Limiting the danger of new technologies

The Internet, the Web, search engines, social media and other communication/information technologies offer both new potential and new danger.

“We get information through search engines and we interact socially online,” says Michael Zimmer, assistant professor of information studies at UWM. “These tools are powerful, sexy and alluring, but we don’t always know what’s going on behind the scenes. We can’t get under the hood.” Zimmer has received national attention for his work in critically exploring and carefully explaining the ethical issues and privacy challenges posed by new communication tools.

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A troubling consequence of new technology has been the rise in cyberbullying and violations of per- sonal privacy, says Zimmer. “It’s one thing to peek through a window and another to have a webcam transmitting what’s happening over the Internet.” Young people who have grown up with new media don’t always understand the power of the tools they’re using. “Students have expectations that only certain people will see something – only their 50 or so friends,” says Zimmer. They don’t consider that future employers, lawyers or a much wider audience around the globe might see that information, too.

Education is one way to offset the problems and harness the value of the technology. “It’s good to be out there,” he says, “but you need to have tools and skills to navigate this new world. You need to have the digital literacy to know how to use the Web safely and responsibly.”

Clearly, I’m not the only person engaged in such work here at UW-M (see the Center for Information Policy Research and other faculty research at the School of Information Studies, as well as related activities within the Center for 21st Century Studies, for example), but it is nice to have our focus area recognized.

The conference program is fantastic, featuring keynote addresses by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Megan Boler. I’ll be presenting an updated version of my paper, “But the Data is Already Public”: On the Ethics of Research in Facebook, based on my critique of the “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook data release.

I’ll also be participating in a pre-conference workshop on Critical Issues and Perspectives in Internet Research Methods and Ethics, where the focus will be on raising awareness of and sensitivity by researchers around critical methodological and ethical issues working particularly in online or Internet-mediated realms.

There already is a great tweet stream at #ir10, so please follow us if you can’t make it.

UPDATE: By most measures, the conference was a great success. As an organizer, I was only able to sit in on a handful of sessions (including my own), but others have blogged about here and here.

There are quite a few images up on Flickr, and I’ve created a Wordle from all the individual paper titles. Matt Allen blogged the AoIR general meeting, where the locations of the next two conferences were announced: Gothenburg, Sweden (2010) & Seattle, Washington (2011). See you there!

Below are some of the Street View images he has found, along with his closing remarks. I urge everyone to read and feel the entire essay.

The collections of Street Views both celebrate and critique the current world. To deny Google’s power over framing our perceptions would be delusional, but the curator, in seeking out frames within these frames, reminds us of our humanity. The artist/curator, in reasserting the significance of the human gaze within Street View, recognizes the pain and disempowerment in being declared insignificant. The artist/curator challenges Google’s imperial claims and questions the company’s right to be the only one framing our cognitions and perceptions.

Following up on March’s special issue of First Monday on “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0,” I was recently interviewed by Joy Austria and A.J. Hannah for the First Monday Podcast series.

You can download the MP3 (5.2MB, 15:16) or read the transcript. Hopefully you can read between the awkward phrasing of my responses (I think I was travel-weary at the time), and find something insightful to complement the special issue.

(Speaking of that special issue, the Washington Post recently quoted Anders Albrechtslund‘s contribution. I’m thrilled folks are finding it useful.)

Technology, Law, Society, Values and Design

The starting point of this reading group is the position that the spheres of technology, society, law, and values are engaged in an eternal dance, each guiding, influencing, and reacting to the other. Technologies are socially constructed, but also shape society. Values are embedded in technologies and reflected in law. Laws react to technologies and form the basis for society. Where these spheres intersect rests the notion of design, the ways in which technologies are built, laws are crafted, values are embedded, and society is shaped.

This reading group will map the terrain of the complex interrelationships between technology, society, law, values, and design, bringing together disparate theories from law, philosophy, ethics, sociology, media theory, science and technology studies, and information science. The reading group will cover key readings selected on the basis of: 1) their depth, rigor, aspirational ideals, contribution to foundational thinking, influence on discourse, etc. and 2) their coverage of as broad a range of topics as possible, including privacy, social software, information policy, information intermediaries, sustainable technologies, digital rights, and Internet governance.

Recognizing that each topic could itself fill a semester, the reading group aims for a broad overview of issues and perspectives, and a sufficient grasp of basic concepts and principles, providing a solid foundation for independent future explorations, and an ability to apply these concepts and principles to innovative research questions.

Schedule
(subject to change)

Feb 5: Foundational Concepts: Values in Technology

• Friedman, Batya, and Nissenbaum, Helen. “Bias in Computer Systems.” ACM Transactions on Information Systems 14, no. 3 (1996): 330-47.
• Mumford, Lewis. “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (1964): 1-8.
• Shneiderman, Ben. “Human Values and the Future of Technology: A Declaration of Responsibility.” ACM SIGCHI Bulletin 23, no. 1 (1991): 11-16.
• Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics.” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121-36.

Feb 12: Foundational Concepts: Technology as Law

• Grimmelmann, J. “Regulation By Software.” Yale Law Journal 114 (2005): 1719-58.
• Lessig, L. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. (chapters 1-2)
• Wu, T. “When Code Isn’t Law.” Virginia Law Review 89, no. 4 (2003): 679-751.

Feb 19: Foundational Concepts: Technology and Society

• Heilbroner, R. “Do Machines Make History?” In Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, edited by Merritt Roe Smith, and Leo Marx, 53-65. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
• Heilbroner, R. “Technological Determinism Revisited.” In Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, edited by Merritt Roe Smith, and Leo Marx, 67-78. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
• Postman, Neil. “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.”
• Sunder, Madhavi. “IP3.” Stanford Law Review 59 (2006)

Feb 26: Foundational Concepts: Design Pragmatics

• Flanagan, Mary, Daniel Howe, and Helen Nissenbaum. “Values in Design: Theory and Practice.” In Information Technology and Moral Philosophy, edited by Jeroen van den Hoven, and John Weckert, Cambridge University Press, in press.
• Friedman, Batya, Kahn, Paul, and Borning, Alan. “Value Sensitive Design: Theory and Methods.” (Technical Report 02-12-01) (2002)
• Manders-Huits, N. & Zimmer, M., Values & pragmatic action: The challenges of engagement with technical design communities

March 4: Information Intermediaries

• Elkin-Koren, Niva. “Let the Crawlers Crawl: On Virtual Gatekeepers and the Right to Exclude Indexing.” University of Dayton Law Review 26 (2001): 180-209.
• Goldman, E. “Search Engine Bias and the Demise of Search Engine Utopianism.” Yale Journal of Law & Technology (2006): 188-200.
• Introna, Lucas, and Nissenbaum, Helen. “Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters.” The Information Society 16, no. 3 (2000): 169-85.

March 11: Social Software

• Agre, Philip. “P2P and the Promise of Internet Equality.” Communications of the ACM 46, no. 2 (2003): 39-42.
• Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. (pp. 356-377)
• Madison, Michael. “Social Software, Groups and Governance.” Michigan State Law Review 1 (2006): 153.
• Shirky, C. Social software and the politics of groups

March 25: Sustainable Technologies

• Selected position papers from Workshop on Ubiquitous Sustainability: Technologies for Green Values
• Additional reading: TBD

April 1: Privacy

• Cohen, Julie. “A Right to Read Anonymously: A Closer Look At ‘Copyright Management’ in Cyberspace.” Connecticut Law Review 28, no. 4 (1996): 981-1039.
• Kang, Jerry. “Information Privacy in Cyberspace Transactions.” Stanford Law Review 50, no. 4 (1998): 1193-294.
• Microsoft Corporation, Privacy guidelines for developing software products and services
• Rotenberg, M. “Fair Information Practices and the Architecture of Privacy (What Larry Doesn’t Get).” Stanford Technology Law Review Review 1 (2001):

April 8: Digital Rights

• Balkin, Jack. “Digital Speech and Democratic Culture: A Theory of Freedom of Expression for the Information Society.” New York University Law Review 79, no. 1 (2004): 1.
• Balkin, Jack. “Virtual Liberty: Freedom to Design and Freedom to Play in Virtual Worlds.” Virginia Law Review 90, no. 8 (2004): 2043-98.

April 15: Internet Governance

• Crawford, Susan. The Radio and the Internet
• Mueller, Milton. Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002. (excerpts)

Today, however, I came across one of my favorite essays by the late Neil Postman, cultural critic and founder of my PhD-granting department at NYU, and felt compelled to interrupt my break from blogging to share it.

The essay, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change,” was delivered by Postman in 1998 to a gathering of theologians and religious leaders in Denver, Colorado.  Postman remarked on the things we should all endeavor to understand about how society is impacted by technological innovation. In it, he said that “technological change is not additive, it’s ecological”, and that in order for us to comprehend, manage, and even embrace the rapid changes brought on by the technological advancement happening all around us, we need to understand that technology doesn’t just add to society — it transforms it.

His concluding remarks continue to be apt 10 years later he first uttered them:

And so, these are my five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

If we had more time, I could supply some additional important things about technological change but I will stand by these for the moment, and will close with this thought. In the past, we experienced technological change in the manner of sleep-walkers. Our unspoken slogan has been “technology über alles,” and we have been willing to shape our lives to fit the requirements of technology, not the requirements of culture. This is a form of stupidity, especially in an age of vast technological change. We need to proceed with our eyes wide open so that we many use technology rather than be used by it.

• Knowledge is the key to social and economic development;
• Creation, acquisition and sharing of knowledge have been going through dramatic changes because of rapidly emerging new information and communication technologies (ICT) and the societal transformations that they generate;
• New approaches are needed to bridge international knowledge gaps while ensuring cultural and linguistic diversity;
• The Internet and new education technologies provide manifold opportunities for all;
• There is a need to continuously harness new technologies and processes to develop knowledge societies that are people-centered, inclusive and development oriented.

…and it goes on to suggest political and structural changes that are needed to improve knowledge acquisition and sharing, including:

• The impact of technology on the evolution of knowledge societies;
• The concept of universal “knowledge norms”;
• The impact of emerging technologies on models of knowledge acquisition;
• The future role of classical knowledge acquisition structures including those of teachers/trainers;
• The role of public-private partnerships in knowledge acquisition and sharing;

The declaration includes a multitude of other areas that need to be focused on, ranging from “Develop long-term strategies to efficiently harness the enormous potential of new communication and information processes and technologies for developing new approaches to knowledge acquisition and sharing” to “Preserve mother-tongue languages while encouraging competencies in one or more global languages” to “Promote user-friendly ICT applications to make knowledge acquisition and sharing available to everybody anywhere and anytime.”

One focus area that is missing involves the increased ability to track, capture, and aggregate people’s knowledge acquisition activities through technological means. Our technological world has largely moved us beyond sole reliance on oral or written transmission of knowledge to an increasingly digital mode of knowledge acquisition. I no longer visit the local library to read up on a subject; instead, I Google it. More efficient? Yes. Access to more sources and opinions? Yes. But this also means the ability to track the knowledge I hope to acquire has increased significantly as well. (I could spend the whole day in the local library and no one would necessarily know I was there, who I am, and what books I happen to browse from the shelves. When I search Google, it is much easier for them to know all those items.) This relates to some of the privacy concerns latent within the access to knowledge framework, something which needs to be further explored.

This absence notwithstanding, this is an important declaration and I agree with its framers that “leaders in the public and private sectors must embrace change in organizations and people by providing opportunities and incentives to facilitate and motivate, as well as to overcome typical barriers in knowledge acquisition and sharing.”

There has been lots of discussion on this seemingly misogynistic “correction” that Google provides, and those familiar with my research know that I’m a proponent of critiquing algorithm and system design for potential bias. But in this case I think it is more a function of the n-gram table of adjacent word frequencies. A user searches for “x y”, Google determines that “x z” is related, and appears more commonly in “natural language”, so it suggests that search as well.

There clearly is a broader cultural problem that “he invented” appears more often in language, but in this case it might just be Google’s algorithm reflecting a pre-existing cultural bias, and not creating it themselves. Now, of course, Google could decide to intervene and NOT allow this suggestion to appear – or to force similar suggestions in the reverse…..plenty of ways for them to “not be evil” here…..

Good related background reading:

• Friedman, B. & Nissenbaum, H. (1996). Bias in computer systems (PDF). ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 14(3), 330-347.
• Introna, L. & Nissenbaum, H. (2000). Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters (PDF). The Information Society, 16(3), 169-185.

We live in techno-enthusiastic times, and we are most likely to celebrate our gadgets. Certainly the advertising that sells us our devices has us working from beautiful, remote locations that signal our status. We are connected, tethered, so important that our physical presence is no longer required. There is much talk of new efficiencies; we can work from anywhere and all the time. But tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people.

Turkle goes on to outline five “troubles that try my tethered soul” (excerpted, numbered, and bolded by me):

[1] Since the late 1990s social computing has offered an opportunity to experiment with a virtual second self. Now this metaphor doesn’t go far enough. Our new online intimacies create a world in which it makes sense to speak of a new state of the self, itself. “I am on my cell … online … instant messaging … on the Web”–these phrases suggest a new placement of the subject, wired into society through technology.

[2] We live a contradiction: Insisting that our world is increasingly complex, we nevertheless have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted. We are primed to receive a quick message to which we are expected to give a rapid response. Children growing up with this may never know another way. Their experience raises a question for us all: Are we leaving enough time to take our time on the things that matter?

[3] We communicate with instant messages, “check-in” cell calls and emoticons. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not intended to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling. (Technological determinism has its place here: Cell calls get poor reception, are easily dropped and are optimized for texting.) The culture that grows up around the cell phone is a communications culture, but it is not necessarily a culture of self-reflection–which depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, sometimes electing to share it with another person, thinking about it differently over time.

[4] We have become virtuosos of self-presentation, accustomed to living our lives in public. The idea that “we’re all being observed all the time anyway, so who needs privacy?” has become a commonplace. Put another way, people say, “As long as I’m not doing anything wrong, who cares who’s watching me?” This state of mind leaves us vulnerable to political abuse. …High school and college students give up their privacy on MySpace about everything from musical preferences to sexual hang-ups. They are not likely to be troubled by an anonymous government agency knowing whom they call or what Web sites they frequent. People become gratified by a certain public exposure; it is more validation than violation.

[5] Might such…arrangements…be bad for us in our lives as moral beings? The answer does not depend on what computers can do today or what they are likely to be able to do in the future. It hangs on the question of what we will be like, what kind of people we are becoming as we develop very intimate relationships with our machines.

In all, Turkle describes well the technological dystopia – “virtuality and its discontents” – the lies in wait given our apparent Faustian bargain with the newest wave of information and communication technologies.