Why the Nate Silvers of the World Don’t Know Everything

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Felix Salmon in Wired: “This shift in US intelligence mirrors a definite pattern of the past 30 years, one that we can see across fields and institutions. It’s the rise of the quants—that is, the ascent to power of people whose native tongue is numbers and algorithms and systems rather than personal relationships or human intuition. Michael Lewis’ Moneyball vividly recounts how the quants took over baseball, as statistical analy­sis trumped traditional scouting and propelled the underfunded Oakland A’s to a division-winning 2002 season. More recently we’ve seen the rise of the quants in politics. Commentators who “trusted their gut” about Mitt Romney’s chances had their gut kicked by Nate Silver, the stats whiz who called the election days before­hand as a lock for Obama, down to the very last electoral vote in the very last state.
The reason the quants win is that they’re almost always right—at least at first. They find numerical patterns or invent ingenious algorithms that increase profits or solve problems in ways that no amount of subjective experience can match. But what happens after the quants win is not always the data-driven paradise that they and their boosters expected. The more a field is run by a system, the more that system creates incentives for everyone (employees, customers, competitors) to change their behavior in perverse ways—providing more of whatever the system is designed to measure and produce, whether that actually creates any value or not. It’s a problem that can’t be solved until the quants learn a little bit from the old-fashioned ways of thinking they’ve displaced.
No matter the discipline or industry, the rise of the quants tends to happen in four stages. Stage one is what you might call pre-disruption, and it’s generally best visible in hindsight. Think about quaint dating agencies in the days before the arrival of Match .com and all the other algorithm-powered online replacements. Or think about retail in the era before floor-space management analytics helped quantify exactly which goods ought to go where. For a live example, consider Hollywood, which, for all the money it spends on market research, is still run by a small group of lavishly compensated studio executives, all of whom are well aware that the first rule of Hollywood, as memorably summed up by screenwriter William Goldman, is “Nobody knows anything.” On its face, Hollywood is ripe for quantifi­cation—there’s a huge amount of data to be mined, considering that every movie and TV show can be classified along hundreds of different axes, from stars to genre to running time, and they can all be correlated to box office receipts and other measures of profitability.
Next comes stage two, disruption. In most industries, the rise of the quants is a recent phenomenon, but in the world of finance it began back in the 1980s. The unmistakable sign of this change was hard to miss: the point at which you started getting targeted and personalized offers for credit cards and other financial services based not on the relationship you had with your local bank manager but on what the bank’s algorithms deduced about your finances and creditworthiness. Pretty soon, when you went into a branch to inquire about a loan, all they could do was punch numbers into a computer and then give you the computer’s answer.
For a present-day example of disruption, think about politics. In the 2012 election, Obama’s old-fashioned campaign operatives didn’t disappear. But they gave money and freedom to a core group of technologists in Chicago—including Harper Reed, former CTO of the Chicago-based online retailer Threadless—and allowed them to make huge decisions about fund-raising and voter targeting. Whereas earlier campaigns had tried to target segments of the population defined by geography or demographic profile, Obama’s team made the campaign granular right down to the individual level. So if a mom in Cedar Rapids was on the fence about who to vote for, or whether to vote at all, then instead of buying yet another TV ad, the Obama campaign would message one of her Facebook friends and try the much more effective personal approach…
After disruption, though, there comes at least some version of stage three: over­shoot. The most common problem is that all these new systems—metrics, algo­rithms, automated decisionmaking processes—result in humans gaming the system in rational but often unpredictable ways. Sociologist Donald T. Campbell noted this dynamic back in the ’70s, when he articulated what’s come to be known as Campbell’s law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,” he wrote, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”…
Policing is a good example, as explained by Harvard sociologist Peter Moskos in his book Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District. Most cops have a pretty good idea of what they should be doing, if their goal is public safety: reducing crime, locking up kingpins, confiscating drugs. It involves foot patrols, deep investigations, and building good relations with the community. But under statistically driven regimes, individual officers have almost no incentive to actually do that stuff. Instead, they’re all too often judged on results—specifically, arrests. (Not even convictions, just arrests: If a suspect throws away his drugs while fleeing police, the police will chase and arrest him just to get the arrest, even when they know there’s no chance of a conviction.)…
It’s increasingly clear that for smart organizations, living by numbers alone simply won’t work. That’s why they arrive at stage four: synthesis—the practice of marrying quantitative insights with old-fashioned subjective experience. Nate Silver himself has written thoughtfully about examples of this in his book, The Signal and the Noise. He cites baseball, which in the post-Moneyball era adopted a “fusion approach” that leans on both statistics and scouting. Silver credits it with delivering the Boston Red Sox’s first World Series title in 86 years. Or consider weather forecasting: The National Weather Service employs meteorologists who, understanding the dynamics of weather systems, can improve forecasts by as much as 25 percent compared with computers alone. A similar synthesis holds in eco­nomic forecasting: Adding human judgment to statistical methods makes results roughly 15 percent more accurate. And it’s even true in chess: While the best computers can now easily beat the best humans, they can in turn be beaten by humans aided by computers….
That’s what a good synthesis of big data and human intuition tends to look like. As long as the humans are in control, and understand what it is they’re controlling, we’re fine. It’s when they become slaves to the numbers that trouble breaks out. So let’s celebrate the value of disruption by data—but let’s not forget that data isn’t everything.

What Jelly Means

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steven Johnson: “A few months ago, I found this strange white mold growing in my garden in California. I’m a novice gardener, and to make matters worse, a novice Californian, so I had no idea what these small white cells might portend for my flowers.
This is one of those odd blank spots — I used the call them Googleholes in the early days of the service — where the usual Delphic source of all knowledge comes up relatively useless. The Google algorithm doesn’t know what those white spots are, the way it knows more computational questions, like “what is the top-ranked page for “white mold?” or “what is the capital of Illinois?” What I want, in this situation, is the distinction we usually draw between information and wisdom. I don’t just want to know what the white spots are; I want to know if I should be worried about them, or if they’re just a normal thing during late summer in Northern California gardens.
Now, I’m sure I know a dozen people who would be able to answer this question, but the problem is I don’t really know which people they are. But someone in my extended social network has likely experienced these white spots on their plants, or better yet, gotten rid of them.  (Or, for all I know, ate them — I’m trying not to be judgmental.) There are tools out there that would help me run the social search required to find that person. I can just bulk email my entire address book with images of the mold and ask for help. I could go on Quora, or a gardening site.
But the thing is, it’s a type of question that I find myself wanting to ask a lot, and there’s something inefficient about trying to figure the exact right tool to use to ask it each time, particularly when we have seen the value of consolidating so many of our queries into a single, predictable search field at Google.
This is why I am so excited about the new app, Jelly, which launched today. …
Jelly, if you haven’t heard, is the brainchild of Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders.  The service launches today with apps on iOS and Android. (Biz himself has a blog post and video, which you should check out.) I’ve known Biz since the early days of Twitter, and I’m excited to be an adviser and small investor in a company that shares so many of the values around networks and collective intelligence that I’ve been writing about since Emergence.
The thing that’s most surprising about Jelly is how fun it is to answer questions. There’s something strangely satisfying in flipping through the cards, reading questions, scanning the pictures, and looking for a place to be helpful. It’s the same broad gesture of reading, say, a Twitter feed, and pleasantly addictive in the same way, but the intent is so different. Scanning a twitter feed while waiting for the train has the feel of “Here we are now, entertain us.” Scanning Jelly is more like: “I’m here. How can I help?”

6 New Year’s Strategies for Open Data Entrepreneurs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The GovLab’s Senior Advisor Joel Gurin: “Open Data has fueled a wide range of startups, including consumer-focused websites, business-to-business services, data-management tech firms, and more. Many of the companies in the Open Data 500 study are new ones like these. New Year’s is a classic time to start new ventures, and with 2014 looking like a hot year for Open Data, we can expect more startups using this abundant, free resource. For my new book, Open Data Now, I interviewed dozens of entrepreneurs and distilled six of the basic strategies that they’ve used.
1. Learn how to add value to free Open Data. We’re seeing an inversion of the value proposition for data. It used to be that whoever owned the data—particularly Big Data—had greater opportunities than those who didn’t. While this is still true in many areas, it’s also clear that successful businesses can be built on free Open Data that anyone can use. The value isn’t in the data itself but rather in the analytical tools, expertise, and interpretation that’s brought to bear. One oft-cited example: The Climate Corporation, which built a billion-dollar business out of government weather and satellite data that’s freely available for use.
2. Focus on big opportunities: health, finance, energy, education. A business can be built on just about any kind of Open Data. But the greatest number of startup opportunities will likely be in the four big areas where the federal government is focused on Open Data release. Last June’s Health Datapalooza showcased the opportunities in health. Companies like Opower in energy, GreatSchools in education, and Calcbench, SigFig, and Capital Cube in finance are examples in these other major sectors.
3. Explore choice engines and Smart Disclosure apps. Smart Disclosure – releasing data that consumers can use to make marketplace choices – is a powerful tool that can be the basis for a new sector of online startups. No one, it seems, has quite figured out how to make this form of Open Data work best, although sites like CompareTheMarket in the UK may be possible models. Business opportunities await anyone who can find ways to provide these much-needed consumer services. One example: Kayak, which competed in the crowded travel field by providing a great consumer interface, and which was sold to Priceline for $1.8 billion last year.
4. Help consumers tap the value of personal data. In a privacy-conscious society, more people will be interested in controlling their personal data and sharing it selectively for their own benefit. The value of personal data is just being recognized, and opportunities remain to be developed. There are business opportunities in setting up and providing “personal data vaults” and more opportunity in applying the many ways they can be used. Personal and Reputation.com are two leaders in this field.
5. Provide new data solutions to governments at all levels. Government datasets at the federal, state, and local level can be notoriously difficult to use. The good news is that these governments are now realizing that they need help. Data management for government is a growing industry, as Socrata, OpenGov, 3RoundStones, and others are finding, while companies like Enigma.io are turning government data into a more usable resource.
6. Look for unusual Open Data opportunities. Building a successful business by gathering data on restaurant menus and recipes is not an obvious route to success. But it’s working for Food Genius, whose founders showed a kind of genius in tapping an opportunity others had missed. While the big areas for Open Data are becoming clear, there are countless opportunities to build more niche businesses that can still be highly successful. If you have expertise in an area and see a customer need, there’s an increasingly good chance that the Open Data to help meet that need is somewhere to be found.”

Big Data Becomes a Mirror

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book Review of ‘Uncharted,’ by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel in the New York Times: “Why do English speakers say “drove” rather than “drived”?

As graduate students at the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics about eight years ago, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel pondered the matter and decided that something like natural selection might be at work. In English, the “-ed” past-tense ending of Proto-Germanic, like a superior life form, drove out the Proto-Indo-European system of indicating tenses by vowel changes. Only the small class of verbs we know as irregular managed to resist.

To test this evolutionary premise, Mr. Aiden and Mr. Michel wound up inventing something they call culturomics, the use of huge amounts of digital information to track changes in language, culture and history. Their quest is the subject of “Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture,” an entertaining tour of the authors’ big-data adventure, whose implications they wildly oversell….

Invigorated by the great verb chase, Mr. Aiden and Mr. Michel went hunting for bigger game. Given a large enough storehouse of words and a fine filter, would it be possible to see cultural change at the micro level, to follow minute fluctuations in human thought processes and activities? Tiny factoids, multiplied endlessly, might assume imposing dimensions.

By chance, Google Books, the megaproject to digitize every page of every book ever printed — all 130 million of them — was starting to roll just as the authors were looking for their next target of inquiry.

Meetings were held, deals were struck and the authors got to it. In 2010, working with Google, they perfected the Ngram Viewer, which takes its name from the computer-science term for a word or phrase. This “robot historian,” as they call it, can search the 30 million volumes already digitized by Google Books and instantly generate a usage-frequency timeline for any word, phrase, date or name, a sort of stock-market graph illustrating the ups and downs of cultural shares over time.

Mr. Aiden, now director of the Center for Genome Architecture at Rice University, and Mr. Michel, who went on to start the data-science company Quantified Labs, play the Ngram Viewer (books.google.com/ngrams) like a Wurlitzer…

The Ngram Viewer delivers the what and the when but not the why. Take the case of specific years. All years get attention as they approach, peak when they arrive, then taper off as succeeding years occupy the attention of the public. Mentions of the year 1872 had declined by half in 1896, a slow fade that took 23 years. The year 1973 completed the same trajectory in less than half the time.

“What caused that change?” the authors ask. “We don’t know. For now, all we have are the naked correlations: what we uncover when we look at collective memory through the digital lens of our new scope.” Someone else is going to have to do the heavy lifting.”

Philosophical Engineering: Toward a Philosophy of the Web

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New book by Harry Halpin (Editor) and Alexandre Monnin (Editor) : “This is the first interdisciplinary exploration of the philosophical foundations of the Web, a new area of inquiry that has important implications across a range of domains.

  • Contains twelve essays that bridge the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology
  • Tackles questions such as the impact of Google on intelligence and epistemology, the philosophical status of digital objects, ethics on the Web, semantic and ontological changes caused by the Web, and the potential of the Web to serve as a genuine cognitive extension
  • Brings together insightful new scholarship from well-known analytic and continental philosophers, such as Andy Clark and Bernard Stiegler, as well as rising scholars in “digital native” philosophy and engineering
  • Includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web”…

Why government health departments are spending millions on mobile gaming

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Trew in Engadget : “Today sees the release of The Walk, an iOS and Android game backed by the UK’s Department of Health. It’s the second release in a collection of apps funded as part of the UK’s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI). The first — StepJockey, an app that lets you map, locate, rate and log the calorific expenditure of staircases around your city — came out on Monday. All five apps in the program encourage you to move more, or change negative habits. Can an app improve your life? At the very least, we’re guessing the Department of Health — having just spent £2 million on this round of investment — thinks so. This is part of a growing trend, that could see government agencies in the UK taking a leaf out of Silicon Valley’s book when it comes to solving (health) problems. Read past the break to find out why it’s putting so much money on third-party digital initiatives.
Your mission is simple, ensure safe transit of a package from Inverness, to Edinburgh — and in the process save the world. Only one problem: a terrorist attack has rendered all motorised transport unusable — you’ll have to go on foot. That’s the premise behind The Walk. The concept isn’t complicated — encourage players to preambulate in the real world as part of an apocalyptic game narrative. Your phone’s accelerometer tracks your movements, unlocking levels and hours of story-telling audio which drive the plot along. Simple, fun, effective. The game’s predecessor (Zombies, Run!) uses similar mechanics, and currently encourages over 750,000 would-be Shauns (or Eds) to escape pursuing Zombies whenever they go for a jog. By lowering the requirement to walking, it’s hoped almost everyone can benefit this time. The focus is on increasing general daily movement, rather than dedicated, prescribed and sometimes prohibitive training routines.
There’s no question the theory is simple: apps that encourage activity, or responsible drinking, could cut down on healthcare requirements through prevention, negating the need for cure. In turn, it could also take a bite out of the estimated £8 billion that obesity and alcohol related diseases cost the UK’s health service each year. More interesting, is that the Department of Health is funding external mobile start-ups and indie developers at all. We asked it why, and were told it’s just as much about nurturing innovative ideas (where they can compete with more conventional fitness apps such as Nike+, MapMyFitness and Adidas miCoach) as it is about encouraging lifestyle change.

The motivation might initially be the potential (and hard to quantify) savings through a healthier public. But using apps to achieve this is an idea the US government is curious about also. ..”

Book Review: Three Harbingers of Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Howard Rheingold reviews the following books in Strategy and Business:
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013)
Marina Gorbis
The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World
(Free Press, 2013)
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture
(New York University Press, 2013)
“Whether you invest, build, teach, research, regulate, investigate, heal, entertain, or sell, major changes in how you do what you do are looming. “Big data,” much in the media spotlight recently—particularly for the revelations of the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) surveillance of “metadata”—is probably already changing how you do your work. But socialstructing and spreadable media, two new terms that signal similarly momentous shifts, may still be unfamiliar. This year’s best business books on digitization can equip you to better understand all three phenomena and the changes that they will enable and engender….”

Net Effects: The Past, Present & Future Impact of Our Networks – History, Challenges and Opportunities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ebook by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler: “Almost a month into my new job, the fact that I’ve always been a “network guy” and an intrepid history buff should come as no surprise. Reading history has reinforced the central importance networks play and revealed the common themes in successive periods of network-driven change. Now, at the FCC, I find myself joining my colleagues in a position of both responsibility and authority over how the public is affected by and interfaces with the networks that connect us.

Prior to my appointment by President Obama, I was doing research for a book about the history of networks. The new job stopped that project. However, I believe strongly that our future is informed by our past. While awaiting Senate confirmation, I tried to distill the project on which I had been working to connect what I had learned in my research to the challenges in my new job.
The result is a short, free eBook, “Net Effects: The Past, Present & Future Impact of Our Networks – History, Challenges and Opportunities”. It’s a look at the history of three network revolutions – the printing press, the railroad, and the telegraph and telephony – and how the fourth network revolution – digital communications – will be informed by those experiences.
It was this process that led me to what I’ve been describing as the “prisms” for looking at policy, or the “pillars” of communication policy: ensuring that our new networks promote economic growth, preserving the fundamental values that have traditionally been the foundation of our communications networks, and enabling public purpose benefits of our networks.
We have the privilege of being present at a hinge moment in history to wrestle with the future of our networks and their effect on our commerce and our culture. If such a topic is of interest to you, I hope you’ll download this short eBook. Hopefully, it’s the beginning of a dialogue.
Download the book on the following platforms for free:

Selected Readings on Smart Disclosure

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of smart disclosure was originally published in 2013.

While much attention is paid to open data, data transparency need not be managed by a simple On/Off switch: It’s often desirable to make specific data available to the public or individuals in targeted ways. A prime example is the use of government data in Smart Disclosure, which provides consumers with data they need to make difficult marketplace choices in health care, financial services, and other important areas. Governments collect two kinds of data that can be used for Smart Disclosure: First, governments collect information on services of high interest to consumers, and are increasingly releasing this kind of data to the public. In the United States, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services collects and releases online data on health insurance options, while the Department of Education helps consumers understand the true cost (after financial aid) of different colleges. Second, state, local, or national governments hold information on consumers themselves that can be useful to them. In the U.S., for example, the Blue Button program was launched to help veterans easily access their own medical records.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Better Choices: Better Deals Report on Progress in the Consumer Empowerment Strategy. Progress Report. Consumer Empowerment Strategy. United Kingdom: Department for Business Innovation & Skills, December 2012. http://bit.ly/17MqnL3.

  • The report details the progress made through the United Kingdom’s consumer empowerment strategy, Better Choices: Better Deals. The plan seeks to mitigate knowledge imbalances through information disclosure programs and targeted nudges.
  • The empowerment strategy’s four sections demonstrate the potential benefits of Smart Disclosure: 1. The power of information; 2. The power of the crowd; 3. Helping the vulnerable; and 4. A new approach to Government working with business.
Braunstein, Mark L.,. “Empowering the Patient.” In Health Informatics in the Cloud, 67–79. Springer Briefs in Computer Science. Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London, 2013. https://bit.ly/2UB4jTU.
  • This book discusses the application of computing to healthcare delivery, public health and community based clinical research.
  • Braunstein asks and seeks to answer critical questions such as: Who should make the case for smart disclosure when the needs of consumers are not being met? What role do non-profits play in the conversation on smart disclosure especially when existing systems (or lack thereof) of information provision do not work or are unsafe?

Brodi, Elisa. “Product-Attribute Information” and “Product-Use Information”: Smart Disclosure and New Policy Implications for Consumers’ Protection. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, September 4, 2012. http://bit.ly/17hssEK.

  • This paper from the Research Area of the Bank of Italy’s Law and Economics Department “surveys the literature on product use information and analyzes whether and to what extent Italian regulator is trying to ensure consumers’ awareness as to their use pattern.” Rather than focusing on the type of information governments can release to citizens, Brodi proposes that governments require private companies to provide valuable use pattern information to citizens to inform decision-making.
  • The form of regulation proposed by Brodi and other proponents “is based on a basic concept: consumers can be protected if companies are forced to disclose data on the customers’ consumption history through electronic files.”
National Science and Technology Council. Smart Disclosure and Consumer Decision Making: Report of the Task Force on Smart Disclosure. Task Force on Smart Disclosure: Information and Efficiency in Consumer Markets. Washington, DC: United States Government: Executive Office of the President, May 30, 2013. http://1.usa.gov/1aamyoT.
    • This inter-agency report is a comprehensive description of smart disclosure approaches being used across the Federal Government. The report not only highlights the importance of making data available to consumers but also to innovators to build better options for consumers.
  • In addition to providing context about government policies that guide smart disclosure initiatives, the report raises questions about what parties have influence in this space.

“Policies in Practice: The Download Capability.” Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement, August 2010. http://bit.ly/HhMJyc.

  • This report from the Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement — the creator of the Blue Button system for downloading personal health records — features a “set of privacy and security practices to help people download their electronic health records.”
  • To help make health information easily accessible for all citizens, the report lists a number of important steps:
    • Make the download capability a common practice
    • Implement sound policies and practices to protect individuals and their information
    • Collaborate on sample data sets
    • Support the download capability as part of Meaningful Use and qualified or certified health IT
    • Include the download capability in procurement requirements.
  • The report also describes the rationale for the development of the Blue Button — perhaps the best known example of Smart Disclosure currently in existence — and the targeted release of health information in general:
    • Individual access to information is rooted in fair information principles and law
    • Patients need and want the information
    • The download capability would encourage innovation
    • A download capability frees data sources from having to make many decisions about the user interface
    • A download capability would hasten the path to standards and interoperability.
Sayogo, Djoko Sigit, and Theresa A. Pardo. “Understanding Smart Data Disclosure Policy Success: The Case of Green Button.” In Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, 72–81. New York: ACM New York, NY, USA, 2013. http://bit.ly/1aanf1A.
  • This paper from the Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research explores the implementation of the Green Button Initiative, analyzing qualitative data from interviews with experts involved in Green Button development and implementation.
  • Moving beyond the specifics of the Green Button initiative, the authors raise questions on the motivations and success factors facilitating successful collaboration between public and private organizations to support smart disclosure policy.

Thaler, Richard H., and Will Tucker. “Smarter Information, Smarter Consumers.” Harvard Business Review January – February 2013. The Big Idea. http://bit.ly/18gimxw.

  • In this article, Thaler and Tucker make three key observations regarding the challenges related to smart disclosure:
    • “We are constantly confronted with information that is highly important but extremely hard to navigate or understand.”
    • “Repeated attempts to improve disclosure, including efforts to translate complex contracts into “plain English,” have met with only modest success.”
    • “There is a fundamental difficulty of explaining anything complex in simple terms. Most people find it difficult to write instructions explaining how to tie a pair of shoelaces.

Social movements and their technologies. wiring social change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Stefania Milan: “Social Movements and Their Technologies. Wiring Social Change explores the interplay between social movements and their “liberated technologies”. It analyzes the rise of low-power radio stations and radical internet projects (“emancipatory communication practices”) as a political subject, focusing on the sociological and cultural processes at play. It provides an overview of the relationship between social movements and technology and investigates what is behind the communication infrastructure that made possible the main protest events of the past 15 years. In doing so, Stefania Milan illustrates how contemporary social movements organize in order to create autonomous alternatives to communication systems and networks and how they contribute to change the way people communicate in daily life, as well as try to change communication policy from the grassroots….
Read an excerpt from the book
“The question of infrastructure might sound trivial in times of abundance of “free” social media, microblogging platforms and apps allowing people to voice their opinions and share pictures and videos at will, and at virtually no cost. But we often forget that these platforms are owned and controlled by media and telecoms corporations whose agenda focuses on profit and corporate interests rather than participation, empowerment, and social justice. With this in mind, in recent decades activist groups have increasingly challenged media corporations and state-owned broadcasters on their own terrain. They have created alternatives to existing communication infrastructure by setting up community radio and television stations, and alternative websites for self-produced information. Such grassroots media have allowed broader swathes of the citizenry to access media production and secure communication channels. They have become what DeeDee Halleck calls “infrastructures of resistance” (2002, p. 191) to the neoliberal order in the media realm.”