Street encounters and digital encounters are hybrids. Trying to understand them separately will trip the ethnographer up (Lane, 2018). Lane elaborates the digital element to street encounters and the reverse using a multi-sited ethnography which traces encounters through street and digital domains.

Doing so means he avoids assuming the meaning of what’s online. In one case, the ‘respect’ code of the street is given another dimension as encounters can be recorded and reviewed. Rivalry is played out online, through Twitter, Facebook and Insta. Reputations can be trashed when it is shown that a previously tough player tries to dodge a physical challenge. However more context is given on each encounter. A video that looks like a one on one defeat with the protagonist backing down from a fight is later shown to be an unfair three to one ambush. It is therefore less fatal to the victim’s reputation. Boyd’s concept of networked publics is used. People living hybrid lives have to act towards many audiences some of which are invisible to them or cohere around their performances at a later point. A really intriguing picture emerges of mutual interrelationships such as. shared facebook friends and rivalry between opposing blocks or gangs. In a way the rivalry could not exist without mutual conduits – often young women – acting as weak tie players between parties to transmit threats, taunts and warnings and to act as a networked public. How male is the code of the street? How does the digital change that – it seems to be a space for girls to have a bit more autonomy and control, a bedroom culture.

In Lane’s work The Pastor follows lots of local youth on Twitter and does a kind of in person predictive crime analysis. He notes suggestions of violence and motivating the community around flashpoint encounters like when groups are going between parties, or when retaliation looks likely. He uses text to communicate with parents and Twitter to communicate with/monitor teens. Doing so bridges two networked publics, using a network of spotters – so covering both in person and online.

A critical part of the gendering of cybercrime is where it takes place. Where is it done: in sweatshops, industrial parks, in homes. We are still missing out on the bedroom where much cultural performance, and much cybercrime takes place. Domesticating cybercrime in terms of both target and perpetrators will lead us back there (Horgan, 2019).

Horgan, Shane Liam. “Cybercrime and everyday life: exploring public sensibilities towards the digital dimensions of crime and disorder.” (2019).

Lane, Jeffrey. The digital street. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Nov 26, 2020

… the heat is on the bottom level

It has been a norm that in the UK we expect public figures to be held to a higher standard than us schmoes. Ordinary folk can make daft statements, fool around, run over the family dog and still be invited to the family barbecue. Public figures are meant to at least hang the dirty laundry behind the house. Back in the Hanoverian era that was not at all the case. Epic sexual libertinage and self indulgence was the mark of the true aristocrat. The Victorians came along later to spoil things for everyone and introduce the discomfiting idea that the personal behaviour of the Royal household, members of the House of Commons and celebrity writers should be something we might seek to emulate.

Twitter governance inverts that. The lesser folk can be pursued and banned for harassment, calls to arms, racially inflammatory statements, generally rambunctiousness. Certain public figures, such as ‘world leaders’ and candidates for high office, can do this rather a lot with no fear of the ban. Twitter effectively defines itself as a public broadcaster for these purposes, with a duty to carry the statements of public figures, but without the duty and accountability of a public broadcaster.  They do not balance Narendra Modi tweets with opposition tweets, for example. When it comes to that part of the equation, Twitter defines its role as marking out an open public square. If you want balance, Q, you will just have to rage tweet your own responses.

Inverted governance is the norm in many places, reflecting a general wariness of the elites towards the masses. Sections of the population are in some instances seen as liable to bouts of ungovernable rages, and an all round threat to the public good.  One of the greatest public sociologists, Christopher Lasch, termed that the revolt of the elites. National elites have more in common with each other than they think they share with our unwashed selves.  Partly because academics are half in, half out of the elites (am I kidding – we are totally part of the elite) we often focus too much on competition between elites. The replacement of one part of the elite by another part may not mean as much throughout society as we are wont to think.

Nov 14, 2020

… in the abstract and also not literally in the concrete

It’s a delusion of a certain type of policy wonk that if you just tweak a society’s political institutions enough you will get the right outcome. A common reference point is the refoundation of West Germany after the second world war as an economic powerhouse with few external political ambitions (polite euphemism). That turned out no to be true. German political ambitions have been sublimated nicely into the EU where everyone can get on with pretending they do not exist. No harm there.

Can you parachute the Federal Republic into the UK and get the same outcomes? That is the hope of policy nerds. But no. Because there are no such things as political institutions. What we call political institutions are names for specific configurations of power, economy and culture. None is reproducible. Hitler did not come to power because the Weimar republic was not properly workshopped, but because it was politically brittle and unsupported by the political culture. They are not transferable between contexts.

The focus on institutions flatters us as policy nerds because it privileges us above all others. Yes, the globalists may exclude us from their clique at play time, and the populists may have taken our lunch money. But deep down we are biding our time., waiting for our opportunity to carefully balance powers between executive and legislative, and formulate the precise limits of judicial interpretation. We make a category error, just as recently when the UK media declared that British universities were ‘closed’, because the buildings were closed. Universities are not their buildings, and polities are not their texts.

That is why it is wrong to say that Britain uniquely has an unwritten constitution. All countries have an unwritten constitution. As the USA discovered recently, the ‘written’ part means nothing without the willingness of policy folk to follow the vastly greater set of unwritten and sometimes unspoken norms and conventions. The appearance of a working constitution just depends on periods in history when nobody tried to rock the boat, so allowing everyone to continue in their shared delusion that order is produced. That is how institutions function all of the time. The University of Edinburgh is a collective agreement about what we are. Writing it in stone and brick is very reassuring, especially when it comes time to put a pretty photo on the prospectus. And collective agreements can change.

Nov 14, 2020

Much of what I’m writing about here I owe to the insights and research of my colleagues Alex Wafer, Kirstin Lardy, Delani Mathevula and Motswaedi. In fact a lot of it comes from a recent talk by Alex.

We know the digital divide very well. Much of economic and social life is now taking place through digital means. People’s ability to access and make use of it effectively is patterned by their economic and cultural capital. There are many layers to the divide. In fact it is less a divide than an overlapping set of centre-periphery relationships. Most users trade privacy for access and ‘free’ use of social media platforms. Some users can buy security and some cannot. Others have very limited, intermittent access. The platforms most users in the West encounter make some basic assumptions that are not correct: that users have always on connections at home, they can easily connect when outwith the home, their use is personal to them and they don’t have anyone looking over their should and so on. This is even less true in the developing world where there is extensive digital innovation alongside significant gaps in infrastructure. There is great developing world innovation – it’s by no means always a case of Western platforms/corporations colonising the space.

With my colleague and friend Alex Wafer of Wits University we are studying digital geographies in and around Johannesburg and the Gauteng province in South Africa. We have worked with Uber drivers, delivery drivers, and residents of unofficial settlements to examine how they use different digital platforms for economic and social life. Our interest is in the informal economy, though we note that really the formal and informal economies are symbiotic. For example, an unregulated transport infrastructure serves labour up to the central core of the formalised economy. Formal economies supply informal ones with resources, the informal economy provides the formal one with usually cheap, temporary labour. Digital platforms are used to communicate, to distribute labour and sometimes as substitute currencies. Digital sparseness applies to the infrastructure and the platforms. Rather than specialised platforms people re-task existing platforms in new ways, sometimes insecure such as using Facebook and Whatsapp for work and payment. Uber emerged as a trust/social credit system used to validate people for off-platform work. For example, a driver may get paid for one ride through Uber, then arrange further rides or other kinds of work through Whatsapp. That allows both customer and driver to use the platform to validate their association while not being dependent on it.

Digital sparseness is a critical problem and manifestation of multiple digital divides. We are dealing with a very sparse infrastructure both technically and physically. Only the better off people have a fixed at home connection. Others have to use mobile devices and scavenge power and data where they can. At there is little available wifi in many settlements people have ot pay for mobile airtime. However package bundles are often too large to be paid for at once. A social economy emerges where people distribute small amounts of data as ‘gifts’ to friends, acquaintances and family. This makes up for some of the limits in the formal data economy at the same time as it ties the very marginalised into it.

A theme that connected our two projects was the different attitude to labour, reflecting the class formation of the labour force in South Africa. As Alex put it, many people in the informal economy had ended up with such little luck in the labour force that they eschewed paid labour. Paid labour had either never been there or only led to precarity or exploitation. In its absence they engaged in the hustle, a tiring never ending activity to scare up trades and deals. Precarity affects the whole labour force though. Many uber drivers were well qualified for the formal economy but recent layoffs and contractions meant they were also unable to find work in it or came to prefer working for themselves. They then moved into the platform economy through Uber. Uber could work in many ways. It could be a way of finding work for informal migrants from the rest of Southern Africa who were shut out of both the formal economy in South Africa and the closed shop of the established taxi system. For some it was a stepping stone for South Africans seeking to put aside capital to start their own business. The Uber hustle was not quite like the informal economy hustle. But maybe we will all have to become used to one or the other.

 

Nov 5, 2020