Wikipedia @ 20

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stories of an Incomplete Revolution edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner (Open Access): “We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident—a wiki attached to a nascent online encyclopedia—has become the world’s most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of “free access to the sum of all human knowledge” when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia’s first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal.

The contributors consider Wikipedia’s history, the richness of the connections that underpin it, and its founding vision. Their essays look at, among other things, the shift from bewilderment to respect in press coverage of Wikipedia; Wikipedia as “the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history”; and the acknowledgment that “free access” includes not just access to the material but freedom to contribute—that the summation of all human knowledge is biased by who documents it….(More)”

Data Action: Using Data for Public Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Sarah Williams: “Big data can be used for good—from tracking disease to exposing human rights violations—and for bad: implementing surveillance and control. Data inevitably represents the ideologies of those who control its use; data analytics and algorithms too often exclude women, the poor, and ethnic groups. In Data Action, Sarah Williams provides a guide for working with data in more ethical and responsible ways. Williams outlines a method that emphasizes collaboration among data scientists, policy experts, data designers, and the public. The approach generates policy debates, influences civic decisions, and informs design to help ensure that the voices of people represented in the data are neither marginalized nor left unheard….(More)”.

Digital Politics in Canada: Promises and Realities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Tamara A. Small and Harold J. Jansen: “Digital Politics in Canada addresses a significant gap in the scholarly literature on both media in Canada and Canadian political science. Using a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, historical, and focused analysis of Canadian digital politics, this book covers the full scope of actors in the Canadian political system, including traditional political institutions of the government, elected officials, political parties, and the mass media. At a time when issues of inclusion are central to political debate, this book features timely chapters on Indigenous people, women, and young people, and takes an in-depth look at key issues of online surveillance and internet voting. Ideal for a wide-ranging course on the impact of digital technology on the Canadian political system, this book encourages students to critically engage in discussions about the future of Canadian politics and democracy….(More)”.

The Politics of Technology in Latin America

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Avery Plaw, Barbara Carvalho Gurgel and David Ramírez Plascencia: “This book analyses the arrival of emerging and traditional information and technology for public and economic use in Latin America. It focuses on the governmental, economic and security issues and the study of the complex relationship between citizens and government.

The book is divided into three parts:

• ‘Digital data and privacy, prospects and barriers’ centers on the debates among the right of privacy and the loss of intimacy in the Internet,

• ‘Homeland security and human rights’ focuses on how novel technologies such as drones and autonomous weapons systems reconfigure the strategies of police authorities and organized crime,

• ‘Labor Markets, digital media and emerging technologies’ emphasize the legal, economic and social perils and challenges caused by the increased presence of social media, blockchain-based applications, artificial intelligence and automation technologies in the Latin American economy….(More)”.

Digital Democracy, Social Media and Disinformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Petros Iosifidis and Nicholas Nicoli: “Digital Democracy, Social Media and Disinformation discusses some of the political, regulatory and technological issues which arise from the increased power of internet intermediaries (such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) and the impact of the spread of digital disinformation, especially in the midst of a health pandemic.

The volume provides a detailed account of the main areas surrounding digital democracy, disinformation and fake news, freedom of expression and post-truth politics. It addresses the major theoretical and regulatory concepts of digital democracy and the ‘network society’ before offering potential socio-political and technological solutions to the fight against disinformation and fake news. These solutions include self-regulation, rebuttals and myth-busting, news literacy, policy recommendations, awareness and communication strategies and the potential of recent technologies such as the blockchain and public interest algorithms to counter disinformation.

After addressing what has currently been done to combat disinformation and fake news, the volume argues that digital disinformation needs to be identified as a multifaceted problem, one that requires multiple approaches to resolve. Governments, regulators, think tanks, the academy and technology providers need to take more steps to better shape the next internet with as little digital disinformation as possible by means of a regional analysis. In this context, two cases concerning Russia and Ukraine are presented regarding disinformation and the ways it was handled….(More)”

Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Hélène Landemore: “To the ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in public and debating laws set by a randomly selected assembly of several hundred citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings, democracy meant meeting every summer in a field to discuss issues until consensus was reached. Our contemporary representative democracies are very different. Modern parliaments are gated and guarded, and it seems as if only certain people—with the right suit, accent, wealth, and connections—are welcome. Diagnosing what is wrong with representative government and aiming to recover some of the lost openness of ancient democracies, Open Democracy presents a new paradigm of democracy in which power is genuinely accessible to ordinary citizens.

Hélène Landemore favors the ideal of “representing and being represented in turn” over direct-democracy approaches. Supporting a fresh nonelectoral understanding of democratic representation, Landemore recommends centering political institutions around the “open mini-public”—a large, jury-like body of randomly selected citizens gathered to define laws and policies for the polity, in connection with the larger public. She also defends five institutional principles as the foundations of an open democracy: participatory rights, deliberation, the majoritarian principle, democratic representation, and transparency.

Open Democracy demonstrates that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elites, at the heart of democratic power is not only the true meaning of a government of, by, and for the people, but also feasible and, today more than ever, urgently needed….(More)”.

The Politics of Social Media Manipulation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

(Open Access) Book edited by Richard Rogers and Sabine Niederer: “Disinformation and so-called fake news are contemporary phenomena with rich histories. Disinformation, or the willful introduction of false information for the purposes of causing harm, recalls infamous foreign interference operations in national media systems. Outcries over fake news, or dubious stories with the trappings of news, have coincided with the introduction of new media technologies that disrupt the publication, distribution and consumption of news — from the so-called rumour-mongering broadsheets centuries ago to the blogosphere recently. Designating a news organization as fake, or <i>der Lügenpresse</i>, has a darker history, associated with authoritarian regimes or populist bombast diminishing the reputation of ‘elite media’ and the value of inconvenient truths. In a series of empirical studies, using digital methods and data journalism, the authors inquire into the extent to which social media have enabled the penetration of foreign disinformation operations, the widespread publication and spread of dubious content as well as extreme commentators with considerable followings attacking mainstream media as fake….(More)”

Technologies of Speculation: The limits of knowledge in a data-driven society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Sun-ha Hong: “What counts as knowledge in the age of big data and smart machines? In its pursuit of better knowledge, technology is reshaping what counts as knowledge in its own image – and demanding that the rest of us catch up to new machinic standards for what counts as suspicious, informed, employable. In the process, datafication often generates speculation as much as it does information. The push for algorithmic certainty sets loose an expansive array of incomplete archives, speculative judgments and simulated futures where technology meets enduring social and political problems.

Technologies of Speculation traces this technological manufacturing of speculation as knowledge. It shows how unprovable predictions, uncertain data and black-boxed systems are upgraded into the status of fact – with lasting consequences for criminal justice, public opinion, employability, and more. It tells the story of vast dragnet systems constructed to predict the next terrorist, and how familiar forms of prejudice seep into the data by the back door. In software placeholders like ‘Mohammed Badguy’, the fantasy of pure data collides with the old spectre of national purity. It tells the story of smart machines for ubiquitous and automated self-tracking, manufacturing knowledge that paradoxically lies beyond the human senses. Such data is increasingly being taken up by employers, insurers and courts of law, creating imperfect proxies through which my truth can be overruled.

The book situates ongoing controversies over AI and algorithms within a broader societal faith in objective truth and technological progress. It argues that even as datafication leverages this faith to establish its dominance, it is dismantling the longstanding link between knowledge and human reason, rational publics and free individuals. Technologies of Speculation thus emphasises the basic ethical problem underlying contemporary debates over privacy, surveillance and algorithmic bias: who, or what, has the right to the truth of who I am and what is good for me? If data promises objective knowledge, then we must ask in return: knowledge by and for whom, enabling what forms of life for the human subject?…(More)”.

For the Win

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Revised and Updated Book by Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter on “The Power of Gamification and Game Thinking in Business, Education, Government, and Social Impact”: “For thousands of years, we’ve created things called games that tap the tremendous psychic power of fun. In a revised and updated edition of For the Win: The Power of Gamification and Game Thinking in Business, Education, Government, and Social Impact, authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter argue that applying the lessons of gamification could change your business, the way you learn or teach, and even your life.

Werbach and Hunter explain how games can be used as a valuable tool to address serious pursuits like marketing, productivity enhancement, education, innovation, customer engagement, human resources, and sustainability. They reveal how, why, and when gamification works—and what not to do.

Discover the successes—and failures—of organizations that are using gamification:

  • How a South Korean company called Neofect is using gamification to help people recover from strokes;
  • How a tool called SuperBetter has demonstrated significant results treating depression, concussion symptoms, and the mental health harms of the COVID-19 pandemic through game thinking;
  • How the ride-hailing giant Uber once used gamification to influence their drivers to work longer hours than they otherwise wanted to, causing swift backlash.

The story of gamification isn’t fun and games by any means. It’s serious. When used carefully and thoughtfully, gamification produces great outcomes for users, in ways that are hard to replicate through other methods. Other times, companies misuse the “guided missile” of gamification to have people work and do things in ways that are against their self-interest.

This revised and updated edition incorporates the most prominent research findings to provide a comprehensive gamification playbook for the real world….(More)”.

Right/Wrong:How Technology Transforms Our Ethics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Juan Enriquez: “Most people have a strong sense of right and wrong, and they aren’t shy about expressing their opinions. But when we take a polarizing stand on something we regard as an eternal truth, we often forget that ethics evolve over time. Many shifts in the right versus wrong pendulum are driven by advances in technology. Our great-grandparents might be shocked by in vitro fertilization; our great-grandchildren might be shocked by the messiness of pregnancy, childbirth, and unedited genes. In Right/Wrong, Juan Enriquez reflects on what happens to our ethics as technology makes the once unimaginable a commonplace occurrence.

Evolving technology changes ethics. Enriquez points out that, contrary to common wisdom, technology often enables more ethical behaviors. Technology challenges old beliefs and upends institutions that do not grow and change. With wit and compassion, Enriquez takes on a series of technology-influenced ethical dilemmas, from sexual liberation to climate change to the “immortality” of mistakes on social media. (“Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google are electronic tattoos.”) He cautions us to judge those who “should have known better,” given today’s vantage point, with less fury and more compassion. We need a quality often absent in today’s charged debates: humility. Judge those in the past as we hope to be judged in the future….(More)”.