The Political Economy of Web Science

Milwaukee.
The final speaker for this session at AoIR 2009 is Michael Dick, who focusses on the idea of Web science as political economy. This builds on Tim Berners-Lee's idea of Web Science, which applies especially computer science approaches to the study of the Web's evolution, design, and operation, with an aim of understanding and 'managing' the Web. The majority of these ideas, however, are the Semantic Web in disguise, Michael says.

This assumes a continual evolution of the Web, from a Web of documents to the interactive Web 2.0 and on to the 'deep Web' which further mines the vast amount of data generated through Web 2.0 services. The next steps from here are the Semantic Web and the Web of data, which describe and utilise this material using universal ontology languages. Essentially, this converts loose Web 2.0 folksonomies to manageable taxonomies.

What's missing here is media theory - reinterpreting McLuhan's and Innis's work in the light of the Web, for example, and taking account of the spatiality and temporality of the Web. A useful tool in this context is Yochai Benkler's work on the wealth of networks, which sees a shift from the current network information economy to the emerging networked public sphere; for him, wealth is in the cultural democracy and social production fostered by a decentralised and unregulated Web. User-generated content, and even the overall Web itself, are examples for this.

This should be used to extend Web science, then: key design characteristics of the networked public sphere for Benkler are universal intake, filtering for potential political relevance, filtering for accreditation, synthesising public opinion, and independence from government control, and especially the first and last of these need to be recognised by Web science and its obsession with the Semantic Web. Questions here are how to balance control and decentralisation (and can Web science then still be a science?), techno-deterministic and socially constructed perspectives on technology, and the utility of the Web science moniker in the first place.

And that's it for today - I''m off to bed to sleep off this illness. Hope I feel better tomorrow...

Technorati : AoIR 2009, Semantic Web, Wealth of Networks, Web Science, Yochai Benkler, produsage, user-generated content
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