Gauravonomics Blog

Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!

‘Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age‘ is an anthology of forty four essays by some really smart people on how to use communications technology to engage (young) people in civic issues –

The Personal Democracy Forum presents an anthology of forty-four essays brimming with the hopes of reenergizing, reorganizing, and reorienting our government for the Internet Age. How would completely reorganizing our system of representation work? Is it possible to redesign our government with open doors and see-through walls? How can we leverage the exponential power of many-to-many deliberation for the common good?

In her foreword to the anthology, Esther Dyson sets the stage for the rest of the essays by saying that new communication technologies will continue to be at the core of civic engagement, for better or for worse, so we should better find ways to use them constructively –

This anthology of essays is intended to shine light, to spark conversations among citizens, and between voters and elected officials, about how we can engage more people in public problem solving and community building. Just as the Net created new business models, so can it foster new governance models…

The discussion on social media introverts started by Pete Cashmore at Mashable reminded me of two other discussion threads on online social dynamics that I had bookmarked but not writen about.

The first discussion thread was started by Will Wilkinson who argued that it is possible to opt out of the status rat race by re-interpreting what status is –

The argument for the politics of relative position is at bottom an argument about the limits of human freedom. We are, it is alleged, locked into the rat race by the relentless engine of our evolved status-hungry nature. And we are, it is argued, almost helpless to reinterpret the context, the frame of reference, within which we evaluate our own choices. But the unique human cultural capacity—equally a part of our biology—liberates us.

Where benevolence, fidelity, cooperation, innovation, and excellence are esteemed, positional races may produce mutual advantage instead of mutual destruction. And while the game of status may be locally zero-sum, it can be globally positive-sum, as scientific, economic, and cultural entrepreneurs identify new dimensions of excellence in which to compete and earn freely conferred prestige as payment for benefit to others. We are not destined to want fancier cars, bigger houses, and more upscale outfits, nor are we helpless to feel diminished by those who out-consume us. We can opt out by opting in to competing narratives about the composition of a good life. And we do it all the time.