#webscience

Warning: this is going to be another one of those posts that starts from a point of moderate easy-going bewilderment and ends up in a place of complete bewilderment and rage. Again, this debate seems to be highly artificial with all sorts of people making all sorts of claims and counter claims and setting up all manner of straw man arguments all over the place. With the amount of straw men being made and destroyed on this course, things are going to get messy!

Big data in itself seems to mean a heck of lot of different things to different people. I'm going to work from the idea that it is any kind of data that is problematic because of either its volume, its variety or its velocity in being produced, or any given combination of these three things. For me then, to put it into terms I can actually understand, "Big Data" is an adjective, not a noun. Big data is not an object; it is a way of describing an object. And it is not immovable or permanent or unchangeable. Data described as "big" today will not be described as "big" in ten years time when clever techies have developed a solution to it which is then in-built in the production of the data.

And that seems to be what the sensible, non-straw men, are arguing. That "big data" refers to data that does not have an in-built mechanism in the way it is produced to make it easy to analyse and process. 

However, this is not to say that "big data" will disappear as we develop solutions because our development of technology will not stand still. The volume and speed of some data will probably continue to outpace us. Moreover the type of data we are trying to analyse will continue to diversify. 

Of course Big Data is pretty much analytics and business intelligence. It just requires a different methodology because the analysis is not as straight forward. To say though that it is meaningless and can be ignored, is as silly as saying it holds the answer to all our problems.

These things are always hyped up to be panaceas and there follows the disillusionment after the perpetual naysayers trash them as nonsense, until they are quietly accepted and assimilated to achieve a significant but small fraction of what they were originally hyped up to do. Look at DNA: its structure was discovered in the 1950s and yet scientists are still trying to work out how to use that knowledge to change medical science.

Merging different types of data to make up a complete picture is hugely appealing, especially in consideration of how we understand medical and social problems. Indeed if we can map a mass of different factors around what we are investigating, we may be able to pinpoint what are genuine correlations and what are incidental because of other factors. 

Make no mistake, like Web 2.0 et al, it will be used for good intentions and bad intentions. The data will sometimes be manipulated, just like any other form of statistics. Remember lies, damn lies and statistics. But we aren't going to ditch statistics as a way of measuring stuff simply because some people use statistics corruptly. Big data is just another tool in the technological arsenal that people can choose to use in whatever way they see a benefit to.

So here I go on the how well do I know my friends task:

On Facebook I have 85 1st degree friends which is apparently more than a busload (hurrah for me); I have 13,889 2nd degree friends therefore according to the Guardian's analysis of Facebook; and I have 2,269,462 3rd degree friends which equals more than the population of Houston, Texas. The point of this by the way is that the NSA is allowed to monitor the communications of people three "hops" from their suspected terror target. So the monitoring of one suspect with only 85 Facebook friends could drag  millions of other individuals into NSA surveillance. 

My privacy settings on Facebook are set to maximum and I only add people I know in "real" life. Periodically I cull my friend list if I haven't seen the people in a while. This does lead to embarrassment on occasion however: I recently went to a university reunion and struck up an old friendship with someone who said "you are on my Facebook" to which I had to admit I had culled them three weeks earlier!

The link for the Guardian article is:

Wow! The network science module is blowing my mind! Nodes and edges and social science all in one - what a treat!

I loved the fantastic video by Manuel Lima with the awesome graphic. It did make me wonder a little about the idea of how our brains function. Lima argues that our brains do not organise information in little compartments as we previously thought but work more like a musical symphony of lots and lots of different instruments. It is more "organised complexity" (Warren Weaver 1948) than simply travelling from a to b. The description of our brains as being essentially a bit messy with connections between different pieces of information being made all over the place, reminded me of the web and what we sometimes find difficult about the web.

Sometimes it can seem like chaos. Information and digital literacy is our response to this, to try and equip students with the ability to cut through the seemingly arbitrary nature if the web and find paths through the information they need. 

What we like as human beings tends to be order, simplicity, hierarchy, symmetry, unity and balance, as Lima argues. We have always mapped information into trees because tree diagrams contain these properties. Perhaps this is why the web is so scary for some people? Because they can't take it and make order out of it. Because it is harder to think of these networks of networks, than something more logical and succinct. 

But then as people created the web, perhaps we created it in our own image? Perhaps the messiness of the web is a reflection of the messiness of the brain and its functions? And whilst we try and button hole the web into something more tree-like to help us understand it, maybe we are misunderstanding ourselves.

For Manuel Lima's thoughts and cool animation follow this link:

Interesting point raised in our web science MOOC discussion by a Lebanese academic regarding privacy and information sharing being largely a Western concern. He argued that in countries like Lebanon a person's name can say much more about them and their profile, than using the internet would. For him, the internet provided a space to be an individual, not tied to a name weighed down with cultural and social baggage. Interesting way to think about sharing information online. 

For our Web Science MOOC we were set a task to look at the different factors that contributed to the development of the web. The task required us to look at different factors and put them into some kind of timeline. I decided to do something different (chronology seemed a little dull) so I looked at all the factors and divided them into themes:

1. Technological innovation

2. Social and economic change

3. The politics of defence

4. The academic world

5. Commerce

6. Managing human knowledge

7. Regulating, researching and renewing the web

Throughout the opening lectures and materials for this course, there has been a huge emphasis on the idea that the web is in principle a free, open and accessible phenomenon founded in the hope of improving the human condition by harnessing technological developments in networking to share information and knowledge on a global scale. Its roots at CERN as a “vague but interesting idea” to support a diverse group of physicists share their data, Berners-Lee’s message “This is for Everyone” (Opening Ceremony London 2012) and the manner in which it was released to the world, explain and confirm these good technological intentions.

However, the web has not remained what it was in 1989. If it had, it would be of no use to anyone except physicists. Through its interactions with different social, economic, commercial and governmental actors, it is evolving into something ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Whether this has been a positive outcome is a different debate. But there is no denying that the interactions between the world and the web has made the web central to the functioning of the world as we know it. Furthermore, new technological developments coupled with the societal forces both driving and exploiting these innovations, will keep changing the web. It cannot stand still.

As Carr, Pope and Halford suggest: “Openness is a property of the Web architecture and a contributory factor in the success of its adoption, but it is not an inevitable property of the user experience in the coming decade” (Carr, Pope and Halford 2010. “Could the Web be a temporary glitch?” In, WebSci10, Raleigh, US, 26 - 27 Apr 2010. , p5). Battles around the security of information, access to it, transparency and privacy, are currently being enacted in the courts, the press and beyond. This provoked some thoughts about the cost of the web to users. I admit this is partly because I misread it at first. It is still an interesting question nonetheless. Will the web always be free of charge? Is there a future in which users will have to pay for access on a subscription basis?

Of course whether or not the web is free of charge currently is problematic. The infrastructure to enable access is not free. Computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets all cost money, as does the electricity to run them, as does having a broadband service. Yet this is simply the hardware that allows us to access an internet. The web itself requires no credit card registration. Some websites do offer their content in exchange for cash. Many others make money through advertising space, something cookies and their capacity for personalised marketing has increased. Some websites make no money at all. By and large though, most content is free at the point of consumption by the user.

What if CERN had decided to sell access to the web Berners-Lee developed as their employee? Or had copyrighted the idea? Or franchised it out? Or what if it was tied to a particular operating system or model of computer, the maker of which could exploit their monopoly? The origins and founding narrative of the web already discussed largely explain why these counter factual situations did not arise. But now with the web dominated by commercial interests, could all this change?

If we take a service like Google as an illustrative example, at the moment it is free but will it always be so? Something that always shocks my information literacy classes is narrowing down the purpose of Google. I ask the students what is Google’s aim in life? Their response is always “to help us find stuff on the internet.” That’s a very nice notion but in reality, as I point out to my students’ incredulity, its purpose is to make money. We know Google makes money in a myriad of ways: you don’t make millions without having a decent product and a cunning business model. But will that ad revenue, rankings optimisation and data selling always produce enough profit? What if Google began to charge for access to its web of spiders?

Sounds unlikely? I don’t think so. Fifteen years ago I’m not sure we would have been reading about banks charging for garden variety bank accounts. Yet post-economic meltdown it is a distinct possibility as boring old current accounts are separated out from the casino banking that caused the crash. If we speculate there may be scandal and collapse in one of the ways Google makes money, could the response from the top execs be “oh well, we’ll just have to charge a subscription then and make money another way”? Looking to newspapers operating behind paywalls: they use both subscriptions and advertising to make money, not one or the other. Will Google become so ubiquitous that it feels able to charge for its service?

This is one of the challenges posed by having something that is relatively free and accessible. In most Western countries, the majority of citizens have some form of free access to the web through their local public library. This suggests two things. Firstly, that the web has become a social right in the Western world. Secondly, that because there is free access more and more can be done through the web. The Coalition Government’s benefits shake-up confirms the trend towards web-only access

The problem with this is that we are moving to a place where everything is done via the web because it is free, so no one is disadvantaged. At that point, when there is no choice about using the web or not, the costs will creep in. As we are finding with energy companies, if you need something for basic survival, the commercial interests providing it will bleed you dry simply because they can. That is the logic of capitalism. The more we need it, the more can be charged for it. Like the drug pusher on the school gate who gives out free drugs to get schoolkids hooked before hitting them with a sudden price rise.