Address by The Hon Lindsay Tanner MP
Minister for Finance and Deregulation
The University of Melbourne
School of Social and Political Sciences
Monday 3 November 2008
It is a privilege to be back at the University of Melbourne to help launch the new School of Social and Political Sciences.
For generations Melbourne University has trained some of our finest political scientists and practitioners. Through them it has helped shape the political landscape in Australia and beyond.
I have no doubt that the new School will strengthen this tradition.
I want to take this opportunity today to reflect on changing patterns of socialisation around information technology that have emerged over the past few years and what these changes might mean for our knowledge institutions.
In brief, my argument to you today is that the rise of internet enabled peer production as a social force necessitates a rethink about how policy and politics is done in Australia.
This is perhaps especially relevant for a newly minted School of Social and Political Science.
For as long as the internet has existed idealists and futurists have talked about its potential to transform culture and society. It has only been recently however that the far reaching impact of the internet’s ability to connect people, places and information has been widely recognised.
The internet is now routinely the cause of new fortunes, ruined careers and overnight celebrity. It brings together and empowers communities to make, learn, discuss and engage with one another. In generates vast amounts of social value – culture, information, activism – often at very low or zero cost.
A decade ago such trends were barely perceptible. While many assumed that the internet would deepen established practices around the way we consume information, few predicted that it would create entirely new schemes of behaviour.
For example, in the late nineties I made the argument that Australia’s future prosperity depended to a considerable extend on our ability to fully comprehend and capitalise on the information technology revolution, especially the burgeoning market in content production.
When I wrote this I had in mind the growing market for niche content providers in a global market for culture. This argument was based on the assumption that the market for culture – with the capital, supply-chain, marketing, distribution and intellectual property elements that constitute it – would continue largely undisturbed.
This prediction has not been proved incorrect – Australia’s future still relies in many ways on our ability to produce cultural and other forms of content. The way society produces content, however, is changing dramatically. The scale now provided by cheap technology and widespread broadband is giving rise to an entirely new mode for the creation, dissemination and reuse of all kinds of information.
This new mode is known among the academic literature as peer production, but is more commonly referred to as Web 2.0. It is a trend that applies to much more than the creation of cultural goods, although these goods, such as the innumerable YouTube video mashups which poke fun at politicians, are acting as the harbingers of change.
Peer production empowers every citizen to be creator and critic, as well as consumer, of information. It is a mode of production that is enabled by two key factors. The first is the collapse of cost barriers to producing information – computers are now widely accessible in western society. The second is the removal of logistical and functional barriers to collaboration through new internet based networks.
Many see the enabling of peer production as a defining feature of our age, marking a new epoch in the way we engage with information no less significant than the creation of the printing press by Gutenberg or the introduction of phone, radio and television technology into people’s daily lives.
The lynchpin of peer production is the scale provided by the internet to its users to collaborate on and consume niche flows of information. A local example is illustrative. When I edited Farrago, we worked all night laying out the paper and then left Melbourne at 5.00 am to drive the proofs to Shepparton where it was printed. Disseminating content widely within the university required me to endanger to lives of kangaroos, wombats and other travellers. Of course, due to email these problems no longer exist.
The practical impact of peer production is to seriously undermine the operational assumptions of the industrial mode of information creation, valuation and consumption.
In the industrial mode of information creation, content and consumers need to be aggregated in order to achieve necessary economies of scale. This is why we have mass markets in everything from news, film and music, through to fashion tips and travel advice. Without a critical mass of people to consume content it is very hard to sustain the capital and labour costs associated with information production – look at the one newspaper culture of most Australian cities.
The same logic governs the production of much public sector information. For example, the limits of government resources make it unfeasible to develop curricula adapted for every school. A mass product for a mass audience must suffice.
Peer production overcomes the problem of scale in two key respects. The first relates to capital. The abundance of cheap inputs for the creation and storage of information means that niche content – novellas, albums, documentaries etc – can now be produced with little upfront capital costs. The internet provides a free and ready made distribution network for information dissemination.
The second way peer production overcomes the problem of scale relates to labour. In the industrial information economy content creation is labour intensive. Consider the example of a newspaper. A newspaper requires journalists to investigate and generate content, sub-editors to refine the content, editors to choose and categorise content, designers to arrange content, and distributors to distribute content. All of these staff requires support services. For efficiency purposes, most of this work is organised to occur in business hours in a central newsroom.
Peer production decouples content creation from the industrial model of labour. It leverages off what Professor Clay Shirky calls our ‘cognitive surplus’: the spare time which knowledge workers have in post-industrial societies to produce content.
Peer production frees labour from the need for geographical or temporal proximity. Groups can now work on a project across time zones and continents. Significantly, peer production does not rely on hierarchy or a unitary approach to organising labour. A content creator can be a drafter, organiser, critic and promoter, depending on their skills, inclination and the needs of the project. Work can be done from 9-5, five days a week, or one hour per month, with no loss to the overall value of the organisational effort.
The glue that binds peer production together is the ethic of collaboration it inculcates among groups. People contribute their time to peer production because they find communities with a passion for making their adopted content niche the best it can be.
People are increasingly choosing to cluster in what Chris Anderson calls the ‘long tail’ of content – where the level of interest in a particular area of content is not high enough to be sustainable as a mass medium, but is sustainable as a product of scaled collaboration.
This environment also creates efficiencies by allowing skilled amateurs to allocate their intellectual capital to the content niche about which they are most passionate. This is significant when you consider the quality and value of work done by people for love and not money.
A good example of this is the success of free and open source software. The myriad major corporations and governments who rely on open source software do so not just because it provides a cost saving but because it many cases the collaboratively produced product is better than the proprietary alternatives.
Peer production is also changing the way we value information.
In the industrial information mode, the physical costs of producing information, both capital and labour, require it to be valued and classified.
Consider the functions of the library. Because of the physical constraints under which libraries operate, classification systems have been created to enable the single identification of one physically held text. Access to books is subject to their scarcity – rare books require greater access privileges than pulp fiction. Librarians exist to explain the classification schemas and enforce the hierarchy of access.
The same constraints also apply to production of much government information.
None of these constraints arise in a distributed network. Information can be classified and reused in infinite ways. Most importantly, information does not need to be filtered through a hierarchy in order to be assigned value. Peer distribution not only harnesses groups to create information, it harnesses groups to classify it.
The valuation of information then is ascribed by the community of its users. This is how Google knows what page you’re most likely to be looking for when you undertake a search and how amazon.com can suggest books you might like for your birthday.
This new information environment has significant ramifications for the functions and process of government. The most obvious pressure it generates in the short term is for greater transparency. The external scrutiny of government and elected representatives has arguably never been higher than it is today. In a highly connected world there is now simply less scope for government to get by on spin and misinformation. Consider the worldwide dissemination of photos from Abu Ghraib. Or consider how the debate about the detainees on board the MV Tampa would have played out if just one refugee had had access to a mobile telephone.
In the longer term governments will have to adapt to information’s new online centre of gravity. This is not an undesirable thing. There are significant opportunities for government to use peer production to consult, develop policy and make closer connections with the citizens it serves.
Governments are, after all, creatures of collaboration. The various organs of state are constitutionally obliged to consult with and critique each other. The constraints of the industrial information society necessitated this collaboration being kept at a small and proximate scale. Representative democracy became the only feasible way to govern democratically. Peer production, by enabling mass collaboration simply and cheaply, pulls at these constraints.
Government also needs to recognise that new technology is empowering individuals and communities to use information to solve problems without reference to the state. For example, when the US federal government failed to respond to the devastations of Hurricane Katrina a group of concerned citizens collaborated to establish an online mechanism to enable people to find the whereabouts of their friends and families. Often non-government actors will be timelier and more responsive than any government can be.
These changes are not easy for government to process. Our Westminster bureaucracy has optimised its policy production processes over centuries. Adaptation to the new information environment will be neither quick nor easy.
The difficulty is compounded by the rate of innovation in the online world. There is a legitimate concern that government will always be stuck implementing yesterday’s model. The risk aversion of governments also fits poorly with the entrepreneurial character of peer production. For every new online platform that succeeds on the web there are thousands of failures. The tolerance for failures by governments, in contrast, is exceedingly low.
Yet in spite of these roadblocks governments around the world have developed a number of successful Web 2.0 initiatives. A good recent example is the blog run by the US Transport Security Administration on the introduction of new security arrangements at US airports. Through the blog government not only gets the chance to explain its security reforms in depth, but is compelled to engage over policy detail.
The Australian Government could and should be leading the way in adapting our old processes of consultation, engagement, policymaking and regulation to the connected world. Yet we lag behind other nations in both the scale and pace of reform. The culture of secrecy, spin and apathy of the Howard years is one obvious culprit – to derive value from Web 2.0 governments must genuinely want to engage with and inform its electors.
I am taking steps to reinvigorate the Commonwealth’s efforts in this area. For example, early in the new year the Government will run a number of trial online consultations using blogs and other Web 2.0 tools. I am also interested in the innovations occurring in other jurisdictions, particularly the UK, around the provision of government information to the public.
A safe prediction is that the rate of change in how humans engage with each other using peer networks will be faster than we expect. Witness the unprecedented bottom up campaigning momentum driving Barack Obama’s campaign for the US Presidency.
Government needs to recognise that not only must it adapt to a world moving online, but it will likely have to do so at an ever increasing pace.
Universities will similarly need to adapt to new ways of creating and sharing knowledge, not just among students, but among the academy.
This is just one of many 21st century questions the newly badged School of Social and Political Sciences will need to grapple with in what I hope is a long and productive existence.
Thank you.
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