Networking Democracy - 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.
