MySpace or YourSpace: which is more involving?

My friends at Involve are running a series of seminars on Participation Nation: The Challenge of Reconnection - and tonight's topic was "My Space not Yours? Public Engagement and the YouTube generation".
The challenge of the seminar seemed to me not just reconnection, but connecting differing views of social media with the world of engagement.
After Involve director Richard Wilson's nicely self-deprecating intro (struggling to keep up with Facebook under direction from colleagues, no longer time for books and radio), we had a blitz of quotes and stats from Oswin Baker of Ipsos-MORI showing the growth of online participation and user generated content. If I remember rightly, the BBC is now the only traditional content provider in the top 10 UK web sites. The rest are for search, social networking, trading, and other forms of user content.
Tom Steinberg of MySociety explained their highly successful strategy of creating specific tools people want - like the No 10 e-petitions site - rather than thinking generally about how to help people engage. Political blogger Iain Dale emphasised the importance of blogging and similar activity in providing people with a voice and influence to a degree previously unknown.
Iain maintains that the blogosphere is a community, with some blogs (like his) up the top of a triangle of prominence, with others less-viewed at the base. No matter, he says, good messages get re-blogged up to the top.
Ros Taylor, of The Guardian, wasn't convinced about the triangle, but liked the idea of blogging by front-line workers to give us insights into the realities of public services, for example.  Nigel Dacre of 10 Alps Digital TV argued that the future would be video, with maybe some surprises about who would participate. A few years ago people were saying teachers would never find time to get to their computers - but teachers.tv is highly successful.
The panel offered a wide range of perspectives, with still more coming from the audience. I ventured that things might get really interesting on the participation front when all these users generating content started to use their skills to challenge public agencies who pretend to engagement but fail to listen to their views.
I felt just a little dissatisfied at the end that clearer strands had not emerged around the Net as an engaging place. Aha - here's an insight!  Most of the contributions focussed on blogging and other online participation as solo activity ... probably because that's what people see on news and political blogs. There didn't seem to be much appreciation of blogging and much online activity as social, conversational, and about relationships. But then perhaps that's inevitable in a panel-style seminar. There's no real chance of conversation. Hmmm ... what would a social networking seminar structure be like? That would really show some MySpace influence on traditional YourSpace events.
Next Tuesday: "Better Things to Do with Our Time? A Progressive Vision of Citizenship" with a panel including Ed Milliband MP. Register with seminars@involve.org.uk

Technorati Tags: engagement, socialmedia

Comments

[Ivo Gormley]

I also found this event a little conclusion-less. I thought the most important point was Tom Steinberg's "give people what they want". The most important aim of 'engagement' is to provide a fair and equal platform to which people can contribute, and upon which that contribution can be acted upon. Engagement should be about providing access to something that people want to contribute to, not about dressing up an issue in order to make people respond to it. The problem with a lot of engagement work is that it grabs people's attention but then does not provide them with the means to act on decisions or even to significantly influence them. I think this way of thinking about engagement simplifies what is often an over-complicated subject.