News reports today citing one of the inventors of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as arguing that the Web “is not working for women and girls”. Tim Berners-Lee is a hero of all of us involved in study and use of the Internet, Web, and related information and communication technologies. Clearly, many women and girls might well ‘experience violence online, including sexual harassment and, threatening messages’. This is a serious problem, but it should not be unnoticed that the Internet and Web have been remarkably gender neutral with respect to access.
In fact, women and girls access and use the Internet, Web and social media at about the same level as men and boys. There are some nations in which the use of the Internet and related ICTs is dramatically lower for women and girls, but in Britain, the US, and most high-income nations, digital divides are less related to gender than to such factors as income, education, and age. This speaks volumes about the value of these media to women and girls, and this should not be lost in focusing on problematic and sometimes harmful aspects of access to content on the Web and related media.
Below is one example of use of the Internet by gender in Britain in 2019, which shows that women are more likely to be next generation users (using three or more devices, one of which is mobile) and less likely to be a non-user:
The full report from which this drawn is available online here.
Professor Noam has focused attention on what seems like a benign and economically rational technical shift from linear TV to online video. Most people have some experience with streaming video services, for example. But the longer term prospects of this shift could be major (we haven’t seen anything yet) and have serious social implications that drive regulatory change, and also challenge those charged with managing the media. What is the next generation of digital television? Can it be managed? Are the principles of business management applicable to new digital organizations?
The Principal of Green Templeton College, Professor Denise Lievesley opened the session and introduced the speaker, and two discussants: Professor Mari Sako, from the Saïd Business School, and Damian Tambini, from the Department of Media and Communication at LSE, and a former director of Oxford’s Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP). Following Eli Noam’s overview of several of the key themes developed in his books, and the responses of the discussants, the speakers fielded a strong set of questions from other participants. Overall, the talk and discussion focused less on the management issues, and more on the potential social implications of this shift and the concerns they raised.
Roland Rosner, Eli Noam, Bill Dutton, Mari Sako, Damian Tambini
The social implications are wide ranging, including a shift towards more individualized, active, emersive, and global media. There will be some of the ‘same old same old’, but also ‘much more’ that brings many perspectives on the future of television into households. The concerns raised by these shifts include threats to privacy and security to even shorter attention spans – can real life compete with sensational emersion in online video? Perhaps the central concern of the discussion focused around media concentration, and not only in cloud services, such as offered by the big tech companies, but also in national infrastructures, content, and devices.
This led to a discussion of the policy implications arising from such concerns, particularly in the aftermath of 2016 elections, mainly around the efforts to introduce governmental regulation of the global online companies and governmental pressures on platforms to censor their own content. This surfaced some debate over the cross-national and regional differences in approaches to freedom of expression and media regulation. While there were differences of opinion on the need and nature of greater regulation, there did seem to be little disagreement with Eli’s argument that many academics seem to have moved from being cheerleaders to fear mongering, when we should all seek to be ‘thought leaders’ in this space, given that academics should have the independence from government and the media, and an understanding informed by systematic research versus conventional wisdom across the world.
Eli Noam presenting his lecture on Digital Media Management
Eli is one of the world’s leading scholars on digital media and management, and his latest books demonstrate his command of this area. One of the speakers referred to his latest tome as an MBA in a box. The text has a version for undergraduate and graduate courses, but every serious university library should have them in their collection.
Bill and Eli with Susanne, a former Columbia Un student of Eli’s, now at the OII and Green Templeton College, holding Eli’s new books
Notes:
Eli Noam has been Professor of Economics and Finance at the Columbia Business School since 1976 and its Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Business Responsibility. He has been the Director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, and one of the key advisors to the Oxford Internet Institute, having served on its Advisory Board since its founding in 2001 through the Institute’s first decade.
His new books on digital media and organizations have been praised by a range of digital and media luminaries, from Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, to the former CEO of Time Warner, Gerald Levin and former CTO of HBO, Robert Zitter.
An interview with Eli Noam will be available soon via Voices from Oxford.
Please check this out if you are considering reading for your Spring courses, or simply have an interest in the many social issues surrounding digital media. From Manuel Castells’ Foreword to Vint Cerf’s concluding chapter, you find a diverse mix of contributions that show how students and faculty can study the social shaping and societal implications of digital media.
Thanks for your own work in this field, at an incredible period of time for Internet and new media studies of communication and technology.
As I noted in my endorsement of this book: “James W. Cortada and Willam Aspray’s brilliantly selected and crafted case studies are must-reads because they bring historical insight to issues of fake news, disinformation, and conspiracy theories of our digital age.”
It is such a pleasure to see the publication today of the second edition of Society and the Internet by Oxford University Press. My co-editor, Mark Graham, and I worked long and hard to assemble a wonderful set of authors to build on the first edition. The success of the original volume led to this new edition. The pace and scale of changes in the issues surrounding the Internet led to almost a completely new set of chapters. Information about the 2nd edition is available on the OUP web site for the paperback edition here, and the hardback here.
Society and the Internet, 2nd Edition
Our thanks to OUP and the many professional staff who helped us produce this new 2nd edition, and particularly to my friend Steve Russell for the brilliant art work on the cover. Thanks as well to the OII, which inspired our lecture series that led to these volumes, and OII colleagues who launched much of the research that informs them. I hope you can read the acknowledgements in full as we owe thanks to so many individuals and institutions, such as MSU’s Quello Center, which together with the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre, supported my own contributions to this second edition.
We owe incredible thanks to our colleague Manuel Castells for his insightful foreword and all the authors of the book’s 24 chapters. These colleagues endured our many requests and most importantly accepted our call to contribute to what we hope will be a perfect reader for courses on Internet studies, digital technology and society, new media, and many other courses dealing with society and the Internet. The authors include junior and senior researchers from around the world. To all, we send our appreciation. No more deadlines, we promise. The authors are:
Maria Bada, Cambridge Cybercrime Centre Grant Blank, University of Oxford Samantha Bradshaw, University of Oxford David A. Bray, People-Centered Internet Antonio A. Casilli, Paris Institute of Technology Manuel Castells, University of Southern California Vint Cerf, Google Sadie Creese, University of Oxford Matthew David, Durham University Laura DeNardis, American University, Washington, DC Martin Dittus, University of Oxford Elizabeth Dubois, University of Ottawa Sandra González-Bailón, University of Pennsylvania Scott A. Hale, University of Oxford Eszter Hargittai, University of Zurich Philip N. Howard, University of Oxford Peter John, King’s College London Sílvia Majó-Vázquez, University of Oxford Helen Margetts, University of Oxford Marina Micheli, European Commission Christopher Millard, Queen Mary University of London Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan Victoria Nash, University of Oxford Gina Neff, University of Oxford Eli Noam, Columbia Business School Sanna Ojanperä, University of Oxford Julian Posada, University of Toronto Anabel Quan-Haase, University of Western Ontario Jack Linchuan Qiu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center Bianca C. Reisdorf, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Ralph Schroeder, University of Oxford Limor Shifman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Ruth Shillair, Michigan State University Greg Taylor, University of Oxford Hua Wang, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York Barry Wellman, NetLab Renwen Zhang, Northwestern University
So, if you are seriously interested in the societal implications of the Internet and related social media and the mobile Internet, please consider this reader. You will see a variety of methods, data, and theoretical perspectives in play to address important issues in ways that challenge conventional wisdom and punditry about the Internet. You can get a paperback edition from OUP here or from your favourite bookstore.
With the academic year fast approaching, we are hoping that the book will be useful for many courses around Internet studies, new media, and media and society. If you are teaching in this area, Mark and I hope you might consider this reader for your courses, and let your colleagues know about its availability. Authors of our chapters range from senior luminaries in our field, such as Professor Manuel Castels, who has written a brilliant foreword, to some promising graduate students.
Society and the Internet 2nd Edition.
How is society being reshaped by the continued diffusion and increasing centrality of the Internet in everyday life and work? Society and the Internet provides key readings for students, scholars, and those interested in understanding the interactions of the Internet and society. This multidisciplinary collection of theoretically and empirically anchored chapters addresses the big questions about one of the most significant technological transformations of this century, through a diversity of data, methods, theories, and approaches.
Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives, Internet research can address core questions about equality, voice, knowledge, participation, and power. By learning from the past and continuing to look toward the future, it can provide a better understanding of what the ever-changing configurations of technology and society mean, both for the everyday life of individuals and for the continued development of society at large.
This second edition presents new and original contributions examining the escalating concerns around social media, disinformation, big data, and privacy. Following a foreword by Manual Castells, the editors introduce some of the key issues in Internet Studies. The chapters then offer the latest research in five focused sections: The Internet in Everyday Life; Digital Rights and Human Rights; Networked Ideas, Politics, and Governance; Networked Businesses, Industries, and Economics; and Technological and Regulatory Histories and Futures. This book will be a valuable resource not only for students and researchers, but for anyone seeking a critical examination of the economic, social, and political factors shaping the Internet and its impact on society.
Great first meeting as a new member of the Quello Center Advisory Board, 9 May 2019. It was a great opportunity to thank Gary Reid, who is retiring, for his contributions to the Center, and to see members of the Board, who continue to contribute to the Center’s success.
Merit Innovation Award to the Quello Center at MSU
Wonderful to see the growing range of research activities, anchored in some major projects, including the award winning ‘Michigan Moon Shot Project’ being conducted with Merit Network. This project began when I was still at the Center, but it has surpassed all expectations in overcoming the challenges of academic-practitioner collaboration in developing such a large scale project. I’ll post a photo of the award, which is well deserved and fun. The Center is also continuing a set of lectures and roundtables, bringing in a number of absolutely major authorities, such as Professor Laura DeNardis, a member of our Quello Advisory Board.
The second half of the meeting was anchored around a roundtable discussion of emerging issues. Not surprisingly, key technical innovations seemed to draw the greatest attention, including advances in AI, IoT, and 5G, but members of the Board were refreshingly skeptical of much of the hype, such as that surrounding 5G. Discussion also moved to the growing focus on ethical questions about what should be done with AI and related technologies, and how to grapple with the so-called ‘techlash’ that has replaced the euphoria over the Internet and related ICTs.
My sense was that the rise of new regulatory initiatives, driven largely by this techlash, will bring debate right to the heart of the Quello Center – which was born around the discussion of policy and regulation.
Congratulations to Professors Johannes Bauer, the new Director, Laleah Fernandez, Assistant Director, and Keith Hampton, Research Director, for sustaining and building on the strength of the Quello Center.
The TPRC is seeking to select up to 6 TPRC Junior Fellows – early-career researchers engaged in research on the Internet, telecommunication and media policy in the digital age. Please nominate individuals whom you think might make outstanding fellows. Those who have wond student paper awards at the TPRC conference as well as those who served Benton Award winners could be candidates, but we are open to anyone you feel to have the potential to do outstanding research on key issues for the TPRC, and engage other early-career researchers in our activities.
The TPRC Junior Fellows Program was designed in part to award excellence but also tobring new members into the TPRC community. Those appointed will be honoured and serve as ambassadors for TPRC, working pro bono and appointed to two-year terms by the Board. Junior Fellows will be emerging scholars with good connections to their peers, including but not limited to successful TPRC paper presenters and alumni of the Graduate Student Consortium and Benton Award.
TPRC hopes that Junior Fellows will help broaden the TPRC community, and improve the participation of underrepresented groups, such as young academics, certain disciplines not traditionally involved in telecom research who are engaged in new media and digitial policy, and those engaged in new research areas, as well as those who bring greater diversity to our community, including women, minorities, and under-represented groups.
The TPRC Board anticipates that Fellows will disseminate information about TPRC on their personal networks, and identify and engage 1-1 with prospective attendees and encourage them to participate in TPRC. In return, TPRC will recognize Fellows on the TPRC web site, and publicly welcome new appointees during the conference, and provide material and mentoring to support their outreach mission. Of course, the Early Career Fellows will be able to list this service on their resumes. Each Fellow will have a designated Board liaison, who will check in periodically to discuss support needed and progress made. TPRC will aim to support your career.
Desiderata
We’re looking for people that meet as many of the following criteria as possible. None of them are required qualifications; we don’t expect that anyone will check all the boxes.
From under-represented groups, including women and minorities
Working in new research areas and those under-represented at TPRC
Academic talent and promise
Good network of contacts, e.g. active on social media
The fifth annual conference of Oxford’s Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre (GCSCC) was held in late February 2019 at the Oxford University’s Martin School. It engaged over 120 individuals from the capacity building community in one full day of conference sessions, preceded and followed by several days of more specialized meetings.*
The focus of the conference was on taking stock of the last five years of the Centre’s work, and looking ahead to the next five years in what is an incredibly fast moving area of Internet studies. So it was an ideal setting for reflecting on current themes within the cybersecurity and capacity building community. The presentations and discussions at this meeting provided a basis for reflections on major themes of contemporary discussions of cybersecurity and how they come together in ways that reinforce the need for capacity building in this area.
The major themes I took away from the day concerned 1) changing nature of threats and technologies; 2) the large and heterogeneous ecology of actors involved in cybersecurity capacity building; 3) the prominence of cross-national and regional differences; and 4) the range and prevalence of communication issues. These themes gave rise to a general sense of what could be done. Essentially, there was agreement that there was no technical fix to security, and that fear campaigns were ineffective, particularly unless Internet users are provided instructions on how to respond. However, there was also a clear recommendation not to throw up your hands in despair, as ‘cybersecurity capacity building works’ – nations need to see capacity building as a direction for their own strategies and actions.
Bill courtesy of Voices from Oxford (VOX)
I’ll try to further develop each of these points, although I cannot hope to give justice to the discussion throughout the day. Voices from Oxford (VOX) has helped capture the day in a short clip that I will soon post. But here, briefly, are my major takeaways from the day.
Changing Threats and Technologies
The threats to cybersecurity are extremely wide ranging across contexts and technologies, and the technologies are constantly and rapidly changing. Contrast the potential threats to national infrastructures from cyberwarfare with the threats to privacy from the Internet of Things, such as a baby with a toy that is online. The number of permutations of contexts and technologies is great.
The Complex Ecology of Actors
There is a huge and diverse set of actors and institutions involved in cybersecurity capacity building. There are: cybersecurity professionals, IT professionals, IT, software, and Internet industries; non-governmental organizations; donors; researchers; managers of governments and organizations; national and regional agencies; and global bodies, such as the World Economic Forum and the Internet Governance Forum. Each has many separate but overlapping roles and areas of focus, and each has a stake in global cybersecurity given the risks posed by malicious actors that can take advantage of global weaknesses.
One theme of our national cybersecurity reviews was that the multitude of actors within one country that were involved with cybersecurity often came together in one room for the very first time to speak with our research team. Cybersecurity simply involves a diverse range of actors at all levels of nations and organizations, and with a diverse array of relationships to the Internet and information and communication technologies, from professional IT teams and cybersecurity response teams to users. Developing a more coherent perspective on this ecology of actors is a key need in this area.
National and Regional Differences
Another clear theme of the day was the differences across the various nations and regions, including the obvious issues of the smaller versus larger nations in the scale of their efforts, but also between the low and high income nations. We heard cases of Somalia juxtaposed with examples from the UK and Iceland. And the range and nature of actors across these nations often differed dramatically, such as in the relevance of different global facilitating organisations, such as the World Bank.
Communication in So Many Words
Given this ecology of actors in a global arena, it might not be surprising that communication emerged as a dominant theme. It arose through many presentations and discussions of the need for awareness, coordination, collaboration (across areas and levels within nations, across countries, regions), as well as the need for prioritizing efforts and instruction and training, both of which work through communication. Of course, the conference itself was an opportunity for communication and networking that seemed to be highly valued.
What Can Be Done? Capacity Building
However, despite these technical, individual, and national differences, requiring intensive efforts to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate nationally, regionally, and globally, there were some common thoughts on what needs to be done. Time and again, speakers stressed the lack of any technical fix – or what one participant referred to as a silver bullet – to fix cybersecurity. And there was a general consensus that awareness campaigns that were basically fear campaigns did not work. Internet users, whether in households or major organizations, need instructions on what to do in order to improve their security. But doing nothing was not an option, and given the conference, it may not be surprising, but there did seem to be a general acceptance that cybersecurity capacity building was a set of instructions on a way forward. Our own research has provided empirical evidence than capacity building works, and is in the interest of every nation.**
Increasingly, the dilemmas facing politics in the United States if not worldwide are being portrayed as outcomes of polarization. It is an attractive topic for discussion, because there is undeniably a great deal of polarization, if defined as wildly different (polar opposite) viewpoints on one or more issues. Moreover, it seems to be tied to popular conceptions of the role of the Internet in enabling individuals to find support for their views online, even if extreme. Conceptions of echo chambers and filter bubbles are tied to this perspective. While I have argued that echo chambers and filter bubbles have been over hyped and under researched, I also can’t believe that polarization has not been prominent throughout the history of American politics.
So what is the problem? What has changed?
Perhaps it is the degree that proponents of different viewpoints have begun to take more ideological, righteous, or even sectarian positions. Their opponents are not wrong, they are seen and portrayed as bad if not evil.
What is surprising about this in the context of American politics is our history of being the model of a so-called ‘civic culture’ (Almond and Versa 1963: 8), defined by a culture based on “communication” and “consensus” in which diverse opinions are moderated by the structures and process of the political system, such as the two-party system and our system of checks and balances. This view was roundly criticized as simply a description of American politics post-World War II, as contrasted with less stable democratic systems leading up to the second world war, such as the Weimar Republic. However, there has been some face validity to this civic culture notion, at least up to the divisions surrounding the Vietnam War. Today, the idea of a civic culture seem ludicrous.
So I don’t think we should be as focused on the dynamics of polarization, or a diversity of opinions, but more on the dynamics of this politically sectarian righteousness. Maybe it is the nature of the issues being considered, such as the right to life, the environment, and immigration, that have connections with deep ethical or religious principles. But the search for answers to this question will lead in different directions than the search for the dynamics of polarization on the issues of the day.
There is a thoughtful letter to the editor of USA Today by David Engen of Spokane, Washington, that focuses on the decline of civil discourse. I find myself in agreement with him and others who are focusing on the decline of civility in American politics as absolutely central to fixing or mitigating what seems to be a decline of our political processes. Yet even the discussion of civility in American politics has been steeped in claims that one or another sectarian group is to blame, such as a recent story about whether voters see the Democrats or President Trump as more responsible for a decline in civility (Wise 2018).
Are we lost in what I would call a post-civic culture?
References
Almond, G. A., and Verba, S. (1963), The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
