What if Bathurst ran on Twitter?

A provocation, presented at the CSU Faculty of Arts and Education Research Forum, August 24–26, 2016, at CSU Bathurst.

Consider a town of about 35,000 residents in a regional part of New South Wales, a few hours from the state capital and with several hundred thousand hectares of rural and small village surrounds. Now, this town is governed by a local council that provides and supports services like town planning, water, waste collection, road building and maintenance, libraries, and tourism. Each year, the town hosts a few large community events, including one that attracts thousands of visitors each Spring, and is broadcast internationally. Let’s call this town, Bathurst.

Now, imagine a town like this, in which 87% of households have the internet (and 80% of those are broadband), decided that every public servant, from the mayor down, was to make themselves available on Twitter. They were to provide daily updates about their work via tweets and respond to resident queries and requests on the platform. To implement this service, the council provides free wireless broadband throughout all the village and town centres in the area.

To help ensure that residents’ concerns are being met, the council offers a sort of local Twitter verification process where any resident can show their license and their Twitter account to have the two linked together and ensure they’re always responded to and their inquiries linked together.

By allowing each public servant to respond to complaints and queries directly on Twitter, they have increased efficiency, reduced paperwork and shaved about $15million from the annual budget of $130million. That extra $15million has been invested back into roads and other services, so the council has actually been able to increase service-level staff. When the Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey made a special visit to Bathurst, he also announced an ongoing grant that would return a certain percentage of local advertising revenue to the council.

There are problems with this scenario:

• What happens if Twitter becomes unreliable, or is sold and shuts down? The investment made into this service and building up goodwill goes down the drain and we have to start all over again.
• We can also ponder the ethics of effectively outsourcing public communications to overseas-based corporations that are very effective at minimising the tax they pay here in Australia.
• Then there are Australian and state-based privacy concerns that come into play, and the council recently found itself in court defending its practices on those grounds.

But, in the face of these concerns, the mayor simply responds. “The people already use Twitter, so we’re simply meeting them there.”

The scenario I’m describing here actually exists in a small town in Spain, Jun, which, admittedly, is about 10 times smaller than Bathurst. But I think it provokes some interesting questions that ask us to think about how our sense of place and our entanglement with place could be shaped by technology.

Many of us already carry these smartphones around in our pockets, whether we use them for Twitter or not. Should we consider expanding our technological embrace to public services on every level, and allow them to help shape the places we live?

If you start to think about place as a network of heterogeneous people, objects and connections which nonetheless relate to certain shared imaginaries and touchstones, you can see the need to ensure they’re working interoperably across the network. A human driving has as much need to make sense of street signs, ducks crossing the street, rain and the motion of the car as it does other humans and the ducks have need to stay off the road. Each agent or object in the network relates to all of the other agents in some way.

There’s an interesting thing happening here which is a direct pushback to early internet rhetoric which promised that we would all be placeless beings able to work from anywhere in the world on anything in the world. But those prognostications ignored the essential sociality of people and the importance of finding meaning and enjoyment in the places we’re living. Instead of becoming utterly placeless, the networks can be used to build strength and connection in the existing networks we’re part of, to enrich place and our relationship to it. But that requires us to engage intelligently with them, carefully and constructively, and for our benefit rather than the benefit of those who own the network.