media

Governance by Algorithms: Reality Construction by Algorithmic Selection on the Internet

Curated on March 31, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Natascha Just & Michael Latzer in Media, Culture & Society (fortcoming): “This paper explores the governance by algorithms in information societies. Theoretically, it builds on (co-)evolutionary innovation studies in order to adequately grasp the interplay of technological and societal change, and combines these with institutional approaches to incorporate governance by technology or rather software as institutions. Methodologically it draws from an empirical survey of Internet-based services that rely on automated algorithmic selection, a functional typology derived from it, and an analysis of associated potential social risks. It shows how algorithmic selection has become a growing source of social order, of a shared social reality in information societies. It argues that – similar to the construction of realities by traditional mass media – automated algorithmic selection applications shape daily lives and realities, affect the perception of the world, and influence behavior. However, the co-evolutionary perspective on algorithms as institutions, ideologies, intermediaries and actors highlights differences that are to be found first in the growing personalization of constructed realities, and second in the constellation of involved actors. Altogether, compared to reality construction by traditional mass media, algorithmic reality construction tends to increase individualization, commercialization, inequalities and deterritorialization, and to decrease transparency, controllability and predictability…(Full Paper)”

Accountable machines: bureaucratic cybernetics?

Curated on March 28, 2016November 14, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Alison Powell at LSE Media Policy Project Blog: “Algorithms are everywhere, or so we are told, and the black boxes of algorithmic decision-making make oversight of processes that regulators and activists argue ought to be transparent more difficult than in the past. But when, and where, and which machines do we wish to make accountable, and for what purpose? In this post I discuss how algorithms discussed by scholars are most commonly those at work on media platforms whose main products are the social networks and attention of individuals. Algorithms, in this case, construct individual identities through patterns of behaviour, and provide the opportunity for finely targeted products and services. While there are serious concerns about, for instance, price discrimination, algorithmic systems for communicating and consuming are, in my view, less inherently problematic than processes that impact on our collective participation and belonging as citizenship. In this second sphere, algorithmic processes – especially machine learning – combine with processes of governance that focus on individual identity performance to profoundly transform how citizenship is understood and undertaken.

Communicating and consuming

In the communications sphere, algorithms are what makes it possible to make money from the web for example through advertising brokerage platforms that help companies bid for ads on major newspaper websites. IP address monitoring, which tracks clicks and web activity, creates detailed consumer profiles and transform the everyday experience of communication into a constantly-updated production of consumer information. This process of personal profiling is at the heart of many of the concerns about algorithmic accountability. The consequence of perpetual production of data by individuals and the increasing capacity to analyse it even when it doesn’t appear to relate has certainly revolutionalised advertising by allowing more precise targeting, but what has it done for areas of public interest?

John Cheney-Lippold identifies how the categories of identity are now developed algorithmically, since a category like gender is not based on self-discloure, but instead on patterns of behaviour that fit with expectations set by previous alignment to a norm. In assessing ‘algorithmic identities’, he notes that these produce identity profiles which are narrower and more behaviour-based than the identities that we perform. This is a result of the fact that many of the systems that inspired the design of algorithmic systems were based on using behaviour and other markers to optimise consumption. Algorithmic identity construction has spread from the world of marketing to the broader world of citizenship – as evidenced by the Citizen Ex experiment shown at the Web We Want Festival in 2015.

Individual consumer-citizens

What’s really at stake is that the expansion of algorithmic assessment of commercially derived big data has extended the frame of the individual consumer into all kinds of other areas of experience. In a supposed ‘age of austerity’ when governments believe it’s important to cut costs, this connects with the view of citizens as primarily consumers of services, and furthermore, with the idea that a citizen is an individual subject whose relation to a state can be disintermediated given enough technology. So, with sensors on your garbage bins you don’t need to even remember to take them out. With pothole reporting platforms like FixMyStreet, a city government can be responsive to an aggregate of individual reports. But what aspects of our citizenship are collective? When, in the algorithmic state, can we expect to be together?

Put another way, is there any algorithmic process to value the long term education, inclusion, and sustenance of a whole community for example through library services?…

Seeing algorithms – machine learning in particular – as supporting decision-making for broad collective benefit rather than as part of ever more specific individual targeting and segmentation might make them more accountable. But more importantly, this would help algorithms support society – not just individual consumers….(More)”

Data Mining Reveals the Four Urban Conditions That Create Vibrant City Life

Curated on March 25, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology from the arXiv: “Lack of evidence to city planning has ruined cities all over the world. But data-mining techniques are finally revealing the rules that make cities successful, vibrant places to live. …Back in 1961, the gradual decline of many city centers in the U.S. began to puzzle urban planners and activists alike. One of them, the urban sociologist Jane Jacobs, began a widespread and detailed investigation of the causes and published her conclusions in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a controversial book that proposed four conditions that are essential for vibrant city life.

Jacobs’s conclusions have become hugely influential. Her ideas have had a significant impact on the development of many modern cities such as Toronto and New York City’s Greenwich Village. However, her ideas have also attracted criticism because of the lack of empirical evidence to back them up, a problem that is widespread in urban planning.
Today, that looks set to change thanks to the work of Marco De Nadai at the University of Trento and a few pals, who have developed a way to gather urban data that they use to test Jacobs’s conditions and how they relate to the vitality of city life. The new approach heralds a new age of city planning in which planners have an objective way of assessing city life and working out how it can be improved.
In her book, Jacobs argues that vibrant activity can only flourish in cities when the physical environment is diverse. This diversity, she says, requires four conditions. The first is that city districts must serve more than two functions so that they attract people with different purposes at different times of the day and night. Second, city blocks must be small with dense intersections that give pedestrians many opportunities to interact. The third condition is that buildings must be diverse in terms of age and form to support a mix of low-rent and high-rent tenants. By contrast, an area with exclusively new buildings can only attract businesses and tenants wealthy enough to support the cost of new building. Finally, a district must have a sufficient density of people and buildings.

While Jacobs’s arguments are persuasive, her critics say there is little evidence to show that these factors are linked with vibrant city life. That changed last year when urban scientists in Seoul, South Korea, published the result of a 10-year study of pedestrian activity in the city at unprecedented resolution. This work successfully tested Jacobs’s ideas for the first time.
However, the data was gathered largely through pedestrian surveys, a process that is time-consuming, costly, and generally impractical for use in most modern cities.
De Nadai and co have come up with a much cheaper and quicker alternative using a new generation of city databases and the way people use social media and mobile phones. The new databases include OpenStreetMap, the collaborative mapping tool; census data, which records populations and building use; land use data, which uses satellite images to classify land use according to various categories; Foursquare data, which records geographic details about personal activity; and mobile-phone records showing the number and frequency of calls in an area.
De Nadai and co gathered this data for six cities in Italy—Rome, Naples, Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Palermo.
Their analysis is straightforward. The team used mobile-phone activity as a measure of urban vitality and land-use records, census data, and Foursquare activity as a measure of urban diversity. Their goal was to see how vitality and diversity are correlated in the cities they studied. The results make for interesting reading….(More)

How to Crowdsource the Syrian Cease-Fire

Curated on March 24, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Colum Lynch at Foreign Policy: “Can the wizards of Silicon Valley develop a set of killer apps to monitor the fragile Syria cease-fire without putting foreign boots on the ground in one of the world’s most dangerous countries?

They’re certainly going to try. The “cessation of hostilities” in Syria brokered by the United States and Russia last month has sharply reduced the levels of violence in the war-torn country and sparked a rare burst of optimism that it could lead to a broader cease-fire. But if the two sides lay down their weapons, the international community will face the challenge of monitoring the battlefield to ensure compliance without deploying peacekeepers or foreign troops. The emerging solution: using crowdsourcing, drones, satellite imaging, and other high-tech tools.

The high-level interest in finding a technological solution to the monitoring challenge was on full display last month at a closed-door meeting convened by the White House that brought together U.N. officials, diplomats, digital cartographers, and representatives of Google, DigitalGlobe, and other technology companies. Their assignment was to brainstorm ways of using high-tech tools to keep track of any future cease-fires from Syria to Libya and Yemen.

The off-the-record event came as the United States, the U.N., and other key powers struggle to find ways of enforcing cease-fires from Syria at a time when there is little political will to run the risk of sending foreign forces or monitors to such dangerous places. The United States has turned to high-tech weapons like armed drones as weapons of war; it now wants to use similar systems to help enforce peace.

Take the Syria Conflict Mapping Project, a geomapping program developed by the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a nonprofit founded by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, to resolve conflict and promote human rights. The project has developed an interactive digital map that tracks military formations by government forces, Islamist extremists, and more moderate armed rebels in virtually every disputed Syrian town. It is now updating its technology to monitor cease-fires.

The project began in January 2012 because of a single 25-year-old intern, Christopher McNaboe. McNaboe realized it was possible to track the state of the conflict by compiling disparate strands of publicly available information — including the shelling and aerial bombardment of towns and rebel positions — from YouTube, Twitter, and other social media sites. It has since developed a mapping program using software provided by Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto-based big data company that does contract work for U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, from the CIA to the FBI….

Walter Dorn, an expert on technology in U.N. peace operations who attended the White House event, said he had promoted what he calls a “coalition of the connected.”

The U.N. or other outside powers could start by tracking social media sites, including Twitter and YouTube, for reports of possible cease-fire violations. That information could then be verified by “seeded crowdsourcing” — that is, reaching out to networks of known advocates on the ground — and technological monitoring through satellite imagery or drones.

Matthew McNabb, the founder of First Mile Geo, a start-up which develops geolocation technology that can be used to gather data in conflict zones, has another idea. McNabb, who also attended the White House event, believes “on-demand” technologies like SurveyMonkey, which provides users a form to create their own surveys, can be applied in conflict zones to collect data on cease-fire violations….(More)

Technology and politics: The signal and the noise

Curated on March 24, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Special Issue of The Economist: “…The way these candidates are fighting their campaigns,each in his own way, is proof that politics as usual is no longer an option. The internet and the availability of huge piles of data on everyone and everything are transforming the democratic process, just as they are upending many industries. They are becoming a force in all kinds of things,from running election campaigns and organising protest movements to improving public policy and the delivery of services. This special report will argue that, as a result, the relationship between citizens and those who govern them is changing fundamentally.

Incongruous though it may seem, the forces that are now powering the campaign of Mr Trump—as well as that ofBernie Sanders, the surprise candidate on the Democratic side (Hillary Clinton is less of a success online)—were first seen in full cry during the Arab spring in 2011. The revolution in Egypt and other Arab countries was not instigated by Twitter, Facebook and other social-media services, but they certainly help edit gain momentum. “The internet is an intensifier,” says Marc Lynch of GeorgeWashington University, a noted scholar of the protest movements in the region…..

However, this special report will argue that, in the longer term, online crusading and organising will turn out to matter less to politics in the digital age than harnessing those ever-growing piles of data. The internet and related technologies, such as smart phones and cloud computing, make it cheap and easy not only to communicate but also to collect, store and analyse immense quantities of information. This is becoming ever more important in influencing political outcomes.

America’s elections are a case in point. Mr Cruz with his data savvy is merely following in the footsteps of Barack Obama, who won his first presidential term with the clever application of digital know-how. Campaigners are hoovering up more and more digital information about every voting-age citizen and stashing it away in enormous databases.With the aid of complex algorithms, these data allow campaigners to decide, say, who needs to be reminded to make the trip to the polling station and who may be persuaded to vote for a particular candidate.

No hiding place

In the case of protest movements, the waves of collective action leave a big digital footprint. Using ever more sophisticated algorithms, governments can mine these data.That is changing the balance of power. In the event of another Arab spring, autocrats would not be caught off guard again because they are now able to monitor protests and intervene when they consider it necessary. They can also identify and neutralise the most influential activists. Governments that were digitally blind when the internet first took off in the mid-1990s now have both a telescope and a microscope.

But data are not just changing campaigns and political movements; they affect how policy is made and public services are offered. This is most visible at local-government level. Cities have begun to use them for everything from smoothing traffic flows to identifying fire hazards. Having all this information at their fingertips is bound to change the way these bureaucracies work, and how they interact with citizens. This will not only make cities more efficient, but provide them with data and tools that could help them involve their citizens more.

This report will look at electoral campaigns, protest movements and local government in turn. Readers will note that most of the examples quoted are American and that most of the people quoted are academics. That is because the study of the interrelationship between data and politics is relatively new and most developed in America. But it is beginning to spill out from the ivory towers, and is gradually spreading to other countries.

The growing role of technology in politics raises many questions. How much of a difference, for instance, do digitally enabled protest surges really make? Many seem to emerge from nowhere, then crash almost as suddenly, defeated by hard political realities and entrenched institutions. The Arab spring uprising in Egypt is one example. Once the incumbent president, Hosni Mubarak, was toppled, the coalition that brought him down fell apart, leaving the stage to the old powers, first the Muslim Brotherhood and then the armed forces.

In party politics, some worry that the digital targeting of voters might end up reducing the democratic process to a marketing exercise. Ever more data and better algorithms, they fret, could lead politicians to ignore those unlikely to vote for them. And in cities it is no tclear that more data will ensure that citizens become more engaged….(More)

The Social Intranet: Insights on Managing and Sharing Knowledge Internally

Curated on March 23, 2016November 14, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ines Mergel for IBM Center for the Business of Government: “While much of the federal government lags behind, some agencies are pioneers in the internal use of social media tools. What lessons and effective practices do they have to offer other agencies?

“Social intranets,” Dr. Mergel writes, “are in-house social networks that use technologies – such as automated newsfeeds, wikis, chats, or blogs – to create engagement opportunities among employees.” They also include the use of internal profile pages that help people identify expertise and interest (similar to Facebook or LinkedIn profiles), and that are used in combination with other social Intranet tools such as on-line communities or newsfeeds.

The report documents four case studies of government use of social intranets – two federal government agencies (the Department of State and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and two cross-agency networks (the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Government of Canada).

The author observes: “Most enterprise social networking platforms fail,” but identifies what causes these failures and how successful social intranet initiatives can avoid that fate and thrive. She offers a series of insights for successfully implementing social intranets in the public sector, based on her observations and case studies. …(More)”

Responsible Data reflection stories

Curated on March 15, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Responsible Data Forum: “Through the various Responsible Data Forum events over the past couple of years, we’ve heard many anecdotes of responsible data challenges faced by people or organizations. These include potentially harmful data management practices, situations where people have experienced gut feelings that there is potential for harm, or workarounds that people have created to avoid those situations.

But we feel that trading in these “war stories” isn’t the most useful way for us to learn from these experiences as acommunity. Instead, we have worked with our communities to build a set of Reflection Stories: a structured, well-researched knowledge base on the unforeseen challenges and (sometimes) negative consequences of usingtechnology and data for social change.

We hope that this can offer opportunities for reflection and learning, as well as helping to develop innovativestrategies for engaging with technology and data in new and responsible ways….

What we learned from the stories

New spaces, new challenges

Moving into new digital spaces is bringing new challenges, and social media is one such space where these challengesare proving very difficult to navigate. This seems to stem from a number of key points:

organisations with low levels of technical literacy and experience in tech- or data-driven projects, deciding toengage suddenly with a certain tool or technology without realising what this entails. For some, this seems to stemfrom funders being more willing to support ‘innovative’ tech projects.
organisations wishing to engage more with social media while not being aware of more nuanced understandingsof public/private spaces online, and how different communities engage with social media. (see story #2)
unpredictability and different levels of visibility: due to how privacy settings on Twitter are currently set, visibilityof users can be increased hugely by the actions of others – and once that happens, a user actually has very littleagency to change or reverse that. Sadly, being more visible on, for example, Twitter disproportionately affectswomen and minority groups in a negative way – so while ‘signal boosting’ to raise someone’s profile might be well-meant, the consequences are hard to predict, and almost impossible to reverse manually. (see story #4)
consent: related to the above point, “giving consent” can mean many different things when it comes to digitalspaces, especially if the person in question has little experience or understanding of using the technology inquestion (see stories #4 and #5).

Grey areas of responsible data

In almost all of the cases we looked at, very few decisions were concretely “right” or “wrong”. There are many, manygrey areas here, which need to be addressed on a case by case basis. In some cases, people involved really did thinkthrough their actions, and approached their problems thoughtfully and responsibly – but consequences they had notimagined, happened (see story #8).

Additionally, given the quickly moving nature of the space, challenges can arise that simply would not have beenpossible at the start.

….Despite the very varying settings of the stories collected, the shared mitigation strategies indicate that there areindeed a few key principles that can be kept in mind throughout the development of a new tech- or data-drivenproject.

The most stark of these – and one key aspect that is underlying many of these challenges – is a fundamental lack of technical literacy among advocacy organisations. This affects the way they interact with technical partners, the decisions they make around the project, the level to which they can have meaningful input, and more. Perhaps more crucially, it also affects the ability to know what to ask for help about – ie, to ‘know the unknowns’.

Building an organisation’s technical literacy might not mean being able to answer all technical questions in-house, but rather knowing what to ask and what to expect in an answer, from others. For advocacy organisations who don’t (yet)have this, it becomes all too easy to outsource not just the actual technical work but the contextual decisions too, which should be a collaborative process, benefiting from both sets of expertise.

There seems to be a lot of scope to expand this set of stories both in terms of collecting more from other advocacy organisations, and into other sectors, too. Ultimately, we hope that sharing our collective intelligence around lessonslearned from responsible data challenges faced in projects, will contribute to a greater understanding for all of us….Read all the stories here