, ranked Wikipedia as the 6th most accessed site on the Internet. Unlike the five sites ahead of it though—Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube (owned by Google), and live.com (owned by Microsoft)—all of which are multibillion-dollar businesses that deal more with information aggregation than information production, Wikipedia is a non-profit that operates on less than $500,000 a year and staffs only a dozen paid employees (Lih). Wikipedia is financed and supported by the WikiMedia Foundation, a charitable umbrella organisation with an annual budget of $4.6 million, mainly funded by donations (Middleton).Wikipedia editors and contributors have the option of creating a user profile and participating via a username, or they may participate anonymously, with only an IP address representing their actions. Despite the option for total anonymity, many Wikipedians have chosen to visibly engage in this online community (Ayers, Matthews, and Yates; Bruns; Lih), and researchers across disciplines are studying the motivations of these new online collectives (Kane, Majchrzak, Johnson, and Chenisern; Oreg and Nov). The motivations of open source software contributors, such as UNIX programmers and programming groups, have been shown to be complex and tied to both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, including online reputation, self-satisfaction and enjoyment, and obligation to a greater common good (Hertel, Niedner, and Herrmann; Osterloh and Rota). Investigation into why Wikipedians edit has indicated multiple motivations as well, with community engagement, task enjoyment, and information sharing among the most significant (Schroer and Hertel). Additionally, Wikipedians seem to be taking up the cause of generativity (a concern for the ongoing health and openness of the Internet’s infrastructures) that Jonathan Zittrain notably called for in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Governance and ControlAlthough the technical infrastructure of Wikipedia is built to support and perhaps encourage an equal distribution of power on the site, Wikipedia is not a land of “anything goes.” The popular press has covered recent efforts by the site to reduce vandalism through a layer of editorial review (Cohen), a tightening of control cited as a possible reason for the recent dip in the number of active editors (Edwards). A number of regulations are already in place that prevent the open editing of certain articles and pages, such as the site’s disclaimers and pages that have suffered large amounts of vandalism. Editing wars can also cause temporary restrictions to editing, and Ayers, Matthews, and Yates point out that these wars can happen anywhere, even to Burt Reynold’s page.Academic studies have begun to explore the governance and control that has developed in the Wikipedia community, generally highlighting how order is maintained not through particular actors, but through established procedures and norms. Konieczny tested whether Wikipedia’s evolution can be defined by Michels’ Iron Law of Oligopoly, which predicts that the everyday operations of any organisation cannot be run by a mass of members, and ultimately control falls into the hands of the few. Through exploring a particular WikiProject on information validation, he concludes:There are few indicators of an oligarchy having power on Wikipedia, and few trends of a change in this situation. The high level of empowerment of individual Wikipedia editors with regard to policy making, the ease of communication, and the high dedication to ideals of contributors succeed in making Wikipedia an atypical organization, quite resilient to the Iron Law. (189)Butler, Joyce, and Pike support this assertion, though they emphasise that instead of oligarchy, control becomes encapsulated in a wide variety of structures, policies, and procedures that guide involvement with the site. A virtual “bureaucracy” emerges, but one that should not be viewed with the negative connotation often associated with the term.Other work considers control on Wikipedia through the framework of commons governance, where “peer production depends on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized rather than hierarchically assigned. Individuals make their own choices with regard to resources managed as a commons” (Viegas, Wattenberg and McKeon). The need for quality standards and quality control largely dictate this commons governance, though interviewing Wikipedians with various levels of responsibility revealed that policies and procedures are only as good as those who maintain them. Forte, Larco, and Bruckman argue “the Wikipedia community has remained healthy in large part due to the continued presence of ‘old-timers’ who carry a set of social norms and organizational ideals with them into every WikiProject, committee, and local process in which they take part” (71). Thus governance on Wikipedia is a strong representation of a democratic ideal, where actors and policies are closely tied in their evolution. Transparency, Content, and BiasThe issue of transparency has proved to be a double-edged sword for Wikipedia and Wikipedians. The goal of a collective body of knowledge created by all—the “expert” and the “amateur”—can only be upheld if equal access to page creation and development is allotted to everyone, including those who prefer anonymity. And yet this very option for anonymity, or even worse, false identities, has been a sore subject for some in the Wikipedia community as well as a source of concern for some scholars (Santana and Wood). The case of a 24-year old college dropout who represented himself as a multiple Ph.D.-holding theology scholar and edited over 16,000 articles brought these issues into the public spotlight in 2007 (Doran; Elsworth). Wikipedia itself has set up standards for content that include expectations of a neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and the publishing of no original research, but Santana and Wood argue that self-policing of these policies is not adequate:The principle of managerial discretion requires that every actor act from a sense of duty to exercise moral autonomy and choice in responsible ways. When Wikipedia’s editors and administrators remain anonymous, this criterion is simply not met. It is assumed that everyone is behaving responsibly within the Wikipedia system, but there are no monitoring or control mechanisms to make sure that this is so, and there is ample evidence that it is not so. (141) At the theoretical level, some downplay these concerns of transparency and autonomy as logistical issues in lieu of the potential for information systems to support rational discourse and emancipatory forms of communication (Hansen, Berente, and Lyytinen), but others worry that the questionable “realities” created on Wikipedia will become truths once circulated to all areas of the Web (Langlois and Elmer). With the number of articles on the English-language version of Wikipedia reaching well into the millions, the task of mapping and assessing content has become a tremendous endeavour, one mostly taken on by information systems experts. Kittur, Chi, and Suh have used Wikipedia’s existing hierarchical categorisation structure to map change in the site’s content over the past few years. Their work revealed that in early 2008 “Culture and the arts” was the most domin

Andre Baechtiger, Seraina Pedrini

The inclusion of structural minorities and disadvantaged groups looms large in the study of democracy. There is ample recognition that “simple political egalitarianism on which the institutions and mechanisms of modern representative democracy were established has given way to increasing demands for group recognition as well as for forms of equality related directly to people's needs, characteristics, identities and conditions.” (Castiglione and Warren 2005: 2) There is also ample recognition that the standard liberal and majoritarian model of democracy is frequently unable to safeguard the most vital interests of structural minorities and disadvantaged groups. Several representation models and institutional devices have been proposed in order to advance the interests of minorities and disadvantaged groups. In the past decade, however, the study of inclusion and representation has increasingly taken a deliberative turn (Williams 1998; Urbinati 2000; Mansbridge 2003; 2009; Dryzek and Niemeyer 2008). Rather than focusing on formal and institutional means of inclusion (such as proportional representation, minority veto, or re-districting), deliberative approaches take an informal and dynamic view on inclusion and representation. In their mainstream and Habermasian-inspired version, deliberative approaches entail the idea of equal participation and symmetric dialogue, reasoned argument, common good orientation, serious and respectful listening (and responding) to other participants' claims, as well as mutual agreement based on the “forceless force of the better argument”. With their focus on equality, symmetry, serious listening, and respect, deliberative approaches spark hope to be susceptible to the interests of structural minorities and disadvantaged groups. Yet, despite tremendous interest in deliberative approaches in recent years, the exact specification and empirical translation of deliberative ideals in the context of minority and group inclusion has lagged behind. This may not be so surprising, given the fact that deliberative approaches are far from being fool-proof devices for the inclusion of disadvantaged groups. The major problem is that mainstream and Habermasian-inspired forms of deliberation might actually hamper inclusionary goals. On the one hand, feminists and difference democrats have argued that many disadvantaged people do not engage in rationalistic forms of deliberation, which may suit only a privileged few. On the other hand, why should disadvantaged groups respectfully listen to privileged groups or even transcend their interests in the light of the “better” argument, especially if they have experienced inequality or if their vital interests are at stake? As Williams (1998) has noted, requiring selflessness and self-transformation of the disadvantaged is deeply unfair. These are two valid objections, not easily addressed by the mainstream deliberative approach. Therefore, we propose a deliberative approach with “friendly amendments”. Our approach focuses on two central principles of deliberation, equality of participation and reciprocity, but it does so with a twist for reciprocity. First, equality of deliberation requires that all affected are included and “that no one person or advantaged group completely dominate the reason giving process, even if the deliberators are not strictly equal in power and prestige.” (Thompson 2008: 507). Second, reciprocity means that discourse participants should listen and respond to each other and do so in a respectful way (Chambers 1999). However, the trick here is to put the “burden” of reciprocity primarily on majorities and privileged groups: it is mainly their obligation to seriously listen and respond to the demands and arguments of minorities and disadvantaged groups and show a willingness to respect and accommodate these interests. Conversely, structural minorities and disadvantaged groups are not fully held accountable to these standards. They may be deliberative, but they may also adopt a more adversarial stance towards majorities and privileged groups. This relaxation is conditional though: the less inequality structural minorities and disadvantaged groups have experienced and the less their vital interests are at stake, the more we expect them to converge to the standards of majorities and privileged groups (and the more privileged groups are dispensed from taking a deliberative attitude vis-a-vis the disadvantaged). Finally, contrary to standard models of political inclusion and representation, our deliberative approach focuses only on the horizontal relationship among different (group) representatives and the ways they interact – rather than on the vertical relationship between representatives and constituents. We think that the former aspect of representation is critical though: it is the moment when inclusion and representation are in action and when constituent interests are turned into binding decisions. So far, there has been little empirical and systematic examination of deliberative forms of inclusion in the context of structural minorities and disadvantaged groups. In this study, we investigate equality of participation and reciprocity in the context of linguistic minorities in Switzerland (French, Italian and Romansch-speakers). To be sure, linguistic groups in Switzerland do not directly qualify as “disadvantaged” groups (such as Blacks in the United States), since they have not experienced deep inequality or oppression in the past. However, when their vital interests are at stake, they do not have formal means of veto power to prevent unwanted legislation but are generally dependent on the decisions of the German-speaking majority to realize their interests (both in representative and direct democracy). Moreover, there have been recurrent complaints of linguistic minorities of being marginalized and ignored by German speakers. As such, an empirical investigation of deliberative inclusion of linguistic minorities in Switzerland is far from being misdirected. At the same time, the institutional architecture of the Swiss political system is also conducive to deliberative forms of policy-making: it involves a consensus system with non-parliamentary features, enabling political actors to engage in consequential deliberation (see Steiner et al. 2004). Moreover, the party system is not organized along linguistic cleavages reducing partisan incentives to politicize linguistic conflicts. This combines with a specific motivation on part of the German-speaking majority to be receptive to the demands of linguistic minorities (Bachtiger and Steiner 2004). Thus, favorable institutional conditions and appropriate actor motivations should provide fertile ground to see our conception of deliberative inclusion “in action”. Put differently, the Swiss case enables us to explore how well the ideals of equality of participation and reciprocity are realized in practice when conditions are fairly ideal. In concrete, we focus on two Swiss parliamentary decision cases that deal with linguistic issues and directly concern linguistic minorities‟ vital interests (language article and language bill); in addition, we focus on a contrast decision case, the labor law revision which does not touch upon vital interests of the linguistic minorities. For the three cases, we explore patterns of participation and reciprocity in the committees of the first and second chambers of parliament. With regard to equality of participation, we analyze how often linguistic minorities speak up compared to the German-speaking majority. With regard to reciprocity, we analyze how often linguistic minorities are referred to, how often linguistic minorities refer to other actors, and whether this is done in a respectful and disrespectful way. Furthermore, we also perform an in-depth analysis of reciprocity and explore how often arguments of linguistic minorities are referred to by the German-speaking minority and whether this is done in a respectful (or, disrespectful) way. Our empirical analysis of deliberative inclusion draws from Steven Levitt‟s (2004) analysis of discrimination in the United States. We calculate frequencies for participation and reciprocity rates as a function of the speakers status – linguistic minority or linguistic majority -, controlling for other characteristics of the speaker (such as gender, role, or partisan affiliation) as well as characteristics of the context (different issues or first vs. second chamber). The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section II presents our model of deliberative inclusion. Section III provides background on deliberative inclusion in the context of linguistic groups in Switzerland, discusses the methodological approach, and presents the empirical results. Section IV concludes.

Paul Starr

THE IDEA THAT WE ARE—or should be—moving from an “industrial age government” to an “information age government” is a staple of political rhetoric. But has the information age significantly altered government in the liberal democracies? And if it has not yet done so, should we expect the liberal state to change in any fundamental way, or be entirely replaced, because of the chain of consequences set in motion by new technology? Since the early development of computers, there have been, broadly speaking, three phases in thinking about the potential of new technology to improve government. Beginning in the 1950s, the application of digital technology to the public sector was conceived of as automation and the hope was mainly for greater efficiency and control in governmental operations. A second phase, dating from the 1980s and rising to a climax in the following decade, pitted two alternative visions against each other—privatization and reinvention—each premised on the idea that the information age made traditional forms of public administration obsolete. Finally, in the most recent phase, digital democracy has become a central theme of visions of new forms of governance based on the diffusion of cheap computing and online communication. Each of these phases has brought some notable but far from revolutionary achievements, and that is what we should continue to expect. Digital technology does enhance some features of democratic government, but the fundamental problems of democracy are not susceptible to technological solutions, and the same developments that strengthen some democratic capacities degrade others. In this new environment, it will be a struggle just to maintain some of the minimal conditions of political accountability that democracy requires. The U.S. federal government, particularly the military, was initially a leader in the development of computers, and from World War II to the 1960s, the state stood on the frontier of information technology. The application of computers to the public sector raised expectations not of radical change but of doing what government agencies already did, only faster and more cheaply—that is, automating the bureaucratic status quo. Top-down control and economy of administration were the primary purposes of computerization. Computers were supposed to cut paperwork and costs, reduce crime, and give managers and policymakers better information. The pursuit of control is at the core of bureaucratic administration. Bureaucracy is ideally supposed to ensure adherence to rules through such means as hierarchical command, specialization of functions, uniformity of procedure, and formal documentation. By limiting individual discretion, these elements of bureaucracy are supposed to increase the capacity of the state to carry out whatever purposes animate it. Democracy, far from being antithetical to bureaucracy, has often stimulated its growth. Scandals regularly prompt demand for new rules. The progressives who brought America the popular referendum and direct election of senators also introduced unified budgetary control and stricter rules about the award of government jobs and contracts. They sought as well to professionalize administration and make it more scientific. Computerization fit the progressive bureaucratic paradigm perfectly. The introduction of computers in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with budgetary reform efforts that were intended to give chief executives and their finance officers greater control over how money was spent. Computerization offered the promise of achieving the elusive fiscal goals of unified control and accurate cost accounting for public services. The very nature of early mainframe computers seemed to dictate centralized control, although line agencies fought to get their own computers. Thus, the most widely anticipated effect of computers on government was the centralization of power. Greater executive control over the bureaucracy was an explicit reform objective, but many critics feared that computerization would augment the state's dominion over the individual, and this concern focused the attention on privacy protection. These anxieties were hardly unreasonable. At all levels, government was oriented not to the computerization of service but to the computerization of constraint—that is, to computerizing functions such as police, revenue collection, and motor vehicle licensing. Within the service agencies, computerization chiefly involved functions in back offices such as record keeping. The “backstage” locus of automation concerned both supporters, who thought the public might not appreciate the value of computers, and critics, who thought the public might fail to appreciate the threat to privacy. The early decades of computerization did bear positive fruit. The mid-twentieth century saw enormous growth in government, and after 1955, computers helped public agencies cope with the sheer increase in transactions. Despite the rise in federal expenditures in the United States, the number of federal civilian employees fell; productivity gains from computerization helped to make that possible. But by the 1980s, new developments in both politics and information technology led to a dramatic turn in thinking. Instead of improving bureaucracy, the goal became overthrowing it. The rise of conservative antigovernment sentiment in the Reagan era coincided with a shift in the relationship of government to technological change. The private sector had now moved into the forefront in the use of information technology. In 1983, a Reagan administration commission was stating the obvious when it declared that although the federal government in the 1960s had been “the acknowledged leader in using state-of-the-art computer hardware and software,” the government had fallen “farther and farther behind.” The technological lag of the public sector was particularly evident at government's front end—that is, where the public had direct contact with government. By this time, businesses were using telecommunications and information technology to improve customer service and produce a wider array of products tailored to different tastes; consumers had become used to the convenience of automated teller machines (ATMs), credit cards, and free, round-the-clock calls to 800 numbers. By comparison, public agencies were far slower to take up the new possibilities. The shift from mainframes to minicomputers and the rise of personal computers also turned earlier assumptions upside down; instead of favoring centralized control, the new technology could be a means of decentralization. Conservatives and liberals responded to this situation in different ways. To conservatives, the failure of government to keep up with information technology confirmed the need for privatization. As many corporations were outsourcing specialized functions, so government should do the same—indeed, the state should generally cut back its size and role. The information revolution thereby provided a legitimizing rhetoric for policies that conservatives had long favored for other reasons. To liberals, the logical response to public sector lag was not to privatize government but to “reinvent” it by making public agencies more flexible in organization, more focused on results rather than procedures, and more responsive to “customers.” The Clinton administration's National Performance Review, led by Al Gore, embodied this approach and linked it to the information revolution. In the same period as this debate was playing out, the Internet was becoming a popular medium, and the vision of a reinvented state increasingly emphasized the use of online communication in making government more customer friendly. The focus on improving government at the point of contact with the public involved more than a pretty new interface; electronic access offered the promise of better integrated and more consistently delivered services. But besides improving government's output, the Internet also awakened an interest in giving citizens more input. And with the development of the Web and tools built on it, that interest has gained traction. Digital media have unquestionably expanded the democratic repertoire. Political campaigns and social movements now have cheap, instant means of communication that circumvent the established mass media, and they can use those resources to mobilize followers, coordinate their activity, and aggregate contributions of money, labor, and knowledge. The successful use of new media in politics has raised expectations about its use in government, particularly for three purposes—increased transparency, collaboration, and participation. Transparency is the most readily achievable of these goals. Just as some early advocates of “teledemocracy” envisioned, the Internet now provides instant access to government documents and data, and allows the public to track legislation and regulatory decisions. The idea of transparency has grown, moreover, into the notion of government as a “platform” that routinely makes granular data available in a form that enables others to build applications on top of it. Here, the goal of open government moves from transparency to collaboration and participation, which raise more difficult questions. Other ideas along these lines call for crowdsourcing proposals for government action and putting such proposals up for electronic voting. The further one moves along the spectrum of actions from transparency to participation, the more vexed the idea of digital democracy becomes. Even though the digital divide has narrowed, any reliance of government on digital technology will put people with less income and education at an inequitable disadvantage because of persistent differences in digital skill as well as access. Moreover, where online participation is opened up, highly committed minorities and special interests are likely to dominate. In a crowdsourcing initiative after the election, the Obama transition effort invited the public to submit and vote on ideas, but the results were embarrassing. As the New York Times reported, “In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Legalizing online poker topped the technology ideas.” Conceived this way, digital democracy recapitulates the classic problems of direct democracy—skewed participation and lack of deliberation. Other difficulties with the idea of revitalizing democracy through online communication arise from the indirect effects of new media on traditional mechanisms of political accountability. By providing an alternative platform for advertising as well as news, the Internet has undercut the sources of newspaper revenue, plunging journalism into a deep crisis and weakening the ability of the press to keep watch on government, particularly at the state and local levels. Resources for journalism are now disappearing from the old media faster than the new media can create them. Furthermore, newspapers have assembled a broad public, including many people who have bought a paper for the sports or crossword puzzle but nonetheless scanned the front page and learned something about the news of their community and the world. Online, however, they can go to a sports or puzzle site without any exposure to the news. In the early years of television, when the evening news was on all three available channels, the national news had a similarly broad public. But beginning with cable television, the advent of new media has brought a profusion of choices of different kinds of entertainment. The share of the public who regularly follows the news and public affairs has declined, though those with the most interest in politics (usually people with strong partisan commitments) have access to more news and a wider range of opinions than before. Despite the cornucopia of information, the politically attentive public has diminished and become more sharply divided along ideological lines. The gains for democracy from new technology are real, but unfortunately, so are the losses. It may be a long time before we can add them up and determine the net impact. In each phase, early enthusiasms have run up against stubborn and uncomfortable limits, even as new democratic possibilities have opened up. We are still in the midst of tremendous ferment in technology, media, and politics, and the creativity now being unleashed is our best hope that when the digital revolution finally runs its course, free societies and popular self-government will be left standing.

B. Balamurugan, T. Poongodi, M. R. Manu, S. Karthikeyan · 5 authors

The moving image archive of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) includes a copy of the film The Double Day (1975), cataloged in the series Moving Images Relating to International Development Programs and Activities, 1979–1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles “created to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).”1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the film—directed by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Women’s Film Project collective and described as “the first Latin American feminist documentary”—examines the gendered dynamics of paid and unpaid labor through the testimonies of women from Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico.2 Its presence in the USAID archive is likely a consequence of its funding history, having received support from the Inter-American Foundation, a USAID-affiliated entity; the development agencies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; the United Nations Development Program; and US philanthropist Calvin Cafritz.3These transnational funding structures not only enabled the film’s production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Day’s institutional trajectory reflects the shifting configurations of aid, gender, and media during a historic moment when women were being repositioned at the center of what Arturo Escobar has described as development’s “regimes of visuality.”5 Especially relevant to The Double Day’s production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nations’ proclamation of 1975 as International Women’s Year, WID emphasized women’s participation in the global economy as both an index and mechanism of development. Indeed, The Double Day premiered at the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, held in Mexico City.6 Within this context, the film forms part of a broader trajectory of media use by international organizations that intensified during the 1970s—as best exemplified by Media Habitat, a collection of 236 documentary films commissioned by the United Nations to represent urban and rural development initiatives for the 1976 Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. As a policy-shaping initiative, Media Habitat primarily featured films from the Global South intended not only to illustrate but also to help codify standardized audiovisual markers of “underdevelopment” that determined access to the emerging global economic order and to international aid.7Framed in relation to these international institutions and their operations, The Double Day could similarly be considered “development media”—exemplifying the type of nonfiction media produced and distributed outside of the commercial film circuits whose aspects and subcategories have been variously described in scholarship as nontheatrical, useful, sponsored, institutional, industrial, educational, or nonprofessional/amateur.8 Scholars working in this area have emphasized the institutional contexts of such media’s production and exhibition infrastructures as shaping its instrumentalized effects. From a feminist perspective, such an approach is crucial to grappling with the broader question of how “gender impacts [these works’] shape, content, and trajectories.”9 Yet we also argue that, taken in isolation, the institutional and infrastructural contexts are insufficient to account for the complex relationship between media and development, potentially not only limiting our understanding of the reach and impact of development but also distorting our interpretive conclusions. For example, to categorize The Double Day as “development media” is to overlook the film’s place within Solberg’s directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational women’s filmmaking and radical Latin American documentary cinema to which it simultaneously belongs. Such exclusive framing is especially limiting given that women globally were disproportionately engaged in nonfiction production throughout the twentieth century—sometimes by political choice but more often due to structural exclusions from fiction filmmaking. Even in nonfiction historiography, however, institutional media has remained particularly marginal, reinforcing hierarchies that separate such works from the aesthetic and authorial frameworks through which film history has been constructed.10 This marginalization not only tends to erase women’s contributions but also presumes a “weak” or derivative authorship, rendering these films unworthy of the interpretive attention needed to apprehend their aesthetic and political complexity.11 The same dynamic is likely to structure assumptions about “development media” as well.Categorizing The Double Day exclusively within this category would further prompt us to assume top-down institutional analyses that have been characteristic of both institutional media methodologies and the scholarship on development at large. This, in turn, would risk obscuring this film’s radical Marxist approach to women’s labor as well as its concrete contribution to activism and its attendant grassroot structures. In Mexico City, The Double Day became a catalyst for feminist solidarity in practice when one of the film’s protagonists, Bolivian activist and trade unionist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, was invited to participate in the Tribune of Non-Governmental Organizations held alongside the official UN conference.12 There, Barrios de Chungara challenged Western feminist priorities by reframing the debate around labor, class, and imperialism, helping to articulate a shared Third World feminist agenda that significantly departed from the developmentalist vision of the United Nations and USAID.13 Seen through the lens of activist media, The Double Day helped forge transnational solidarity networks by enabling information exchange across the diverse voices that shaped its making—from the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated it—revealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the film’s Latin American context—reflected in Solberg’s formation in Brazil as the only woman in Cinema Novo, its focus on women from across the region, and its premiere and key reception in Mexico City—requires grappling with the regional specificities of the very notion of development in its multiple iterations.14 Far from being an epistemological and political framework imposed solely by the Global North, both the practices of development and the theoretical foundations of developmentalism (understood as a broad and polysemic set of discourses) were shaped through the active participation of Latin American economists.15 Within this iteration, underdevelopment, as a constitutive notion of developmentalism, became central to a distinctly critical strand, which by the late 1960s became known as the dependency theory.16 This same approach is reflected in some of the best-known Latin American radical film manifestos of the time, arising precisely from the same milieus to which Solberg belonged.17These various considerations of the film’s history illustrate the methodological challenges confronting feminist scholars seeking to assess the impact of development on media projects, theories, and practices. To disregard the developmentalist context of such works by emphasizing their political aesthetics and affects risks reproducing a romanticized narrative of heroic resistance (albeit from a feminist perspective). Yet to engage exclusively with their institutional and material infrastructures risks naturalizing developmentalism’s political and epistemological foundations at the expense of the goals and beliefs of the many women who participated in these projects. The contradictions and ambivalences that animate such histories call for feminist frameworks capable of holding both institutional complicity and radical possibility in view.This challenge resonates with ongoing debates about the politics of the archive and what Allyson Field has termed “the practice of informed speculation.”18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to “press at the limits” of the archive to “inoculate our scholarship against our evidence’s afflictions.”19 The concern that the evidence we draw on in our analysis reproduces the very structures and blind spots of the dominant ideology and therefore shapes and delimits our interpretation becomes particularly urgent when engaging the developmentalist media corpus. Informed speculation offers an alternative by inviting the experimental, creative, and speculative rewriting of history, mobilizing the archive “in a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.”20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and “intimate familiarity with the archive” that we are working with and against. Building on this imperative, we suggest that the developmentalist archive, in particular, demands expansion and critical reconsideration in ways that unsettle the very disciplinary frameworks through which it has been studied as well as the larger institutional contexts for such knowledge production.Our focus on The Double Day in the opening of this introduction thus foregrounds the entanglements of institutional and grassroots forces, local and international contexts, structural and interpersonal relations, and creative and economic factors that have shaped not only this film but the broader ecosystem of development media projects—and their preservation—over time. Addressing such a constellation involves transgressing methodologically entrenched divisions between political economy and aesthetics, between material infrastructures and affective regimes; reckoning with divergent periodizations across film history and world economics; and situating these within the local specificities of women’s movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of development—each historically, geographically, and ideologically situated.We imagine this special issue as an opening toward a critical dialogue, not only about how such an approach might be enacted in practice but also about the far-reaching ways development paradigms have shaped both our objects of study and the contours of the field itself. The decision to center institutionally sponsored films across all the essays in this issue is deliberate and enables us to highlight institutional critique as a vital methodological imperative within our analytical framework. Created within the frameworks of international organizations, state agencies, or NGOs, these films’ histories make legible the institutional logics that underwrite their production. Yet our critique does not stop at these specific entities. Rather, we argue for a broader interrogation of the political conditions and institutional infrastructures that shape media and knowledge production more generally. This includes contemporary corporations embedded in the digital platform economy, from streaming services to the rapid expansion of AI. Equally critical is a reflexive examination of academia itself, where departments of economics, political science, and centers for development have played a formative role in producing and legitimizing developmentalist theories and policy frameworks. While the humanities and arts have at times offered critical alternatives, they have also frequently mirrored and reinforced many of the same developmentalist assumptions. A feminist analysis of the nexus between development and media must therefore unsettle not only dominant archives but also the institutional and disciplinary foundations of our own scholarly practices.As scholars, we share the complex position of navigating the same tensions between institutional complicity and emancipatory aspiration as many of the media-makers whose work we study. Mirroring our subjects is also the transnational, collective mode of this special issue’s own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordances—such as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platforms—we have been working toward creating a community that exceeds, and often resists, the prevailing logics of our academic institutions. Our aim has been to create a space for shared inquiry and mutual support that pushes back against disciplinary siloing and technocratic neoliberal assessment modes of both labor and knowledge production—and this certainly extends to our experience collaborating with the journal editors throughout the publication process. Our goal has been to examine both the persistence and variability of developmentalism, understood as what Gustavo Esteva calls a “powerful but fragile semantic constellation,” as a conceptual formation that has historically inspired, legitimized, and mobilized media projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 And gendered biopolitics, from population control to gender mainstreaming, have remained integral to development policies and media practices, recurring across formats from institutional newsreels to film festivals.We share the conviction that, far beyond the history of nonfiction institutional media, development (as both a broad ideological project and a network of material and institutional practices) and developmentalism (as a set of discourses and theoretical models associated with development) have exerted a far-reaching influence on film and media cultures at large. As such, they must be treated as a major force in shaping global film and media systems and also the many ongoing assumptions behind their critical discourses. The discipline of communication studies was founded on modernization theory governed by Cold War goals of dissemination of Western liberal democracy around the world, while “an area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.”22 Despite critique from postcolonial and critical race studies, many of these frameworks have remained foundational for media theory.23 In historical scholarship, as we increasingly move beyond “modernity” as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and media’s entanglements with the logics of and economic and the associated with as well as their conceptual underdevelopment, and impact in as diverse as and of media aesthetic and paradigms in film and film and funding are developmentalist assumptions to the they to underwrite the narrative and logics of and global media from the structure of the film to the cultures of argue that a examination of the historical entanglements between film and developmentalist aesthetics, modes of as well as infrastructures and critical the and that our contemporary media is a of the historical contours of development as a field of inquiry embedded within a of some of the methodologies by the featured in this special a of this complex history, to the larger at in media, development, and gender all its development a it as an of be with practices as divergent as and in In as we work on this the of the of the USAID the ideological that have the history of international the and of this on the global its a from development as a global practice and as an institutional and which over the has as a with its own media Yet or does not erase the historical impact of these the contradictions they have reflected and over the as the of development several crucial to the economic theories of development initiatives to and through the of the development an international policy framework at from the Global to the of the Global the by the political role of and the of the International the on was challenged by dependency theory and at development as global structural the neoliberal of the the Programs by the and World imposed and as conditions for and forms of assistance became known as the major markers for international development development has moving beyond economic to such as the Human Development and the Development and from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of These frameworks increasingly of and liberal of and with what in many ways to various while the of the to development’s epistemological more scholarship has toward a of its and material the field has to a of and critical by and scholars, which development as a dynamic of conceptual and political to these the studies in this special issue call for sustained analysis in place of In we draw from a of and that in of of gender and to this special issue engage that and from Mexico to contemporary specific local historical of global distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to studies that this issue a in the global history of development on and documentary work in Mexico how early women infrastructures as of while US films an early of state and transnational on a outside the Global as the of developmentalist both the and markers of development media, its to the and Latin central grounded in archival also women’s in transnational and the methodological of archives on study of the series to a a digital media not by but by women not as but as subjects and within circuits of neoliberal and the aesthetics and of how development’s has models of to contemporary neoliberal paradigms of and analysis how digital and gender and practices, discourses on and their of these essays the of some of the historical of developmentalist as the question of the role of the state within such on a notion of economic as a and the dominant of development that the state as the for and through infrastructural projects. This understanding of development was shared across both of the as well as in the Third The United and the increasingly mobilized international in the of the modes of international at the postcolonial of policy and ideological These programs were at the expansion of their and of while with the and decolonial of The conceptual between modernization and development that the Cold in of and hierarchies of that long and As an of postcolonial their role as of international aid concern about the of Western development projects. In alternative across the Global South that to structural between and through policies of and In many they were further the global structures. In Latin for example, this approach was through organizations such as the United Nations for Latin and the both developmentalist projects and their have taken many forms historically, and they have and they have been to a of projects, and postcolonial and development has been and in ways and with frequently political While many of these alternative frameworks the embedded in dominant Western they often technocratic and assumptions. gender and gender as for the of to be shaped by This becomes particularly in the media that of development where women frequently a crucial associated with and women were as both the subjects and of their participation in the and labor often as the index of In this study of from the 1970s how women were as of this as these about women’s urban and recurring and of a within the own of and critique that official examination of archives and enables a feminist interrogation of their mobilizing a of the in the of contribution to this issue similarly the of a dynamic within as well as across ideological the of women’s and the media of the and as active in labor and as integral to the technocratic women became of as their labor remained a of and analysis and archival with attention to the specific of and It also transnational that as a and affective a nexus of and practices through which gender, media, and developmentalism one film not as a but as part of the of alongside and work a broader concern of this special media as a of developmentalist projects. The debates the World and which international such as the United Nations and a critical historical for such primarily by postcolonial and of the for the of media and communication infrastructures in as to counter Western The a between and economic how systems of media and reinforced global hierarchies of and in an agenda that supported and alternative media infrastructures across postcolonial contexts, the framework gender as an analytical This “gender in the 1970s by of the Women in Development in relation to The Double its political critique of with its broader to center women in development policy through and This was also in of media, which was shaped by its international reach and audiovisual production and and and Yet, as WID institutional it also to the and of the women’s development programs often by in These were by a of studies, and on and the to of women’s presence and through the of their economic and In this on the filmmaker this history directly by the and of for women by the WID framework during the with and agencies the of and against Women in at the of the neoliberal turn, when institutional media often the only to access and support to projects. The an by this dynamic as of the from the Global South are to engage with the developmentalist assumptions funding models that their similarly the as a in developmentalist media history by the of and centers on the Film a between of and the attention toward the and labor by and work was foundational the of and the of audiovisual aid, as both a of development projects and a critical for their the in this issue argue for a with media, gender, and developmentalism as an field of that is and shaped by feminist and methodologies and that challenge the entanglements between academic knowledge production and and technocratic development And while methodological these dynamics at the structural the of feminist in media and cinema by this the very a