[zerogeography-blog]

Philip Leverhulme Award: Internet Geographies

I am extremely happy to report the news that I have been awarded one of the 2016 Philip Leverhulme prizes!

I hope to use the resources offered by the Leverhulme Trust to extend my research into information and internet geographies.  This line of research asks who and where is made more powerful and given more voice by the new digital layers of place that augment the places that we live in, and who and where tends to get silenced and excluded. In previous research we have seen some of the ways in which the digital can amplify and strengthen those already in global informational cores. But, as ever more people get connected to the internet, we need to know more about what sort of change we're seeing over time.

Going forwards, this will mean hiring a postdoc trained in some flavour of computational social science/ GIS/ big data/ quantitative geography to work with me  I'll be posting a job ad soon, but in the meantime please get in touch if you're interested in working with me on such topics.

It really is a massive honour to have this award and to have the opportunity to use it to further some of our ongoing work. None of this would have been possible without the help of some of my brilliant and  smart collaborators over the last few years. As part of the immediate group of researchers that I've supervised at the OII, I've had the luck to work closely with Sanna Ojanpera, Nicolas Friederici, Amir Anwar,  Isis Hjorth, Alex Wood, Chris Foster, Stefano De Sabbata, Ralph Straumann, Heather Ford, Joe Shaw, Nisa Haji Ibrahim, Devin Gaffney, Charlotte Smart, Caludio Calvino, Ahmed Medhat, David Palfrey, Richard Farnbrough, Ning Wang, Tessy Onaji, and David Peter Simon: all of whom have played an important part in designing, carrying out, and publishing our scholarship. I also have a broader network of collaborators that I've also had the fortune to directly research and publish with: Matt Zook, Monica Stephens, Taylor Shelton, Ate Poorthuis, Bill Dutton, Bernie Hogan, Vili Lehdonvirta, Helena Barnard, Tim Waema, Charles Katua, Casper Andersen, Shilad Sen, Andrea Ballatore, Grant Blank, Scott Hale, Taha Yasseri, Illhem Allagui, Andrew Boulton, Jaz Choi, Han-Teng Liao, Felix Akorli, Grace Illah, Claude Bizimana, Havard Haarstad, Ralph Schroeder, Greg Taylor, Matt Wilson, Jeremy Crampton, Stann Brunn, Sean Gorman, Eduardo Lopez, Iginio Gagliardone, Emmanouil Tranos, Jim Thatcher, Dorothea Kleine, Richard Heeks, Padraig Carmody, and Rina Ghose (apologies if I have missed anyone out).  

Just typing out that list of names made me realise how truly incredible the last few years have been, and what a privilege it is to get to work with so many people from such a diverse range of backgrounds. And this list doesn't even include all of the other people who have helped along the way (such as the ever-helpful support staff at Oxford).

I didn't intend for such a long post about this award, but once I started to write it became clear that there is no way to say 'thanks' for this award without thanking all of the people in my network who actually made it possible.

Mark

[zerogeography-blog]

The Impact of Connectivity in Africa: Grand Visions and the Mirage of Inclusive Digital Development

My colleagues Nicolas Friederici, Sanna Ojanperä, and I have recently finished a paper in which we analyse ‘Grand Visions’ of how Internet connectivity affects development in Africa. In the paper, we contrast these visions with the actually available empirical evidence to support those claims. You will be able to read our full conclusions in the paper below:

Friederici, N. Ojanperä, S., and Graham, M. 2017. The Impact of Connectivity in Africa: Grand Visions and the Mirage of Inclusive Digital Development. Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries (in press).

We show that the evidence base to support the claim that Internet connectivity has a vast positive or "transformative" impact on development in Africa is thin. More worryingly, once we see the techno-determinist and modernist assumptions at the core of many visions, visions of rapid development precipitated though ICTs might not just fail to achieve their goals (even on their own terms), they could actively undermine those very efforts in a world of scarce resources.

Here are some excerpts as a preview of the paper:

Development has always grappled with why some people and places have much more than others. Yet much of that conversation is lost within contemporary discourses of ICTs and development. As states and organisations rush to develop policies and plans to build drones and balloons, lay fibre-optic cables, and find other ways to connect the disconnected, much is said about the power of ICTs to positively transform the world’s most underprivileged people and places.

This is because ‘self-evident’ discourses of connectivity, like modernist visions before them offer a powerful, aspatial and ahistorical teleology (Graham et al., 2015). This allows policymakers to point to new technological fixes instead of focusing on how the political economy of any given context works to allocate power and wealth.

Visions and aspirations of transformation through connectivity are thereby able to drive concrete government projects and development funding. Hardly any dependable aggregate figures of funding and subsidies are available; many development actors are not accountable to tax payers (such as philanthropic organisations) and thus do not disclose their spending. Heeks (2009) uses official development assistance data as a proxy and concludes that ‘hundreds of millions of US dollars per year are invested in [ICT for development] projects; and that tens of billions of US dollars per year are invested in… infrastructure.’ The World Bank, as an example of a large development organisation, spent US$4.2 billion for ICT programming from 2003 to 2010 (Independent Evaluation Group, 2011), and is currently investing about US$1.2 billion in grants and loans for regional connectivity infrastructure programmes in Africa (Navas-Sabater, 2015). Rockefeller’s digital jobs programme, as an example of an initiative without infrastructure investments, provides US$100 million across Africa. Irrespective of how we measure the specifics, it is clear that huge sums have been, and continue to be, invested in the area.

Admittedly, it is impossible to establish a direct, causal connection between the discourses we have outlined and the myriad decisions that go into such ‘digital development’ spending. Still, our analysis highlights the ubiquity and assertiveness of discourses that are optimistic about the impacts and potentials of connectivity. It is clear that the productive power of these discourses provides a fertile ground for the argumentation of actors seeking to set up connectivity infrastructure, run Internet-related development projects, or sell equipment and services connected to the agenda (see (Graham, 2015) for an example of how Kenyan ICT firms strategically deploy visions of changing connectivity). As just one example, in a recent presentation, the World Bank summarized the rationale for investments in a fibre network in Central Asia in unequivocal terms: ‘Improved Internet connectivity = Economic benefits’ (Navas-Sabater, 2015, p. 4). Such a simple rationale can only be credible if the audience is sufficiently credulous, and this credulity is what discourse produces.

Discourses of development have always produced and reproduced the very objects of their ‘concern’ (Escobar, 1995). We can take a lead from Ferguson’s (1994) prompt to ask ‘what do aid programmes do besides fail to help poor people?’ Our worry here is not just that the significant resources invested in connecting Africa’s disconnected will be wasted. It is rather that the Grand Visions of connectivity will themselves lead to an exacerbation of the very things that they purport to solve. For instance, by framing inequality as something that can be effectively tackled with more connectivity, we might take away focus from the structural economic processes bringing about widening inequalities. What is worse than a developmental intervention not working is believing that an important issue has been effectively addressed when it, in reality, clearly hasn’t.

It is possible that contemporary Grand Visions of connectivity are truly reflective of a promising future for ICTs and economic development. But it is equally possible that many of those visions are hugely overblown. The current evidence base is mixed and inconclusive. We therefore need to ensure that we do more to ask the organisations and entities who produce Grand Visions to justify their claims, refusing that it is self-evident that ICTs will automatically bring about development.

(Cross-posted from Mark Graham's blog.)

Related work:

Graham, M. 2015. Contradictory Connectivity: Spatial Imaginaries and Techno-Mediated Positionalities in Kenya's Outsourcing Sector. Environment and Planning A 47 867-883 (pre-publication version here).

Graham, M., Andersen, C., and Mann, L. 2015 Geographical Imagination and Technological Connectivity in East Africa. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40(3) 334-349. (pre-publication version here).

[zerogeography-blog]

Reconsidering the Role of the Digital in Global Production Networks

Chris Foster and I have a new publication out in Global Networks. We previously shared a pre-publication version, but the piece is officially in the journal now. You can access an open-access version at the following link:  

Foster, C. and Graham, M. 2016. Reconsidering the Role of the Digital in Global Production Networks. Global Networks. DOI: 10.1111/glob.12142 (pre-publication version here).

Abstract:

Global production networks (GPN) has become a key framework in conceptualising linkages, power and structure in globalised production. However, this framework has been less successful in integrating the influence of digital information and ICTs in production, and this problematic in a world where relationships and power are increasingly mediated by digital information flows and resources.

We thus look to adapt the GPN framework to allow more substantive analysis of ‘the digital’. Primarily this is done through a theoretical analysis of the three core categories of the GPN framework - embeddedness, value and networks – to highlight how these categories can better integrate a more dynamic and contested conceptualisation of the digital. Illustrations from research on the digitalization of tea sector GPNs in East Africa highlight how these theoretical advances provide new insights on the digital and its expanding role in economic production.

[zerogeography-blog]

Accepting new PhD (Dphil) students for 2017

I’m currently accepting students for the next academic year. The Oxford Internet Institute is a great community to be a part of, and we have a range of full scholarships that can cover your costs. 

I’m most keen to supervise students interested in either: (a) internet geographies broadly defined (people thinking about what the digital does to power, place, positionality); (b) digital labour (especially in the context of a global world of work and/or economic development). You can read a bit more about the topics I’m working on, on my academic profile page.

If you want to learn more about the programme, check out our detailed information here - or email [email protected] for anything that isn’t listed there. And do get in touch with me directly if it is something you are considering. 

[zerogeography-blog]

“Perish or Globalize:” Network Integration and the Reproduction and Replacement of Weaving Traditions in the Thai Silk Industry

The practice of handmade silk weaving has disappeared from much of the world, but continues to be practiced by thousands of people in Northeastern Thailand. However, as the Thai economy becomes increasingly embedded into global flows and networks of commodities, capital and culture, there are worries that silk weaving as a practice will either cease to be reproduced or will have to radically change in order to service the global market. This paper, based on in-depth interviews and surveys with sellers of silk, examines this dilemma faced by the industry. It finds that the means through which economic information is codified and transmitted over space and the tastes of non-local markets are ultimately resulting in changes to production practices throughout the country. Despite the fact that the internet is enabling trade and thereby allowing production practices to continue, fears are being realized about traditional practices being replaced as producers become ever more integrated into global networks.

You can access the paper here:

Graham, M. 2011. “Perish or Globalize:” Network Integration and the Reproduction and Replacement of Weaving Traditions in the Thai Silk Industry ACME: Journal of Critical Geographies10(3) 458-482.

I just had to refer to this paper in a chapter I’m writing, so decided to post it here (I’ve never blogged it, and my website contained a dead link to it). 

If you like the topic, here is some related work that I did:

Graham, M. 2013. Thai Silk dot Com: Authenticity, Altruism, Modernity and Markets in the Thai Silk Industry. Globalisations 10(2) 211-230.

Graham, M. 2011. Disintermediation, Altered Chains and Altered Geographies: The Internet in the Thai Silk Industry. Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries. 45(5), 1-25

Graham, M. 2010. Justifying Virtual Presence in the Thai Silk Industry: Links Between Data and Discourse. Information Technologies and International Development. 6(4), 57-70.

Graham, M. 2011. Time Machines and Virtual Portals: The Spatialities of the Digital Divide. Progress in Development Studies. 11 (3). 211-227.

Graham, M. 2011. Cultural Brokers, the Internet, and Value Chains. In The Cultural Wealth of Nations. eds. Wherry, F. and N. Bandelj. Standford: Stanford University Press. 222-239 (email for a copy).

[zerogeography-blog]

Mapping Flickr

Flickr is one of the world’s most popular photo sharing websites, and represents a key way in which people form impressions about different parts of our planet. In other words it is an important part of the digital augmentations of places. 

Antonello Romano has been doing some great work mapping content from the site, and I’ve pulled some of his data together into this map. What we see are huge differences in the amount of images augmenting different parts of the world. To anyone familiar with some of our previous research, this will be unsurprising. But it is again perhaps the scale of some of these differences that never ceases to astound. 

I’ve shaded each country as a percentage of the USA’s total rather than as absolute numbers, so that this digital information inequality can be better visualised. You can see, for instance, that there are only five countries in Africa that have more than 0.1% of the USA’s total number of photos about them. 

These geographies of information matter: they shape what is known, and what can be known about a place. And even in our age of connectivity, large parts of the planet remain left off the map. 

[zerogeography-blog]

The Digital Geographies specialty group mailing list

I have been working with some brilliant colleagues and collaborators to set up a new ‘Digital Geographies’ speciality group up at the Association of American Geographers. The AAG is currently reviewing our application package. But what you can do in the meantime, is sign up to our newly-created mailing list (set up by the tireless Jim Thatcher). 

Those of you thinking of attending the AAG, might also be interested in the related call for papers that we’ve put together: Digital\\Human\\Labour

[zerogeography-blog]

The geography of Wikipedia edits

Wikipedia has a geography. This is something that my colleagues and I have explored previously in a variety of scholarship. 

For a new book on ‘Open Development’, my colleague Stefano De Sabbata and I decided to update our most recent paper about information geographies with the above maps of Wikipedia. 

The basic underlying inequalities haven’t changed. Using the number of edits to every language version of Wikipedia coming from all countries and territory in the last quarter of 2014 (the most recent full set of data available), the above maps show that the geography of participation on Wikipedia is highly uneven.  

Stark inequalities are readily apparent: Europe and North America contribute 35.2% and 23.6% of Wikipedia’s edits respectively. In contrast, Africa contributes only. 1.3% of the world’s total (although it is worth noting that a few years ago, Africa’s contribution was consistently less than 1%). In fact, contributions from Africa are so low that there are actually more edits that originate in the Netherlands than the whole continent combined.

While some of these disparities can be explained by the total number of Internet users in a country, even normalizing by the percent of the population online (the second map) results in Africa still registering far fewer edits than would be expected (see our paper on this topic for detailed statistical analyses).

These geographies of Wikipedia edits because they represent how people from different parts of the world get to represent each other. Some people and places continue to have little voice and continue to be left off the map.

For more on this topic, see:

Graham, M., Straumann, R., Hogan, B. 2016. Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping Participation in Wikipedia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 105(6) 1158-1178. doi:10.1080/00045608.2015.1072791.(pre-publication version here)

Graham, M. 2015. Information Geographies and Geographies of Information New Geographies 7 159-166.

Graham, M., De Sabbata, S., Zook, M. 2015. Towards a study of information geographies:(im)mutable augmentations and a mapping of the geographies of information Geo: Geography and Environment.2(1) 88-105. doi:10.1002/geo2.8

Graham, M., Hogan, B., Straumann, R. K., and Medhat, A. 2014. Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 104(4). 746-764. (pre-publication version here)

Or a recent talk I gave:

[zerogeography-blog]

Why the digital gig economy needs co-ops and unions

We live in a world in which it is increasingly possible to use online labour markets to outsource work directly to any corner of the planet. Millions of new jobs are thus available for workers in some of the poorest parts of the planet. But the fact that we now have millions of people around the world all competing for the same jobs threatens to undermine a range of working standards.

This situation in which we find ourselves is largely possible because of the rapid spread of the internet to relatively low-income populations. Ten years ago, less than 20% of the world’s population was connected to the internet; and next year we’ll probably have more connected people in the world than disconnected ones. Many of these new internet users live in parts of the world in which well-paying jobs (or indeed any kinds of paying jobs) are hard to come by.

So it makes sense that so many people turn to online work marketplaces do to tasks like virtual assistance, translations, transcriptions, computer programming, graphic design, writing, and other such intellectual and digital forms of work. This system is often organised as a cut-throat bidding process: clients lists jobs on those marketplaces, and workers then try to outbid each other for contacts by offering a lower price or better service.

What it notable about this labour system is that it potentially cuts out a lot of intermediaries, or ‘middle-men’, in chains of work. Think, for instance, of a small business in Manchester that needs a document translated. This could have once been done by outsourcing that task to a local firm, who would outsource to a large business process outsourcing firm, who, in turn, would outsource it to a smaller firm based in Manila, who would then employ a translator to do the work. Now this task can simply be done by connecting the buyer in Manchester with the worker in Manila through an online marketplace.

In theory, this can yield benefits for both the buyer and seller of work, as far less profit needs to now be captured by a chain of intermediaries. But, in many instances, what actually happens is that new intermediaries arise in these digital marketplaces: taking relatively high rates from clients and paying relatively low wages to workers.

This seems to happen for two main reasons. The first is that in traditional workplaces, workers are grouped together under one roof, making it straightforward for the employer to observe the work. However, when work is organised instead through digital platforms, the employer and worker enter into a non-proximate relationship, making monitoring and control difficult.

Ranking and reputation scores, therefore, play a massive role in ensuring quality. If you have a good feedback score as a worker, you’ll get a lot of work. Conversely, if you have not yet managed to amass positive feedback, it becomes extremely challenging to find work. There are a lot of workers on platforms like Upwork.com and Freelancer.com who spend years trying to get their first job. Such workers will accept extremely low paying jobs and sometimes undertake speculative and free labour for the promise of a high rating. What then happens at the same time is that some of the people who do have good scores bid for jobs and then re-assign them to workers with lower scores (usually for a much lower wage).

Second, and perhaps more importantly, online work platforms – by design – treat labour as a commodity to be bought and sold. Work is often packaged up into bite-sized tasks, and workers are treated as replaceable. If labour is a commodity to be easily bought and sold, then the very existence of millions of people in online marketplaces who are desperate for work and are willing to work for low wages will create intermediaries. It is irrational to do tasks yourself as a worker who has a decent score when you could outsource them for a fraction of the cost you would receive to deliver them.

This means that practices like paying minimum wages and living wages become less meaningful – when tasks can be commoditized and outsourced. The very existence of a broad base of people willing to work for subsistence-level wages can exert a gravitational downwards pull on any work towards them in a supply chain.

As millions more potential digital workers join the global network every year, how then should we avoid a situation in which an oversupply of labour can result in an unfairly low market price for work?

We’ll probably need to begin by reframing the very work that goes on in these platforms. If work is a commodity to be bought and sold, and workers are all individual entrepreneurs, it is rational to use these platforms to exploit co-workers. Many workers have internalized these sorts of internalised visions of individuality, competition and predatory behavior. But if people see themselves as workers rather than entrepreneurs, then we have more possibilities for workers to collaborate, cooperate, and organise in an attempt to secure better working conditions for all involved in this disparate digital workforce.

There is a range of ways in which this could be done. One place we could learn from is agricultural production networks. For instance, as the poverty of workers began to impact yields and the supply and availability of coffee, the creation of cooperatives and other benevolent intermediaries was actually encouraged by multinational buyers.

We could therefore envision more digital platform cooperatives that would ensure that workers all have a stake in the platforms that mediate their work and receive fair compensation for their time. Trebor Scholz and others have been working tirelessly to bring this vision into being for platform workers. The idea has even been adopted by Jeremy Corbyn as part of his ‘Digital Democracy Manifesto.’

However, while platform cooperatives will undoubtedly be beneficial for the workers who are enrolled into them, they do not inherently solve the problems introduced by a low market price for work. Stopping a cooperative worker being paid a fair wage from re-outsourcing that work to other workers for much lower wages could prove hard to police.

Others might look to digital unions or looser forms of networks as ways to build a sense of solidarity between digital workers. One explicit role for a digital workers’ union could be building a class consciousness amongst workers, even those at opposite ends of the globe. Such work would need to highlight the precariousness of much of the digital work that is out there. In this effort, it’s worth turning to Gina Neff’s work on this so-called ‘venture labour’, who pinpoints that this notable absence of class consciousness is characterised by “explicit expression of entrepreneurial values by non-entrepreneurs". This cannot be allowed to become the norm. Organising efforts should instead use those very digital forms of communication to highlight the fact that workers are receiving all of the risks of entrepreneurship, but few of the rewards.

These strategies for cooperative forms of organising do not guarantee to resolve the problems of the global digital workforce. But they present a promising starting point; an alternative vision for what digital labour should look like. As thousands of people join the internet every day, many of whom are hungrily looking for work, we need to creatively think about how best to use digital tools for collaboration amongst workers instead of competition between them. Our digital tools are new, the forms of work that they mediate are new, and many of the challenges they raise are new. But, in a world where the atomization of work continues to be used against digital workers, let’s not forget an old rallying cry that has served us well: workers of the world, unite!

(this article was originally posted at OpenDemocracy)

[zerogeography-blog]

Symposium on Big Data and Human Development - closing remarks

It has been an extremely rewarding two days at the Symposium on Big Data and Human Development that Eduardo Lopez and I organised. We had a full room of people from academia, government, and the development sector - all speaking about how we might better use big data in the contexts of development. 

There are many threads that we’ll try to tie up over the next few weeks (an edited book, some workshop reports, perhaps another conference next year, etc.). But in the meantime, it might be useful if I reproduce the notes that I used to sum up the event here. Those of you who attended, please do comment if you see that I omitted anything. Those of you who didn’t, please feel free to use this as a prompt to get involved. 

***

This has been a much-needed conversation at a moment in which we’re awash with hype about ‘big data’. 

We’ve learnt a lot about some of the potentials of big data: We've got new sorts of early warning signals. And – as we move from data to information to knowledge - we seem to be getting better at figuring out what to look for when it comes to disease tracking, or predicting things like student failure rates or corruption. The fact that so much data comes from mobile phones has also created a specific opportunity to look at human mobility. And the relative democratisation of connectivity has important implications for deliberation and public participation at scales that have never before been possible.

But, with all that in mind, I want to pick up with areas that I think we still need to find ways to resolve as we all move forwards at this intersection of topics: First, one theme that keeps coming up is that of data presences and absences really mattering. We have great data about some places, processes, people. But there are still big gaps - and, going forwards, we'll really to address this head-on.  If we're using data to deploy scarce resources or deliver essential services, but there are blank spots on our map - then what strategies should we be employing to deal not just with our known unknowns, but also our unknown unknowns? Some of this might entail really getting good about asking questions about outliers in our models: Where are they, who are they, when are they? Second, another important theme is not just data presences and absences - but even within the presences, there is the question of open versus closed data. So, for instance –  many of us - me included - tend to use Twitter data to ask and answer a range of questions. And we do this because it is easily available and free and relatively straightforward to use. But we should be careful that we don't get into the sort of situation in which the tail wags the dog rather than the dog wags the tail - as my colleague Ralph Schroeder puts it. What sorts of questions are we prevented from asking because of a lack of open, available data sources? What sorts of questions or topics are we perhaps focusing too much energy on? And what sorts of questions do our data lend or not lend themselves to? Third, and relatedly, we're faced with some tension between issues of privacy, ownership, and control. How do we balance the desire to have more open data with best practices that prevent data leakage and still afford citizens with some control over their own data shadows?

There was an interesting discussion in the session that I organised with Richard Heeks at the DSA conference earlier this week about what we might learn from the literature on resource management – if we treat data as a resource.

And more broadly, are we happy with the current political-economy of development data? What current rights of access, control, and use should be rethought and challenged?

Fourth, how do we ourselves operate with maximum transparency - especially when we're not just dealing with descriptive analytics, but predictive analytics, and even prescriptive analytics? If our research, and the data we use, impacts on real people in real ways - are we happy with the current scientific models of dissemination that we use - or do we need any sort of alternate strategies that better engage with the communities that are the users - or subjects - of development? Fifth, what can, or should, we learn across contexts? Or specifically, what should we rethink and relearn in different places or contexts? What sorts of things aren't transferrable? This is maybe where the repeated call throughout this conference for all of us to be thinking and collaborating in a multidisciplinary way comes in useful.  

[zerogeography-blog]

Digital\\\Human\\\Labour  **Call for papers at the 2017 AAG meeting**

Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting. April 5-9, 2017, Boston, MA

The proposed Digital Geographies Working Group of the RGS/IBG and the proposed Digital Geographies Specialty Group of the AAG would like to invite submissions to a series of paper sessions and panels for the 2017 meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Boston, MA. Reflecting the shared interests of these groups, and their mutual desire to facilitate conversations between a wide range of geographical scholarship, this call is for papers exploring specifically the various intersections of ‘digital’ and ‘labour’ in diverse meanings of both.

We will convene a concluding panel session, and encourage interested participants to submit abstracts for any of these three paper sessions:

The human labour of digital work Discussant: Mark Graham

The spread of the internet to three and a half billion people around the world has significant implications for the human labour. It is now relatively straightforward to outsource business processes to anyone, anywhere, that has a digital connection. This session aims to bring together scholarship that explores the human labour of this digital work. Who carries it out? How does it effect the livelihoods of workers? What sorts of political and organisational governance regimes bring it into being? And what are the ethical, spatial, social, and economic implications of a world in which human labour is increasing disembedded into digital networks?

The digital labour of being human Discussant: Gillian Rose

Digital technologies are now embedded in many aspects of everyday life in many places, mediating everyday experiences of embodiment, mobility, and communication.  It is clear that many of these mediations are reproducing existing ways and forms of ‘being human’, but it is also clear that new forms of (post)humanities are emerging, co-produced with, for example, VR headsets, big data, and social media platforms.  This session aims to bring together scholarship that addresses these monadic emergences.  What new forms of distributed agency, performative gestures and navigational orientations could and should be mapped?  What are their temporalities and spatialities, and what hierarchies of power and difference do they enact?

The algorithmic labour of being Discussant: Jim Thatcher

Alongside the rise in access to internet technologies and the quotidian uses of said technologies, has come an entwined rise in the analysis and manipulation of digital information through algorithms. Just as new technologies introduce interfaces, mediations, and affordances to (re)produce representations of self, so too do the algorithms which sort, select, and present information constrain what can be done and known through the use of said devices. Similarly, even as the very real geography of the labor of digital work shifts and extends across the globe, algorithms increasingly insert themselves betwixt and between laborers, customers, and corporate interests, altering traditional employment relations through the mediation of technology. Building from the themes of the previous two sessions, this session aims to bring together research on the many ways in which algorithms and quantification function in the world. Questions of interest include, but are not limited to: What sorts of new spatial relations are possible through the algorithmic mediation of labor relations? Where is the work of algorithms done? What are the historical roots of this process? What new forms of knowledge and power have been enabled (and constrained) by these systems?

If you have any additional questions, please contact Jim Thatcher ([email protected]), Mark Graham ([email protected]) or Gillian Rose ([email protected]).

For consideration of inclusion, please submit abstract to [email protected] by October 15th, 2016.  Please format your abstract in a text file of no more than 250 words, including a title, your name, institutional affiliation and email address in the document.

[zerogeography-blog]

New paper: Provenance, Power and Place: Linked Data and Opaque Digital Geographies

Heather Ford and I have a new commentary coming out in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. As places are ever-more augmented by digital content, and the internet becomes ever-more structured by linked data and the semantic web, we ask what this means for the ways in which people interact with everyday places. Specifically, we highlight our concern that non-specialists will have ever-less control over the cities and towns in which they live. 

Full citation 

Ford, H. and Graham, M. 2016. Provenance, Power, and Place: Linked Data and Opaque Digital geographies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. doi:10.1177/0263775816668857 (pre-publication version here).

Abstract

Places are not only material but are also informational. Place is made up of memories, stories, information and histories. What is Johannesburg? It is a city of trees and buildings, concrete and sand. It is also constituted by a myriad statements made by multiple actors, some of which are represented by information in books, in census reports, in tourism leaflets and photographs (Graham et al., 2015). Today, much of that information is digital and available on the Internet. Spatial information is either digitized from analogue sources or in increasingly “born digital” (created as digital data rather than scanned or translated into digital formats) and can take a range of forms such as geotagged images on Instagram, hashtags on Twitter, annotations on Google Maps and Wikipedia articles, in addition to official data from government and corporate sources.

In addition to the enhanced ability of ordinary people to contribute to the digital representations of cities (Goodchild, 2007; Graham, 2013; Hacklay et. al., 2008), we have also seen a growing centralization in the control of platforms that mediate everyday life. Silicon Valley-based Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia have become the most-used websites and digital platforms in most countries, and some scholars (Introna and Nissenbaum, 2000; König, 2014; Morozov, 2013) warn of the dangers of increasing centralization and commercialization of the guiding forces of the Internet.

The power yielded by search engines, in particular, has come under increased scrutiny by researchers in recent years. Introna and Nissenbaum (2000: 1), for example, have shown how search engines “systematically exclude... certain sites, and certain types of sites, in favor of others”. Eli Pariser (2012) argues that search engines drive the construction of “filter bubbles” that only show users information that they agree with. Our increasing reliance on search engines like Google constitutes what Siva Vaidhyanathan (2012) refers to as an “outsourcing” of judgement to Google, particularly because search engines have become critical to the public health of the Internet (König, 2014). As place becomes increasingly digital and the digital becomes increasingly spatialized, Graham and Zook (2013) have shown that informational filter bubbles can manifest into material divisions and barriers.

The goal of this paper is to highlight a new problem. As digital data becomes increasingly abstracted into short data statements that can be shared and interconnected according to logics of “the semantic web” or “linked data, the concentration of power in the hands of search engines has been enhanced still further. We argue that the increased control of search engines over human knowledge has been garnered due to the loss of provenance, or source information, in data sharing algorithms. When the links between information and their sources are severed, users’ capabilities to actively interrogate facts about the world are significantly diminished. Paul Groth (2013) has noted that the loss of provenance information in semantic web projects is a significant challenge (c.f. Groth, 2013) but we explore the socio-spatial implications of this technological change by focusing on what the loss of provenance information means for how people experience and represent place.

We highlight the origins and consequences of the loss of provenance information in the context of the contemporary moment in which the web is being significant re-engineered. What first appears to be merely a simple engineering problem turns out to be indicative of the growing commercialization of the web, a problem that stems from the dominance of an epistemology that sees knowledge about the world as essentially reducible to depoliticized data that is natural and obvious, rather than what it actually is: a re-constructed representation that obscures the origins of information and, in so doing, reduces the ability of ordinary users to interrogate that data. Despite the promise of the move towards a more semantic web (Egenhofer, 2002) for more precise digital representations of place, there has been a parallel decrease in the capabilities of people to interrogate and control that data.

Further reading

Ford, H., and Graham, M. 2016. Semantic Cities: Coded Geopolitics and the Rise of the Semantic Web. In Code and the City. eds. Kitchin, R., and Perng, S-Y. London: Routledge. 200-214.

Graham, M. 2015. Why Does Google Say Jerusalem is the Capital of Israel? Slate.com Nov 30, 2015

Graham, M. 2013. The Virtual Dimension. In Global City Challenges: debating a concept, improving the practice. eds. M. Acuto and W. Steele. London: Palgrave. 117-139.

Graham, M. 2012. The Problem with Wikidata. The Atlantic Apr 6, 2012.

[zerogeography-blog]

Pokémon Go and the Need to Critically Consider Augmented Realities

Pokémon Go is currently taking the world by storm. The game uses smartphones to overlay the material world with digital elements, encouraging users to travel around to different places in order to progress in the game.

The addictive gameplay has led to police departments warning people that they should be more careful about revealing their locations, players injuring themselves, finding dead bodies, and even the Holocaust Museum telling people to play elsewhere!

But I think the game is also worth noting because it offers a nice illustration of some of the themes that Matt Zook, Andrew Boulton, and I wrote about a few years ago in the following piece.

Graham, M., M. Zook., and A. Boulton. 2013. Augmented Reality in Urban Places: contested content and the duplicity of code. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 38(3), 464-479. (pre-publication version here)

In the piece we note that there are four kinds of power that manifest in the coming together of material and virtual spatialities:

Distributed Power: The power of a distributed group of actors to influence what is and isn’t present in our augmented world. In other words, the augmented world is created in the way that it is not because of the decisions of a single actor, but from a network of people (often in opaque and untraceable ways). 

Communication Power: The fact that some actors have more power than others to control and use the digital layers of place. A street takes on very different meanings for those with and without access to digital content. 

Code Power: The ability for code and algorithms to impact how our augmented world are produced and brought into being. 

Timeless Power: The flattening of time. Because of the ways that many augmented digital layers are constructed, time in augmented spaces takes on different temporalities. Some digital layers are relatively static and timeless; others are live. 

These ways of thinking about power and augmented realities are important because digital augmentations are never imposed onto any sort of socially neutral space. There are existing social, economic, and political contexts that influence how people use these augmented spaces. Think for instance, of whether minorities might feel safe in all areas the game leads them to, or - for similar reasons - whether women can augmented their worlds in the same ways men can. 

As ever more of the world becomes augmented, and as ever more people augment their lives with digital content, I hope that we can use (and improve) these ways of thinking about the power-laden practices we bring our augmented worlds into being with. 

[zerogeography-blog]

A short video interview that I did about digital labour markets at the ETUI conference on ‘Shaping the New World of Work’. 

[zerogeography-blog]

Mapping the EU Referendum on Twitter

With the British Eu Referendum vote looming, we decided to take a look at what the sentiment for the remain vs. the leave vote looks like on Twitter.

The map above takes all geotagged tweets that were sent in great Britain between April 15 and June 14 and filters them by pro-leave hashtags (#leave, #britainout, #voteleave, #betteroffout, #no2eu) and pro-remain ones (#hugabrit, #strongerin, #bremain, #pleasedontgouk, #voteremain, #yes2eu, #betteroffin, #ukineu). It was put together by myself and my Oxford Internet Institute colleague Graham McNeil. 

When doing this, we see that most of Great Britain’s Twitter users are far more likely to be using leave rather than remain-related terms. Indeed Scotland is the only part of the country with more remain tweets than leave ones.   

London and Yorkshire come close to parity, with only slightly more leave sentiment than remain sentiment. But the rest of the country is awash in leave tweets. Two parts of the country are even home to twice as many leave tweets as remain ones. 

Because we know exactly when each of these tweets was sent, we could easily see how particular events in the last few months sparked leave and remain activity in different parts of the country (however, this is work for another day).

There are some obvious weaknesses with this approach: we may be missing some key hashtags; use of hashtags isn’t necessarily a good predictor of sentiment (although with the tags we used, I’d argue that it isn’t necessarily a terrible one); and a single tweet could be counted in both camps if it included at least one remain and one leave hashtag.   

If this map does accurately predict the outcome of the forthcoming referendum, and Scotland is indeed the only part of the country favouring a remain vote, it is likely that we’ll be seeing another referendum soon.  

[zerogeography-blog]

The problem with “cyberspace”

Why should we be careful when we use the term “cyberspace” or capitalise the “i” in “internet”? That is the question I tackle in a piece I wrote that traces the history of the word ‘cyberspace’, and argues that it can be unproductive to apply in many contemporary settings.

Graham, M. 2013. Geography/Internet: Ethereal Alternate Dimensions of Cyberspace or Grounded Augmented Realities? The Geographical Journal 179(2) 177-182.

The paper argues that many of the ways in which we discuss, imagine, and envision the internet rely on inaccurate and unhelpful spatial metaphors. In particular, the it focuses on the usage of the ‘cyberspace’ metaphor and outlines why the reliance by contemporary policy makers on this inherently geographic metaphor matters.

The metaphor constrains, enables, and structures very distinct ways of imagining the interactions between people, information, code, and machines through digital networks. These distinct imaginations, in turn, have real effects on how we enact politics and bring places into being.

The paper traces the history of ‘cyberspace,’ explores the scope of its current usage, and highlights the discursive power of its distinct way of shaping our spatial imagination of the internet.

[zerogeography-blog]

Power, politics and digital development (our DSA 2016 sessions)

We’ve pulled together a fantastic group of papers for the upcoming DSA meeting in Oxford:

Convenors

Richard Heeks (University of Manchester) email

Mark Graham (University of Oxford) email

Ben Ramalingam (Institute of Development Studies) email

Short Abstract

Covers the broad intersection of power, politics and digital development including both directionalities - the impact of power and politics on design, diffusion, implementation and outcomes of ICT application; and the impact of ICT application on power and politics - and their mutual interaction.

Long Abstract

Digital Dividends" - the 2016 World Development Report - finds the benefits of digital development to be unevenly distributed, and identifies emergent "digital ills". The cause in both cases is inequalities of power in economic and political arenas including vested interests, digital monopolies, lack of citizen voice vis-a-vis the state, and other factors.

This panel invites papers at the broad intersection of power, politics and digital development including both directionalities - the impact of power and politics on design, diffusion, implementation and outcomes of ICT application; and the impact of ICT application on power and politics - and their mutual interaction.

We welcome work anywhere along the spectrum from the micro-exercise of power within individual ICT4D initiatives through the politics of national ICT-using organisations and institutions to global Internet governance. Other topics for papers might include but are not limited to:

- The organisational politics of ICT4D

- Digital resources as foundations of power in development

- Reproduction and transformation of power and inequality through digital development

- Digital development discourse as a source and reflection of power

- The institutional logics that conflict and contest to shape digital development

- How national and international ICT policies address and express issues of power

Papers

U.S. Foreign Policy and the Internet: Chronicling the Shift from Circumvention to Connectivity

Author: Deniz Duru Aydin (University of Oxford)  

Short Abstract

This paper investigates the evolution of Internet-related U.S. foreign policy and development agenda from Internet freedom to today’s Global Connect Initiative. The reasons for this policy shift are analyzed within the broader global context such as Snowden revelations and the recently adopted SDGs.

Configuring the users adapting the system: participation and ICT4D in Afghanistan

Author: Melanie Stilz (Technical University Berlin)  

Short Abstract

Participation is still almost exclusively defined from a donor perspective. How can those offering their help and resources enable participation by those receiving the support? In this paper I examine how “participation” is interpreted and executed in ICT project in the Afghan education sector.

Critical Agency in Digital Development

Author: Tony Roberts (United Nations University) 

Short Abstract

This paper uses critical theory to extend Sen's capability approach and to argue that key to digital development should be enhancing people's critical-agency i.e. their ability to critique and act upon any power and political constraints on their development.

Digital Politics, Institutional Logics and Development

Author: Richard Heeks (University of Manchester) 

Short Abstract

This paper illustrates, explains and draws conclusions from the six patterns that emerge from growth of digital politics in the global South; patterns of Copy, Spread, Curve, Boost, Shift and Hybrid between dominant competitive and subordinate cooperative institutional logics.

Digital technologies, power, and intermediaries in Myanmar and India

Authors: Elisa Oreglia (SOAS University of London)   Janaki Srinivasan  

Short Abstract

Digital technologies that can disintermediate markets are now common in Myanmar and India and yet intermediaries and traditional practices still dominate rural markets. We explore the resilience of intermediaries and how digital technologies reinforce, and more rarely challenge, existing power hierarchies.

From Open Data to Empowerment: Lessons from Indonesia and the Philippines

Author: Michael Canares (World Wide Web Foundation)  

Short Abstract

Using case studies in the Philippines and Indonesia, this paper explains how and why open data can affect the spaces, places, and forms of power and how it provides avenues for citizens to exert efforts to reclaim its space in decision-making, agenda-setting, and meaning-making.

Identity, transparency and other visibilties: A liquid surveillance perspective of biometric technologies

Author: Shyam Krishna (Royal Holloway, University of London) 

Short Abstract

This paper studies ‘Aadhar’ – India’s national biometric digital identity program under a ‘liquid surveillance’ lens exploring surveillant power and associated politics of the project which seeks a seeming trade-off between citizen privacy and its modernist and developmentalist purpose.

Institutional isomorphism and organized hypocrisy in aid information management systems (AIMS): Case of Indonesia

Author: Kyung Ryul Park (LSE )  

Short Abstract

The study highlights the complexity of aid information management systems (AIMS), and explains its implementation and shutdown. By doing an in-depth qualitative study in Indonesia, it shows that AIMS is not mainly driven by a search for managerialistic gain, but motivated by external pressures.

Points-of-presence: Cloud giants in the datacenter-periphery

Authors: Rupert Brown (Prodiga Research)   

Short Abstract

We show the incursion of the big three cloud providers into African networks and illustrate flows and caches between regional peers. An investigation of Bandwidth-delivery and Security-ownership shows shadow technology, with services and instances, sidestepping local and national control.

Political Power and Digital Payments in a Government Social Social Cash Programme

Author: Atika Kemal (Anglia Ruskin University UK)   

Short Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of political power on the design and implementation of digital payments in a government social cash programme in Pakistan. It adopts an interpretive case study methodology to collect primary data through qualitative methods.

The Dialectics of Open Development

Authors: Yingqin Zheng    Becky Faith (Institute of Development Studies)   

Short Abstract

This paper aims to provide a critical literature review on open development, explore the ideological assumptions, political foundations and economic forces behind open development, examine the challenges and unintended consequences, and consider the dialectics of boundaries in openness.

The Digital Politics of Development and Anonymous Online Power

Author: Brett Matulis (University of Leicester) 

Short Abstract

Development is an inherently political act that is both promoted and disputed through online media. With the rise of the “darknet” and anonymous digital activism, we are witnessing an important shift in power relations and a new phase in digital political resistance to development projects.

The Networkers of Outrage: a Demographic Survey of Indonesian Twitter Activists

Author: Lukas Schlogl (King's College London) 

Short Abstract

This paper explores Twitter protest during a nationwide political controversy about Indonesia’s local direct elections. Drawing on novel survey data, it analyzes geo-demographic and socioeconomic determinants of political Twitter use and evaluates Twitter’s impact on Indonesia’s democracy.

The Struggle for Digital Inclusion: Phones, Healthcare, and Sharp Elbows in India

Author: Marco Haenssgen (Nuffield Department of Medicine) 

Short Abstract

I use an India-wide household panel to explore healthcare marginalisation among digitally excluded and included groups in rural areas. I find that phone diffusion creates a struggle that sharpens the elbows of those who are able to use the devices—provided the health system permits such use.

Unique Identification Number To A Billion Indians: Politics Around Identity, Data Sharing And Analytics

Authors: Ranjini Raghavendra  Shirin Madon (LSE) 

Short Abstract

The paper focusses on issues of Identity, Data Sharing and Analytics within the world’s largest social identity programme namely Aadhar, in India.

What is Free about Free Basics?

Author: Jenna Keenan-Alspector (University of Colorado - Boulder) 

Short Abstract

Investigating how industry giants leverage power and increase inequalities, further straining the resources of the poor; a new 'digital ill' has risen: the emergence of the drug dealer of mobile broadband, Free Basics.