William H. Dutton

Journal of Information, Communication & Society (iCS)

Brian D. Loader

Since 1997, the journal of Information, Communication & Society (iCS) has been charting the global diffusion and implications of digital media, communication and information technologies for individuals, households and society at large. The ubiquity of such media is a striking testimony to their influence in the contemporary world. This rich interdependence and inseparability of social and technical manifestations is well represented in the titles of articles published in iCS covering almost every facet of our lifestyles including patterns of work and leisure, entertainment, consumption, education, environmentalism, political activity, domestic life and individual identity. From the outset iCS has encouraged a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis and understanding of the economic, political, cultural and other social implications of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This has and continues to be reflected in the contributions by academics, practitioners and policy-makers drawn from such fields as communication and media, political sciences, sociology, philosophy, psychology, geography, gender studies, computer sciences, social and public policy, science fiction and many more.

A defining objective of iCS is the publication of the highest quality material from these varied sources and to provide an international forum for accessible but critical analyses of the social shaping and implications of technological change. It has always avoided the more hyperbolic claims of technological futurists and has instead sought to ground our knowledge and understanding on high quality empirical and theoretic studies of media, communication and information technologies and society. As such it addresses such questions as:

• What are the social issues of new and evolving forms of social networking?
• What is the geography of communication on the worldwide network of networks? Will ICTs facilitate globalization or reinforce local identity, ethnic difference and region sub-cultures?
• Are new technologies, from the Internet to sensor networks leading to an age of electronic surveillance?
• How are ICTs affecting daily life and social institutions such as the family, work, organization, education, politics, health care and leisure activities?

iCS publishes eight issues a year which includes a number of special issues and book reviews. We are also pleased to publish special issues of selected papers presented at the annual conferences of The Association of Internet Researchers and The American Sociological Association (CITASA Group). iCS has become the place to submit leading articles on the social issues of our networked society.

For more information, see the journal Web site at Taylor and Francis-Routledge.

Joshua Harris was a graduate student of mine in the early 1980s. My most memorable experience with him was in connection with a major paper that was assigned. Josh wanted to focus on the future of the personal computer. This was of course very early in the life of the personal computer, only invented at the end of the 70s. Josh said he envisioned what we would years later call a multimedia computer. He had clear ideas about how the technology would develop that were well ahead of his contemporaries.

The problem was that Josh did not want to do a traditional paper. Instead he wanted to build a model of his multimedia computer. I could not convince my colleagues to accept this proposal. It was shortly after this that he became disillusioned with the value of graduate school, and left to seek his fortune, which he soon did. In 1986, he founded Jupiter Communications, one of the world’s first Internet market research companies. He made millions went it went public. Later, in 1994, in line with his vision from a decade before, he founded the world’s first Internet-based interactive television network (Pseudo.com).

Called the ‘Warhol of the Web’, Josh was too constrained by academic institutions and processes. More importantly perhaps was his commitment to doing things – building models so that people could see what he envisioned rather than simply to read about it. This might be common in design and technology, but Josh personified this commitment.

Therefore, I can only celebrate his next creation – a world in which there would be no privacy. Surveillance was everywhere. Today, in 2010, most computer and social scientists who think about it are alarmed by the ways in which new technologies promise to erode privacy in society. One need not be a technological determinist to see how the technological capabilities are being developed in surveillance technologies, from satellite imaging to miniature cameras and sensors, to see everything. But also, and importantly, people want the technologies, whether security cameras or Webcams to check on the children at preschool. Josh saw this and built an environment in which he and 1000 other inhabitants lived for one month – a place with no privacy, branded ‘We Live in Public’ — created well before reality TV.

Josh is the best person to describe this vision and related projects. Take a look at this 2009 Sky Television interview with Josh or look at a trailer for the ‘We Live in Pubic’ documentary, which won acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival.

Josh has kept in touch with me through the years as one of the professors who supported his proposal. Schools are hard to build for a Joshua Harris. We should have let Josh build the model, but we did not dampen the creativity of a budding Internet pioneer with a vision of the future that everyone should seriously ponder.

The need for a greater emphasis on multidisciplinary research in the area of climate change was made even more evident by a poll discussed in The Times, entitled ‘Widespread scepticism on climate change undermines Copenhagen summit‘. The article leads with the point that ‘[o]nly a quarter of people believe that climate change is the most serious problem that the world faces’. Furthermore, the poll conducted in Britain over the previous weekend (7-8 November), found that ‘only two in five people in Britain accept as an established fact that global warming is largely man-made.’

Putting to the side all of the issues that might be raised about the reliability and validity of any weekend poll of Britains, from sampling to question wording, it struck me as a tremendous example of a very common feature of research on climate change — its focus on the hard sciences, from climate forecasting to earth sciences, and the relative neglect of the social sciences. Some of the biggest questions that the article raises are: Why do people hold these beliefs? Why are the findings of scientists not well understood or accepted by more of the public? Why are policy initiatives so difficult to implement nationally and globally? Why does the press focus on the 2 in 5 who do not accept a fact, versus the 3 in 5 that do? These are all basic questions of the social and political sciences, not the so-called hard sciences. Yet, the funding of research on climate change is hugely skewed toward the sciences, as compared with the social sciences.

Even when these questions are asked or foregrounded, leaders look to the hard scientists to answer them. Environmental scientists sign a petition and wonder why it is not directly translated into policy, leading social scientists to wonder if they have a clue about how policy is shaped, how opinions are formed, how influence works in politics and public policy. Do people realize that entire fields are devoted to the study of influence, persuasion, communication, the politics of policy-making and policy implementation, and so on. These ’soft’ sciences are needed to address the hardest questions about whether governments around the world will be able to respond to the threats of climate change. Part of the success of Al Gore’s work on climate change has been his ability to communicate with the public, but even former Vice President Gore focused on the science of climate change rather than the politics of climate change policy. Hopefully, he and others are doing much more behind the scenes to shape policy and practice, including public opinion, by employing what we know from the social sciences.

Until governments place priority on the social sciences in addressing some of the hard questions about influence and policy related to climate change, we cannot expect to make real progress. The common refrain of the scientist is that we know what should be done, but the policies are not being implemented. ‘Why are our pronouncements not automatically reflected in policy?’ Well, the study of the politics of public policy has a long history, and much to offer, but remains largely neglected by the climate change community that seems to adopt this overly rational view that scientific findings are immediately translated into law and policy. Where is Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli when we need him?

The OII’s Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP) is accepting applications for the 2010 SDP, which will be held in Oxford from 5-16 July. See: OII SDP2010: Oxford (5-16 July 2010) We began this programme in the summer of 2003, and it has always been one of the most successful activities of the OII. We invite students from round the world who are doing a dissertation on the Internet. Anyone who has passed the stage of completing a proposal, but has not completed their thesis is most welcome. The idea is to return from the programme with an improved thesis, at whatever stage you joined. If you are interested, please check out the Web site, and e-mail the course director this summer, Dr Rebecca Eynon, on mailto:sdp@oii.ox.ac.uk

Here is a terrific video production on the 40 years of the Internet, produced by Intel. While it exaggerates the relationship of the Internet to national defense, and gives a sense of the Internet following a progressive trajectory rather than being reinvented and reconfigured over the years through an ecology of choices by a growing array of actors*, it is a nice celebration of the anniversary.

*Dutton, W. H. (2008), ‘Social Movements Shaping the Internet: The Outcome of an Ecology of Games’, Chapter 19, pp. 499-517 in Elliott, M. and Kraemer, K. L. (eds), Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion: From Mainframes to Ubiquitous Computing. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.

The Information Communication and Society (iCS) journal will be co-organizing a 3-day symposium on ‘Networking Democracy? New Media Innovations in Participatory Politics’ at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania, from the 25th through the 27th of June, 2010. I plan to participate and hope to present some of the themes from the Dagstuhl Conference I attended late this summer, develop some of the work I have been conducting on ‘The Fifth Estate’ and the Internet and politics more generally.

Babes-Bolyai University, Romania

The conference seeks to critically assess developing wisdom about the political significance and implications of such innovations in the Internet and Web as Web 2.0.

A call for papers is now on the Web. I encourage you to consider submitting a paper or attending.

Balliol College is inviting applications for scholars of outstanding distinction or promise to be Oliver Smithies Lecturers at Balliol College, Oxford, for the academic year 2010-11. The closing date is 16 April but full details can be accessed on the Balliol College Web site.

There are no subject matter restrictions, but Balliol appears to be particularly interested this year in ‘distinguished visitors from scientific disciplines’. Professor Oliver Smithies was a joint winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

The Oxford Internet Institute will be celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Internet by holding lectures by two of the most influential scholars focused on society and the Internet: Manuel Castells and Duncan Watts.

Manuel Castells, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Oxford, and Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia, will be speaking on Thursday, the 22nd of October 2009, from 16.30-18.00 at Oxford University Press, Walton Street. The title of his talk is ‘The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Towards a New Economic Order’. Manuel Castells is the foremost cited communications scholar in the world. He has authored 19 books, including his most recent book, entitled Communication and Power (Oxford University Press 2009).

Duncan Watts is Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, and director of the Human Social Dynamics Group. He is also professor of sociology at Columbia University, and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. Duncan will speak on Friday, the 23rd of October, from 16.00-17.30 at the Said Business School, University of Oxford (Seminar Room A) on ‘Using the Web to do Social Science’. The talk is organized by the OII in collaboration with CABDyN and the Oxford e-Social Science (OeSS) project. Duncan Watts is the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Norton 2003) and Small Worlds (Princeton 1999). 

We think there is no better way to recognize the anniversary of the Internet than to hear from some of the most influential scholars in the field. Please join us.

If you would like to attend either or both events, please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk More information on both events can be found on the OII’s events Web page.

There is a useful and insightful article in the Telegraph today that addresses the issues of getting older people online, and why it matters. It draws extensively from the thinking of Tony Watts, editor of Mature Times, and his reading of OII research — the Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS). There is also a piece in the online news, see Yahoo! entitled ‘Digital Divide ‘isolates elderly’. And even more coverage. See’10 million over 50s on the wrong side of the digital divide‘ and ‘older people digitally isolated‘.

I think the typology of older users has a great deal of face validity. The piece argues that older people will be increasingly isolated if they are not online. OxIS does find that those who are not online feel more lonely than do Internet users, a relationship we are trying to better understand. However, the flip side seems very clear. The Internet could be used by older people to keep in contact with their family, friends and the world and this opportunity is missed by most.

I participated in a useful workshop on issues of e-democracy, which my colleagues and I helped organize under the title ‘Democracy in a Network Society‘. It was held at the Castle (Schloss) Dagstuhl’s Leibniz Centre for Information Science. This and other Dagstuhl workshops are held over a period of one week in a relatively isolated location, with a manageable number of colleagues — enabling the group to develop a collaborative set of perspectives during the course of the meeting. This group pulled together computer scientists and engineers, primarily within the areas of securing and cryptography, and political scientists, primarily interested in e-democracy issues, such as e-voting or consultations, along with my own interests in the Fifth Estate.

Schloss Dagstuhl

The conference was organized by David Chaum at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Miroslaw Kutylowski, at Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland; Tracy Westen, at the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles, and myself, at the OII. We had a core of participants that stayed through the entire week, plus about an equal number who could only stay for 2-3 days during the week. They created a continuity but also provided a way to change the chemistry of the group in interesting ways through the week. The most interesting aspect of the conference, from my perspective, was the co-creation of our notes, which I will post on this blog when they are completed. Essentially, from the first day of the meetings, we developed a Googledoc that was edited jointly by all of the participants. In the last days of the meeting, there were sessions, such as late into the night on Thursday, when we sat around the table co-producing our findings, managing contributions in real time. At the conclusion of the meeting, we sent a note to all the participants, giving each one week to review and comment on the final draft. We then plan to have one final editorial pass through the jointly authored manuscript before posting for broader public access. We’ve entitled the document ‘Machiavelli Confronts 21st Century Technology: Notes from the Daghstuhl Workshop on Democracy in a Network Society’.

The central theme was the degree to which discussion about the design of systems to support democracy, such as electronic voting, are caught up in a highly charged political context. While I might argue that all information and communication technologies can reconfigure the relative communicative power of different actors, this is most apparent and immediate in the case of applications designed to support democratic institutions and processes. All of the participants would value comments on our notes from the discussion.

Afternoon Hike, Dagstuhl

Landscape outside Dagstuhl