What Would an Always-On-The-Record Government Look Like?
Recently, I wrote a post about Government 2.0 predictions for 2010-12, and one of them was that government would "always be on-the-record." By that I meant that the combination of (1) the proliferation of tech-savvy citizens with mobile camera/video devices, (2) the prevalence of wi-fi or other Web connections, (3) the massive number of people using social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and (4) the great interest that people have right now in a number of controversial issues like our current wars, health care, and climate change that people could and probably would start documenting everything that government officials do and say, where they go, who they meet with, for how long, what their staffers eat for lunch and with whom, and so on. And you don't need to be a professional journalist to do this, or even to do it well. An entire site along the lines of Gawker.com could be started around this, in fact. GovernmentGawker.com, anyone? Well, I was doing some research to look at planes versus trains to get home for the holidays, in light of the recent blizzard that's affected transport in the DC-NY-Boston corridor, and I came across a fantastic video that essentially puts the Amtrak Acela First Class service on the record for the trip between New York and Boston (7 min edited clip). It's fantastic. Now, imagine if someone did the same thing, but wanted to document a day in the life of Senator Ben Nelson. It's not hard. You check the general schedules of his committees and such beforehand, go through security at the Capitol, find his office, camp out, maybe ask the person at the front desk some questions, find some press in the hallways and ask some questions, stalk the cafeteria and listen for people saying "Nelson," go back to his office and see him leaving to walk down the hall to a committee hearing, go to the committee hearing and tape it from a Flip in your coat pocket, upload it to YouTube while you follow him to his next meeting, and so forth. And you could do variations on this for political appointees you don't like, lobbyists you're interested in, principal deputy assistant secretaries that make important decisions but don't necessarily travel in armored vehicles with bodyguards, etc. Trust me, this isn't hard. But why would someone do this? Well, most people wouldn't. But it's just like Wikipedia - only about 1% of people who use Wikipedia actively edit it; about 9% do sometimes, and 90% just read it. Twitter is not unlike that either - only about 10% of users contribute 90% of the tweets. So what if 1% of U.S. citizens started doing this? Roughly there are 300 million people, say half of them are adults, so we have 1% of 150 million as 1.5 million. Now, if everyone just did this at the state, local, or federal level one day a year, and generated one "amateur journalism piece" from that day, that's about 4,100 videos/blog posts/tweet sets generated PER DAY. That's a lot of government on-the-record.
Comments (10)
And there's certainly a tradition of citizen-watchdogs, who may not rise to the professional level of journalists but who would provide the content, for sure, at a minimum on a hyperlocal level.
But there's a downside (at least one): who on earth would want to take a position in public service with this to look forward to? Talented individuals with a "rich" private life would rule themselves out, certainly. We'd wind up only with attention-gluttons who crave the spotlight... the Jon & Kate Show comes to the Capitol!
Counter-argument? Politicians and elected officials will shape up, with glare upon them? Um, I doubt it. We're all human.
We've been suffering for the past twenty years since celebrity journalism included politics in its swath. Jack Kennedy would never run for office today; he enjoyed his girlfriends too much to give that up, and he'd never get away with them in today's scenario. Abe Lincoln would surely think twice about running, as he was already highly protective of his wife's reputation and mental well-being... if there'd been some 24x7 spotlight on her, as there is on Michelle Obama, Abe would've been toast.
No one looks great in HD television.... and leadership in public service will never look the same under this glare.
Lewis - I think you're right, but that's not necessarily all bad. I don't know if it would be good or bad to have Senator Alec Baldwin yelling about climate change on the floor, but would that necessarily be worse than many of the folks there now?
Mark, HuffPost and Gawker cover stories of national interest, nio hyperlocal fair. I think govgawker's a long shot. That said, I also think it's a very noble idea that would be inspirational to work on. When do we launch?
Personally, I don't feel that either course would be something to look forward to. To the extent we further the notion that government officials are always on stage, we reduce the possibility of them making informed reasonable decisions and approaches and increase the possibility that they play to the crowd first, and conduct effective governance strategies second.
As Lewis Shepherd states above, the Jon and Kate show taking over Washington would not be a good thing. The question then is how we can work a balance between transparency and disclosure and good governance. Best case is they work hand in hand, but that only occurs in a trusting environment. The process described in post you outline above will result in the opposite of a trusting environment.
Instead, your "Always on the record" prediction seems to me to be an extreme end-point of a current trend. We could probably make a really cool Cyberpunk movie plot out of this (hopefully we take it International & Indy so we don't end up with a mess like "I, Robot"), but the chances of it reality beginning to look like this any time soon are slim.
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So my first reaction to the governmentgawker.com is great idea. But then I wonder, since you need drama, conflict and tension to cut through the information overload and capture anyone's interest these days, would a site like this get enough traffic to get anyone excited and really make a difference? Perhaps it wouldn't need to to be worthwhile, but perhaps it would to regulate the actions of elected officials through transparency.
Second, how do voters make sense of so much unstructured information? Sure, it is valuable to have information available that shows us what elected officials are doing so we can make sure there's no major gap between what they say, and what they do. But when it comes time to renew or revoke the contracts of our representatives, unless there's an EASY way to analyze and synthesize 1.5 million voices, that information may remain largely untapped, in the ether of the Net. Access may not be enough. This is a huge challenge with respect to making citizen media useful.
I agree with you, people are going to create it and upload to the web. So how do we make all this information useful?