In his conclusion, Jenkins taps the work of Warren Ellis to describe a society in which government happens not by expert opinion, but by the logic of collective intelligence. Accordingly, Ellis’s Global Frequency “depicts a multiracial, multinational organization of ordinary people who contribute their services on an ad hoc basis. “Conceived... in the wake of September 11 as an alternative to calls for increased state power and paternalistic constraints on communications,” Global Frequency “doesn’t imagine the government saving its citizens from whatever Big Bad is out there. Rather, as Ellis explains, “Global Frequency is about us saving ourselves” (261). This is a rather exciting vision of essentially the same future Jenkins is describing, where advances in communication technologies and in government attitudes toward citizen participation result in a total redistribution of decision making protocols.
What would it mean for us -- “personally and professionally” -- to contribute our time and effort “to a cause larger than [our]selves” such as that depicted in Global Frequency (261)? I personally have never read the comic, but I find this to be a very interesting point of emphasis. Tried and true claims that declines in voter participation can be attributed to feelings of disconnectedness from the political process ring even truer in light of Jenkins’s analysis; our society is one in which the things people do on a regular basis -- like gather around the “water cooler” to talk about work or their favorite TV shows -- are held to be silly, trivial, and even undignified in comparison to the “serious” business of politics. There’s a lot of rhetoric in Washington about the know-how of the “average American,” but to date there has been very little effort to utilize what “average Americans” actually know in crafting, executing, and interpreting legislation. This has been largely due to technological limitations, sure. But as Jenkins points out in the afterword, there are cultural factors to consider here too. The Mitt Romneys don’t want to know what we know -- or perhaps more accurately, they don’t want to listen if doing so will force them to compromise their sense of cultural “place” (read: empowerment). Cultural paternalism of the like practiced by Romney has the ultimate effect of causing people to miss the connections between their personal and political lives, setting the conditions for declines in participation by groups who fail to relate to the Beltway style of political rhetoric. And as long as these attitudes continue to dictate the way politics play out in this country, grassroots parody videos and other forms of new media discourse will continue to remain marginal to the issue analysis process. The key, then, is to get people to rethink what counts as politics.
Cory Doctorow’s concept of the “adhocracy” -- “an organization characterized by a [total] lack of hierarchy” -- is another intriguing notion (262). Equally intriguing is the contrast Jenkins draws between adhocracies like the Global Frequency network and the bureaucracies we currently rely on for so many of our social, economic, and political services. What is it about the thought of having to go to the DPS for a license renewal that’s positively cringe-inducing? The lines, the uncomfortable silence, the sheer lack of interactivity -- I would say it’s the feeling of being shuffled through a big, impersonal system without a bit of say in how you’d like the service to be administered -- or perhaps more accurately, how you’d like the service to be experienced. The vision of Global Frequency is that the quality and delivery of government services will improve when we can begin to harness advances in digital communications toward tapping the collective knowledge and experience of the body politic. It’s a rosy picture of a perhaps distant future -- as Jenkins suggests, we shouldn’t expect bureaucracies to up and disappear, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest that civic participation ought always to be pleasurable. But expanding opportunities for meaningful public service is something most people can get on board with... and now that we more or less have the technology to make it happen, we might as well get started.
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