Stefaan Verhulst

Mario Carpo at eFlux: “…as the costs of electronic computation have been steadily decreasing for the last forty years at least, many have recently come to the conclusion that, for most practical purposes, the cost of computation is asymptotically tending to zero. Indeed, the current notion of Big Data is based on the assumption that an almost unlimited amount of digital data will soon be available at almost no cost, and similar premises have further fueled the expectation of a forthcoming “zero marginal costs society”: a society where, except for some upfront and overhead costs (the costs of building and maintaining some facilities), many goods and services will be free for all. And indeed, against all odds, an almost zero marginal cost society is already a reality in the case of many services based on the production and delivery of electricity: from the recording, transmission, and processing of electrically encoded digital information (bits) to the production and consumption of electrical power itself. Using renewable energies (solar, wind, hydro) the generation of electrical power is free, except for the cost of building and maintaining installations and infrastructure. And given the recent progress in the micro-management of intelligent electrical grids, it is easy to imagine that in the near future the cost of servicing a network of very small, local hydro-electric generators, for example, could easily be devolved to local communities of prosumers who would take care of those installations as their tend to their living environment, on an almost voluntary, communal basis.4 This was already often the case during the early stages of electrification, before the rise of AC (alternate current, which, unlike DC, or direct current, could be carried over long distances): AC became the industry’s choice only after Galileo Ferraris’s and Nikola Tesla’s developments in AC technologies in the 1880s.

Likewise, at the micro-scale of the electronic production and processing of bits and bytes of information, the Open Source movement and the phenomenal surge of some crowdsourced digital media (including some so-called social media) in the first decade of the twenty-first century has already proven that a collaborative, zero cost business model can effectively compete with products priced for profit on a traditional marketplace. As the success of Wikipedia, Linux, or Firefox proves, many are happy to volunteer their time and labor for free when all can profit from the collective work of an entire community without having to pay for it. This is now technically possible precisely because the fixed costs of building, maintaining, and delivering these service are very small; hence, from the point of view of the end-user, negligible.

Yet, regardless of the fixed costs of the infrastructure, content—even user-generated content—has costs, albeit for the time being these are mostly hidden, voluntarily born, or inadvertently absorbed by the prosumers themselves. For example, the wisdom of Wikipedia is not really a wisdom of crowds: most Wikipedia entries are de facto curated by fairly traditional scholar communities, and these communities can contribute their expertise for free only because their work has already been paid for by others—often by universities. In this sense, Wikipedia is only piggybacking on someone else’s research investments (but multiplying their outreach, which is one reason for its success). Ditto for most Open Source software, as training a software engineer, coder, or hacker, takes time and money—an investment for future returns that in many countries around the world is still born, at least in part, by public institutions….(More)”.

Paper by Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand: “The spread of misinformation and disinformation, especially on social media, is a major societal challenge. Here, we assess whether crowdsourced ratings of trust in news sources can effectively differentiate between more and less reliable sources. To do so, we ran a preregistered experiment (N = 1,010 from Amazon Mechanical Turk) in which individuals rated familiarity with, and trust in, 60 news sources from three categories: 1) Mainstream media outlets, 2) Websites that produce hyper-partisan coverage of actual facts, and 3) Websites that produce blatantly false content (“fake news”).

Our results indicate that, despite substantial partisan bias, laypeople across the political spectrum rate mainstream media outlets as far more trustworthy than either hyper-partisan or fake news sources (all but 1 mainstream source, Salon, was rated as more trustworthy than every hyper-partisan or fake news source when equally weighting ratings of Democrats and Republicans).

Critically, however, excluding ratings from participants who are not familiar with a given news source dramatically reduces the difference between mainstream media sources and hyper-partisan or fake news sites. For example, 30% of the mainstream media websites (Salon, the Guardian, Fox News, Politico, Huffington Post, and Newsweek) received lower trust scores than the most trusted fake news site (news4ktla.com) when excluding unfamiliar ratings.

This suggests that rather than being initially agnostic about unfamiliar sources, people are initially skeptical – and thus a lack of familiarity is an important cue for untrustworthiness. Overall, our findings indicate that crowdsourcing media trustworthiness judgments is a promising approach for fighting misinformation and disinformation online, but that trustworthiness ratings from participants who are unfamiliar with a given source should not be ignored….(More)”.

Book edited by Btihaj Ajana: “…provides an empirical and philosophical investigation of self-tracking practices. In recent years, there has been an explosion of apps and devices that enable the data capturing and monitoring of everyday activities, behaviours and habits. Encouraged by movements such as the Quantified Self, a growing number of people are embracing this culture of quantification and tracking in the spirit of improving their health and wellbeing.
The aim of this book is to enhance understanding of this fast-growing trend, bringing together scholars who are working at the forefront of the critical study of self-tracking practices. Each chapter provides a different conceptual lens through which one can examine these practices, while grounding the discussion in relevant empirical examples.
From phenomenology to discourse analysis, from questions of identity, privacy and agency to issues of surveillance and tracking at the workplace, this edited collection takes on a wide, and yet focused, approach to the timely topic of self-tracking. It constitutes a useful companion for scholars, students and everyday users interested in the Quantified Self phenomenon…(More)”.

Chapter by Walter Castelnovo in Network, Smart and Open: “Citizens’ engagement and citizens’ participation are rapidly becoming catch-all concepts, buzzwords continuously recurring in public policy discourses, also due to the widespread diffusion and use of social media that are claimed to have the potential to increase citizens’ participation in public sector processes, including policy development and policy implementation.

By assuming the concept of co-production as the lens through which to look at citizen’s participation in civic life, the paper shows how, when supported by a real redistribution of power between government and citizens, citizens’ participation can determine a transformational impact on the same nature of government, up to the so called ‘Do It Yourself government’ and ‘user-generated state’. Based on a conceptual research approach and with reference to the relevant literature, the paper discusses what such transformation could amount to and what role ICTs (social media) can play in the government transformation processes….(More)”.

Paper by Faxi Yuan and Rui Liu at the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction: “…rapid damage assessment plays a critical role in crisis management. Collection of timely information for rapid damage assessment is particularly challenging during natural disasters. Remote sensing technologies were used for data collection during disasters. However, due to the large areas affected by major disasters such as Hurricane Matthew, specific data cannot be collected in time such as the location information.

Social media can serve as a crowdsourcing platform for citizens’ communication and information sharing during natural disasters and provide the timely data for identifying affected areas to support rapid damage assessment during disasters. Nevertheless, there is very limited existing research on the utility of social media data in damage assessment. Even though some investigation of the relationship between social media activities and damages was conducted, the employment of damage-related social media data in exploring the fore-mentioned relationship remains blank.

This paper for the first time, establishes the index dictionary by semantic analysis for the identification of damage-related tweets posted during Hurricane Matthew in Florida. Meanwhile, the insurance claim data from the publication of Florida Office of Insurance Regulation is used as a representative of real hurricane damage data in Florida. This study performs a correlation analysis and a comparative analysis of the geographic distribution of social media data and damage data at the county level in Florida. We find that employing social media data to identify critical affected areas at the county level during disasters is viable. Damage data has a closer relationship with damage-related tweets than disaster-related tweets….(More)”.

Rachel Botsman at the Guardian: “…Once seen as saviours of democracy, those titans are now just as likely to be viewed as threats to truth or, at the very least, impassive billionaires falling down on the job of monitoring their own backyards.

It wasn’t always this way. Remember the early catchy slogans that emerged from those ping-pong-tabled tech temples in Silicon Valley? “A place for friends”, “Don’t be evil” or “You can make money without being evil” (rather poignant, given what was to come). Users were enchanted by the sudden, handheld power of a smartphone to voice anything, access anything; grassroots activist movements revelled in these new tools for spreading their cause. The idealism of social media – democracy, friction-free communication, one-button socialising proved infectious.

So how did that unbridled enthusiasm for all things digital morph into a critical erosion of trust in technology, particularly in politics? Was 2017 the year of reckoning, when technology suddenly crossed to the dark side or had it been heading that way for some time? It might be useful to recall how social media first discovered its political muscle….

Technology is only the means. We also need to ask why our political ideologies have become so polarised, and take a hard look at our own behaviour, as well as that of the politicians themselves and the partisan media outlets who use these platforms, with their vast reach, to sow the seeds of distrust. Why are we so easily duped? Are we unwilling or unable to discern what’s true and what isn’t or to look for the boundaries between opinion, fact and misinformation? But what part are our own prejudices playing?

Luciano Floridi, of the Digital Ethics Lab at Oxford University, points out that technology alone can’t save us from ourselves. “The potential of technology to be a powerful positive force for democracy is huge and is still there. The problems arise when we ignore how technology can accentuate or highlight less attractive sides of human nature,” he says. “Prejudice. Jealousy. Intolerance of different views. Our tendency to play zero sum games. We against them. Saying technology is a threat to democracy is like saying food is bad for you because it causes obesity.”

It’s not enough to blame the messenger. Social media merely amplifies human intent – both good and bad. We need to be honest about our own, age-old appetite for ugly gossip and spreading half-baked information, about our own blindspots.

Is there a solution to it all? Plenty of smart people are working on technical fixes, if for no other reason than the tech companies know it’s in their own best interests to stem the haemorrhaging of trust. Whether they’ll go far enough remains to be seen.

We sometimes forget how uncharted this new digital world remains – it’s a work in progress. We forget that social media, for all its flaws, still brings people together, gives a voice to the voiceless, opens vast wells of information, exposes wrongdoing, sparks activism, allows us to meet up with unexpected strangers. The list goes on. It’s inevitable that there will be falls along the way, deviousness we didn’t foresee. Perhaps the present danger is that in our rush to condemn the corruption of digital technologies, we will unfairly condemn the technologies themselves….(More).

Dorota Mokrosinska at the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence: “Among the classic arguments which advocates of open government use to fight government secrecy is the appeal to a “people’s right to know.” I argue that the employment of this idea as a conceptual weapon against state secrecy misfires. I consider two prominent arguments commonly invoked to support the people’s right to know government-held information: an appeal to human rights and an appeal to democratic citizenship. While I concede that both arguments ground the people’s right to access government information, I argue that they also limit this right and in limiting it, they establish a domain of state secrecy. The argument developed in the essay provides a novel interpretation of Dennis Thompson’s claim, who in his seminal work on the place of secrecy in democratic governance, has argued that some of the best reasons for secrecy are the same reasons that argue for openness and against secrecy….(More)”.

Book edited by Julia Schwanholz, Todd Graham and Peter-Tobias Stoll: “In light of the increased utilization of information technologies, such as social media and the ‘Internet of Things,’ this book investigates how this digital transformation process creates new challenges and opportunities for political participation, political election campaigns and political regulation of the Internet. Within the context of Western democracies and China, the contributors analyze these challenges and opportunities from three perspectives: the regulatory state, the political use of social media, and through the lens of the public sphere.

The first part of the book discusses key challenges for Internet regulation, such as data protection and censorship, while the second addresses the use of social media in political communication and political elections. In turn, the third and last part highlights various opportunities offered by digital media for online civic engagement and protest in the public sphere. Drawing on different academic fields, including political science, communication science, and journalism studies, the contributors raise a number of innovative research questions and provide fascinating theoretical and empirical insights into the topic of digital transformation….(More)”.

Bas Leurs at Nesta: “Through our work in the Innovation Skills team, we often find ourselves being asked by governments and civil servants which innovation tools and techniques they should use. So what innovation approaches are there that can be applied in the public sector? And how are they related to each other?

With these questions in mind, over the last couple of years we’ve been mapping out the various innovation methods and approaches we’ve come across from studying innovation practice and our many conversations with different lab practitioners, colleagues and other innovation experts.

Download this diagram as a PDF.

The map we’ve created provides an overview of innovation methods and approaches that help people make sense of reality, and approaches that help develop solutions and interventions to create change.

Understanding and shaping reality

The approaches mapped out in the diagram are structured into four spaces: intelligence, solution, technology and talent. These spaces are built on the premise that in order to create change, you need to make sense and understand reality, as well as develop solutions and interventions to change that reality:

• intelligence space – focuses on approaches that help you make sense of and conceptualise reality

• solution space – focuses on methods that help you test and develop solutions

In terms of mindsets, you could say that the intelligence space is more academic, whereas the solution space involves more of an entrepreneurial approach. The activities in these are supported by two further spaces:

• technology space – includes approaches and technology that enable action and change, such as digital tools and data-related methods

• talent space – focuses on how to mobilise talent, develop skills and increase organisational readiness in order to ultimately make change happen…(More)”.