Over the last couple of years, the social sciences have been increasingly interested in using computer-based tools to analyze the complexity of the social ant farm that is the Web. Issuecrawler was one of the first of such tools and today researchers are indeed using very sophisticated pieces of software to “see” the Web. Sciences-Po, one of these rather strange french institutions that were founded to educate the elite but which now have to increasingly justify their existence by producing research, has recently hired Bruno Latour to head their new médialab, which will most probably head into that very direction. Given Latour’s background (and the fact that Paul Girard, a very competent former colleague at my lab, heads the R&D departement), this should be really very interesting. I do hope that there will be occasion to tackle the most compelling methodological question when in comes to the application of computers (or mathematics in general) to analyzing human life, which is beautifully framed in a rather reluctant statement from 1889 by Karl Pearson, a major figure in the history of statistics:
“Personally I ought to say that there is, in my own opinion, considerable danger in applying the methods of exact science to problems in descriptive science, whether they be problems of heredity or of political economy; the grace and logical accuracy of the mathematical processes are apt to so fascinate the descriptive scientist that he seeks for sociological hypotheses which fit his mathematical reasoning and this without first ascertaining whether the basis of his hypotheses is as broad as that human life to which the theory is to be applied.” cit. in. Stigler, Stephen M.: The History of Statistics. Harvard University Press, 1990 p. 304
This spring worked on an R&D project that was really quite interesting but – as it happens with projects – took up nearly all of my spare time. La montre verte is based on the idea that pollution measurement can be brought down to street level if sensors can be made small enough to be carried around by citizens. Together with a series of partners from the private sector, the CiTu group of my laboratory came up with the idea to put an ozone sensor and a microphone (to measure noise levels) into a watch. That way, the device is not very intrusive and still in direct contact with the surrounding air. We built about 15 prototypes, based on the fact that currently, Paris’ air quality is measured by only a handful of (really high quality) sensors and even the low resolution devices we have in our watches should therefore be able to complement that data with a geographically more fine grained analysis of noise and pollution levels. The watch produces a georeferenced measurement (a GPS is built into the watch) every second and transmits the data via Bluetooth to a Java application on a portable phone, which then sends every data packet via GPRS to a database server.
My job in the project was to build a Web application that allows people to interact with and make sense of the data produced by the watches. Despite the help from several brilliant students from our professional Masters program, this proved to be a daunting task and I spent *at lot* of time programming. The result is quite OK I believe; the application allows users to explore the data (which is organized in localized “experiments”) in different ways, either in real-time or afterward. With a little more time (we had only about three month for the whole project and we got the hardware only days before the first public showcase) we could have done more but I’m still quite content with the result. Especially the heatmap (see image) algorithm was fun to program, I’ve never done a lot of visual stuff so this was new territory and a steep learning curve.
Unfortunately, the strong emphasis on the technological side and the various problems we had (the agile methods one needs for experimental projects are still not understood by many companies) cut down the time for reflection to a minimum and did not allow us to come up with a deeper analysis of the social and political dimensions of what could be called “distributed urban intelligence”. The whole project is embedded in a somewhat naive rhetoric of citizen participation and the idea that technological innovation can solve social problems, in this case matters of urban planning and local governance. A lesson I have learned from this is that the current emphasis in funding on short-term projects that bring together universities and the industry makes it very difficult to carve out an actual space for scientific practice between all the deadlines and the heavy technical demands. And by scientific practice, I mean a *critical* practice that does not only try to base specifications and prototyping on “scientifically valid” approaches to building tools and objects but which includes a reflection on social utility that takes a wider view than just immediate usefulness. In the context of this project, this would have implied a close look at how urban development is currently configured in respect to environmental concerns in order to identify structures of governance and chains of decision-making. This way, the whole project could have targeted issues more clearly and consciously, fine-tuning both the tools and the accompanying discourse to the social dimension it aimed at.
I think my point is that we (at least I) have to learn how to better include a humanities-based research agenda into very high-tech projects. We have known for a long time now that every technical project is in fact a socio-technical enterprise but research funding and the project proposals that it generates are still pretending that the “socio-” part is some fluffy coating that decorates the manly material core where cogs and wire produce tangible effects. As I programmer I know how difficult and time-consuming technical work can be but if there is to be a conscious socio-technical perspective in R&D we have to accept that the fluffy stuff takes even more time – if it is done right. And to do it right means not only reading every book and paper relevant to a subject matter but to take the time to reflect on methodology, to evaluate every step critically, to go back to the drawing board, and to include and to produce theory every step of the way. There is a cost to the scientific method and if that cost is not figured in, the result may still be useful, interesting, thought-provoking, etc. but it will not be truly scientific. I believe that we should defend these costs and show why they are necessary; if we cannot do so, we risk confining the humanities to liberal armchair commentary and the social sciences to ex-post usage analysis.
After having finished my paper for the forthcoming deep search book I’ve been going back to programming a little bit and I’ve added a feature to termCloud search, which is now v0.4. The new “show relations” button highlights the eight terms with the highest co-occurrence frequency for a selected keyword. This is probably not the final form of the feature but if you crank up the number of terms (with the “term+” button) and look at the relations between some of the less common words, there are already quite interesting patterns being swept to the surface. My next Yahoo BOSS project, termZones, will try to use co-occurrence matrices from many more results to map discourse clusters (sets of words that appear very often together), but this will need a little more time because I’ll have to read up on algorithms to get that done…
PS: termCloud Search was recently a “mashup of the day” at programmeableweb.com…
Programmable web just pointed to a really interesting mashup competition. Sunlight labs announced the Apps for America contest and the idea is to attract programmers that will use a series of data APIs to “make Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent”. Among the criteria two stand out:
- Usefulness to constituents for watching over and communicating with their members of Congress
- Potential impact of ethical standards on Congress
The design goal is accountability and that indeed is a perfect case for society oriented design. While people in Europa love to scold the US for their lack of data protection and privacy laws, just looking at the APIs the contest proposes to use makes me salivate for something similar in France. If you look at the Capitol Words API for example, just imagine the kind of discourse analysis one could build on that. Representations of what is said in Congress that make the data digestable and bring at least some of the debate potentially closer to citizens. The whole thing is just a really great idea…
Winter holidays and finally a little bit of time to dive into research and writing. After giving a talk at the Deep Search conference in Vienna last month (videos available here), I’ve been working on the paper for the conference book, which should come out sometime next year. The question is still “democratizing search” and the subject is really growing on me, especially since I started to read more on political theory and the different interpretations of democracy that are out there. But more on that some other time.
One of the vectors of making search more productive in the framework of liberal democracy is to think about search not merely as the fasted way to get from a query to a Web page, but to think about how modern technologies might help in providing an overview on the complex landscape of a topic. I have always thought that clusty – a metasearcher that takes results from Live, Ask, DMOZ, and other sources and organizes them in thematic clusters – does a really good job in that respect. If you search for “globalisation”, the first ten clusters are: Economic, Research, Resources, Anti-globalisation, Definition, Democracy, Management, Impact, Economist-Economics, Human. Clicking on a cluster will bring you the results that clusty’s algorithms judge as pertinent for the term in question. Very often, just looking on the clusters gives you a really good idea of what the topic is about and instead of just homing in on the first result, the search process itself might have taught you something.
I’ve been playing around with Yahoo BOSS for one of the programming classes I teach and I’ve come up with a simple application that follows a similar principle. TermCloud Search (edit: I really would like to work on this some more and the name SearchCloud was already taken, so I changed it…) is a small browser-based app that uses the “keyterms” (a list of keywords the system provides you with for every URL found) feature of Yahoo BOSS to generate a tagcloud for every search you make. It takes 250 results and lets the user navigate these results by clicking on a keyword. The whole thing is really just a quick hack but it shows how easy it is to add such “overview” features to Web search. Just try querying “globalisation” and look at the cloud – although it’s just extracted keywords, a representation of the topic and its complexity does emerge at least somewhat.
I’ll certainly explore this line of experimentation over the next months, jQuery is making the whole API thing really fun, so stay tuned. For the moment I’m kind of fascinated by the possibilities and by imagining search as a pedagogical process, not just a somewhat inconvenient stage in accessing content that has to be speeded up by personalization and such. Search can become in itself a knowledge producing (not just knowledge finding) activity by which we may explore a subject on a more general level.
And now I’ve got an article to finish…
You’ve probably already read it somewhere (like here or here), amazon.com has blundered a little bit – for a couple of hours the search query “terrorist costume” brought up a single hit, a rubber mask with Obama’s face. I really don’t know how many people would have found out on their own but there’s some buzz going now and there actually is something worth pondering about the case. How it happened is quite easy to reconstruct: amazon allows users to label products (Folksonomy) and includes these tags into their general search engine. So somebody tagged the Obama mask with “terrorist” (“costume” was already a common keyword) and there you go. What I find interesting about this is not that there would be any real political consequence to this matter but the fact that folk-tagging can be as easily dragged into different directions as anything else. I’m currently working on a talk for the Deep Search conference (running late as so often these days) and I’ve been looking at Jimmy Wales’ project Wikia Search which uses community feedback in order to re-rank results. The question for me is how this system would be less pervasive to manipulation or SEO than today’s dominant principle, link analysis. The amazon case shows quite well that when you enter a contested field, there’s going to be fallout and the reason that there isn’t more of it already is probably because the masses are not yet aware of the mischief potential. And I don’t see how the “wisdom of the crowd” principle (whether that is folksonomy, voting, result re-ranking, etc.) cannot be hijacked by a determined individual or company that understands the workings of the algorithms that structure results (in the amazon case you would have needed to know that user tags are used in the general search). So what is really interesting about the Obama mask incident is how things continue at amazon (and other folksonomy based servives) – if user tags can be used to drive traffic to specific products, the marketeers will come in droves the moment the numbers are relevant…
Continuing in the direction of exploring statistics as an instrument of power more characteristic of contemporary society than means of surveillance centered on individuals, I found a quite beautiful citation by French sociologist Gabriel Tarde in his Les Lois de l’imitation (1890/2001, p.192f):
Si la statistique continue à faire des progrès qu’elle a faits depuis plusieurs années, si les informations qu’elle nous fournit vont se perfectionnant, s’accélérant, se régularisant, se multipliant toujours, il pourra venir un moment où, de chaque fait social en train de s’accomplir, il s’échappera pour ainsi dire automatiquement un chiffre, lequel ira immédiatement prendre son rang sur les registres de la statistique continuellement communiquée au public et répandue en dessins par la presse quotidienne.
And here’s my translation (that’s service, folks):
If statistics continues to make the progress it has made for several years now, if the information it provides us with continues to become more perfect, faster, more regular, steadily multiplying, there might come the moment where from every social fact taking place springs – so to speak – automatically a number that would immediately take its place in the registers of the statistics continuously communicated to the public and distributed in graphic form by the daily press.
When Tarde wrote this in 1890, he saw the progress of statistics as a boon that would allow a more rational governance and give society the means to discuss itself in a more informed, empirical fashion. Nowadays, online, a number springs from every social fact indeed but the resulting statistics are rarely a public good that enters public debate. User data on social networks will probably prove to be the very foundation of any business that is to be made with these platforms and will therefore stay jealously guarded. The digital town squares are quite private after all…
When talking about the politics of the social Web and particularly online networking, the first issue coming up is invariably the question of privacy and its counterpart, surveillance – big brother, corporations bent on world dominance, and so on. My gut reaction has always been “yeah, but there’s a lot more to it than that” and on this blog (and hopefully a book in a not so far future) I’ve been trying to sort out some of the political issues that do not pertain to surveillance. For me, social networking platforms are more relevant to politics as marketing rather than surveillance. Not that these tools cannot function quite formidably to spy on people, but it is my impression that contemporary governance relies on other principles more than the gathering of intelligence about individual citizens (although it does, too). But I’ve never been very pleased with most of the conceptualizations of “post-disciplinarian” mechanisms of power, even Deleuze’s Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle, although full of remarkable leads, does not provide a fleshed-out theoretical tool – and it does not fit well with recent developments in the Internet domain.
But then, a couple of days ago I finally started to read the lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France between 1971 and 1984. In the 1977-1978 term the topic of that class was “Sécurité, Territoire, Population” (STP, Gallimard, 2004) and it holds, in my view, the key to a quite different perspective on how social networking platforms can be thought of as tools of governance involved in specific mechanisms of power.
STP can be seen as both an extension and reevaluation of Foucault’s earlier work on the transition from punishment to discipline as central form in the exercise of power, around the end of the 18th century. The establishing of “good practice” is central to the notion of discipline and disciplinary settings such as schools, prisons or hospitals serve most of all as means for instilling these “good practices” into their subjects. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon – a prison architecture that allows a single guard to observe a large population of inmates from a central control point – has in a sense become the metaphor for a technology of power that, in Foucault’s view, is part of a much more complex arrangement of how sovereignty can be performed. Many a blogpost has been dedicated to applying the concept on social networking online.
Curiously though, in STP, Foucault calls the Panopticon both modern and archaic, and he goes as far as dismissing it as the defining element of the modern mechanics of power; in fact, the whole course is organized around the introduction of a third logic of governance besides (and historically following) “punishment” and “discipline”, which he calls “security”. This third regime is no longer focusing on the individual as subject that has to be punished or disciplined but on a new entity, a statistical representation of all individuals, namely the population. The logic of security, in a sense, gives up on the idea of producing a perfect status quo by reforming individuals and begins to focus on the management on averages, acceptable margins, and homeostasis. With the development of the social sciences, society is perceived as a “natural” phenomenon in the sense that it has its own rules and mechanisms that cannot be so easily bent into shape by disciplinary reform of the individual. Contemporary mechanisms of power are, then, not so much based on the formatting of individuals according to good practices but rather on the management of the many subsystems (economy, technology, public health, etc.) that affect a population so that this population will refrain from starting a revolution. Foucault actually comes pretty close to what Ulrich Beck’s will call, eight years later, the Risk Society. The sovereign (Foucault speaks increasingly of “government”) assures its political survival no longer primarily through punishment and discipline but by managing risk by means of scientific arrangements of security. This not only means external risk, but also risk produced by imbalance in the corps social itself.
I would argue that this opens another way of thinking about social networking platforms in political terms. First, we would look at something like Facebook in terms of population not in terms of the individual. I would argue that governmental structures and commercial companies are only in rare cases interested in the doings of individuals – their business is with statistical representations of populations because this is the level contemporary mechanisms of power (governance as opinion management, market intelligence, cultural industries, etc.) preferably operate on. And second – and this really is a very nasty challenge indeed – we would probably have to give up on locating power in specific subsystems (say, information and communication systems) and trace the interplay between the many different layers that compose contemporary society.
Mashable.com has a piece on Google’s expanding media empire and there is one observation that is actually quite obvious but which I’ve never really thought about:
It becomes pretty clear how Google is going about launching new products or acquiring others: analyzing the most popular topics within its search engine.
People are searching a lot for second life? All right, let’s launch our own 3D virtual world then. Google Trends already exploits search statistics for really simple trend / market analysis but in a dynamic marketplace like the Web the vast amount of search queries Google registers can really be a much more formidable tool for taking society’s pulse. There is no doubt that Google uses this data internally for some heavy market research and I could imagine that the company might license these tools or data to third parties in the future. Nielsen would get some serious competition.
The point I find really interesting about this matter is that Google is mostly criticized for commercially biases search results, their monopoly on online search and the gathering of data that might be used to spy on citizens – I have yet to read something that reflects data collection on users’ search behavior not only as potentially dangerous to individual rights but as a unique tool for corporate strategy. Mining their all knowing logfile might give Google a competitive advantage that other companies simply cannot emulate. Spotting shifts in cultural trends early could give their business planning an asset that money (currently) cannot buy. It would be prudent to convert to Googlism while they still accept new members.