ICTlogy

The PhD on the Information and Knowledge Society Programme recently opened the call for candidates — including 10 full time fellowships —, offering 33 student places in the following fields:

• Computer Science and Networking Technologies
• Community and Social Action
• Law and ICT
• eGovernance
• eLearning
• Information Systems
• New Economy
• Technology and health
• Technology and Education System
• Research Programmes

As said, UOC‘s research institute, the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, offers 10 grants for full-time PhDs that are carried out physically in its headquarters in Castelldefels’s Mediterranean Technology Park (20 minutes from Barcelona). It carries a stipend and access to travel funds.

Please visit the PhD programme‘s website, for detailed information about the places on offer and the fellowships.

Seminar by professor José Manuel Robles, at UOC headquarters, 3 July 2008, about digital citizenry and political engagement of Internet users.

Digital Citizenry: Political engagement and ideology of Spanish Internet users

See what are the differences between heavy Internet users and offliners in relationship with their political behaviour, interests, etc.

At a first glance:

• Left wing Internet users are almost four times more numerous than right wing ones.
• The mean of political though at the Internet is slightly biased towards the left in comparison with the whole of the population
• Internet users say to be more interested than people offline in culture (2x), labour issues (1.5x) or information and communication (4x)

So, why are Internet users more likely to be left winged than right winged? Classical models that describe how/why people gather around political ideologies:

• Cleavages theory: people gather around their preferred values and the people identified with them
• Natural election theory: ideology depends on the ranking of the public problems that affect them
• People gather around parties and their ideologies (i.e. political socialization): first come party identification and, then, alignment with ideologies

Methodology: the classical approach

We build a regression according to the previous models.

Regression to see whether the ideological positioning (dependent variable) depends on their profile: age, being an Internet user, age, habitat, education level. And the regression does not seem to show any evidence of relationship at a significance level.

Regression to see whether the ideological positioning (dependent variable) depends on their identification with political problems: political problems, being an Internet user. In this case, being an Internet user correlates with the political positioning (which is something we already knew), but the model is too simple to show why.

Regression to see whether the ideological positioning (dependent variable) depends on the identification with a party: age, being an Internet user, habitat, education level, voting preferences. And, again, the regression does not seem to show any evidence.

Preliminary conclusion: classical theories cannot explain why Internet users are more left winged (in Spain) than the average of the population.

The segmentation analysis

We break Internet users according to their intensity of use and their personal characteristics, from “Men, with higher education, working or students, 95.7% of them are Internet users and are left winged” to “Women, up to primary education, older than 60 y.o., just 1% of them are Internet users and are right winged”.

In this train of though, yes we find correlation between the socio-economic nature of a specific segment and their probability to be intense Internet users. If these socio-economic characteristics can be linked with political positioning, then we could find the relationship between political positioning and Internet use. For instance, age does not seem to be determinant, but education level and being a worker/student or unemployed they seem to.

My comments

Maybe classical models cannot explain the relationship between political positioning and being an Internet user, but the philosophy of the Internet (openness, hacker ethics, community building, collaboration, common benefit, etc.) and how different parties and/or ideologies are related to that philosophy.

Another aspect, to distinguish between heavy users from both wings, would be adding a question such as “from 0 to 10, state how the Internet will change society at large (0) or the economy (10)”.

I’m pleased to announce an event of which I’m part of the organizing committee, the course Network Society: Social changes, organizations and citizens, to take place in Barcelona, Spain, from 15 to 17 October de 2008.

Some info about the course:

• Website of the course, with more information about the speakers, fees, registration, etc.
• Facebook Event
• There will be translation to and from Spanish and English

PROGRAMME: NETWORK SOCIETY: SOCIAL CHANGES, ORGANIZATIONS AND CITIZENS

Day 1 – Wednesday 15 October

Introduction
09h00 – 09h30 : Opening
09h30 – 10h30 : Juan Freire – Presentation of the course
10h30 – 11h00 : Café

Citizenship in the Network Society
Chairs: Marc López
11h00 – 12h30 : Carol Darr
12h30 – 14h00 : Tom Steinberg
14h00 – 16h00 : Lunch

Organizations in the Network Society
Chairs: Genís Roca
16h00 – 17h30 : Miguel Cereceda
17h30 – 19h00 : David Weinberger

Day 2 – Thursday 16 October

09h00 – 09h30 : Juan Freire – Presentation of the day

Communication in the Network Society
Chairs: Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí
09h30 – 11h00 : Andrew Rasiej
11h00 – 11h30 : Café
11h30 – 13h30 : Diálogo Josu Jon Imaz & Miquel Iceta
13h30 – 16h00 : Lunch
16h00 – 17h30 : Enrique Dans
17h30 – 19h00 : Gumersindo Lafuente

Day 3 – Viernes 17 October

Innovation in the Network Society
Chairs: Ismael Peña-López
09h00 – 10h30 : Carlos Domingo
10h30 – 12h00 : Ethan Zuckerman
12h00 – 12h30 : Coffee break

Closing
12h30 – 14h30 : Round Table: Freire, Darr, Steinberg, Weinberger, Lafuente, Domingo, Zuckerman, Dans
14h30 – 15h00 : Closing

I have been invited by the Spanish Center of Judicial Documentation (Centro de Documentacion Judicial, CENDOJ) to impart a conference at the III Encuentro de Información y Documentación Judicial de la Red IberIUS [III Meeting about Judicial Information and Documentation of the IberIUS Network].

The idea was to give an overview of what the Network Society is and what are the concepts besides collective creation. Here come my slides (in Spanish):

Full reference and PDF downloadable here.

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.
Session VIII

Round Table
Towards citizenship 2.0?

Eduard Aibar, Vice President, Research, UOC.

So, the landscape has changed… but have citizens? has the concept of citizenship so much shifted as, supposedly, has the Web?

Ana Sofía Cardenal, Professor of Political Science, UOC

We’re putting all our eggs in the Web 2.0 basket, but data seem to bring evidence that all the promises of the web do not seem to apply:

• The demand for political information has not increased despite the supposition that it would be cheaper (in money, in time) to be informed on a digital socielty
• The supposition that costs of information have decreased is at stake too
• The participation does not seem to have changed either
• Few sites collect most links: so information might be cheaper to diffuse… but only in specific sites

What’s the political blogosphere like in Spain? Hypotheses

• Balcanization: atomization, decentralization
• Few blogs get most audience, the rest remain invisible. But who are they? Are they influential?

David Osimo, e-Government researcher and activities coordinator, European Commission’s Institute for Prospective Technological Studies

Web 2.0 is an opportunity, but it’s not taking up. So, where or what are the limits?

• Limited take-up: how to reach the second wave of adopters (after the digerati)?
• not so important
• invisible because pervasive
• not sustainable financially
• no time for this
• exclusion
• social fragmentation
• intellectual property rights
• steered by vested interests
• lack of trust
• lack of accountability
• etc.

Different kind of participation, of citizens’ involvement

• Producing content (3%)
• Providing ratings, reviews (10%)
• Using user-generated content (40%)
• Providing attention, taste data (100%)
• … of all Internet users (50% of EU population)

It’s not about mass collaboration, it’s about involving specific users, the most relevant ones.

• There’s a gap from what the Government expected from the Web 2.0 (mass collaboration) with the reality of it (qualitative, relevant collaboration)
• It’s a new way of doing the traditional “find-contact-ask the expert”: it’s not representative, but highly qualitative

Eduard Aibar, Ana Sofía Cardenal, Joan Subirats, Helen Margetts, David Osimo

Helen Margetts, Director of Research, Professor of Society and the Internet, Oxford Internet Institute

Skepticism is about ignorance of the online world.

Evidence shows that people rely on the Internet to find all the information they do not want to force themselves to remember. And the shift towards this attitude has been huge. For instance, if we ask people for politicians’ names, they might not remember them, but this is not political disengage, but optimization of their (memory) resources.

Smallest actions just like using YouTube to upload presumably stupid political videos might not be a lot, but it definitely is something, and it was not there before the Web 2.0.

The Internet has the possibility to reconfigure the dynamics and logic of collective action: allows geographically disperse groups to gather; increases the visibility/exposure of free riders; etc.

Joan Subirats, Professor of Political Science, Autonomous University of Barcelona

Have we adopted a new concept of participation 2.0? Have the new tools or way of behaving?

More individualization, higher presence, constant flow of information that challenges the concept of representativeness. And, indeed, if the majority is more heterogenous, the minority can still represent that majority? And, with such an intense presence and changing scenarios, do the results of the elections (happened 3 or 4 years ago) still apply?

The Web 2.0 challenges the concept of a Government and an Administration designed as benevolent omniscient institutions, that know what’s better for the citizenry… but that now is informed and can have their voice heard.

On the other hand, voting is cheap in effort for the voter. It actually is the cheapest way of participation. So, do we want to increase the burden/costs on the voter? Does he want so?

The web 2.0 leaves plenty of room for autonomy, equality (being aware of the digital divide, of course) and diversity. Does poor in the reaching of consensus and the collective creation of a common, stable project.

Q&A

Me: Have we to redefine what participation is? is uploading a video to YouTube participation? is forwarding it to my contacts list participation? What’s the blogosphere? A blog? A blog aggregator? A blog + youtube + Flickr + Slideshare +… +…? Is the blogoshpere an unmeasurable hydra? Isn’t it as important as the aggregate the non-aggregate, personal approach of the emitter that can now send the message, more efficiently, with more efficacy. HM: Indeed, the reasons why people participate are many and very different. Thus, it is important to take into account any kind of participation, despite its aggregate impact, as it is a gate to participation itself and to political engagement.

Marc López: how can we use the Web 2.0 to operate smallest changes (e.g. to decide the menu of my children at their school with the other parents) without having to focus on big impacts? What’s the role of the Government in enabling and fostering this? DO: From Fix my Street to Fix my School. HM, JS: there’s plenty of room for policy making in these issues.

Notes from the 4th Internet, Law and Politics Congress.
Session VII

Debate
Electoral strategies on the Internet

The experience of the 2008 Spanish General Elections.
José Rodríguez and Xavier Peytibí, political experts.

In the Spanish general elections (March 9th, 2008), the web has had more importance than ever, but it still far from being a mainstream communication media.

Main changes

• Interactivity between the party and the citizenry, with an increase on blogs and nanoblogs (e.g. twitter) resulting in an increase of the reach of the political message.
• New methods to outsource participation: not only members of the party and campaign volunteers, but also occasional supporters: from outsourcing to crowdsourcing. This has meant more reach and at a much lesser cost.
• Change of formats: everything reusable and by anyone, being embedding the main practice.
• Social Networking Sites: enable or ease that people that think alike support each other. Facebook arguably the star.
• i-Campaigning: personal campaigning. With any kind of multimedia material, anyone can create their own campaign.

The blogosphere of a party is not really their blogosphere, controlled by the powers of the party, but a blurry cloud of people gathering around similar ideas/ideologies. This has been really significative in the case of the party in the opposition in Spain (the Popular Party, PP) after their defeat in 2004. This made of that blogosphere a strong and organized voice that faced the 2008 elections with a lot of strength. But, after the second defeat in 2008, this blogosphere in part split in several pieces and in part turned against its “own” party. So: the blogosphere is neither controlled, nor predictable.

An important thing to state about political blogospheres is that they are loudspeakers of the dissensions and problems that take place inside the party.

In the socialist party, the blogosphere as indeed succeeded in creating — not yet in having it accepted — amendment to the status of virtual volunteers. While the party wanted to treat them as a separate thing to the core of the party, them virtual volunteers and supporters want a status alike any other volunteer or supporter, with they right to vote and have delegates.

José Rodríguez, Albert Padró-Solanet, Xavier Peytibí

Presentation of the results from the Parties and ICT research project.
Albert Padró-Solanet, Professor of Political Science, UOC, and member of the GADE-IN3 research group. Comments and moderator: Rosa Borge, Professor of Political Science, UOC.

Research goals: why ICTs are so notorious in recent political campaigns? Is it due to sort of a cyberoptimism?

The intensive use in the US of Web 2.0 applications, the reporting on the TV of the performance of politics 2.0, and the self-perception of the political e-leaders themselves that the web rules have undoubtedly boosted the notoriety of Politics 2.0.

Opportunities: additional media, almost costless, enormous potential of reach, segmentation, quick response, links with individuals and groups that think alike and endorse their discourse, bigger support, can better control the diffusion of the information (as they cannot directly control mass media), potentially interactive.

Risks: cost of having information up-to-date, ambiguity is avoided and thus debate is not fostered, in the long run the control over the message is absolutely lost.

The research model tries to explain the web behaviour of the political party according to several independent variables:

• Ideology: left-right, nationalism (Spanish-Catalan)
• Organization: kind of party (catch-all, masses), centralization (centralized-decentralized), internal conflict visible (y/n)
• Electoral market: government-opposition, regional-state wide, size (big-small), coalition (y/n)

The dependent variables are the ones by Gibson & Ward (2001) that measure the degree of development of a party’s website:

• Informing
• Campaigning
• Participation
• Fundraising
• Networking

Conclusions

• There’s an evident strategic use of the Web for political issues: no hype, no “because it’s cool” factor
• Leadership, big size, in the political movement implies (pressure to achieve) leadership in the Internet
• Smaller size requires more participation, to have more members and raise more funding
• Mass parties reproduce offline structures to the online landscape
• There is some rivalry between offline and online participation
• Batlle, A., Borge, R., Cardenal, A. S. & Padró-Solanet, A. (2007). Reconsidering the analysis of the uses of ICTs by political parties: an application to the Catalan case. Communication presented at the 4th ECPR General Conference. Pisa: ECPR.

Q&A

Me: what’s the weight of the budget in Web 2.0 campaigning? JR & XP: It is important to kick off the campaign, but the sustainability in the long run and its growth it’s directly related to the ability to engage volunteers. Actually, Obama raises a lot of money on the web, i.e. it’s more an investment than a cost.

Helen Margets: is it the website a dependent variable or an independent one? Ever done the analysis the other way round? AP-S: There is a strong correlation between the structure of the party and the use of the web, so it makes sense thinking of it the other way round, but there’s no analysis yet with this approach.

An attendee: so, the way people participate has really changed? XP: Yes, it has. The possibility that supporters can rip-mix-burn the campaign materials is a crucial change in the whole concept of campaigning. JR: Indeed, an elite of high-class (intellectuals, scholars, etc.) supporters are subverting the whole system of the political party, implying that the basis of the party are left aside in benefit of latecomers that have high e-media impact. Thus, more people taking part into the internal debate of a specific party can indeed imply less internal democracy, as the structures are overridden by the high-class digerati elite latecomers.

Marc López: What’s the role of cybersupporters, to help diffuse the discourse of the powers of the party, or to debate them? Who are the cyberpartisans? JR: Dissension is tolerated while constructive, but if it turns to be destructive, bloggers become a problem. XP: We don’t know who the partisans are, but we do know that cyberpartisans and cybersupporters and birds of a different feather. XP-S: there’s another issue that makes it difficult to know who the cybersupporters are and it’s privacy.