Internet Technologies

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Andrew Iliadis, whose focus is on the role of metadata. Metadata and related terms such as ontology have rocketed to broader attention in recent years; here, philosophical concepts related to ontology have come to be translated to computationally accessible relationship constructs between data entities.

The next speaker at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Theodora Sutton, who has studied a digital detox event in the San Francisco Bay area, Camp Grounded. This takes place in nature and bans digital technology, real names, work talk, watches, and drugs and alcohol.

The second keynote speaker in this opening evening at ECREA 2018 is Lina Dencik, whose keynote at last weekend’s iCS Symposium I covered a few days ago; here, her focus is on resistance in the datafied society. Such resistance is important in the present moment, and scholars have an increasingly important and more and more politicised role in this context.

There has been an overall, ongoing shift towards data-driven governance in recent years, leading to the emergence of a genuinely – but far from universally beneficially – datafied society. We have already seen a long history of digital surveillance, exemplified not least in the Snowden leaks, and this is represented in policy, news coverage, and general public understanding. This complicates our positioning as digital citizens and colours our understanding of the datafied society; it has revealed big data and surveillance capitalism as a form of governance, and normalised data collection and surveillance culture in our everyday lives.

At the conclusion of my travels in Canada and Europe, I’ve made my way to Lugano for ECREA2018. We start with the first of two keynotes, by Eszter Hargittai, whose focus is on the digital divide in online participation. The fundamental question here is who benefits the most from Internet participation, and who does not: do participation divides facilitate social mobility or reproduce social divides?

The key point here is that digital divides cannot be solved by mere connectivity: getting online does not equate to using the Internet effectively and efficiently. Rather, such uses continue to be moderated by socioeconomic status, technical and social contexts, personal Internet skills, and the types of uses being made. Internet skills here include especially an awareness of what is possible, and the ability to create and share content, amongst a long list of others – and it is important to focus on such skills because users’ skills levels can be addressed by a variety of interventions more quickly than a variety of more intractable factors.

The second day at the iCS Symposium at IT University Copenhagen starts with a keynote by Lina Dencik. She explores the difficulties in researching the datafied society, building on several of the projects currently underway at the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University. This work must involve researchers, but also civil society actors, practitioners, journalists, and others.

The datafied society represents an immensely fast-moving space; there are constant updates on development projects, company initiatives, government actions, data scandals, etc. As researchers, it is important to introduce a sense of slowness into this environment from time to time, in order to take a more considered and careful look at what is going on, yet the speed at which new data-driven technologies are being implemented across society, often without having been fully trialled and tested, makes this very difficult and gives a great deal of unchecked power to the companies providing these technologies.

The final speakers in this AoIR 2018 session are Willian Fernandez Araújo and João Carlos Magalhães; they are interested in how ordinary people comprehend algorithms, and captured Portuguese-language tweets that used relevant terms to explore this.

The third speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Martina Mahnke, who is approaching algorithms from a human rather than technical perspective. Indeed, the term algorithm is often used to avoid explaining exactly how automated systems function, and what logics them embed; the study of algorithms from the user’s or programmer’s view has a considerably shorter history to date.

The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Noemi Festic, whose focus is on algorithmic content selection processes by automated systems. This includes search applications, recommendation systems, and a broad range of other automated tools; these govern user behaviour by limiting and shaping activities but thereby also provide a space for new forms of engagement.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Aram Sinnreich, whose interest is in the continuing consequences of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – and in particular its anti-circumvention elements that criminalise the bypassing of copyright protection mechanisms such as encryption, even in contexts where ‘fair use’ exceptions apply.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Andrea Alarcon, whose focus is on Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org project. Its aim was to provide free basic Internet service around the world, especially for people who were within the Web’s reach but remained unconnected with it; access to Facebook itself was deeply baked into this initiative, and this generated significant accusations of building a walled garden.