Stefaan Verhulst

Slacktivism

Curated on May 18, 2013December 7, 2022 by Stefaan Verhulst

A pejorative term that belittles easily performed activities that do not express a full–blown political commitment.

Research featured in the New Scientist focuses on the impact of so-called “slacktivism”, or “low-cost, low-risk online activism,” on subsequent civic action. A detailed analysis of slacktivism was developed by Henrik Serup Christensen in his 2011 paper in First Monday where he defined the concept and its origin as follows:

“Slacktivism has become somewhat of a buzzword when it comes to demeaning the electronic versions of political participation. The origins of the term slacktivism is debated, but Fred Clark takes credit for using the term in 1995 in a seminar series held together with Dwight Ozard. However, they used it to shorten slacker activism, which refer to bottom up activities by young people to affect society on a small personal scale used. In their usage, the term had a positive connotation.

Today, the term is used in a more negative sense to belittle activities that do not express a full–blown political commitment. The concept generally refer to activities that are easily performed, but they are considered more effective in making the participants feel good about themselves than to achieve the stated political goals. Slacktivism can take other expressions, such as wearing political messages in various forms on your body or vehicle, joining Facebook groups, or taking part in short–term boycotts such as Buy Nothing Day or Earth Hour.”

The research featured in the New Scientist comprises work by Yu-Hao Lee and Gary Hsieh, both from Michigan State University, who analyzed the effects of slacktivism following (using the description of the New Scientist) “the Colorado cinema shootings in 2012, which had prompted wide debate over access to firearms. Hsieh’s team recruited 759 US participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace and surveyed them for their position on gun control. They asked people if they would sign an e-petition to either ban assault rifles or expand access to guns. Some of the participants then had the opportunity to donate to a group that was pro or against gun control. Another group, including people from both sides of the gun debate, were asked to donate to an education charity.”

“We found that participants who signed the online petition were significantly more likely to donate money to a related charity, demonstrating a consistency effect. We also found that participants who did not sign the petition donated significantly more money to an unrelated charity , demonstrating a moral balancing effect. The results suggest that exposure to an online activism influences individual decision on subsequent civic actions.”

These two psychological effects provide additional insight on whether or not slacktivism is damaging real citizen engagement and potentially replacing meaningful action – as suggested in the below UNICEF video–part of a series titled “Likes Don’t Save Lives”:

UK Report: Public Data Will Boost Business

Curated on May 17, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tech Europe (WSJ): “The report into public data commissioned by the department for Business, Innovation and Skills said that creating an open national database would benefit both the U.K.’s private and public sectors. Data will be a core resource in the future, said Stephan Shakespeare, chair of the U.K.’s Data Strategy Board and the report’s author….
An analysis by Deloitte accompanying Mr. Shakespeare’s report calculated that the use of public data in 2011-2012 had added up to £7.2 billion ($11 billion) to the U.K. economy. In one case, opening up live transport information from Transport for London had saved Londoners working time valued at up £58 million in one year alone, Deloitte calculated. Opening up more public data would unlock more value, said the accountants.
In the document, which the government will respond to this summer, Mr. Shakespeare outlines a strategy for how the government could open access to everything from trash-collection data to information on heart treatments.”

The Informed Brain in a Digital World

Curated on May 17, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Description of new report from the National Academies: “Digital media provide humans with more access to information than ever before—a computer, tablet, or smartphone can all be used to access data online and users frequently have more than one device. However, as humans continue to venture into the digital frontier, it remains to be known whether access to seemingly unlimited information is actually helping us learn and solve complex problems, or ultimately creating more difficulty and confusion for individuals and societies by offering content overload that is not always meaningful.
Throughout history, technology has changed the way humans interact with the world. Improvements in tools, language, industrial machines, and now digital information technology have shaped our minds and societies. There has always been access to more information than humans can handle, but the difference now lies in the ubiquity of the Internet and digital technology, and the incredible speed with which anyone with a computer can access and participate in seemingly infinite information exchange. Humans now live in a world where mobile digital technology is everywhere, from the classroom and the doctor’s office to public transportation and even the dinner table. This paradigm shift in technology comes with tremendous benefits and risks. Interdisciplinary Research (IDR) Teams at the 2012 National Academies Keck Futures Initiative Conference on The Informed Brain in the Digital World explored common rewards and dangers to Humans among various fields that are being greatly impacted by the Internet and the rapid evolution of digital technology.”

Use of Social Network Diagrams

Curated on May 17, 2013November 13, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New York Times: “Consulting companies like Activate Networks create social network diagrams to help pharmaceutical marketers identify prescribing histories and relationships among doctors. Such diagrams can help marketers pinpoint highly connected physicians, the best potential targets for marketing.”

How Estonia became E-stonia

Curated on May 17, 2013December 6, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Mansel from BBC News: “In some countries, computer programming might be seen as the realm of the nerd.

But not in Estonia, where it is seen as fun, simple and cool.
This northernmost of the three Baltic states, a small corner of the Soviet Union until 1991, is now one of the most internet-dependent countries in the world.
And Estonian schools are teaching children as young as seven how to programme computers….
better known is Skype, an Estonian start-up long since gone global.
Skype was bought by Microsoft in 2011 for a cool $8.5bn, but still employs 450 people at its local headquarters on the outskirts of Tallinn, roughly a quarter of its total workforce. Tiit Paananen, from Skype, says they are passionate about education and that it works closely with Estonian universities and secondary schools….
Estonians today vote online and pay tax online. Their health records are online and, using what President Ilves likes to call a “personal access key” – others refer to it as an ID card – they can pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy. The card offers access to a wide range of other services.
All this will be second nature to the youngest generation of E-stonians. They encounter electronic communication as soon as they enter school through the eKool (e-school) system. Exam marks, homework assignments and attendance in class are all available to parents at the click of a mouse.”

NSF-funded Research on Elections and Cooperation

Curated on May 17, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

John Sides @ the Monkey Cage: “Much of politics is about collective action, whereby groups of people need to cooperate in order to produce an outcome. One of the biggest challenges is getting people to cooperate in providing a public good, which by its nature can be shared by everyone regardless of whether they’ve cooperated in the first place.
One way to enforce cooperation is via some central authority that’s external to the group (like a government). Another way, prominent in Elinor Ostrom’s work, is via internal policing by peers within the group.
In this NSF-funded study by Guy Grossman and Delia Baldassarri show that a third way can work as well: developing a leadership or authority structure within the group itself. More importantly, they show that the success of such an authority depends on politics itself. Leaders need to be elected to induce cooperation.The study was conducted among Ugandans who are members of farmer organizations and experience directly the challenges of cooperating to produce public goods. Grossman and Baldassarri not only examined how these people behaved when asked to play a simple “public goods game” in a quasi-laboratory setting, but how they actually behaved within their farmer organization in real life. In both contexts, members cooperated significantly more when leaders were democratically elected—as was true in one experimental condition of the public goods game—or when they perceived the leadership of their farmer organization as more legitimate.
For more in this week’s presentation of NSF-funded research recently published in the American Journal of Political Science, see here, here, and here.]”

Data Edge

Curated on May 17, 2013December 6, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Steven Weber, professor in the School of Information and Political Science department at UC Berkeley, in Policy by the Numbers: “It’s commonly said that most people overestimate the impact of technology in the short term, and underestimate its impact over the longer term.
Where is Big Data in 2013? Starting to get very real, in our view, and right on the cusp of underestimation in the long term. The short term hype cycle is (thankfully) burning itself out, and the profound changes that data science can and will bring to human life are just now coming into focus. It may be that Data Science is right now about where the Internet itself was in 1993 or so. That’s roughly when it became clear that the World Wide Web was a wind that would blow across just about every sector of the modern economy while transforming foundational things we thought were locked in about human relationships, politics, and social change. It’s becoming a reasonable bet that Data Science is set to do the same—again, and perhaps even more profoundly—over the next decade. Just possibly, more quickly than that….
Can data, no matter how big, change the world for the better? It may be the case that in some fields of human endeavor and behavior, the scientific analysis of big data by itself will create such powerful insights that change will simply have to happen, that businesses will deftly re-organize, that health care will remake itself for efficiency and better outcomes, that people will adopt new behaviors that make them happier, healthier, more prosperous and peaceful. Maybe. But almost everything we know about technology and society across human history argues that it won’t be so straightforward.
…join senior industry and academic leaders at DataEDGE at UC Berkeley on May 30-31 to engage in what will be a lively and important conversation aimed at answering today’s questions about the data science revolution—and formulating tomorrow’s.

Economic effects of open data policy still 'anecdotal'

Curated on May 16, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam Mazmanian in FCW:’ A year after the launch of the government’s digital strategy, there’s no official tally of the economic activity generated by the release of government datasets for use in commercial applications.
“We have anecdotal examples, but nothing official yet,” said federal CIO Steven VanRoekel in an invitation-only meeting with reporters at the FOSE conference on May 15. “It’s an area where we have an opportunity to start to talk about this, because it’s starting to tick up a bit, and the numbers are looking pretty good.” (Related story: APIs help agencies say yes)…
The Obama administration is banking on an explosion in the use of federal datasets for commercial and government applications alike. Last week’s executive order and accompanying directive from the Office of Management and Budget tasks agencies with making open and machine readable data the new default setting for government information.
VanRoekel said that the merits of the open data standard don’t necessarily need to be justified by economic activity….
The executive order also spells out privacy concerns arising from the so-called “mosaic effect,’ by which information from disparate datasets can be overlaid to decipher personally identifiable information.”