NeuroGovernment

Amazing video!  Now, speaking as a public administration and public policy scholar, I am fascinated to see how this will change government in the next decade.

According to Forrester Research (thanks for the link from Read Write Web).  If you are responsible for government agency communications, you will want to look at Figure 1.  How is your agency’s social media strategy serving the various groups on that ladder?

I was talking to a friend about my January 14th posting where I wrote about being “unfollowed” on Twitter after an exchange over the validity of informal learning.  He laughed about it and told me that I shouldn’t be so sensitive.  “It happens all the time.” he said.

“Well, then social networking has achieved a communication first,” I replied.  “Remember the constant quote from our professors in the communication program?  That you cannot not communicate.”

“Yes.”

“Well, it appears that social networking technologies can create new and more immediate ways of communicating.  And it also appears that social networking technologies can now make it possible to fully not communicate.”

That is a powerful unintended effect with major societal ramifications.

This is from the O’Reilly who is the technology publisher.  In the last year or so, he has written extensively on the use of Web 2.0 for opening up government and improving the connection between government and the citizens it serves.  In January 2010, he plans to publish Open Government which will be a collection of essays, interviews, and case studies.  Should be a must read when it is published.

Back when the Internet was still an exclusive hobbyist network and Bill Clinton was running his first Presidential campaign, Walter Anderson was writing about how the technologies of that time allowed people to construct their own views of reality.  Back in the days of one cable news network, few people owned a cellphone, and 1200-baud modems, his ideas seemed fantastic to me but I could see it happening once the necessary technology infrastructure was in place.

Now we have the Internet and it is quite easy to construct your own reality.  It’s called group polarization and, according to Joshua-Michéle Ross, it is one of the paradoxes of the Internet age.  As the Internet offers us more opportunities to connect with more people, we tend to connect with people like us.  This leads to the hardening of opinions and a quicker propensity to group think.

This is why I worry about the dark side of social networking as informal learning gurus and collaboration vendors try to push their technological solutions.  I have yet to see a social networking technology that can counter groupthink or group polarization.