ICTlogy

Student research seminar: Fred Stutzman

In this talk I will seek feedback on the potential framework of my dissertation. I am interested in the role social technologies play in the management of real-world social networks, particularly in the management of real world social networks in periods of transition.

What happens with online identity with (so much) Web 2.0 services, subscriptions, etc. How do we create digital identity? What does it mean to have a digital identity? How do we manage it?

How do Microformats play with online identity?

All along your trip through social networks, you can take with you some content, people, resources and leave behind the other ones. Across your transition through platforms… where’s the meeting point? the focal point?

This transition: is a personal strategy, or just follow the flow? What are the characteristics of this behavior?

How do you keep social capital? And… what happens if you ever take with you your social capital (i.e. friends), is this negative (you don’t let yourself evolve, mature)?

My reflections

• Can identity be tied to what you do, such as an e-Portfolio, as well as what’s your network of people?
• John Clippinger makes a very interesting point in saying that, at the beginnings of the Internet, everybody wanted to be anything (except themselves), and now the problem is to try and succeed in keeping a consistent digital identity

More info

• Fred Stutzman’s Vitae
• ClaimID
• Rossi, P. G., Pascucci, G., Giannandrea, L. & Paciaroni, M. (2006). “L’e-Portfolio Come Strumento per la Costruzione dell’Identità”. In Informations, Savoirs, Décisions, Médiations, (25), art.348. La Garde: Université du Sud Toulon-Var.
• DiMaggio, P., Hargittai, E., Neuman, W. R. & Robinson, J. P. (2001). “Social Implications of the Internet”. In Annual Review of Sociology, 2001, 27, 307-336. Palo Alto: Annual Reviews.
• Identity Parade, by Daithí Mac Síthigh

Student research seminar: Michael Zimmer

My presentation will include a quick overview of my dissertation research, as well as the “value-conscious design” methodology I am attempting to apply in order to pragmatically engage with the web search engine industry. I will also outline the “next steps” of the work, and my hope is that attendees can help me identify new avenues of exploration and solve some of the methodological and philosophical gaps in the project.

Faustian Bargain: privacy vs. better search, must provide information to participate. Then: how to design good technology with a value-conscious design, including moral and ethical values. Is this bargain acceptable? depends on efficiency, utility and relevancy.

Perfect search:

• provide results that suit the context and intent of the search query
• User satisfaction and loyalty
• Increased revenues, due to better fitting ads with context

Perfect reach: process and understand all the information of the world

Perfect recall: understand what you want, give you what you want

Threat to Spheres of Mobility: search engines are the latest tech medium to support physical intellectual and digital mobility

What’s next

• Need answers to the “nothing to hide” argument
• Need FoxNews sound bites…
• Initiate empirical examination of uses, harms & effects: perform Eszter Hargittai-type user studies, collaborations
• Engage with technical design community

My reflections

More info

• SDP2007 Presentation: The Quest for the Perfect Search Engine, blogpost by Michael Zimmer
• Dissertation abstract
• Research blog
• Values in Technology Design
• Value Sensitive Design Research Lab
• Values in Computer and Information System Design Graduate Student Workshop
• Quest for the Perfect Dissertation, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• Perfect Search and the Perfect Presentation, by Joris van Hoboken

Leads: John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, Rob Faris

Over the past five years, the incidence of Internet filtering has expanded from a small number of states, including China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to well over thirty countries worldwide. While Internet filtering and content restrictions continue to grow in scope, scale and sophistication, censorship of the Internet broaches many unanswered questions, touching on legal, political, economic, social and ethical issues.

Critics of filtering focus on the frequent collateral damage, the suppression of free speech as an infringement on human rights, the often tenuous legal status of filtering and the potential for negative impacts on economic and human development. For others, filtering is seen as an appropriate remedy for Internet content that is distasteful, disruptive, harmful or illegal.

The influence of Internet censorship on democratic processes, access to information and technological growth is complex. It undoubtedly has huge implications for how connected citizens will be to the events unfolding around them, to their own cultures, and to other cultures and shared knowledge around the world. At the same time, filtering practices raise questions about how citizens relate to the states in which they live – states that are ordinarily neither transparent about how these filtering regimes work nor accountable for the problems inherent in the way they are carried out today.

We take a look at recent trends in international filtering and put on the table a number of questions of policy and practice.

Joris van Hoboken introduces the session with a — for me — terrific question: How Internet Filtering is affecting access to knowlege?

What

• Discovering what Web sites (compare with Internet) are filtered on demand or indfluence by public authorities
• Discovering/developing means of circunvention and assessing effectiveness, e.g. Psiphon

Why test

• Comparing Internet to traditional media: State censorship — and circumvention — is a venerable tradition; e.g. Soviet content blocking and samizdat. But, what’s different about the Internet? What’s the same? Prominent of geographic boundaries; testing “the Internet is revolutionary” hypothesis
• Censorship is bad; human rights are good (“access to knowledge”): underscoring state filtering around the world can help reduce it; studying filtering and circumvention can assist people who want to circumvent
• Censorship is bad when done without “due process”; too easy for state (or private parties controlling the technical means) to abuse

How

• Technical enujmeration: “20 questions”: come up with a list of web sites or web URLs to test;
• Contextual studies

Challenges

• One of the biggest challenges is the political, ethical charge of such studies, that make them no neutral. Solution is twofold: don’t do any research at all, or just disclose and put crystal clear, very transparent, what your background and your believes are, so that you don’t get cheated when reading the output data of the research results.

My reflections

• Besides focusing on content — right to communicate, expression, etc. — if we focus on the carrier, the technology, and its socieconomical possibilities — again, besides human rights, democracy, and so on — it is possible that Internet Filtering does not only provide a means to keep voices shut, but to keep control over the international economy’s gate, such as Ancient Europe’s monopolies on naval trade.
• Related to this question, Daithí Mac Síthigh points me to Harold Innis, and I quote Daithí (thank you!): he’s a Canadian (died 1952) who did some interesting early work on the history of communications and control; it’s very relevant for ‘new’ media. There are various elements – one is an analysis of time-based vs space-based media and the types of control it favours (“Bias of Communications”) and a more detailed, political study (“Empire and Communications”).

Readings

More info

• Internet Filtering, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• OII Day 2, by Alla Zollers
• Internet Filtering Session at the SDP 2007, by John Palfrey
• OpenNet Initiative web site
• OpenNet Initiative: Internet Filtering Map, post in this blog
• Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, audio podcast (time: 1:08:57) at MediaBerkman
• Jørgensen, R. F. (Ed.) (2006). Human Rights in the Global Information Society. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• The connection between cute cats and web censorship, by Ethan Zuckerman

Lead: Jonathan Zittrain

The Internet of tomorrow will not much resemble the Internet of today. What are the changes sweeping over the Net, and who stands to gain and lose by them?

The big change the personal computer brought in — compared to big mainframes — was that one solution — the PC — fitted many problems/questions. It was a multipurpose machine that let the customer use it for whatever he could imagine (or almost). And software was the tool to be used to accomplish any purpose.

The “Hourglass” architecture follows a similar purpose: let’s get anyone connected, but let anyone get connected the way the want and exchange whatever they want. Just some standards are of consensus to make thinks work. Reference: The Internet’s Coming of Age (2001).

With the “hourglass” architecture, one layer can develop and know anything about any other layer (provided you respect the standards that make layers communicate one to each other). Same happens with Internet Science… or not. It depends on what you’re planning to accomplish. Nevertheless, it is clear that you have to have a general awareness on how the other layers work to get deep into your personal research field/layer.

Generativity: third parties can contribute and second parties can benefit from the improvements. i.e. one plugin for WordPress

You get generativity on the four layers:

• social: i.e. CouchSurfing
• content: i.e. Wikipedia
• logical
• physical

Limits, Lockdown

• Captcha: a generative solution to a generative problem… which can be tricked by means of generativity.
• Certificates
• Web code is highly generative, thus easy to hack to do whatever evil

Is this (these threats) the end of the generative computer? of the actual systems design? are tethered appliances/devices the future/present (and the death of generativity)?

My reflections

While most of these threats to generativity might be true, isn’t the pendulum of “threats” getting overridden by:

• Free software and the way it’s changed politics?
• Open access and the way it’s changing science and knowledge building?
• The changes that Law (Intellectual Property, Privacy, etc.) is suffering (and will be) in the most recent years?

Jonathan’s just answered Rachel Cobcroft‘s question and, indirectly, commented my reflections: it is not an apocalypse he’s depicting — the end of generativity — but a warning: if we focus too much in our layer, we could have the freest Internet ever but the end point can be caught under control for lack of our “surveillance”, because we just forgot. And most important (as an answer to Chintan Vaishnav), the question is if generativity will become a thing for geeks, or it is supposed to remain for everyone.

Readings

More info

• 3rd IDP Congress on Internet, Law and Politics. Briefings, part I: Jonathan Zittrain keynote speech, post in this blog around the same issues.
• A Generative Presentation, by Daithí Mac Síthigh
• Generativity, by Aaron S. Veenstra
• OII Day 1, by Alla Zollers
• J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed & D.D. Clark. End-to-end arguments in system Design (PDF)
• Committee on the Internet in the Evolving Information Infrastructure, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, National Research Council. The Internet’s Coming of Age

On December 5 and 6, 2006, the W3C Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries took place in Bangalore, India. Half a year has passed, but the conclusions still apply.

It is very important not to forget the real goal of providing ICT in developing countries. The point is not at all to connect people to the Web but to provide services (health, banking, government service, education, business,…) […] the most appropriate way to provide such e-services on mobile phones is with SMS-based applications. The reasons for that are numerous:

* Easy to use (everybody knows how to send an SMS)
* Low and predictable cost (no cost for receiving a message, low and known cost for sending a message)
* Availability on all phones

Of course, there is a general agreement on the limitations of such applications :
* Low capabilities (text-only, limited size, basic services like single query – answer, …)
* Interoperability problems between operators

Adopting the Web as the platform for developing future services requires work on these blocking factors which have been identified:
* Problems of availability of Web browser
* Problems of configuration
* User Interface
* Cost

That said, there is a general agreement that the Web is providing unique opportunities which may facilitate the bridging of the digital divide:
* a standardized platform to ease service development
* cheap service development and hosting
* large scope and wide audience
* easy reachability and “discoverability” of existing services (search engines, portals, …)

More info

• Worshop home page
• Executive Summary
• Agenda, with full papers and presentations
• The Mobile Web in Developing Countries: Next Steps, by Stéphane Boyera
• Mobile Web in Developing Countries (MWI-DC) Wiki

The second edition of the World Information Society Report is out, bringing us a new calculation for the Digital Opportunity Index.

It’s a pity that the graphical representation of the Digital Opportunity Map has changed colors, as it makes it more difficult to compare among years. Nevertheless, here come both maps for 2006 and 2005 (remember that the report shows the DOI for the preceding year):

Digital Opportunity Index 2006. Source: World Information Society Report 2007
[click to enlarge]

Digital Opportunity Index 2005. Source: World Information Society Report 2006
[click to enlarge]

Major improvements — DOI increases above 20%, World Rank increases above 5 places (most of them are two digits increases) — are those of Antigua & Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Cambodia, Fiji, Guatemala, Lao P.D.R., Nicaragua, Palestine, Rwanda, St. Kitts & Nevis and Tanzania, reinforcing the trend of some Central America, Africa and Asia countries taking off and showing the path to other countries of the region with poor e-readiness results.

Getting worse — DOI decreases and loss of World Rank places —: Central African Republic, D.R. Congo, Madagascar, Turkmenistan and Zimbabwe, which as happened with the climbers, I think, sadly, does not surprise anyone.

Some other main conclusions are the huge strength of mobile telephony adoption in developing countries — in particular — and in the whole World — in general —, that makes coverage be almost universal and, thus, make the digital divide […] shrinking. We’ve talked about this statement several times here, and luckily, this time the report warns about the danger that those infrastructures make broadband adoption more difficult than fixed lines, hence the availability and affordability of broadband remain a cause for concern.

Actually, even if decreasing, inequality in digital development in the World (measured, for instance, through Internet usage) is still a major problem far to be solved and, if worst scenarios about broadband penetration come true, eager to get worse.

• World Information Society Report (main site)
• Full Report (13.4 Mb)
• Executive Summary (8.43 Kb)
• Map of Digital Opportunity Worldwide, 2005 (6.35 Mb)
• World Information Society Report 2006 and Digital Opportunity Index 2006