A Manifesto for Social Innovation Using Social Media

Vienna.
The next speakers at Challenge Social Innovation are Christoph Kaletka, Ricard Ruiz de Querol, and Bastian Pelka, who are presenting nothing short of a manifesto for social media and social innovation. Social media, Bastian starts, are not a technology, but a specific form of using existing technology: a social innovation. Social media is an umbrella term for a rapidly growing set of practices and platforms, which are based around the core innovation of user-generated content as a new social routine.

Social media, then, describe a new communication pattern (a paradigm shift in communication), which replaces finished communicative processes with always-unfinished, collaboratively developed, incrementally evolving outcomes that are developed through bottom-up, collaborative, and distributed processes. Such shifts are in line with the overall shift from the industrial to the knowledge society; in the process, knowledge and content production processes are decentralised. Not least, this changes conventional ideas of ‘quality’, of course.

Social media are an answer to structural challenges, in fact: decentralised, participatory and user-led communication processes provide an alternative to traditional government-led institutional frameworks for addressing social issues and concerns, and social media can provide socio-technical platforms which can be used to empower individuals and groups to better pursue their interests.

Ricard suggests that we need a manifesto on social media for social innovation, because social media are social in a different way (they are used mainly for leisure and entertainment); because they face major challenges; and because social innovation as innovation of social practices still lacks speed and scale. The manifesto attempts to highlight research problems that address major social challenges, therefore.

There are now symptoms of a system failure and a high degree of confrontation (including the Arab Spring and the social protests following the financial crisis in Europe), and social media are used in important ways to generate counter-movements, but in themselves have not yet generated any results; we do not yet know enough about how to use social media to collaborate to address social problems. How can we realise the real social and collaborative potential of social media?

The manifesto aims to address these questions, and to promote multidisciplinary research on them. It is driven by the participants of the 2011 workshops on Social Innovation and Social Media in Barcelona, and is available online now.

Christoph concludes by pointing to the success of the Pirate Party in the Berlin state elections yesterday – how social innovation manifests is different in different local contexts, clearly. Social innovations are social innovations if they are actually used in everyday practice, routinised, help to better solve concrete problems, diffuse into different areas of society, and are different from social inventions (which may be innovative, but not actually used widely) and social change. The manifesto formulates requirement and options to initiate social innovation processes (such as empowerment and e-inclusion) that are supported and accelerated by social media.

The technology behind social media will change, but social innovation will remain and will change the way we learn and work in the knowledge society. Initial research should focus on the organisational and management level (the professionalisation of the drivers of social initiatives), the sustainability level (how to generate and sustain sufficient speed and scale), local and regional laboratories for social media projects and initiatives, and pedagogical approaches for learning with social media, Christoph suggests.