New book edited by Janssen, Marijn, Wimmer, Maria A., and Deljoo, Ameneh: “The explosive growth in data, computational power, and social media creates new opportunities for innovating the processes and solutions of Information and communications technology (ICT) based policy-making and research. To take advantage of these developments in the digital world, new approaches, concepts, instruments and methods are needed to navigate the societal and computational complexity. This requires extensive interdisciplinary knowledge of public administration, policy analyses, information systems, complex systems and computer science. This book provides the foundation for this new interdisciplinary field, in which various traditional disciplines are blending. Both policy makers, executors and those in charge of policy implementations acknowledge that ICT is becoming more important and is changing the policy-making process, resulting in a next generation policy-making based on ICT support. Web 2.0 and even Web 3.0 point to the specific applications of social networks, semantically enriched and linked data, whereas policy-making has also to do with the use of the vast amount of data, predictions and forecasts, and improving the outcomes of policy-making, which is confronted with an increasing complexity and uncertainty of the outcomes. The field of policy-making is changing and driven by developments like open data, computational methods for processing data, opining mining, simulation and visualization of rich data sets, all combined with public engagement, social media and participatory tools….(More)”
Social Dimensions of Privacy
New book edited by Dorota Mokrosinska and Beate Roessler: “Written by a select international group of leading privacy scholars, Social Dimensions of Privacy endorses and develops an innovative approach to privacy. By debating topical privacy cases in their specific research areas, the contributors explore the new privacy-sensitive areas: legal scholars and political theorists discuss the European and American approaches to privacy regulation; sociologists explore new forms of surveillance and privacy on social network sites; and philosophers revisit feminist critiques of privacy, discuss markets in personal data, issues of privacy in health care and democratic politics. The broad interdisciplinary character of the volume will be of interest to readers from a variety of scientific disciplines who are concerned with privacy and data protection issues.
- Takes an innovative approach to privacy which focuses on the social dimensions and value of privacy in contrast to the value of privacy for individuals
- Addresses readers from a variety of disciplines, including law, philosophy, media studies, gender studies and political science
- Addresses new privacy-sensitive areas triggered by recent technological developments (More)”
Data Reinvents Libraries for the 21st Century
Whatever the case, the truth is that today libraries are proving they’re more than mausoleums of old knowledge. They’re in a state of progressive reform, rethinking services and restructuring with data. It’s a national trend as libraries modernize, strategize and recast themselves as digital platforms. They’ve taken on the role of data curator for information coming in and citizen-generated data going out….
Nate Hill is among this band of progressives. As a data zealot who believes in data’s inclination for innovation, the former deputy director for Tennessee’s Chattanooga Public Library, led a charge to transform the library into a data centric community hub. The library boasts an open data portal that it manages for the city, a civic hacker lab, a makerspace for community projects, and expanded access to in-person and online tutorials for coding and other digital skill sets….
The draw in data sharing and creating, Hill said, comes from the realization that today’s data channels are no longer one-way systems.
“I push people to the idea that now it’s about being a producer rather than just a consumer,” Hill said, “because really that whole idea of a read-write Web comes from the notion that you and I, for example, are just as capable at editing Wikipedia articles on the fly and changing information as anybody else.”
For libraries, Hill sees this as an opportunity and asks what institution can better pioneer the new frontier of information exchange. He posits the idea that, as the original public content curator, adding open data to libraries is only natural. In fact, he says it’s a logical next step when considering that traditional media like books, research journals and other sources infuse data points with rich context — something most city and state open data portals typically don’t do.
“The dream here is to treat the library as a different kind of community infrastructure,” Hill said. “You can conceivably be feeding live data about a city into an open data portal, and at the same time, turning the library into a real live information source — rather than something just static.”
In Chattanooga, an ongoing effort is in the works to do just that. The library seeks to integrate open data into its library catalog searches. Visitors researching Chattanooga’s waterfront could do a quick search and pull up local books, articles and mapping documents, but also a collection of latest data sets on water pollution and land use, for example.
Eyeing the library data movement at scale, Hill said he could easily envision a network of public libraries that act as local data hubs, retrieving and funneling data into larger state and national data portals….(More).
Putting Open at the Heart of the Digital Age
Presentation by Rufus Pollock: “….To repeat then: technology is NOT teleology. The medium is NOT the message – and it’s the message that matters.
The printing press made possible an “open” bible but it was Tyndale who made it open – and it was the openness that mattered.
Digital technology gives us unprecedented potential for creativity, sharing, for freedom. But they are possible not inevitable. Technology alone does not make a choice for us.
Remember that we’ve been here before: the printing press was revolutionary but we still ended up with a print media that was often dominated by the few and the powerful.
Think of radio. If you read about how people talked about it in the 1910s and 1920s, it sounds like the way we used to talk about the Internet today. The radio was going to revolutionize human communications and society. It was going to enable a peer to peer world where everyone can broadcast, it was going to allow new forms of democracy and politics, etc. What happened? We got a one way medium, controlled by the state and a few huge corporations.
Look around you today.
The Internet’s costless transmission can – and is – just as easily creating information empires and information robber barons as it can creating digital democracy and information equality.
We already know that this technology offers unprecedented opportunities for surveillance, for monitoring, for tracking. It can just as easily exploit us as empower us.
We need to put openness at the heart of this information age, and at the heart of the Net, if we are really to realize its possibilities for freedom, empowerment, and connection.
The fight then is on the soul of this information age and we have a choice.
A choice of open versus closed.
Of collaboration versus control.
Of empowerment versus exploitation.
Its a long road ahead – longer perhaps than our lifetimes. But we can walk it together.
In this 21st century knowledge revolution, William Tyndale isn’t one person. It’s all of us, making small and big choices: from getting governments and private companies to release their data, to building open databases and infrastructures together, from choosing apps on your phone that are built on open to using social networks that give you control of your data rather than taking it from you.
Let’s choose openness, let’s choose freedom, let’s choose the infinite possibilities of this digital age by putting openness at its heart….(More)”- See also PowerPoint Presentation
Why Technology Hasn’t Delivered More Democracy
Collection of POVs aggregated by Thomas Carothers at Foreign Policy: “New technologies offer important tools for empowerment — yet democracy is stagnating. What’s up?…
THe current moment confronts us with a paradox. The first fifteen years of this century have been a time of astonishing advances in communications and information technology, including digitalization, mass-accessible video platforms, smart phones, social media, billions of people gaining internet access, and much else. These revolutionary changes all imply a profound empowerment of individuals through exponentially greater access to information, tremendous ease of communication and data-sharing, and formidable tools for networking. Yet despite these changes, democracy — a political system based on the idea of the empowerment of individuals — has in these same years become stagnant in the world. The number of democracies today is basically no greater than it was at the start of the century. Many democracies, both long-established ones and newer ones, are experiencing serious institutional debilities and weak public confidence.
How can we reconcile these two contrasting global realities — the unprecedented advance of technologies that facilitate individual empowerment and the overall lack of advance of democracy worldwide? To help answer this question, I asked six experts on political change, all from very different professional and national perspectives. Here are their responses, followed by a few brief observations of my own.
1. Place a Long Bet on the Local By Martin Tisné
2. Autocrats Know How to Use Tech, Too By Larry Diamond
3. Limits on Technology Persist By Senem Aydin Düzgit
4. The Harder Task By Rakesh Rajani
5. Don’t Forget Institutions By Diane de Gramont
6. Mixed Lessons from Iran By Golnaz Esfandiari
7. Yes, It’s Complicated byThomas Carothers…(More)”
How Twitter Users Can Generate Better Ideas
Salvatore Parise, Eoin Whelan and Steve Todd in MIT Sloan Management Review: “New research suggests that employees with a diverse Twitter network — one that exposes them to people and ideas they don’t already know — tend to generate better ideas…. A multitude of empirical studies confirm what Jobs intuitively knew. The more diverse a person’s social network, the more likely that person is to be innovative. A diverse network provides exposure to people from different fields who behave and think differently. Good ideas emerge when the new information received is combined with what a person already knows. But in today’s digitally connected world, many relationships are formed and maintained online through public social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Increasingly, employees are using such platforms for work-related purposes.
Studying Twitter Networks
Can Twitter make employees more innovative? In particular, does having a greater diversity of virtual Twitter connections mean that good ideas are more likely to surface, as in the face-to-face world? To answer this question, we used a technique called organizational network analysis (ONA) to create visual representations of employee Twitter networks. We studied ten employee groups across five companies in a range of industries….
….in analyzing the structure of each employee’s Twitter network, we found that there was a positive relationship between the amount of diversity in one’s Twitter network and the quality of ideas submitted. However, Twitter activity and size measures (such as the number of tweets, number of followers and number of people followed) were not correlated with personal innovation….(More)“
New Technologies and Civic Engagement
Book edited by Homero Gil de Zuniga Navajas: “First, this book pays attention to the overall impact of the Internet and people’s use of digital media and new technologies to analyze civic life at large, reconceptualizing what citizenship is today. Secondly, and more specifically, participants shed light over the intersection of a number of current new agendas of research in regards to some of the most rapidly growing technological advances (i.e., new publics and citizenship), and the emergence of sprouting structures of citizenship. The volume shows the implications that new technological advances carry with respect the possibilities, patterns and mechanisms for citizen communication, citizen deliberation, public sphere and civic engagement….(More)”
Video: The power of public art
“Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director of Creative Time USA, says artists have the power “to kick open the door to social change.” In this video for the World Economic Forum, Pasternak talks about some of Creative Time’s commissions – from lighting up the New York skyline to shaking the hands of sanitation workers – and how art can help expose and heal social issues.
Click on the video to watch the full talk, or read selected quotes below”
Navigating the Health Data Ecosystem
New book on O’Reilly Media on “The “Six C’s”: Understanding the Health Data Terrain in the Era of Precision Medicine”: “Data-driven technologies are now being adopted, developed, funded, and deployed throughout the health care market at an unprecedented scale. But, as this O’Reilly report reveals, health care innovation contains more hurdles and requires more finesse than many tech startups expect. By paying attention to the lessons from the report’s findings, innovation teams can better anticipate what they’ll face, and plan accordingly.
Simply put, teams looking to apply collective intelligence and “big data” platforms to health and health care problems often don’t appreciate the messy details of using and making sense of data in the heavily regulated hospital IT environment. Download this report today and learn how it helps prepare startups in six areas:
- Complexity: An enormous domain with noisy data not designed for machine consumption
- Computing: Lack of standard, interoperable schema for documenting human health in a digital format
- Context: Lack of critical contextual metadata for interpreting health data
- Culture: Startup difficulties in hospital ecosystems: why innovation can be a two-edged sword
- Contracts: Navigating the IRB, HIPAA, and EULA frameworks
- Commerce: The problem of how digital health startups get paid
This report represents the initial findings of a study funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Subsequent reports will explore the results of three deep-dive projects the team pursued during the study. (More)”
We Have Always Been Social
Zizi Papacharissi introducing the first issue of Social Media + Society: “I have never been a fan of the term “social media.” Not only had I not been a fan of the term but I had also expressed this distaste frequently and fervently, in public talks and in writing, academic and not. The reason why I dislike the term, as I regularly explain, is that all media are social. All media foster communication and by definition are social. This is not that groundbreaking a position anymore, although it has been my mantra ever since I started studying the social character of the Internet in the mid-1990s. In fact, it is a position held by many of our Editorial Board members who have contributed to this issue, and you will encounter variations of it as you read through this first issue.
To term some media social implies that there are other media that are perhaps anti-social, or even not social at all—asocial. It also invites comparisons between media based on how social each medium is. But each medium is social in its own unique way and invites particular social behaviors, its own form of sociality. Finally, the term identifies as social platforms that are no more, and perhaps less so, social than media not characterized by that moniker, such as the telephone.
But, whether I like it or not, “social media” has become mainstream, and I have come to terms with that. …
Social Media + Society is thus deeply committed to advancing beyond an understanding of social media that is temporally bound. …
To this end, I invited members of our Editorial Board to contribute short essays that would serve to outline the scope for Social Media + Society, in defining how we understand social media. ….The result is a magnificent set of essays presented in the democracy of alphabetical order, serving as our first issue, and a manifesto for our journal. I hope you enjoy reading them and are inspired by them as much as I have been. (More)”