Sunday 8 June 2014


Web Impact on Society 





University of Southampton, Web Science


OVERVIEW: The Web is not just an engineered technical artefact because the Web architecture (HTTP, HTML and URIs) is only the kernel of an enormously complex social-technical machine. Phenomena like online banking, Web TV, internet shopping, e-government and social networking are the names that we give to human activities and human agendas that have co-opted the capabilities of this web architecture. While we may look to the Web to offer a source of "big data" for "social analytics", one of the goals of Web Science is to try to find a perspective that helps us to understand the bigger "socio-technical" picture of the Web, and hence to better interpret the data that we harvest from the Web. By looking at specific examples of how the Web has grown and developed (such as open access, open government data), we can start to see some of the principles and mechanisms of the socio-technical Web.
READINGS:
    Tinati, R.,  Carr, L., Halford, S., Pope, C. (2013) The HTP Model: Understanding the Development of Social Machines, WWW2013 Workshop: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines,
    Tinati, R., Carr, L., Halford, S., Pope C. (2014) (Re)Integrating the Web: Beyond ‘Socio-Technical’, WWW2014 



13 comments:

  1. My question for Professor Carr is: What kind goals or measures can we adopt to keep the Web open, given the multiplicity of different actors competing for Web presence and control? What can we learn from Web science that can help us keep the Web open?

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    1. I had this question in mind all along in this talk and Dame Hall's. It seems to me that we're not doing enough, as academics—and we're not doing enough to answer Maxwell's question. Hackers are doing good work, but they could use our help.

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  2. Translation, the second phase of the socio-technocal network theory reminded me of Heylighen's ideas about self-organization.
    Heylighen divides self-organization to alignment, division of labor, workflow and aggregation, while Carr uses problematization, interessement, enrolment, and mobilization. Are these two different theories about the process of web challenge-tackling? They both seem to say that these methods are multi-staged, multi-actor processes that tend toward stability. I would be interested to hear what Heylighen and Carr think of the other's ideas. Does Carr have as utopian a view? He mentioned the Web tending toward omniscience and a bit of omnipresence, but did not address omnipotence or omnibenevolence.

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  3. I found this talk pretty informative and motivating.
    The last part made me think of this recent UK inquiry on Facebook for pursuing an unauthorized news feed emotion study recently: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-uk-inquiry-emotion-study
    Outside of the ethical implications of this particular case, I am worried by the strong impact Facebook has in its user lives. Although it keeps amazing me, I am afraid of all its negative consequences in many spheres.
    When and why did Facebook become so powerful, when compared to other social networks? What can we do as users to get the most benefit possible from this network while protectimg ourselves from the privacy, copyright and ehthical violations that may arise from this platform?

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  4. Professor Carr, we could not see to the end of your slide because of time. However, that's true. The web impact on society is BIG. This is the beginning. This phenomenon is particularly exponential. You can started with Macro-level. In fact, it can be analyzed from different points of angles.

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  5. My question is about the business model behind the social web , I'm wondering if this growth is going to continue or to collapse without clear income resources , a especially regarding to the user behavior which tend to get free access everywhere.

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  6. If the web started with an open research/academic motivation, and then, unexpectedly, it led to enormous commercial and social uptake, how come it is taking academics/researchers so long to provide open access to their research?

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    1. I would think this occurs because open access was never the norm. When the internet started, not many researchers used it. Most researchers continued to publish in paper journals. Those paper journals then slowly transitioned onto the internet. Why would an author take the leap from paper ‘closed-access’ journals to online open-access journals? However, I can see how people would slowly transition from the system they know to a similar online system.

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  7. Would virtual currencies like Bitcoin be considered a "social machine"?

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    1. A machine is something that takes input and gives outputs in a systematic manner. Perhaps the entire crypto-currency market is a machine (as one could call the banking system a machine).

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  8. Dear Less, Thank you for your very interesting presentation ! I have one question : If we consider that social interactions in social machines are not always neutral or positive, how it’s possible to model and to predict in a socio-technical and computational point of view, if individuals maintain and respect a cooperation principle or if they defend their own interests?

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  9. One of the metaphors used in projects like the Global Brain that was presented by Professor Heylighen or the European Future ICT project is a planetary nervous system. This metaphor speaks on human machine integration at the planetary level and facilitated by the web and provides a platform for planetary level coordination and governance. One of the advantages of this perspective is that it encourages distributed governance and self organization at all scales while achieving high level of coordination, information and resource sharing and more. But this visionary direction is of course not only a matter of technology but rather ensuring that the web remains free and neutral, serving planetary democratic participatory citizenship and not a tool of power in the hands of nation states or giant corporates.

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  10. The HTP model makes it apparent as to why copyright and intellectual property issues are so difficult to enforce on a practical level when it comes to the web. This is partly because of the rapid development and change that is constantly occurring but I think the third point in the paper (Carr et al., 2013) about success in one network causing changes in other networks and the shifting of phases of activity. This is reminiscent of the way an idea or meme as Dennett would call it, travels from one agent to another. So, who can rightfully own the cascade of changes caused by a group of agents' organized network activity?

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