ICTlogy

Presentation of the Conference: Manuel Castells

In recent years there have been social movements that address the lack of representativeness and legitimacy of their politicians and governments. Institutions have been emptied of content.

It is not that democracy has ceased to be “democratic”, but many citizens believe so, which is a serious issue. And that is why many citizens look for alternative and more effective ways of participation.

So, what we are witnessing is not a minor protest, but a new pattern of behaviour that leads to change. Change of institutions and forms of institutionalization that should lead to new ways of decision-making that affects people’s lives. It is not (only) about building a new future, but about fixing our present. And it is not (only) about finding new ways of participation, but about designing new democracies.

We should be able to tell the difference between the actual mobilizations that imply occupations, fights with the police and some times some violence, from the ideas that boost these mobilizations. There of course is much debate and disagreement around the way mobilizations take place, but the consensus arises when the debate focus on the reasons and foundations of the mobilizations.

What forms of activism and mobilization in the public space can be carried on so that they affect the public agenda, real politics and decision-making? And this is the field of experimentation that we are witnessing. And what happens when the red line of violence is trespassed, as it implies the death-sentence of the movement.

This is what is at stake and it is very likely to intensify until it finds a solution.

Round table: From wikileaks to the Global Spring. Logics of the Internet in collective action
Chairs: Arnau Monterde

Marga Padilla (Dabne.net)

Protests in the Internet have their own specificities, fights in the Internet work, if not different, with their own rules of the game.

So, what is the Internet? What is the cyberspace? In his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow defines it as a free non-physical space where physical violence cannot be enforced, where the rules of a material world do not apply any more. Despite the romantic approach of the declaration, it is absolutely true that the cyberspace, or the Internet, does imply many challenges to law and governance as we know them. This feature of an disembodied space implies:

• The Internet can be experienced in many ways depending on the interests that drive action on the Net, interests that are often opposed. Ambiguity is, thus, the very nature of the Internet.
• If a device can work in many ways and its not physical, it cannot be controlled. The Internet, and the messages that go through it, cannot be controlled.
• Last, a very specific thing about the Internet is that we have its code, we know how it works.

What is then at stake is (1) how to control access to this virtual space and, as a consequence, (2) how to control access to virtual goods that are not scarce, that can be freely and costlessly distributed and replicated.

The case of Wikileaks

Wikileaks presents a paradigmatic case of ways to attack the freedom of speech in the Internet, taken as a separate space from “reality”: while Wikileaks was haunted all along cyberspace (attacking their hosting services, their domain names, etc.), newspapers publishing Wikileaks’ documents were not attacked. Why was that so? Was Wikileaks more dangerous on the Net that on paper? Or was it because of the nature of the Internet?

One of the explanations is that while newspapers are usually national and politically-biased, Wikileaks acted internationally, with no political-bias, attacking the core of governments without a political agenda behind (did not want to substitute a government by another, which would have been understood as “fair”), it provided raw data and not just interpreted or mediated information.

Wikileaks is an unfinished device, it needs a solidarity network that “completes” what Wikileaks is providing. Wikileaks contributes to the commons by resigning control. All other nodes in the network acknowledge that Wikileaks is providing wealth to the network, which is good in itself (despite agreement or disagreement on what is specifically providing). Providing content, networking, wealth, is of most value in a network. And it is that value that was attacked.

On the other hand, the Internet is still seen as a lawless space, where the rules and law of the “real world” somewhat do not apply. Freedom of speech, the right to have a name or a website, etc. can be more easily attacked on the Net that on the flesh-and-bones world.

The cyberactivism kit

• Deep professional and technological knowledge.
• Capability to react quickly.
• Deliberate ambiguity, confusion, comfortability with chaos.
• Decentralized information &mash; vs. centralized traditional independent news sources.

The case of Anonymous

Anonymous — a non-organization, with an undefined political goal — can be understood as the reply of the lack of (or violation of) human rights on the Internet. If governments and firms act illegally or a-legally on the Net, Anonymous will do tantamount from the approach of the citizen.

Anonymous can also be understood as the result of the clash of two different rights: the freedom of speech, the freedom to access culture, and copyright.

Anonymous adds to the cyberactivism kit:

• Citizen politics with generic and plain English words
• Aim of anonymization, in the sense of unselfishness.

Laura Pérez Altable (UPF)
Informative flows during the Arab Spring: the case of Tunis

Some examples of digital networks of communication helping social movements:

• Castells labels the Zapatist Movement (1994) as the first informational guerilla: it used international media intensively to both diffuse their message and also to organize themselves around the message.
• The Battle of Seattle (1999) used for the first time the blog to organize and also diffuse their message.
• Iran lived unrests in 2009 against the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad where Twitter was broadly used as a tool to organize the protests.
• The Arab Spring (2010–), which witnessed how the message was co-built and co-broadcasted by citizens and corporate media.
• Others: Occuppy Wall Street, YoSoy132, etc.

Sampedro (Opinión pública y democracia deliberativa. Medios, sondeos y urnas. Istmo, Madrid, 2000) states that there are two different public spheres: the central one, where politics and media act, and outer or periferic public spheres that is where citizens act.

The traditional scheme of a political sphere that affects media that affect the public sphere is intercepted by a new actor: the digital networks of communication. These networks intercept the message especially between media and the public sphere, but actually affect all levels and actors in the scheme. With the appearance of the new actor, both the Agenda-Setting Theory and the Gate-Keeping Theory are altered and have to be explained from scratch, now including the new actor. Media are transformed: from being gatekeepers that filter information they turn into gatewatchers that make it visible.

Citizens hack local media and the official discourse of the government by aiming at international media and the international civil society.

Discussion

Q: People on the Internet may not suffer violence in it, but they definitely do outside of it because of their virtual actions. So, it is just partially true that there is no violence in cyberspace. How can this be counteracted? What is disobedience in cyberspace? Marga Padilla: the best way to perform disobedience is by hacking, that is, not going against the law on a straightforward manner, but circumventing it or even using it for one’s own purposes.

Eduard Aibar: The decentralized structure of the Internet is it true or just an illusion? How can the Egyptian government shut the Internet down in a matter of hours? A: While it may be physically possible to shut down the Internet, alternatives to connect to the Net were possible. On the other hand, the social and economical impact of shutting down the Internet implied that shutting it down was not sustainable in the medium-term. Marga Padilla: the best way to avoid Internet shut-downs is the ability to have a plan B by creating mirrors, for which both knowledge and the physical layer are required. Any social movement should have a hacker in their lines: hacking should be in each and every political or citizen agenda.

Present: Javier Toret, Pablo Aragón and Oscar Marín, members of the group Datanalysis15M.

The research group #datanalysis15m was created to analyse the new movements that emerged in 2011: Arab Spring, Spanish Indignants, Occupy, etc. The main questions being: How can we measure augmented events? How can we measure new ways of organization, of communication, of engagement? How do ideas spread (virally)? How can we characterize network-systems?

About data

In 1969 ARPANET is born as a packet-switching network, which implies a major improvement in communications. With the World Wide Web in 1990, the user can consume information passively online with web browsers and circa 2004 the Web 2.0 is born, where the consumer also becomes a producer. All this activity is increasingly been traced and produces huge amounts of data. This is yet another evolution of the Internet which has been called Big Data.

There are many implications in the generation of such a big amount of data: privacy, security, commoditization of uses and users’ behavior, dematerialization of the economy, information overload, economics of attention, neuromarketing, etc.

Michael Cooley (Architect or Bee? distinguishes between data, information — organized data — knowledge — comprehended and applied information — and wisdom — knowledge put at the service of achieving some specific goals. Wisdom cannot be transmitted and always carries an ethical connotation.

After data acquisition, data analysis is crucial to be able to transform data into information: understanding and structuring data is the core of the information-building process. Last, but still very important, information can be presented in several ways, in what has been called information visualization.

How to organize information:

• Location: maps, dynamic maps and animations.
• Alphabet: lists of words, tag clouds.
• Time: overlapping layers of data along time (to infer correlation or even causality, depending on what comes first in time), timelines (how data evolves along time).
• Category: allows clustering of information and identification of groups.

• Hierarchy: relationships of power/importance between different sets of data.

How technology shapes moods that engage people to act. If we can tell how mood is shaped by technology — or how technology can help in mood-shaping — then technology can help in choosing the appropriate time to invite and engage people to participate.

Engagement is also related to language: the use of the 1st person of plural is much more engaging and viral rather than other alternatives. “We are”, “we can”, etc. has way more punch than “I am” or “they can”.

Network or data laws:

• First law of preferential connection: the more connections a node has, to more likely it is to gain more connections.
• Law of Metcalfe: The value of a network increases proportionally to the square of their users. Behind this law we can find the concept of critical mass: how many propagations have to take place in a network before it explodes.
• The power of histograms: while populations usually follow a normal distribution, histograms usually do not, as people lie in surveys. Thus, adjustments have to be made and caveats must be taken into account.
• Dunbar number: the cognitive number of people is circa 150. After this number, it is very difficult to have quality relationships between people. We can find that in social networking sites, even if people have several hundreds (or thousands) of acquaintances, stable relationships happen in the 100-200 contacts range.
• Power law: big head vs. long tail. Popularity, power, etc. is not evenly distributed, but distributed according to a power law/curve. This complements Pareto’s Law (20% of products represent the 80% of sales): the long tail can get thicker depending on the density of connections in the network, reaching up to 50% of the total of (in this case) sales.
• Zipf’s law: the distribution of the words in a text also follows a power law. 80% of the words in a generic text is irrelevant from a semantic point of view.

Network Analysis

Network Analysis is deeply rooted in Graph Theory models.

Types of social relationships:

• Directed: social relationship is not bi-directional
• Non-directed social relationship is bi-directional
• Explicit: relationships are explicitly stated.
• Implicit: relationships are built through data analysis.

Average distance: number of intermediaries between two different nodes as an average.

Diameter (or effective diameter) of the network is the maximum distance between the most far away nodes. The diameter usually decreases as the network increases (Leskovec, 2007).

Density: proportion of links of a network in relationship with the total of possible links.

Giant component: the biggest connected component in a network. Outside of the giant component, groups are very small.

Clustering coefficient: measures the density of connections between neighbours of a node. Probability of a connection being the connection of another connection. Clusters are linked one to another through weak ties (Granovetter, 1983). Weak ties foster serendipity: weak ties have a higher potential to expose information to their contacts that they would otherwise never discover.

Reciprocity of a directed network measures how many of these relationships are really bi-directional.

Assortativity, associated with haemophilia, is the preference for relationships between users with same or different characteristics. If assortativity (r) is bigger than zero, the network is endogamic; if r < 0, the network is dissortative. Social networking sites tend to be assortative.

Degree distribution: how connections are distributed. Networks free of scale, where a small group of nodes have a high degree of connections and a long tail of nodes with a small number of connections.

Discussion

There are different social networks that are but different layers of the same reality. The purpose of social network analysis is to try to understand one of these layers and how does a specific layer feedbacks with the rest of layers and reality. One can usually find correlations between different networks and how they sync in emotions, contents, bodies.

It is also interesting to state that we increasingly see online behaviours being translated/transposed into “real life”. Not that online networks (their composition) is replicated offline, but that the practices of sharing, communication, decentralization, etc. are also put into practice even without digital technologies, thus reshaping traditionally organized networks.

We also see how information, communications, contents in online networks transcend the platform and permeate in other (offline) media, such as newspapers or TV news. Thus, even if the former network was not significantly representative of reality, the final message does get to a significantly representative share of people.

Another aspect to take into account is, even if the users of a specific social networking site are not representative of the population, whether their behaviour can be a good proxy to predict the general behaviour of the whole population. While this might sound a contradiction (not representativeness leading to predicting the whole population), the key could be in how this sample shapes the agenda of the whole population and thus, in the short or medium term ends up being a good proxy for prediction.