#webscience

[techteacherfbd]

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[bagustris]

Social Shaping of the Web

The web not only create technological determinism, but also it shape social activity. In other word, We change the technology, and we also change the society to reflect that technology

[jacapo47]

Big Data

Warning: this is going to be another one of those posts that starts from a point of moderate easy-going bewilderment and ends up in a place of complete bewilderment and rage. Again, this debate seems to be highly artificial with all sorts of people making all sorts of claims and counter claims and setting up all manner of straw man arguments all over the place. With the amount of straw men being made and destroyed on this course, things are going to get messy!

Big data in itself seems to mean a heck of lot of different things to different people. I'm going to work from the idea that it is any kind of data that is problematic because of either its volume, its variety or its velocity in being produced, or any given combination of these three things. For me then, to put it into terms I can actually understand, "Big Data" is an adjective, not a noun. Big data is not an object; it is a way of describing an object. And it is not immovable or permanent or unchangeable. Data described as "big" today will not be described as "big" in ten years time when clever techies have developed a solution to it which is then in-built in the production of the data.

And that seems to be what the sensible, non-straw men, are arguing. That "big data" refers to data that does not have an in-built mechanism in the way it is produced to make it easy to analyse and process. 

However, this is not to say that "big data" will disappear as we develop solutions because our development of technology will not stand still. The volume and speed of some data will probably continue to outpace us. Moreover the type of data we are trying to analyse will continue to diversify. 

Of course Big Data is pretty much analytics and business intelligence. It just requires a different methodology because the analysis is not as straight forward. To say though that it is meaningless and can be ignored, is as silly as saying it holds the answer to all our problems.

These things are always hyped up to be panaceas and there follows the disillusionment after the perpetual naysayers trash them as nonsense, until they are quietly accepted and assimilated to achieve a significant but small fraction of what they were originally hyped up to do. Look at DNA: its structure was discovered in the 1950s and yet scientists are still trying to work out how to use that knowledge to change medical science.

Merging different types of data to make up a complete picture is hugely appealing, especially in consideration of how we understand medical and social problems. Indeed if we can map a mass of different factors around what we are investigating, we may be able to pinpoint what are genuine correlations and what are incidental because of other factors. 

Make no mistake, like Web 2.0 et al, it will be used for good intentions and bad intentions. The data will sometimes be manipulated, just like any other form of statistics. Remember lies, damn lies and statistics. But we aren't going to ditch statistics as a way of measuring stuff simply because some people use statistics corruptly. Big data is just another tool in the technological arsenal that people can choose to use in whatever way they see a benefit to.

It may even be used to slay a straw man or two...

[jacapo47]

Activism, the web and selling out

Again I'm finding it very frustrating to engage with arguments that reify the web into something beyond a tool, or a set of tools. It isn't a force in itself. It isn't an actor or a participant. It has no agency or potency of its own. It is what we make of it. After its inception it provided a space beyond the conventional media where independent journalism could find a platform. It still does this. Those spaces still exist. The only difference is that the audience is a heck of a lot bigger. And let's face it, web space is hardly in short supply. There is no competition for space or readership in reality.

Apologies for harping back to the printing press (see earlier posts) but I do feel it is probably the only technology which can be intelligently compared to the web in terms of its impact on society. If we consider the dissemination of Martin Luther's 95 Theses as being a genuinely revolutionary act enabled by the printing press, we can see that the technological advancement gave him the space to share his dispute with the Catholic Church over the practice of indulgences with a far wider audience than if he had stood in the town square and ranted. The printing press also provided the possibility of anonymity for the first time in much the same way the web did. However it wasn't always used for subversion, the printing press went on to become a tool of state in much the same way the web is used by governments today. This didn't stop Karl Marx from printing Das Kapital or the Communist Manifesto and take advantage of the technology available to reach potential converts to the cause, using the most pervasive and effective medium possible.

If anyone assumed the web would be immune to commercial interests or the security forces, they were incredibly naive. Surely the fact these companies and agencies have bothered to invest huge amounts of time, money and energy into colonising the web, demonstrates how significant a medium of communication it is. The amount of money pouring into online advertising, promotion via social media and web analytics, show how powerful the web is in getting your message across.

It would be ridiculous for political activists to abandon the web because it is popular and mainstream - that should be the very reason you embrace it! Otherwise you are just barking at the moon, shouting into space, talking among yourselves, preaching to the converted etc, and what could possibly be the point of that if you are trying to influence the opinions of people who aren't already followers of your cause? 

And let's not forget that democracy is about ordinary people. It is about the masses, the multitude and the 99%. Abandoning a pluralist multi-dimensional tool like the web suddenly because it is no longer niche and edgy, but now enjoyed by the many rather than the few, is simply a kind of philosophical snobbery and elitism that has no place in genuinely emancipatory politics. It displays a deep distrust of the people and their ability to make decisions rather than reflect misgivings about the way the state and corporations use selective parts of the web.

Of course if you are a political activist planning something the state in which you live will persecute you for or attempt to disrupt, I can fully appreciate a decision to go offline in terms of plans. I cannot believe though that there aren't spaces on the web where activists can still plan their activities and share their ideas without the NSA tracking them down - the carding forums facilitating both online and offline crime discussed last week are a prime example of spaces states simply cannot control. The web is not a uniformly "smooth space" in Hardt and Negri's terms (Hardt and Negri 2001), it is simply too large and diverse to police. There are pockets where resistance to global capitalism, neo-liberalism and environmental destruction will continue to exist. 

References:

Hardt and Negri's Empire 2001

[jacapo47]

How well do I know my friends? task

So here I go on the how well do I know my friends task:

On Facebook I have 85 1st degree friends which is apparently more than a busload (hurrah for me); I have 13,889 2nd degree friends therefore according to the Guardian's analysis of Facebook; and I have 2,269,462 3rd degree friends which equals more than the population of Houston, Texas. The point of this by the way is that the NSA is allowed to monitor the communications of people three "hops" from their suspected terror target. So the monitoring of one suspect with only 85 Facebook friends could drag  millions of other individuals into NSA surveillance. 

My privacy settings on Facebook are set to maximum and I only add people I know in "real" life. Periodically I cull my friend list if I haven't seen the people in a while. This does lead to embarrassment on occasion however: I recently went to a university reunion and struck up an old friendship with someone who said "you are on my Facebook" to which I had to admit I had culled them three weeks earlier!

The link for the Guardian article is:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/28/nsa-files-decoded-hops

[jacapo47]

The Power of Networks

Wow! The network science module is blowing my mind! Nodes and edges and social science all in one - what a treat!

I loved the fantastic video by Manuel Lima with the awesome graphic. It did make me wonder a little about the idea of how our brains function. Lima argues that our brains do not organise information in little compartments as we previously thought but work more like a musical symphony of lots and lots of different instruments. It is more "organised complexity" (Warren Weaver 1948) than simply travelling from a to b. The description of our brains as being essentially a bit messy with connections between different pieces of information being made all over the place, reminded me of the web and what we sometimes find difficult about the web.

Sometimes it can seem like chaos. Information and digital literacy is our response to this, to try and equip students with the ability to cut through the seemingly arbitrary nature if the web and find paths through the information they need. 

What we like as human beings tends to be order, simplicity, hierarchy, symmetry, unity and balance, as Lima argues. We have always mapped information into trees because tree diagrams contain these properties. Perhaps this is why the web is so scary for some people? Because they can't take it and make order out of it. Because it is harder to think of these networks of networks, than something more logical and succinct. 

But then as people created the web, perhaps we created it in our own image? Perhaps the messiness of the web is a reflection of the messiness of the brain and its functions? And whilst we try and button hole the web into something more tree-like to help us understand it, maybe we are misunderstanding ourselves.

For Manuel Lima's thoughts and cool animation follow this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJmGrNdJ5Gw

[jacapo47]

Going online to find privacy?

Interesting point raised in our web science MOOC discussion by a Lebanese academic regarding privacy and information sharing being largely a Western concern. He argued that in countries like Lebanon a person's name can say much more about them and their profile, than using the internet would. For him, the internet provided a space to be an individual, not tied to a name weighed down with cultural and social baggage. Interesting way to think about sharing information online. 

Stephane Bazan, Head of Research at UIR Web Science and lecturer in Web Culture, USJ Lebanon

[jacapo47]

Explanation of the infographic

For our Web Science MOOC we were set a task to look at the different factors that contributed to the development of the web. The task required us to look at different factors and put them into some kind of timeline. I decided to do something different (chronology seemed a little dull) so I looked at all the factors and divided them into themes:

1. Technological innovation

2. Social and economic change

3. The politics of defence

4. The academic world

5. Commerce

6. Managing human knowledge

7. Regulating, researching and renewing the web

I then used easel.ly to create an infographic representing the relative importance of each theme to the development of the web and where these themes overlap and interact with one another.