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[blog] Cloud communities and the materiality of the digital (GLOBALCIT project, EUI)

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This invited blog post originally appeared in the forum ‘Cloud Communities: The Dawn of Global Citizenship?’ of the GLOBALCIT project (European University Institute). It is part of an interesting multidisciplinary conversation accessible from the GLOBALCIT website. I wish to thank Rainer Baubock and Liav Orgad for the invitation to contribute to the debate. 

Cloud communities and the materiality of the digital

By Stefania Milan (University of Amsterdam)

As a digital sociologist, I have always found ‘classical’ political scientists and lawyers a tad too reluctant to embrace the idea that digital technology is a game changer in so many respects. In the debate spurred by Liav Orgad’s provocative thoughts on blockchain-enabled cloud communities, I am particularly fascinated by the tension between techno-utopianism on the one hand (above all, Orgad and Primavera De Filippi), and socio-legal realism on the other (e.g., Rainer Bauböck, Michael Blake, Lea Ypi, Jelena Dzankic, Dimitry Kochenov). I find myself somewhere in the middle. In what follows, I take a sociological perspective to explain why there is something profoundly interesting in the notion of cloud communities, why however little of it is really new, and why the obstacles ahead are bigger than we might like to think. The point of departure for my considerations is a number of experiences in the realm of transnational social movements and governance: what we can learn from existing experiments that might help us contextualize and rethink cloud communities?

Three problems with Orgad’s argument

To start with, while I sympathise with Orgad’s provocative claims, I cannot but notice that what he deems new in cloud communities—namely the global dimension of political membership and its networked nature—is indeed rather old. Since the 1990s, transnational social movements for global justice have offered non-territorial forms of political membership—not unlike those described as cloud communities. Similar to cloud communities, these movements were the manifestation of political communities based on consent, gathered around shared interests and only minimally rooted in physical territories corresponding to nation states (see, e.g., Tarrow, 2005). In the fall of 2011 I observed with earnest interest the emergence of yet another global wave of contention: the so-called Occupy mobilisation. As a sociologist of the web, I set off in search for a good metaphor to capture the evolution of organised collective action in the age of social media, and the obvious candidate was… the cloud. In a series of articles (see, for example, here and here) and book chapters (e.g., here and here), I developed my theory of ‘cloud protesting’, intended to capture how the algorithmic environment of social media alters the dynamics of organized collective action. In light of my empirical work, I agree with Bauböck, who acknowledges that cloud communities might have something to do with the “expansion of civil society, of international organizations, or of traditional territorial polities into cyberspace”. He also points out how, sadly, people can express their political views – and, I would add, engage in disruptive actions, as happens at some fringes of the movement for global justice – only because “a secure territorial citizenship” protects their exercise of fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression and association. Hence the questions a sociologist might ask: do we really need the blockchain to enable the emergence of cloud communities? If, as I argue, the existence of “international legal personas” is not a pre-requisite for the establishment of cloud communities, what would the creation of “international legal personas” add to the picture?[1]

Secondly, while I understand why a blockchain-enabled citizenship system would make life easier for the many who do not have access to a regular passport, I am wary of its “institutionalisation”, on account of the probable discrepancies between the ideas (and the mechanisms) associated with a Westphalian state and those of politically active activists and radical technologists alike. On the one hand, citizens interested in “advanced” forms of political participation (e.g., governance and the making of law) might not necessarily be inclined to form a state-like entity. For example, many accounts of the so-called “movement for global justice” (McDonald, 2006; della Porta & Tarrow, 2005) show how “official” membership and affiliation is often not required, not expected and especially not considered desirable. Activism today is characterised by a dislike and distrust of the state, and a tendency to privilege flexible, multiple identities (e.g., Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Juris, 2012; Milan, 2013). On the other hand, the “radical technologists” behind the blockchain project are animated by values—an imaginaire (Flichy, 2007)—deeply distinct from that of the state (see, e.g., Reijers & Coeckelbergh, 2018). While the blockchain technology is enabled by a complex constellation of diverse actors, it is legitimate to ask whether it is possible to bend a technology built with an “underlying philosophy of distributed consensus, open source, transparency and community” with the goal to “be highly disruptive”(Walport, 2015)… to serve similar purposes as those of states?

Thirdly, Orgad’s argument falls short of a clear description of what the ‘cloud’ stands for in his notion of cloud communities. When thinking about ‘clouds’, as a metaphor and a technical term, we cannot but think of cloud computing, a “key force in the changing international political economy” (Mosco, 2014, p. 1) of our times, which entails a process of centralisation of software and hardware allowing users to reduce costs by sharing resources. The cloud metaphor, I argued elsewhere (Milan, 2015), is an apt one as it exposes a fundamental ambivalence of contemporary processes of “socio-legal decentralisation”. While claiming distance from the values and dynamics of the neoliberal state, a project of building blockchain-enabled communities still relies on commercially-owned infrastructure to function.

Precisely to reflect on this ambiguity, my most recent text on cloud protesting interrogates the materiality of the cloud. We have long lived in the illusion that the internet was a space free of geography. Yet, as IR scholar Ron Deibert argued, “physical geography is an essential component of cyberspace: Where technology is located is as important as what it is” (original italics). The Snowden revelations, to name just one, have brought to the forefront the role of the national state in—openly or covertly—setting the rules of user interactions online. What’s more, we no longer can blame the state alone, but the “surveillant assemblage” of state and corporations (Murakami Wood, 2013). To me, the big absent in this debate is the private sector and corporate capital. De Filippi briefly mentioned how the “new communities of kinship” are anchored in “a variety of online platforms”. However, what Orgav’s and partially also Bauböck’s contributions underscore is the extent to which intermediation by private actors stands in the way of creating a real alternative to the state—or at least the fulfilment of certain dreams of autonomy, best represented today by the fascination for blockchain technology. Bauböck rightly notes that “state and corporations… will find ways to instrumentalise or hijack cloud communities for their own purposes”. But there is more to that: the infrastructure we use to enable our interpersonal exchanges and, why not, the blockchain, are owned and controlled by private interests subjected to national laws. They are not merely neutral pipes, as Dumbrava reminds us.

Self-governance in practice: A cautionary tale

To be sure, many experiments allow “individuals the option to raise their voice … in territorial communities to which they do not physically belong”, as beautifully put by Francesca Strumia. Internet governance is a case in point. Since the early days of the internet, cyberlibertarian ideals, enshrined for instance in the ‘Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace’ by late JP Barlow, have attributed little to no role to governments—both in deciding the rules for the ‘new’ space as well as the citizenship of its users (read: the right to participate in the space and in the decision-making about the rules governing it). In those early flamboyant narratives, cyberspace was to be a space where users—but really engineers above all—would translate into practice their wildest dreams in matter of self-governance, self-determination and, to some extent, fairness. While cyberlibertarian views have been appropriated by both conservative (anti-state) and progressive forces alike, some of their founding principles have spilled over to real governance mechanisms—above all the governance of standards and protocols by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the management of the the Domain Name System (DNS) by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).[2] Here I focus on the latter, where I have been active for about four years (2014-2017).

ICANN is organized in constituencies of stakeholders, including contracted parties (the ‘middlemen’, that is to say registries and registrars that on a regional base allocate and manage on behalf of ICANN the names and numbers, and whose relationship with ICANN is regulated by contract), non-contracted parties (corporations doing business on the DNS, e.g. content or infrastructure providers) and non-commercial internet users (read: us). ICANN’s proceedings are fully recorded and accessible from its website; its public meetings, thrice a year and rotating around the globe, are open to everyone who wants to walk in. Governments are represented in a sort of United Nations-style entity called the Government Advisory Committee. While corporate interests are well-represented by an array of professional lobbyists, the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG), which stands in for civil society,[3] is a mix and match of advocates of various extraction, expertise and nationality: internet governance academics, nongovernmental organisations promoting freedom of expression, and independent individuals who take an interest in the functioning of the logical layer of the internet.

The 2016 transition of the stewardship over the DNS from the US Congress to the “global multistakeholder community” has achieved a dream unique in its kind, straight out of the cyberlibertarian vision of the early days: the technical oversight of the internet[4] is in the hands of the people who make and use it, and the (advisory) role of the state is marginal. Accountability now rests solely within the community behind ICANN, which envisioned (and is still implementing) a complex system of checks and balances to allow the various stakeholder voices to be fairly represented. No other critical infrastructure is regulated by its own users. To build on Orgad’s reasoning, the community around ICANN is a cloud community, which operates by voluntary association and consensus [5],[5] and is entitled to produce “governance and the creation of law”.[6]

But the system is far from perfect. Let’s look at how the so-called civil society is represented, focusing on one such entity, the NCSG. Firstly, given that everyone can participate, the variety of views represented is enormous, and often hinders the ability of the constituency to be effective in policy negotiations. Yet, the size of the group is relatively small: at the time of writing, the Non-Commercial User Constituency (the bigger one among the two that form the NCSG) comprises “538 members from 161 countries, including 118 noncommercial organizations and 420 individuals”, making it the largest constituency within ICANN: this is nothing when compared to the global internet population it serves, confirming, as Dzankic argues, that “direct democracy is not necessarily conducive to broad participation in decision-making”. Secondly, ICANN policy-making is highly technical and specialised; the learning curve is dramatically steep. Thirdly, to be effective, the amount of time a civil society representative should spend on ICANN is largely incompatible with regular daily jobs; civil society cannot compete with corporate lobbyists. Fourthly, with ICANN meetings rotating across the globe, one needs to be on the road for at least a month per year, with considerable personal and financial costs.[7] In sum, while participation is in principle open to everyone, informed participation has much higher access barriers, which have to do with expertise, time, and financial resources (see, e.g., Milan & Hintz, 2013).

As a result, we observe a number of dangerous distortions of political representation. For example, when only the highly motivated participate, the views and “imaginaries” represented are often at the opposite ends of the spectrum (cf., Milan, 2014). Only the most involved really partake in decision-making, in a mechanism which is well known in sociology: the “tyranny of structurelessness” (Freeman, 1972), which is typical of participatory, consensus-based organising. The extreme personalisation of politics that we observe within civil society at ICANN—a small group of long-term advocates with high personal stakes—yields also another similar mechanism, known as “the tyranny of emotions” (Polletta, 2002), by which the most invested, independently of the suitability of their curricula vitae, end up assuming informal leadership roles—and, as the case of ICANN shows, even in presence of formal and carefully weighted governance structures. Decision-making is thus based on a sort of “microconsensus” within small decision-making cliques (Gastil, 1993).[8] To make things worse, ICANN is increasingly making exceptions to its own, community-established rules, largely under the pressure of corporations as well as law enforcement: for example, the corporation has recently been accused of bypassing consensus policy-making through voluntary agreements ad private contracting.

Why not (yet?): On new divides and bad players

In conclusion, while I value the possibilities the blockchain technology opens for experimentation as much as Primavera De Filippi, I do not believe it will really solve our problems in the short to middle-term. Rather, as it is always with technology because of its inherent political nature (cf., Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, 2012), new conflicts will emerge—and they will concern both its technical features and its governance.

Earlier contributors to this debate have raised important concerns which are worth listening to. Besides Bauböck’s concerns over the perils for democracy represented by a consensus-based, self-governed model, endorsed also by Blake, I want to echo Lea Ypi’s reminder of the enormous potential for exclusion embedded in technologies, as digital skills (but also income) are not equally distributed across the globe. For the time being, a citizenship model based on blockchain technology would be for the elites only, and would contribute to create new divides and to amplify existing ones. The first fundamental step towards the cloud communities envisioned by Orgad would thus see the state stepping in (once again) and being in charge of creating appropriate data and algorithmic literacy programmes whose scope is out of reach for corporations and the organised civil society alike.

There is more to that, however. The costs to our already fragile ecosystem of the blockchain technology are on the rise along with its popularity. These infrastructures are energy-intensive: talking about the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, tech magazine Motherboard estimated that each transaction consumes 215 Kilowatt-hour of electricity—the equivalent of the weekly consumption of an American household. A world built on blockchain would have a vast environmental footprint (see also Mosco, 2014). Once again, the state might play a role in imposing adequate regulation mindful of the environmental costs of such programs.

But I do not intend to glorify the role of the state. On the contrary, I believe we should also watch out for any attempts by the state to curb innovation. The relatively brief history of digital technology, and even more that of the internet, is awash with examples of late but extremely damaging state interventions. As soon as a given technology performs roles or produces information that are of interest to the state (e.g., interpersonal communications), the state wants to jump in, and often does so in pretty clumsy ways. The recent surveillance scandals have abundantly shown how state powers firmly inhabit the internet (cf., Deibert, 2009; Deibert, Palfrey, Rohozinski, & Zittrain, 2010; Lyon, 2015)—and, as the Cambridge Analytica case reminds us, so do corporate interests. Moreover, the two are, more often than not, dangerously aligned.

I do not intend, with my cautionary tales, to hinder any imaginative effort to explore the possibilities offered by blockchain to rethink how we understand and practice citizenship today. The case of Estonia shows that different models based on alternative infrastructure are possible, at least on the small scale and in presence of a committed state. As scholars we ought to explore those possibilities. Much work is needed, however, before we can proclaim the blockchain revolution.

References

Bennett, L. W., & Segerberg, A. (2013). The Logic of Connective Action Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bijker, W. E., Hughes, T. P., & Pinch, T. (Eds.). (2012). The Social Construction of Technological Systems. New Direction in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press.

Deibert, R. J. (2009). The geopolitics of internet control: censorship, sovereignty, and cyberspace. In A. Chadwick & P. N. Howard (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics (pp. 323–336). London: Routledge.

Deibert, R. J., Palfrey, J. G., Rohozinski, R., & Zittrain, J. (Eds.). (2010). Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

della Porta, D., & Tarrow, S. (Eds.). (2005). Transnational Protest and Global Activism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Flichy, P. (2007). The internet imaginaire. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Freeman, J. (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

Gastil, J. (1993). Democracy in Small Groups. Participation, Decision Making & Communication. Philadelphia, PA and Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.

Juris, J. S. (2012). Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation. American Ethnologist, 39(2), 259–279.

Lyon, D. (2015). Surveillance After Snowden. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.

McDonald, K. (2006). Global Movements: Action and Culture. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.

Milan, S. (2013). WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and the exercise of individuality: Protesting in the cloud. In B. Brevini, A. Hintz, & P. McCurdy (Eds.), Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (pp. 191–208). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Milan, S. (2015). When Algorithms Shape Collective Action: Social Media and the Dynamics of Cloud Protesting. Social Media + Society, 1(1).

Milan, S., & Hintz, A. (2013). Networked Collective Action and the Institutionalized Policy Debate: Bringing Cyberactivism to the Policy Arena? Internet & Policy, 5, 7–26.

Milan, S., & ten Oever, N. (2017). Coding and encoding rights in internet infrastructure. Internet Policy Review, 6(1).

Mosco, V. (2014). To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World. New York: Paradigm Publishers.

Murakami Wood, D. (2013). What Is Global Surveillance?: Towards a Relational Political Economy of the Global Surveillant Assemblage. Geoforum, 49, 317–326.

Polletta, F. (2002). Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Reijers, W., & Coeckelbergh, M. (2018). The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies. Philosophy & Technology, 31(1), 103–130.

Tarrow, S. (2005). The New Transnational Activism. New York: Cambridge University.

Walport, M. (2015). Distributed Ledger Technology: Beyond blockchain. London: UK Government Office for Science. London: UK Government Office for Science.

Notes:

[1] I am aware that there is a fundamental drawback in social movements when compared to cloud communities: unlike the latter, the former are not rights providers. However, these are the questions one could ask taking a sociological perspective.

[2] The system of unique identifiers of the DNS comprises the so-called “names”, standing in for domain names (e.g., www.eui.eu), and “numbers”, or Internet Protocol (IP) addresses (e.g., the “machine version” of the domain name that a router for example can understand). The DNS can be seen as a sort of “phone book” of the internet.

[3] Technically, of the DNS, which is only a portion of what we call “the internet”, although the most widely used one.

[4] Civil society representation in ICANN is more complex than what is described here. The NCSG is composed of two (litigious) constituencies, namely the Non-Commercial User Constituency (NCUC) and the Non-Profit Operational Concerns (NPOC). In addition, “non-organised” internet users can elect their representatives in the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), organised on a regional basis. The NCSG, however, is the only one who directly contributes to policy-making.

[5] ICANN is both a nonprofit corporation registered under Californian law, and a community of volunteers who set the rules for the management of the logical layer of the internet by consensus. See also the ICANN Bylaws (last updated in August 2017).

[6] This should at least in part address Post’s doubts about the ability of a political community to govern those outside of its jurisdiction. One might argue that internet users are, perhaps unwillingly or simply unconsciously, within the “jurisdiction” of ICANN. I do believe, however, that the case of ICANN is an interesting one for its being in between the two “definitions” of political communities.

[7] ICANN allocates consistent but not sufficient resources to support civil society participation in its policymaking. These include travel bursaries and accommodation costs and fellowship programs for induction of newcomers.

[8] Although a quantitative analysis of the stickiness of participation in relation to discursive change reveals a more nuanced picture (see, for example, Milan & ten Oever, 2017).

 

[blog] Tech, data and social change: A plea for cross-disciplinary engagement, historical memory, and … Critical Community Studies

Kersti R. Wissenbach | March 2018

It has been a while since I first got my feet into the universe of technology and socio-political change. Back then, coming from a critical development studies and communication science background, I was fascinated by the role community radio could play in fostering dialogue among communities in remote areas, and between those communities and their government representatives.

My journey started in the early 2000s, in the most remote parts of Upper West Ghana, with Radio Progress, a small community radio station doing a great job in embracing diversity. Single feature mobile phones were about to become a thing in the country and the radio started to experiment with call-in programs for engaging its citizens in live discussions with local politicians. Before, radio volunteers would drive to the different villages in order to collect people’s concerns, and only then bring those recorded voices back into a studio-based discussion with invited politicians. The community could merely listen in as their concerns were discussed. With the advent of mobile phones, people suddenly could do more than just passively listen to the responses: finally they could engage in real-time dialogue with their representatives, hearing their own voices on air. Typically, people were gathering with family and other community members during the call-in hours to voice their concerns collectively. Communities would not only raise concerns, but also share positive experiences with local representatives following up on their requests. These stories encouraged neighbouring communities to also get involved in the call-in programs to raise their concerns and needs to be addressed.

Fast forward to today and much has changed on the ‘tech for social change’ horizon, at least if we listen to donor agendas and the dominant discourses in the field and in the academia. But what has really changed is largely one thing: the state of technology [1]. In the space of two decades, our enthusiasm, and donor attention, fixed on the ubiquity of mobile technologies, followed by online (crowdsourcing) platforms, social media, everything data (oh, wait … BIG data), and blockchain technology.

Whilst much of what has changed in these regards over the last few decades can be bundled under the Information and Communication for Development (ICT4D) label, one aspect seems to remain constant: change, if it is meant to happen and last, has to be rooted in the contexts and needs of those it intends to address. This is the ultimate ingredient for direct and inclusive engagement of the so-called civil society. Like a cake that needs yeast to rise, no matter whether we add chocolate or lemon, socio-political change in the interest of the people requires the buy-in of the people, no matter what tech is on the menu at a certain moment in time, and in a certain place of the world.

We have learnt many lessons along the way, and we had to sometimes learn them the hard way. Some are condensed in initiatives such as the Principles for Digital Development, a living set of principles helping practitioners engaging with the role of technologies in social or political change programs to learn from past experiences, in order to avoid falling into the same traps – be it of technological, political, and/or ethical nature.

We have observed an upsurge in ‘civic’ users of technologies for facilitating people’s direct engagement in governance, coupled with an emphasis on ‘open government models’. Much of this work emerged in parallel to or from earlier ICT4D experiences, and largely taps into the same funding structures. The lessons learned should be a shared heritage in the field. With various early programs coming to an end, this transnational community of well-intended practitioners, many of which have been involved in what we have earlier called ICT4D work, is now reflecting on the effectiveness of technology in promoting civil society participation in governance dynamics. What puzzles me year after year, however, is how practitioners of civic tech and open government, currently producing ‘first lessons learned’ on the effectiveness of technology in civil society participation in governance, are largely reproducing what we already know, and thus lessons we should have learnt. As critical as I am towards project work driven by traditional development cooperation, all this leaves me wondering what is novel, if anything, in these newest networks – largely breathing from the same funding pots.

New developments in the tech field do not liberate us from the responsibility to learn from what has already been learned – and build on it. The lessons learnt in decades of development communication and ICT4D works evidently cut across technological innovations, and apply to mobile technology as much as to the blockchain. Most importantly: different socio-political contexts call for personalized solutions, given the challenges remain distinct and increase in complexity, as we can see in the growing literature on critical data studies (see e.g. Dalton et al., 2016; Kitchin and Lauriault, 2014).

The critical role of proactive communities, their contexts and needs in fostering social or political change has been discussed since decades. Besides, as the Radio Progress anecdote shows, it applies across technologies. Sadly, once again, the dominant civic tech discourse seems to keep departing from the ‘tech’ rather than the ‘civic’. Analyses start off from the technology-in-governance side, rather than from the much-needed critical discourse of the fundamental role of power in governance: how it is constructed, reproduced, and distributed.

Departing from the aseptic end of the spectrum confines us to a tech-centric perspective, with all the limitations highlighted since the early days of Communication for Social Change and ICT4D critique. Instead, we should reflect on how power structures are seeded and nourished from within the very same communities. This relates to issues such as geographical as much as skill-related biases, originating patterns of exclusion that no technology alone can solve. Those biases are then reproduced, not solved, by technological solutions which aim would be, instead, to enable inclusive forms of governance.

For the civic tech field to move forward, we should move beyond an emphasis on feedback allocation and end-users ultimately centring on the technological component; we should instead adopt a broader perspective in which we recognise the user not merely as a tech consumer/adopter, but as a complex being embedded in civil society networks and power structures. We, therefore, should ask critical questions beyond technology and about communities instead; we should ask ourselves, for example, how to best integrate people’s needs and backgrounds across all stages of civic tech programs. Such a perspective should include a critical examination of who the driving forces of the civic tech community are and how they do subsequently affect decision-making on the development of infrastructures. What is crucial to understand, I argue, is that only inclusive communities can really translate inclusive technology approaches and, consequently, inclusive governance.

From the perspective of an academic observer, a disciplinary evolution is in order too, if we are to capture, understand, and critically contribute to these dynamics. The proposed shift of focus from the ‘tech’ to the ‘civic’ should be mirrored in the literature with a new sub-field, which we may call Critical Community Studies. Emerging at the crossroad of disciplines such as Social Movement Studies, Communication for Social Change, and Critical Data Studies, Critical Community Studies would encourage to taking the community as an entry point in the study of technology for social change. This means, in a case such as the civic tech community, addressing issues such as internal diversity, inclusiveness of decision-making processes, etc. and ways of different ways of engaging people. It also relates to the roots of decisions made in civic tech projects, and in how far those communities, supposed to benefit from certain decisions, have a seat on the table. More generally, Critical Community Studies should invite to critically reflect on the concept of inclusion, both for practitioner agendas and academic frameworks. It would also encourage us to contextualize, take a step back and ask difficult questions, departing from critical development and communication studies (see e.g. Enghel, 2014; Freire, 1968; Rodriguez, 2016) , while taking a feminist perspective (see e.g. Haraway, 1988; Mol, 1999).

Since such a disciplinary evolution cannot but happen in dialogue with existing approaches and thinkers, I would wish to see this post to evolve into a vibrant, cross-disciplinary conversation on how a Critical Community Studies could look like.

 

I would like to thank Stefania Milan for very valuable and in-depth feedback and insights whilst writing this post.

 

 

Cited work

Dalton CM, Taylor L and Thatcher (alphabetical) J (2016) Critical Data Studies: A dialog on data and space. Big Data & Society 3(1): 2053951716648346. DOI: 10.1177/2053951716648346.

Enghel F (2014) Communication, Development, and Social Change: Future Alternatives. In: Global communication: new agendas in communication. Routledge, pp. 129–141.

Freire P (1968) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Haraway D (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599. DOI: 10.2307/3178066.

Kitchin R and Lauriault T (2014) Towards Critical Data Studies: Charting and Unpacking Data Assemblages and Their Work. ID 2474112, SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2474112 (accessed 19 March 2018).

Mol A (1999) Ontological politics. A word and some questions. The Sociological Review 47(S1): 74–89. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1999.tb03483.x.

Rodriguez C (2016) Human agency and media praxis: Re-centring alternative and community media research. Journal of Alternative and Community Media 1(0): 36–38.

 

1 I am consciously not using the innovation term here since I truly believe that innovation can only be what truly features into people’s contexts and needs. Innovation, then, is not to be confused with the latest tech advancement or hype.

[blog] Facebook newsfeed changes: Three hypotheses to look into the future

Image: Vincenzo Cosenza

In this blog post, DATACTIVE research associate Antonio Martella is looking forward to the consequences of Facebook’s news feed modifications as result of larger corporate policy changes. He investigates and discusses implications through three hypotheses: 1) the divide between the attention-rich and the attention poor will grow 2) increasing engagement with peer-created content will tighten the filter bubble aspect of networking and 3) the “new” news feed will have a negative impact on users’ mood.

Guest Author: Antonio Martella

On November 11th, 2017, Facebook has announced that the user timeline will change in January 2018. In their words:

“With this update, we will also prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people. To do this, we will predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about and show these posts higher in the feed. These are posts that inspire back-and-forth discussion in the comments and posts that you might want to share and react to – whether that’s a post from a friend seeking advice, a friend asking for recommendations for a trip, or a news article or video prompting lots of discussions. […] We will also prioritize posts from friends and family over public content, consistent with our News Feed values.” (Newsroom Facebook 2018)

Any modification in the feed algorithm will have many consequences, and these are not equally predictable. Facebook is a very complicated environment, semi-public in nature and not only related to friendship management. In fact, as the Pew Research Center reported last September, 67% of Americans consume news over social media. This pattern seems to apply to the European news consumption too, where youngsters are exposed to news mostly in a social media context rather than television or newspaper. Indeed, as the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2017 shows, many users follow others because of the news they share.

According to the Pew Research Report, Facebook surpasses other social media as a source of news consumption. This is partially due to the large userbase Facebook has, and partially because news is actually interwoven with people’s timelines. The Digital News Report also shows that exposure to news in Facebook is often incidental; a direct result of news shared by other users, a wide range of news companies that are followed, etc. Notwithstanding, we need to keep in mind that exposure to any content in social media or search engines is algorithm-driven.

Following these considerations, there are several possible consequences to the Facebook news feed changes. This blogpost invests into three probable implication, being

  1. the divide between the attention-rich and the attention poor will grow;
  2. continuous personalisation;
  3. negative impact on users’ mood

1. The divide between the attention-rich and the attention poor will grow

All pages and groups that share content on Facebook will lose visibility and revenues that come from users reading their posts, clicking their links, and visiting their websites1. It’s easy to guess that those who want to remain visible have two choices: either pay more for Facebook ads in order to make their posts visible; or create more engaging content. But the generated engagement in Facebook is deeply connected with the number of followers. This will probably increase the gap between attention reach and attention poor, which is in line with the observed Matthew effect (Merton, 1968) that rules many patterns and practices online (Barabasi, 2013) and in social media.

In fact, many aspects of the society both online and offline are governed by the preferential attachment process that stays behind the so-called “Matthew effect” or the “80/20 rule”. Hence, the more connection you have the more visible you are, and the more new connections you would get as a consequence. This principle can easily be illustrated by the fact that famous websites and people tend to have more followers on social media. But the other way around is equally true: the fewer connection you have, the less attention you would get. In conclusion, contents produced by people or organizations with less power/resources and with lower budgets will decrease in visibility.

2. Continuous personalisation

The second consequence of the news feed change deals with the kind of content that will be dominant in users’ feeds. According to Mark Zuckerberg, content produced and shared by “friends and family” will be more visible in all Facebook timelines. But a news feed dominated by friends’ posts could arguably exacerbate two negative social media aspects, previously expressed through notions of the filter bubbles and the echo chamber. Online social networks developed in social media platforms are strongly based on homophily (Barberà, 2014; Aiello et al 2012) meaning that users connect with others who share similar interests, values, political views, etc. This typical behaviour is also found in offline social networks (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, Cook, 2001), and shows its most problematic characteristics when focusing on information diffusion.

On the one hand, this change will foster the filter bubble in which we are all involved. In fact, filter bubbles (Pariser, 2011) are the result of users’ activities on the web: social media algorithms which continuously learn from every users’ clicks and likes2. On the other hand, more homophily in social media due to the prevalence of “friends and family contents” could easily sustain the echo chamber effect. This phenomenon preceded social media platforms, for like-minded people love to talk to each other fostering their opinions and biases. However, in social media, it is easier to avoid a contrasting point of views, values, or interests as a consequence of the self-selection of “friends”, pages, and groups. Indeed, as research has highlighted, there is a user tendency to promote their favourite narratives and to form polarised groups on Facebook (Quattrociocchi, Scala, Sunstein 2016; Bakshy, Messing, Adamic, 2015) even though it is not a clear and deterministic process (Barberà et al. 2015).

Based on these last considerations, another outcome of news feed changes will be a growth in the visibility of friends’ opinions and points of view. This will most probably result in more polarised information flow in users’ news feeds and a limited number of different point of views and professional (or semi-professional) content. In practice this means that if we would think about a contested news like glyphosate and cancer causation, we have to take in account that information sources will be more socially driven; the chance to read a different point of views and professional news will be smaller than before.

3. Negative impact on users’ mood

The news feed changes will probably influence the mood of billions of people in an inscrutable way. One can say that a news feed more populated by friend’s content would have a negative impact on happiness. According to Mark Zuckerberg “the research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being”. In fact, according to an experiment conducted on users timeline (Kramer, Guillory, Hancock, 2013) content on the users’ timeline does indeed influences their mood. As many researchers have shown, personal feelings (happiness, depression, etc.) flow through offline social networks (Fowler, Christakis, 2008) and their representation in online environments seems to share similar diffusion patterns. In other words: moods contagiously spread online. And in extension, recent scholarly and non-scholarly work shows that scrolling through your Facebook feed can have a negative impact on well-being (Shakya, Christakis, 2017)3. Lastly, it has been demonstrated that the constant bombardment of everyone’s news, biases the attempt to provide the best representation of the self and it seems to have a negative impact on happiness.

Questions to ask

Throughout the hypothesis, I have tried to show some real-life aspects that might be affected by the important changes on Facebook algorithms. As Facebook stated, there are around 2 billion active users on its platform monthly.

These statements subsequently evoke two questions:

  1. Can these changes be made by a private company without any form of public discussion?
  2. Is it our democratic right to scrutinize algorithms as organiser of public space?

Further information on how Facebook algorithms work can be found here: an interesting article edited by Share Lab that has tried to shed some light on what is behind this platform.

 

References

Aiello, Luca Maria, Barrat, Alain, Schifanella, Rossano, Cattuto, Ciro, Markines, Benjamin, Menczer, Filippo. 2012. Friendship prediction and homophily in social media. ACM Trans. Web 6, 2, Article 9, 33 p. 66.

Bakshy, Eytan, Messing, Solomon, Adamic, Lada A. 2015.Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook in Science 05 Jun 2015: Vol. 348, Issue 6239, pp. 1130-1132.

Pariser, Eli, 2012, The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You, Penguin: London.

Quattrociocchi, Walter, Scala, Antonio, Sunstein, Cass R. 2013. Echo Chambers on Facebook. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2795110.

Shakya, Holly B., Christakis, Nicholas A. 2017. Association of Facebook Use With Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study in American Journal of Epidemiology, 185:3, pp. 203–211.

Rogers, Richard, 2015. Digital Methods for Web Research, in Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource (ed. Scott, Roberts; Buchmann, Marlis C.; Kosslyn Stephan), Wiley & Sons: New York

 

  1. For example, this is exactly what happened to the blog LittleThings. This blog had to shut down a month after the news feed change due to the web traffic drop.
  2. This is already happening as an Italian experiment on Facebook have partially shown during the last Italian election (link, unfortunately only in Italian). According to this experiment, Facebook news feed shows different kind of content and media (photo, video, web links) based on likes, comment and shares of each user. Indeed, according to Facebook statements, proposed content will be more based on each user’s intention to interact (algorithmically predicted) fostering the visibility of tailored content.
  3. For example «Liking others’ content and clicking links posted by friends were consistently related to compromised well-being, whereas the number of status updates was related to reports of diminished mental health» (Shakya, Christakis, 2017, p. 210).

 

On the author: Antonio is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Pisa. His research focus is political leaders populism in social media. His approach coincides with the Digital Methods for Web Research recommendations (Rogers, 2015), and he is particularly interested in social media algorithms and their effects.

luncheon seminar with Angela Daly (March 21, 1 pm)

On Tuesday March 21th, DATACTIVE will host an informal luncheon seminar with socio-legal scholar and activist Angela Daly (Queensland University of Technology & Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society). You are welcome to join! Angela will give a presentation titled ‘reflections on socio-legal studies (and activism) of data’. For more info, you can find Angela’s paper ‘Data and Fundamental Rights’ (2017) here, and visit Angela’s website: https://angeladaly.com/

Bio

I am a socio-legal scholar of technology with interest in the Internet, 3D Printing and renewable energy. I am Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in Queensland University of Technology’s Faculty of Law, and a research associate at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT) in the Netherlands. My books, Socio-Legal Aspects of the 3D Printing Revolution, published by Palgrave Macmillan, and Private Power, Online Information Flows and EU Law: Mind the Gap, published by Hart, are out now!

BigBang hackaton in London, March 17-18

This weekend the DATACTIVE team will be joining the IETF101 hackathon to work on quantitative mailing-list analysis software. The Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) is the oldest and most important Internet standard setting body. The discussions and decisions of the IETF have fundamentally shaped the Internet. All IETF mailing-lists and output documents are publicly available. They represent a true treasure for digital sociologist to understand how the Internet infrastructure and architecture developed over time. To facilitate this analysis DATACTIVE has been contributing to the development of BigBang, a Python-based automated quantitative mailinglists tool. Armed with almost 40 gigabyte worth of data in the form of plain text files, we are eager to boldly discover what no one has discovered before. By the way, we still have some (open) issues, feel free to contribute on Github 🙂

Lonneke at NPO1 on Sousveillance

Lonneke was invited to briefly discuss her sousveillance on the radio at the program Focus, at Nederlandse Publieke Omroep 1.

Find the recording/podcast here (3 minutes, in Dutch):

If you are on the internet, you must assume that you are being watched. You always leave traces. But who is watching all of them? Who keeps track of what you click on, which websites you visit and what searches you type in? And what do they do with it?

Lonneke van der Velden obtained her doctorate in February at the University of Amsterdam for an investigation into internet surveillance and turned the matter around: what happens when the person being spied peeks back?

[blog] Internet Archive and Hacker Ethics: Answers to datafication from the hacktivist world

Guest author: Silvia Semenzin

This blogpost looks into the Internet Archive as a case-study to discuss hacktivism as a form of resistance to instances of control on the Internet and the use of data for political and commercial purposes. It argues hacktivism should not only be considered a social movement, but also an emerging culture informed by what may be defined as ‘hacker ethics’, after Pekka Himanen.

The Internet Archive is a free digital library founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer at MIT, who created a non-profit project which aims to collect cultural artefacts (books, images, movies, audio, etc.) and internet pages to promote human knowledge. Building a “global brain” can be challenging in the era of datafication and the Information Society, especially because huge amounts of information (and disinformation) are added on the internet continuously. Trying to create a modern version of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Internet Archive’s goal is to make human knowledge accessible to everybody and preserve all kinds of documents. So far, the Internet Archive has digitalized more than 3 million of books, still scanning around 1000 books per day.

The Internet Archive in both strategies and business model seems to appeal to ‘hacker ethics’ as described by the Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen through the hacker ethics of work, hacker ethics of money, and hacker ethics of the network:

1. For Himanen, ‘Hacker ethics of work’ describes passion in work, the freedom to organize one’s time, and creativity -which is the combination of the first two: for hackers, working with passion is the final purpose. This means that financial motivations are not of primary importance. Instead, they are just a result of work.
2. Benefits are measured in both passionate effort and social value, both features of the ‘hacker ethics of money’. This means that the work of a hacker must be recognized by the hacker community and that it must be accessible and open to everyone. This represents the vision of an open and horizontal model of knowledge, similar to the one at the Academy of Plato, which was based on a continuous and critical debate to reach scientific truths, even though many could argue that, in general, hacker culture is still not that open and horizontal (e.g. hostility to non-white male identities). However, projects such as Internet Archive seem to follow this model of shared knowledge for the sake of science.
3. Finally, the ‘hacker ethics of the network’ refers to the relationship between hackers and the Internet. On the one hand, from this relationship stems the value of the free activity, which indicates the act of defending total freedom of expression on the internet. On the other hand, hackers do also worry about involving everyone in the digital community and make the Network free and accessible to everybody (crypto parties are born as a result of this idea). This value is known as ‘social responsibility’.

Applied to the Internet Archive, it seems to draw on three strategies, in particular, that of participation and anonymity by default and non-profit business model. By doing so, the Internet Archive is defending the freedom of information, a fundamental right that needs protection in both the offline and the online world. To make sure that there is freedom of information, it is necessary to involve as many people as possible in the sharing of knowledge. Anyone can read and upload material to the website, thereby taking part in building a global digital library. Secondly, Freedom of information, freedom of expression and the right to anonymity are built in the Internet Archive by design and align with hacker ethics values. The Internet Archive does not track their user; they do not keep the Internet Protocol (IP) address of readers and make use of a secure web protocol (https). The website does not use data from users, not even for marketing: being a non-profit library, Internet Archive is funded on donations instead of advertising, or the collection/selling of personal data.

In extension, it could be argued that the Internet Archive with these anonymity and participatory practices often opposes larger datafication processes. The processes of datafication of society, recently observed in the rise of platforms and apps, implies that our financial habits, personal communication, movement, social network and political and religious orientation will translate into data. The availability of significant amounts of data raises questions concerning their usage by governments and corporations. Their access to Big Data might have a negative effect on both individuals and communities, by increasingly turning citizens into consumers, thereby sustaining a certain form of control. Fundamental rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of association or right to privacy seem growingly threatened by the collection and analysis of large data sets.

Guided by these values, hacktivists often criticize the use of technology and Big Data as it would go against their ethics, and try to spread hacker ethics using different a kind of action. Among the heterogeneity of hacktivist action, the Internet Archive can represent a good example of hacker ethics, as well as a powerful project born to defend freedom of knowledge and digital rights. These kinds of initiatives are relevant when researching for hacktivism and datafication because they illustrate how hacker ethics may be spreading the awareness concerning issues of datafication.

References

Himanen, P. (2002). Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Society. Prologue by LinusTorvalds. Destino

Hintz, A., Dencik, L., & Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2017). Digital Citizenship and Surveillance| Digital Citizenship and Surveillance Society—Introduction. International Journal of Communication, 11, 9.

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine. (n.d.). Retrieved 22 February 2018, from https://archive.org/index.php

Milan, S. & Atton, C. (2015). Hacktivism as a radical media practice. Routledge companion to alternative and community media, 550-560.

Noah C.N. Hampson (2012), ‘Hacktivism: A New Breed of Protest in a Networked World’ 35 B.C. Int’l & Comp. L. Rev. 511, http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/iclr/vol35/iss2/6 accessed 05/02/2018

 

About Silvia

Silvia Semenzin is a DATACTIVE research associate and PhD student in Sociology at the University of Milan. She is currently researching hacktivism and hacker ethics and is interested in the influence that digital technologies have on political action, public debate and citizens’ mobilization as instruments for democracy.

fresh out of the press: Political Agency, Digital Traces, and Bottom-Up Data Practices

The article ‘Political Agency, Digital Traces, and Bottom-Up Data Practices’ by Stefania Milan has been published in the International Journal of Communication, in a special section on ‘Digital Traces in Context’, edited by Andreas Hepp, Andreas Breiter, Thomas N. Friemel. It is open access 🙂

Abstract. This theoretical article explores the bottom-up data practices enacted by individuals and groups in the context of organized collective action. Conversing with critical media theory, the sociology of social movements, and platform studies, it asks how activists largely reliant on social media for their activities can leverage datafication and mobilize social media data in their tactics and narratives. Using the notion of digital traces as a heuristic tool to understand the dynamics between platforms and their users, the article reflects on the concurrent materiality and discursiveness of digital traces and analyzes the evolution of political agency vis-à-vis the datafied self. It contributes to our understanding of “digital traces in context” by foregrounding human agency and the meaning-making activities of individuals and groups. Focusing on the possibilities opened up by digital traces, it considers how activists make sense of the ways in which social media structure their interactions. It shows how digital traces trigger a quest for visibility that is unprecedented in the social movement realm, and how they can function as particular “agency machines.”

Activism through feminist understandings of technology, Stefania Milan @Uppsala University

February 12th, 2018, – Stefania Milan presented her work titled “Studying mediated activism through feminist understandings of technology” at the Uppsala University. The presentation is part of the first panel, Intersectionality beyond feminist studies, in the Experiences of Inclusion and Exclusion seminar on Intersectionality. Please find the abstract of her talk below.

Seminar aim

This seminar will focus on intersectionality and how the different forms of discrimination and exclusion combine, overlap, or intersect by examining intersectionality in and beyond feminist studies as well as in political practices. Additionally, the seminar is interested in contributions that expand the concept and praxis of intersectionality in media studies as a tool to analyse the complexity of multiple identities and their relations to power in a mediated social world.

The seminar on intersectionality invites contributions from a wide range of disciplines as well as from activists, civil society, media and public sector to share knowledge, practices, alternatives and ideas on issues related to contextual dynamics of power, inequalities and marginalised communities.

Abstract of talk

Studying activism entails relating to and writing about vulnerable subjects, both groups and individuals. Vulnerability takes many forms, often intersecting known categories of discrimination such as gender, race and sexual orientation and class; what’s more, often activists are subject to surveillance and repression, often perpetrated and/or facilitated through digital technology. Working with vulnerable subjects such as activists calls for setting up appropriate additional safeguards that have consequences, at two levels: ontological/epistemological and ethical/methodological.

While (new) media studies applied to activism have often considered media as an empowering force able to shape activism for the better, feminist theories of technology emerged along the axis of Science and Technology Studies (STS) might help us to take into account as well as contextualize forms of discrimination that exist within and/or are perpetuated through digital technology. This contribution reflects on what can we learn from STS for the study of contemporary activism, with a focus on tech and data activism.