I’m currently attending the Politics 2.0 conference being held at the Royal Holloway University of London, organized by Andrew Chadwick. The Wikicandidate project that my students and I have been developing made it a natural fit, and we were lucky to have a really good audience for our panel. So while I’m here, I may throw some thoughts to the blog, about the implications of new media phenomena for political involvement.

One issue that emerged from our panel and the discussion that followed, is the tension between engagement and consensus. There is a tension in the ideas about public political involvement and the “public sphere,” between whether the value of public participation in debating the issues of the day is the value of engagement for its own sake, or engagement in order to accomplish something, to reach consensus or resolution. I don’t know Habermas’ body of work as well as I should, so I don’t know if he addressed this directly or not. But it seems to be a persistent but often implicit question when we actually build for political involvement. Are we building spaces for people to come together to debate, because debate is a good thing, because it makes us better citizens overall, because it is the symbolic heart of democracy as an ideal? Or, are we building spaces for people to come together to debate because we want that debate to accomplish something, to reach a resolution on some pressing issue, to take an informed vote on some bill, to set the agenda of an governing body? Or, are we building spaces for people to come together to debate because we want people to reach consensus, to agree?

One point a made in my presentation was that wikis, and especially as instantiated in Wikipedia, seem to emphasize consensus over engagement for its own sake. Though some trumpet Wikipedia for its collaborative nature, the priorities at Wikipedia are about the resource produced – I think Wikipedia would prefer an encyclopedia entry that is fair and accurate but written by one person, to an entry that’s flawed and incomplete but built by many. And the wiki is technologically designed to highlight the consensus produced over the discussion that produced it: the tool foregrounds the entry and backgrounds the discussion, history, and edit functions. (You could imagine an alternative-universe Wikipedia where, when you go to the entry on “democracy” you’d arrive first to the page where users debated how to present the concept of democracy, then could click to see what they came up with. This is just as technologically possible as the one we have, but already seems counterintuitive. Its not so far from the way a Usenet threaded discussion on democracy would look.)

So if there is a tension between engagement for its own sake and engagement for the production of consensus, and remains an open question about which has greater value (or what combination of the two we require), new media platforms are being built today that decide on an answer to this question, without the question being asked.

One of the most important steps we can take as scholars is to demand that, as new answers are being offered to old questions, the question at least gets asked.