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Networking Democracy - The "National Conversation" Conversation - Tony Curzon Price

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The "National Conversation" Conversation

Tony Curzon Price

This is one of the four pieces which initiated this discussion group.

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Conversation requires effort—listening, talking with consideration, taking the occasional risk with direction—and offers the reward of mutual enrichment. You come out of good conversation with your mind somehow changed, and knowing that you have played your part in somehow changing the minds of others. At its best, conversation delivers great mutual satisfaction. (It is no wonder that Roland Barthes, in the Fragment of the Lover’s Discourse, marks the beginning of the end of love as the end of conversation before anything carnal.)

The “National Conversation” adds some motivation to this general picture: it is to produce a statement of British values (or establish that British values are best expressed without a statement) and a decision about their role in society— from none to extensive. In other words, this conversation is to have an outcome. In politics, “conversation” is meant to denote some process beyond a simple electoral choice. It evokes Athenian deliberation or Rousseauist participation, where the political choices of participants are moulded by the process through which the choices are made. Rousseau is particularly eloquent on this: in the small group, in the right conditions, the General Will cannot but emerge. If the process of “conversation” were not important in itself, the whole issue could be left to our ordinary political processes.

We all know the reasonable limit of the unproblematic group conversation is an 8 person meal conducted over 3 hours. Each person gets approximately 20 minutes of talking and the rest of the time is devoted to listening. If you try to squeeze more people into the same time, conversation tends to fragment as each finds the balance of paying attention to others versus being attended to swings too disadvantageously. If you extend the time over which the conversation takes place, the collective effort of sustaining focus on the matter of debate tends to dissipate—it is no longer a leisure activity.

Given something like this as the ideal of a conversation that works, what does it mean to converse on a national scale, and how can the web help?

First, note the sheer impossibility for any technology to have a straight “dinner-style” conversation amongst 20 million households. Give each 20 minutes of spotlight, of undivided attention, and we would need 2283 years of listening 8 hours per day on the part of the 20 million. In fact, if we assume that 3 days is the absolute most one could ask people to take out of their lives to consider the matter, that would allow 72 people to listen to each other for 20 minutes each. But 72 people—one small street—do they really have enough of a government problem amongst themsleves to spend 3 days at its discussion? After a couple of hours most people would have left, having heard what there is to hear on perspectives of the 72. Note also—600 people giving an average attention of 10 minutes to each other will take 150 8 hour days. This is basically the configuration of Parliament—half as much attention to the individual representative as a dinner party guest gets.

In other words we have a real conceptual problem: what is a conversation on the scale of a nation? The scale of a nation does not seem to translate to conversation. The World Economic Forum fell into this kind of a trap this year when it organised “The Davos Question”, a process by which individuals could address the Davos participants by uploading a 1 minute YouTube video onto a special Davos website. Davos was aiming at a global conversation—the people talk to Davos, Davos talks back to the select. If 10 million people had uploaded videos, that would have been an impressive turnout, even if an insignificant percentage of the global audience Davos wanted to talk to. But those would have taken 10 million minutes to watch, or 57 man years (working 8 hours per day). Of course, they would have had to use mechanical or arbitrary means to sort out the videos to pass on to the business and finance leaders whose man-years are so valuable. In other words, a large turnout condemns the “conversation” to being mediated, mechanised. (As it turned out, Davos avoided that embarrassment by having only 200 videos uploaded, an embarrassment all of its own.)

The Davos example throws up a paradox of “mega-conversation”: if the turnout is big, it fails, and if the turnout is small, it fails. It fails in the first case because conversation must then be with some sort of machine-filter; it fails in the second case because it is unrepresentative and gimmicky. This is not a problem with technology but with the bandwidth of individual attention. (If anything, the web makes it worse by leaving so little attention free for other matters.)

Back to the UK’s national conversation; how can it avoid the paradox of the mega-conversation? The first way not to go we might call the “re-invention of representation”. Let us say that the aim is to convene a national citizen’s summit that will bring together 1,000 people for 3 days. Representatives might be elected, according to some constituency scheme. Delegates will knock on doors, parties will build programs, endorsements will be sought. This is like an election to a “special Parliament”, and all the non-state aggregators of opinion will come into play as they usually do. The web will play its part, just as it does in any election. But this is just a re-invention of the politics we know, not a “national conversation”. Note, of course, that our habitual system of representation emerges from the very difficulty of scale that we have identified as the paradox of the mega-conversation.

More promising are the methods developed by “deliberative democrats” (openDemocracy ran a blog on the state of the art of deliberative democracy at http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/dliberation. A deliberative poll borrows from the Rouseauist convention and from focus-group marketing. A small subset of the population is selected—possibly according to some representative scheme—and is put into an environment conducive to informed deliberation. Experts are at hand to inform, facilitators mediate conversation. Participants are polled before and after the event. And, importantly, the deliberative group makes a real decision to motivate a responsible attitude towards opinion. Think of it as a jury for political questions. There is a conversation, but it is only “national” in the same way the conversations in the palace of Westminster are “national”—carried out by representatives of the nation. If having the conversation is the important thing, good for them, but not for the great majority excluded.

Just as focus groups can be operated on the web—YouGov and other polling companies regularly do so—so a deliberative process could be operated on the web. It might be cheaper, might avoid some travel, but would not obviously in itself offer any particular advantage in scalability or decentralisation over the tea and biscuits version.

Neither the straight delibertive poll nor the re-invention of representation do much to ensure that a “national” conversation will be had. Maybe the creation of a “single-issue Parliament” will capture enough people’s attention that households across the land will talk about the statement of values. Maybe many simultaneous conversations is actually what we really mean by a “national conversation”—just as we all know what most households are talking about when some great sporting story grips the nation. But it is not in our political culture, I think, to be carried away like that by a top-down political process. I doubt that the model of the “special parliament” will create much of a conversation.

An alternative model would be to link conversation and convention much more directly, and here the web could come into its own. Imagine making participation in the convention, or selection in the deliberative polls, conditional on having convened sufficient conversations. For example, if you have convened a conversation of some magnitude, you can be entered into a draw to attend the convention.

This scheme would critically require measurement and evidence of “conversation”. If those conversations are on the web, this would be possible (though not simple). You would submit the blog or forum where your conversation was held; you would establish your relationship to that blog; you would submit server log files for machine analysis. Given all these, a machine will be able to come to a view on whether “conversation” has occurred. A shortlist of conversation sites would be made public.

Similar metrics would be used for non-web conversations. Digital photos, summaries of discussion, contact details of select participants. A shortlist of eligible offline conversations would be published for public challenge and scrutiny. The logic in both cases is: “establish that you have convened the right sorts of conversations, and you will be entered in the lottery to attend the convention”. While this scheme would not exclude the usual representative institutions that would be part of the “special Palriament” solution, they would allow the possibility of new entrants. But most of all, the criterion for entry would be to have had, and have spread, the conversation.

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