Factors in the Governance of Social Media Spaces

Berlin.
Now that the Berlin Symposium is properly underway (congratulations to all concerned!), I’ve made my way into the workshop session on social media governance. The featured speaker in this session is Niva Elkin-Koren, whose research is on governance structures within social media themselves. Social media participants in the first place constitute an unorganised crowd outside of traditional organisations – from open source development outside of companies to political action outside of traditional parties, as we have seen in various countries around the world over the past twelve months. This can lead to real political change, as well as to real violence, of course, which makes it even more important to study.

Research in this area has focussed variously on collaborative content creation, crowdsourcing, organisational processes (without organisations), etc. Niva’s interest is in challenging this idea of the unorganised crowd, then: what processes of governance, including emergent self-governance, apply in these cases? Who are the players, the actors, the individual users and collective groups participating here? Term being used widely here include ‘strangers’, ‘crowd’, as well as ‘community’ – but what do we mean by these terms, and what are the differences between them?

What mechanisms of governance are in operation here, then? There are four factors to be considered here: formal law, underlying platform design (sometimes as a substitute for law), social norms (which also indicate community consensus), and contracts (e.g. as drafted by platform providers or by third parties, such as Creative Commons). How do these four elements interact?

Niva’s research examines a number of different social contexts of online life – variously highlighting privacy and transparency, the protection of minors, and content ownership; different approaches to configuring the parameters of each of the four factors will be mapped, and this is also done through internationally comparative models, to see whether there are national and cultural differences between different territories, as well as over time, to see the dynamics of change in these situations. This is a ‘living lab’ approach, Niva says.

The big challenge will be to examine the interactions between these factors, and to identify the discrepancies between them. How, for example, do code and contracts work alongside or against one another? What if the code itself permits copying content, but the contract doesn’t – which form of ‘private ordering’ processes win out, which, ultimately, matter?

Finally, what is the rulemaking power of crowds themselves? How do their social norms intersect with the contracts and designs used by social media platforms; (how) do they shape them, even?
 

Respondent Chinmayi Arun points us to systems dynamics theory to help understand (if not predict) the processes through which these factors interact; she also encourages us to understand users as diverse actors who do not all participate in identical ways. Further, technology keeps evolving, as do people’s online relationships and their online activity choices (both short- and long-term); this, too, needs to be considered. Minorities and non-participants need to be studied further, as well, as do external influences on social norm formation.