Social media but a speed-hump on the old-fashioned institutional trajectory

Until recently, social media promised to facilitate greater policy participation, enable greater user-generated content, and generally bring about the benefits of a digital economy. But none of this has happened and for the most part it has returned to business as usual.

How does a disruptive technology fail to disrupt? Simple. Key industry players and institutional frameworks coincide to ensure that new technologies do not become disruptive in the long term. There may be a moment or two when amateur experimenters get the jump on big business and government, but it doesn't take long until the existing system either changes the rules or subsumes the new technology into existing business models or government institutions.

Pay-TV provides a case in point and the story is captured eloquently by Paul Barry in his 2008 book The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer Uncut. In Australia, Steve Cosser's attempt to capture the pay-TV market in Sydney and Melbourne using microwave systems caught big business and the federal government off-guard. Both business and the feds believed that microwave was an inferior technology. However, the US was using it to great effect and Cosser was on the ball. To cut a long story short, Packer intervened with Cosser's content providers and Keating intervened to prevent Cosser from getting the jump on satellite, ending the government's professed stance on technological neutrality.

Similarly in the US, pay-TV promised a business model free from advertising where users simply paid for the content they watched, rather than having programs interrupted by advertising. However, Winston (1998: 320) outlines how the new technology was soon absorbed by the old ways:

Americans now pay twice, through advertisements and subscriptions, what they used to pay for only once. This has been done in obedience to the 'law' of the suppression of radical potential whereby the new technology over a period of fifty years has been absorbed by the institutional structures of the old. This process has not only reduced cable's, and (probably) DBS's, disruptive potential, it also ensured that those same structures will remain profitable. Although taken over and somewhat battered and by no means inured to the consequences of myopic managements, nevertheless all the major American broadcasting players are still in place.

What does this have to do with social media? Go to Google and search "facebook regulation", then narrow the search to "news". It is immediately obvious that Facebook's disruptive capacity is under attack, globally, from multiple angles: privacy, alcohol advertising, education, security, the law... the list goes on.

In light of the challenges presented to popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, it is little wonder that social media has failed to live up to what it promised just a few short years ago.

Admittedly, I embraced social media and tried to implement its use in my teaching, but institutional barriers exist even to simple things such as the use of e-textbooks - these are still under attack from those who do not wish to use them, contracts that stipulate hard copies must be provided to libraries, and a delivery system  that makes it difficult for libraries to provide e-texts instead of hard copy books. To make matters worse, government measures of research output specifically exclude publications produced in online-only formats - only commercial publishers count. So much for sustainable publishing practices and making new knowledge readily available to the public.

Importantly, social media does not exist in a political or institutional vacuum - so the disruptive capacity of  new media has more or less ended now that big businesses and governments have caught up. History suggests that this is inevitable, and it will take more than the technological capacity coinciding with a social revolution to realise the potential social media promised but has not delivered. 

I lament the passing of the promise of change, I really do. But in light of the power of institutions, I think the focus on technology and social movements alone is not the path to an enlightened digital revolution. Indeed, it hasn't worked at all.

From now on I intend to examine in more detail how institutional arrangements help or hinder the realisation of the benefits of a digital economy. My only hope is that this time I will be wise enough to know the difference.

NBN Advertising: Dodgy use of public monies?

It doesn't take a genius to work out that the National Broadband Network will change a few things for the average Australian.

Indeed, if you live in any Australian suburb like Palmerston via Gungahlin and you have recently received a little "mail out" from NBN Co in your letterbox, any improvement in service delivery will be a welcome change from the archaic services currently experienced at "top of the range" prices.

I am now paying $AUD 99.95 per month for a Telstra wireless service with a theoretical speed of 8mbps, but when you see the reality of my speed test (presented here courtesy of ozspeedtest.com at the time of writing) it is very different:

Before the peanut gallery chimes in with "oh, you should get a plan with... [blah, blah, blah], let me tell you something: it is simply not available here in Palmerston via Gungahlin, especially ADSL. You might also see from my speed test that tonight is a good night, but it doesn't matter because the download limit on Telstra's wireless service here is 15GB per month. Even if I offered Telstra $1 million per month, as a consumer, I am on the absolute best of the premium plans available in this area.

What rattles me about the NBN is that a while back, I attended a community meeting run by NBN Co where they kept asking us "what will you do with high-speed broadband?" I wasn't interested in discussing this with them. Frankly, it is none of their business. But what made matters worse was that some random NBN Co employee emerged from the audience and admitted that he had been sitting among us to hear what we had been saying. This made me feel pretty much that this was all a government-controlled freak show. At this point, it still didn't bother me so much so I said nothing more of it. Until now, that is!

So when I received an NBN Co "mail out" this week inviting me:

To find out what the NBN rollout means to Gungahlin and the exciting benefits fibre optic broadband could bring to you and your community, come to our information session on Saturday 12 May any time between 11am and 3pm...

I decided immediately that I was not interested in attending. All I want to know is: When will I get access to NBN? In October 2010, at the last community meeting on NBN at the Palmerston Community Centre, we were invited to "dream" about the NBN and how we might use it. But the biggest question on everybody's lips was simply: "When do we get it?"

Yet here we are, 18 months later and well past the September 2011 date "mentioned" at the last community meeting in October 2010 for the rollout to begin, and nothing has changed.

What is quite clear is that the consultation process is all just "spin". I expect politicians to bore me with their spin. But what really gets up my nose is when public monies are used to pay for that spin.

Not a day goes by when I don't see NBN advertisements appearing on television or in my letterbox. Yet I don't believe a single word: it is all just spin.

Spin from politicians is a political reality: it is a farce packaged as "democracy" and I have little choice but to live with it. But when I have to pay for the spin, this is when I really feel insulted.

Surely every advertisement about the NBN is election campaigning which citizens pay for? How this is legal defies logic. If they were telling me WHEN I might be able to access NBN, I might be a little less bothered. But in the meantime, spending public money to ask me to "come dream about NBN" while effectively delaying the rollout date is a complete "rock show".

As much as the Opposition is to blame for getting us here in the [broadband] first place, the fact that they haven't whispered a word about public-funded electioneering demonstrates that they really did set such a low standard during the Howard Government's "Workchoices" campaign that they have nowhere else to go on this obvious misuse of public monies.

As for NBN, the current situation where taxpayers are paying to have their intelligence insulted is nothing short of ridiculous. The publicly-funded advertisements about NBN should be withdrawn immediately.

NBN Co not fast enough, but Coalition shouldn't talk

Personal experience of NBN'nt

I delivered a lecture yesterday morning and after speaking for nearly two hours non-stop, I had lost my voice. By mid-afternoon I had cancelled my evening lecture and the dreaded Canberra flu had struck its first blow. 

Today I was forced to go to the doctor, and antibiotics were on the menu. Thankfully, Palmerston via Gungahlin has its own medical centre with great doctors and a chemist run by a very knowledgeable pharmacist.

But before I travelled the 600m to the medical centre, I thought I would save myself the slightly longer trip to the Medicare/Centrelink shop-front in Gungahlin and register for Medicare's online service. I remembered going to the doctor last year and hadn't registered so my Medicare claim could be lodged immediately by the medical centre.

Here the drama began. To get a Medicare account, I had to login to my australia.gov.au account. My password didn't seem to work so I requested a new one through the "lost password" function. Moments later I had a new password. When I tried to login to Medicare, my password was wrong.

So I end up adding a Centrelink account (no idea why), but still it wouldn't work. Clicking on the Medicare "lost password" link just gave me a 404 Error. Ten minutes later, and I found a different "lost password" link for Medicare. And it worked... well, almost. I was subsequently advised that my new password was in the... wait for it... POST!

I decided to call Medicare and after a five-minute wait (in the 1990s the wait could be hours!) the friendly Department of Human Services (the name always reminds me of the film Metropolis) officer had issued me a temporary password, and I was registered. Yay!

But when I arrived at the Palmerston Medical Centre, the first thing I noticed was a sign which read (words to the effect of):

Due to an unreliable Internet connection we are no longer able to provide electronic lodgement of Medicare claims. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

I could have cried: Palmerston via Gungahlin. I empathised with my neighbours because 600m down the street it was certainly no better.

Don't forget who brought us here

While the Coalition is having lots of fun with NBN Co's slow roll-out and poor take-up, it is important to remember who was the party in power that got us here in the first place. If the Coalition is in charge after the next election, I doubt Palmerston via Gungahlin will be any better off.

The problem with communications technologies in Australia is and has always been that it is caught up in politics. The Coalition may have a decentralised and technologically-neutral approach to improving broadband, but this policy is just a different model of the same government-controlled monolith.

Until consumers can simply purchase services from businesses that simply provide the service, the politics of communications policy in this country will never end. Today provided me with first-hand experience of just how political even simple services like lodging an online Medicare claim can be. 

In a country that prides itself on being disinterested in politics, we sure do lead an overly-political lifestyle. While the communications industry remains a big policy lever, I can't see the situation changing regardless of the ruling party.