4,434 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2018
    1. <link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/username/xmlrpc" /> <link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/username/webmention" />
    1. promuoverne
    2. Appare necessario, per quell’indispensabile ripristino delle condizioni della fiducia, avere la massima attenzione alle diversità di ogni tipologia di amministrazione, dal piccolo comune al grande ente centrale, mettendo in evidenza sempre le tante eccellenze presenti, nate spesso dell’impegno di una unità organizzativa e dei suoi dirigenti, che devono trovare pubblicità, apprezzamento dell’opinione pubblica, effettivi riconoscimenti da parte del governo centrale. Anche appoggiandosi a agenzie indipendenti, il governo dovrebbe curare un catalogo ricco e aggiornato di “buoni esempi”, che porti con sé anche la strumentazione amministrativa utile per replicarlo.

      … Valorizzare le buone pratiche realizzate dagli enti italiani e promuoverne la diffusione dovrebbe essere un obiettivo prioritario utilizzando il bando Horizon 2020 "Blockchains for Social Good", links: [https://ec.europa.eu/research/eic/index.cfm?pg=prizes_blockchains] [https://ec.europa.eu/research/eic/pdf/infographics/eic_horizon-prize-blockchains.pdf] Il bando ha il seguente Timetable aggiornato a maggio 2018:<br> 16 May 2018 – contest opens ; 2 April 2019 – deadline for registration of interest ; 3 September 2019 – deadline to submit applications.<br> This prize aims to develop solutions to social innovation challenges using distribute ledger technology. The contest is open to individuals, groups, organisations and companies.

    1. Oh no I’m sure any delta is brighter than an epsilon like those. That’s one of the wonderful things about being a gamma. We’re not too stupid and we’re not too bright to be a gamma is to be just right

      this part of the dialogue creates a great sense of social and class inequality in the world created by this movie. Deltas are considered wise and have greater responsibilities whereas gammas are considered somewhere in between and are in charge of more mundane matters.

    1. Rather than imagine a timeless world of connection and multiple paths, the Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.
    1. Trump’s digital strategy, Singer and Brooking argue, is not unlike militant groups and street gangs that leverage the viral web to tell a compelling story about policy, religious dogma, or their own perceived fearsomeness, all in an engaging voice, while repeatedly targeting exactly the right audience to trigger a dopamine response or sheer terror, both online and IRL. "To 'win' the internet, one must learn how to fuse these elements of narrative, authenticity, community, and inundation," Singer and Brooking write. "And if you can 'win' the internet, you can win silly feuds, elections, and deadly serious battles."
    2. In 1968, two psychologists wrote a paper theorizing that computers could become communications devices. The US Department of Defense ran with the idea, and in 1969 the precursor of the internet as we know it today, the military-operated ARPANET, went live. The National Science Foundation took over in the 1980s before business began to dominate in the 90s, at which point, things started to grow in exponential leaps. There were 28,000 internet users in 1987, according to Singer and Brooking. Today, there are billions.
    3. Trump's unlikely rise to the White House was symptomatic of social, political, and technological trends decades in the making—trends that gave rise to the internet and social media and which, in turn, transformed the way we control, spy on, and kill each other.
    1. All tribes need tribal leaders, who in turn need loyalty. Followers of Corbyn and Trump will both detest the comparison, but note how both have the merch, the chants, the hagiography. They’re radically different, but both are products of the tribalism that social media has accidentally brought about.
    1. My relationship is a lot healthier with blogs that I visit when I please. This is another criticism I have with RSS as well—I don’t want my favorite music blog sending me updates every day, always in my face. I just want to go there when I am ready to listen to something new. (I also hope readers to my blog just stop by when they feel like obsessing over the Web with me.)

      Amen!

  2. Aug 2018
    1. Our empirical example also highlighted the value of achieving virtual temporal symmetry for members of a geographically dispersed community. As electronic me­dia become increasingly central to organizational life, in­dividuals may use asynchronous media in various ways to shape devices of virtual symmetry that help them co­ordinate across geographical distance and across multiple temporal structures. This suggests that when studying the use of electronic media, researchers should pay attention to the conditions in which virtual temporal symmetry may be enacted to coordinate distributed activities, and with what consequences. Interesting questions for empirical research include the following. As work groups in orga­nizations become more geographically dispersed and/or more dependent on electronic media, do members enact virtual temporal symmetry for certain purposes? If so, for which types of purposes? And how? If not, how do such work groups achieve temporal coordination?

      virtual coordination across geographic distance via electronic media and how it shapes/is shaped by temporal structures

    1. social ecology formally emerged with the work of Murray Bookchin

      We should clarify that the term "social ecology" is not Bookchin's, but, at least according to Janet Biehl's Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin, originated with E.A. Gutkind. In 1953, Gutkind authored Community and Environment: A Discourse on Social Ecology. Use of the term may go back even further.

    2. the critique of a thing is inherent in the alternative presented

      Posing alternatives to capitalism and the nation-state simultaneously: 1) asserts the inadequacy of those institutions (a "negative" critique), and 2) asserts the superiority of the alternative being posed (a "positive" critique).

    3. We refer to the plural

      From our perspective, we are seeking to develop a social ecological theory within a broader ecosocialist movement in which there is no privileged praxis, but a plurality of mutually reinforcing practical strategies.

      Already, we can see that "Libertarian Municipalist," dual power, revolutionary syndicalist, and prefigurative approaches can be taken. Often, the praxes that emerge from the broadly ecosocialist sphere start from a high degree of theoretical agreement, but diverge strategically and not antagonistically.

    4. About

      Greetings! Potemkin here (one of the primary authors), just getting the hang of this annotation system. It's open-source. I like the idea of using annotation to facilitate deeper discussion, and perhaps as a more civilized and precise method of commenting or interacting with a website. I think this can facilitate virtual study groups and other remote collaborations. Exciting stuff!

      Please annotate, comment on blog posts that are open for comments, and let's try to build a positive, supportive, open ecosocialist community dedicated to creating Better Worlds and Brighter Futures!

    1. tri-fold pamphlet created around 2007

      I attempted to keep some of the formatting of the original, but this was not very successful. There are no doubt better overviews of Esperanto out there, but I wanted to highlight the little information I could find at the time on Esperanto's radical history, particularly among anarchists.

      I still believe in the potential of Esperanto. It's very simple and accessible for working-class and impoverished people--taking little time and with an abundance of free resources--to learn. After that, a world of potential is opened, being able to speak with any other Esperantist the world over and sharing information in a universal way.

      To me, Esperanto has the potential to facilitate a truly international revolutionary movement and its use helps dissolve borders and embodies the humanistic, anarchistic, cosmopolitan idea of "unity-in-diversity."

    1. This approach, I believe, works well for digital ethics, where we try to articulate rules that govern how we interact with each other through digital technologies. For example, when social media emerged, there was no fixed rule about when it is appropriate to tag someone in a picture and when it isn’t. So we figured out a netiquette and ethical norms as we were going along, based on experience, existing norms, insights from experts etc. There still might be areas of disagreement, but I would argue that overall we have come to an understanding of what is acceptable and what isn’t on this issue, and these norms are passed on to new users of social media.
    2. Phillip Kitcher, in the introduction of The Ethical Project describes the project of this pragmatic naturalism as follows: “Ethics emerges as a human phenomenon, permanently unfinished. We, collectively, made it up, and have developed, refined, and distorted it, generation by generation. Ethics should be understood as a project --the ethical project-- in which we have been engaged for most of our history as a species.” This a functionalist view sees ethics as a set of guidelines that make communal living possible. A successful ethical system is one that can fulfill this function.
    3. For a pragmatist, documenting this change and questioning what perpetuated it in order to better understand our current norm is the more interesting endeavor. From this understanding, ethical guidelines can be crafted, but the descriptive process precedes the prescriptive one.
    4. According to pragmatics, our attitudes and norms change in response to societal changes. For example, in an episode of Mad Men a guest at a party could be seen slapping a child that wasn’t his. It was one of the many (and one of the milder) examples in which the show’s creators’ reminded their audience that in the 1960s different rules governed social interactions.
    1. The social foci hypothesis predicts that links are more likely to form among individuals who, for example, are classmates, co-workers, or go to the same gym (they share a social foci). The triadic closure hypothesis predicts that links are more likely to form among individuals that share “friends” or acquaintances. Finally, the homophily hypothesis predicts that links are more likely to form among individuals who share social characteristics, such as tastes, cultural background, or physical appearance (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1954), (McPherson et al. 2001).

      definitions of social foci, triadic closure, and homophily within network science.

    1. merican public life has become increasingly ideologically segregated as newspapers have given way to screens. But societies have experienced extremism and fragmentation without the assistance of Silicon Valley for centuries. And the polarization in the US began long ago, with the rise of 24-hour cable news. So just how responsible is the internet for today’s divisions? And are they really as bad as they seem?
    1. Social media is well-understood to be contributing to identity politics, but I’d argue it’s contributing to something deeper: identity paralysis. This condition is one in which we have a forced awareness of how everything we say and do — even the seemingly inconsequential, like the shoes we wear, or the airline we fly — reflects on us.

      This relates to another article on gender dysphoria in teens.

      Among the noteworthy patterns Littman found in the survey data: 21 percent of parents reported their child had one or more friends become transgender-identified at around the same time; 20 percent reported an increase in their child’s social media use around the same time as experiencing gender dysphoria symptoms; and 45 percent reported both.

      Is rapid-onset gender dysphoria a response—if only partially—to the identity paralysis borne out of an age of pervasive social media?

    1. we can’t just recreate the same thing we’re trying to escape, and we can’t expect the solution to be precisely as easy on us as the problem was.
    2. Just like in real life, where your bar trivia team doesn’t really overlap with your work softball team or your church bowling league, all of your online communities gathered in their own places, ones best suited to them, and you didn’t have to act as all facets of yourself simultaneously when trying to only interact with one.
    1. You might have seen the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in the previous step. In this 6-minute video, #BlackTwitter after #Ferguson, we meet activists who were involved in the movement and learn about their own uses of Twitter as a platform of protest. Hashtags, when used like this, can be extremely complex in the way they represent ideas, communities and individuals.
    1. To start you thinking, here’s a quote from lead educator Jean Burgess. Jean considers how Twitter has changed since 2006 and reflects on her own use of the platform in the context of changing patterns of use. In response to the suggestion that Twitter is a dying social media platform, Jean states that: the narratives of decline around the place at the moment […] have to do with a certain loss of sociability. And to those of us for whom Twitter’s pleasures were as much to do with ambient intimacy, personal connections and play as they were to do with professional success theatre, celebrity and breaking news, this is a real, felt loss: sociability matters.
    1. Leaming viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral par­ticipation. By this we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcom­ers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community.

      LPP definition

      The phrase "situated learning" is contested (see pp. 31-35). Lave and Wenger use this definition:

      "In our view, learning is not merely situated in practice — as if it were some independently reifiable process that just happened to be located somewhere; learning is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world. The problem — and the central preoccupation of this monograph — is to translate this into a specific analytic approach to learning. Legitimate peripheral participation is proposed as a descriptor of engagement in social practice that entails learning as an integral constituent."

      At the end of the chapter, Lave and Wenger offer this description:

      "In conclusion, we emphasize the significance of shifting the analytic focus from the individual as learner to learning as participation in the social world, and from the concept of cognitive processes to the more-encompassing view of social practice."

    2. "Legitimate peripheral participation" provides a way to speak about the relations between newcom­ers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice. A person's intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of be­coming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. This so­cial process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills.

      This is an apt description for how SBTF volunteers are onboarded and learn how to contribute to a crowdsourcing process.

    1. Thus, an enacted environment has both a public and a private face. Publicly, it is a construction that is usually visible to observers other than the actor. Privately, it is a map of if-then assertions in which actions are related to out- comes. These assertions serve as expectations about what will happen in the future.

      How does the process of social coordination influence the actions, interpretations, and predictions that are enacted from the map?

    2. At the heart of enactment is the idea that cognition lies in the path of the action. Action precedes cognition and focuses cognition. The sensemaking sequence implied in the phrase, ‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’ involves the action of talking, which lays down traces that are examined, so that cognitions can be inferred. These inferred cognitions then become pre- conceptions which partially affect the next episode of talk, which means the next set of traces deposited by talk are affected partially by previous labels and partially by current context. These earlier inferences also affect how the next episode of talk is examined and what is seen.

      Related to the preceding annotation, how does the social coordination process influence enactment?

      Are the volunteers "talking out loud" on Slack as a means of sensemaking to themselves or with others?

    1. Another way to use a classification system is to consider if there are other possible values that could be used for a given dimension.

      Future direction: Identify additional sample values and examples in the literature or in situ to expand the options within each dimension.

    2. For researchers looking for new avenues within human computation, a starting point would be to pick two dimensions and list all possible combinations of values.

      Future direction: Apply two different human computation dimensions to imagine a new approach.

    3. These properties formed three of our dimensions: motivation, human skill, and aggregation.

      These dimensions were inductively revealed through a search of the human computation literature.

      They contrast with properties that cut across human computational systems: quality control, process order and task-request cardinality.

    4. A subtle distinction among human computation systems is the order in which these three roles are performed. We consider the computer to be active only when it is playing an active role in solving the problem, as opposed to simply aggregating results or acting as an information channel. Many permutations are possible.

      3 roles in human computation — requester, worker and computer — can be ordered in 4 different ways:

      C > W > R // W > R > C // C > W > R > C // R > W

    5. The classification system we are presenting is based on six of the most salient distinguishing factors. These are summarized in Figure 3.

      Classification dimensions: Motivation, Quality control, Aggregation, Human skill, Process order, Task-Request Cardinality

    6. "... groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent.” [41]

      Collective intelligence definition.

      Per the authors, "collective intelligence is a superset of social computing and crowdsourcing, because both are defined in terms of social behavior."

      Collective intelligence is differentiated from human computation because the latter doesn't require a group.

      It is differentiated from crowdsourcing because it doesn't require a public crowd and it can happen without an open call.

    7. Data mining can be defined broadly as: “the application of specific algorithms for extracting patterns from data.” [17]

      Data mining definition

      No human is involved in the extraction of data via a computer.

    8. “... applications and services that facilitate collective action and social interaction online with rich exchange of multimedia information and evolution of aggregate knowledge...” [48]

      Social computing definition

      Humans perform a social role while communication is mediated by technology. The interaction between human social role and CMC is key here.

    9. The intersection of crowdsourcing with human computation in Figure 1 represents applications that could reasonably be considered as replacements for either traditional human roles or computer roles.

      Authors provide example of language translation which could be performed by a machine (when speed and cost matter) or via crowdsourcing (when quality matters)

    10. “Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” [24

      Crowdsourcing definition

      Labor process of worker replaced by public.

    11. modern usage was inspired by von Ahn’s 2005 dissertation titled "Human Computation" [64] and the work leading to it. That thesis defines the term as: “...a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve.”

      Human computation definition.

      Problem solving by human reasoning and not a computer.

    12. When classifying an artifact, we consider not what it aspires to be, but what it is in its present state.

      Criterion for determining when/if the artifact is a product of human computation.

    13. human computation does not encompass online discussions or creative projects where the initiative and flow of activity are directed primarily by the participants’ inspiration, as opposed to a predetermined plan designed to solve a computational problem.

      What human computation is not.

      The authors cite Wikipedia as not an example of human computation.

      "Wikipedia was designed not to fill the place of a machine but as a collaborative writing project in place of the professional encyclopedia authors of yore."

    14. Human computation is related to, but not synonymous with terms such as collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, and social computing, though all are important to understanding the landscape in which human computation is situated.

    1. Because of both the content that people upload and the behavioral traces that they leavebehind, social network sites have unprecedented quantities of data concerning humaninteraction. This presents unique opportunities and challenges. On one hand, SNSs offera vibrant “living lab” and access to behavioral data at a scale inconceivable to manysocial scientists. On the other, the data that are available present serious research ethicsquestions and introduce new types of biases that must be examined (boyd and Crawford2012)

      The scope and scale of trace data —from settings, public facing fatures, and server-side — presents similar challenges as technological platform changes = new ethics/privacy issues.

    2. For those of us who believe that social network sites are socio-technical systems, in whichsocial and technical factors shape one another, failing to describe the site under studyignores the fact that the technological constraints and affordances of a site will shapeuser practices and that social norms will emerge over time. Not including informationabout what the feature set was at the time of data collection forecloses the possibility ofidentifying patterns that emerge over time and through the accumulated scholarshipacross a range of sites and user samples. Unfortunately, because they have no knowledgeabout how things will continue to evolve and which features will becomeimportant to track, researchers may not be able to identify the salient features to reportand may struggle with devoting scarce publication space to these details, but this doesn’tundermine the importance of conscientious consideration towards describing the artifactbeing analyzed.

      What about documenting technological features/artifacts on a stand-alone website or public repository, like Github to account for page limits?

    3. In order to produce scholarship that will be enduring, the onus is on social mediaresearchers to describe the technological artifact that they are analyzing with as muchcare as survey researchers take in describing the population sampled, and with as muchdetail as ethnographers use when describing their field site. This is not to say thatresearchers must continue to describe technologies as if no one knows what they are—weare beyond the point where researchers must explain how electronic mail or “email” islike or unlike postal mail. But, rather, researchers must clearly describe the socio-technical context of the particular site, service, or application their scholarship isaddressing. In addition to attending to the technology itself, and the interchange betweentechnical and social processes, we believe SNS researchers should make a concertedeffort to include the date of data collection and to describe the site at the moment of datacollection and the relevant practices of its users. These descriptions will enable laterresearchers to synthesize across studies to identify patterns, much in the same wayreporting exact effect sizes allows for future meta-analyses

      Excellent point and important for my SBTF studies.

    4. One key challenge of studying social media is that designers of these tools are innovatingat a very rapid timeframe and often with little advance notice. Given the rapidly changinginfrastructure and the timeframe of academic publishing, the site at the time of datacollection is likely to be very different from its incarnation at the point of publication.

      Challenges of studying SNSs:

      Temporal effects of platform changes.

      Later in the passage, the authors encourage researchers to fully describe the SNS/platform features studied and any potential effects on user behavior, practices, and norms to avoid orphaned research.

    5. Because of howpeople's position within the SNS shapes their experiences of it, activity-centric analysesrequire contextualization and translation, not unlike what social scientists studyingdiffering cultural practices have had to do for decades.

      Challenges of studying SNSs:

      User's position with the social graph shapes experience and interactions.

    6. What oneexperiences on SNSs and the content to which one is exposed differs depending on thestructure of one's network, a user's individual preferences and history, and her activitiesat that moment.

      Challenges of studying SNSs:

      Content varies by network structure, preferences, history and user activity -- but also site technology/upgrades/new features/deprecated features.

    7. By far the most pressing challengefor SNS scholars lies in the rapid pace at which innovations and technical changes areimplemented in this space. For scholarship in this arena to develop, SNS researchersneed to be mindful of the ways in which these sites evolve over time and the effects thismay have on the interpersonal, psychological, and sociological processes they arestudying.

      Challenges of studying SNSs.

      Evolution of site and the way people use it.

    8. What makes “social media” significant as a category is not the technology, butrather the socio-technical dynamics that unfolded as millions of people embraced thetechnology and used it to collaborate, share information, and socialize. Popular genres ofsocial media integrated the public nature of interest-driven CMC with the more intimatedynamics of interpersonal CMC.

      I'm curious why the authors don't mention the UI/UX advancements in SNS that allowed non-technical people to participate online, rather than passively read. Even most blogs in the early 00s were challenging to use, let alone publish on, without some technical savvy.

    9. All SNSs support multiple modes of communication: one-to-many and one-to-one,synchronous and asynchronous, textual and media-based

      This functionality is the make-or-break for collecting user-generated content during humanitarian crises by DHNs.

    10. Many of the weak tie relationships articulatedon SNSs would fade away were it not for the ease with which people can communicate,share, and maintain simple connections. For this reason, this new definition positionssocial network sites first and foremost as a communication platform, while alsohighlighting the importance of sharing content, typically consumed through a stream.

      Evolution of the new definition of social network site emphasizes its use as a communication platform, followed by content sharing.

    11. A social network site is anetworked communication platformin which participants1) haveuniquely identifiable profilesthat consist of user-supplied content, contentprovided by other users, and/or system-level data; 2) canpublicly articulateconnectionsthat can be viewed and traversed by others; and 3) can consume,produce, and/or interact withstreams of user-generated contentprovided by theirconnections on the site.

      Updated social network site definition.

    12. As social network sites have become mainstream, traversing the connections betweenpeople to view profiles is no longer the sole—or, even primary—way of participation.Content is surfaced through streams, and each piece of content is embedded withnumerous links to other content nuggets.

      Streamed content has supplanted the social graph for traversing SNSs.

      Like the API robots, this also contributes to mis/disinformation campaigns that influence on- and offline behavior.

    13. Yet, one significant shift has unfolded: the traversability ofconnections has become more important for machines than users. As APIs make thesocial graph available to broader audiences, algorithms are being designed to traversethe graph and learn about the individual nodes’ relationship to one another.

      For the SNS, crawlers help serve recommended content, ads, search, and drive prediction models.

      Also, very likely contributes to ease of launching mis/disinformation campiagns.

    14. The ability to see—andtraverse—others’ contact lists was innovative and important in several ways. From anadoption perspective, it enabled users to find shared contacts easily, thus lowering thebarriers to initiating contact with other users and enabling users to harness networkeffects more easily. From a social perspective, it allowed people to easily see therelationships between others, to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances, and totravel through the network in a way that enhanced social interactions.

      Value of viewing/traversing connections.

      Early on, this capacity was a critical and defining feature. The default site design is to "display one's articulated network..."

    15. The rise of open APIs and developer platforms meant that these collections of articulatedcontacts became valuable in contexts outside that particular SNS. Engineers andentrepreneurs alike began talking about the “social graph”—the global network oflinkages between all individuals within a system (Fitzpatrick and Recordon2007). Thislanguage emerged at a time when commercial entities began to believe that the socialgraph hadvalue beyond the individual's relationship with a given social networksite.

      Social graph definition.

    16. As SNSs became more popular with a wider range ofindividuals, many individuals’ contact lists became more diverse as these users Friendedpeople representing a range of contexts (family, professional contacts, church members,etc.). This growing diversity has contributed to cases of “context collapse,” whichdescribes the ways in which individuals that we know from different social contexts cometogether in SNSs in potentially uncomfortable ways (Marwick and boyd2011)

      Context collapse definition.

    17. For users, these connections represent what sociologistsrefer to as a person'ssocial network—the collection of social relations of varyingstrengths and importance that a person maintains

      Social network definition.

    18. Earlier communication tools enabled individuals to create a private list ofcontacts (for instance a buddy list on instant messaging), to establish a group of contactsthat were shared by others (such as a listserv membership list), or to publish a list ofrelated links (such as a blogroll), but SNSs extended the practice of creating a publiclyvisible, personally curated list of contacts and made it a mainstream practice.

      Differences between SNS and CMC.

    19. Streams of quotidian,ephemeral content encourage people to participate more in that they provide an initialartifact around which others can engage. Features that support actions associated withstatus updates—the ability to post comments to, share, or register interest in an update—also encourage a stream of activity that is prompted by an update but often takes on a lifeof its own in the central stream. Today's SNSs are more like news aggregators than theyare like profile-based contexts, even if the algorithm for displaying content is quiteobfuscated.

      Essentially, this is the hook to motivate user-generated content.

    20. In boyd and Ellison (2007), we attempted to stabilize the discussion by offeringa definition of social network sites:web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-publicprofile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom theyshare a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and thosemade by others within the system.

      Early definition of social network sites. Later Ellison and boyd redefine SNS per evolving Web 2.0 standards, CMC studies and social norms.

    1. hus it becomes possible to see how ques-tions around data use need to shift from asking what is in the data, to include discussions of how the data is structured, and how this structure codifies value systems and social practices, subject positions and forms of visibility and invisi-bility (and thus forms of surveillance), along with the very ideas of crisis, risk governance and preparedness. Practices around big data produce and perpetuate specific forms of social engagement as well as understandings of the areas affected and the people being served.

      How data structure influences value systems and social practices is a much-needed topic of inquiry.

    2. Big data is not just about knowing more. It could be – and should be – about knowing better or about changing what knowing means. It is an ethico- episteme-ontological- political matter. The ‘needle in the haystack’ metaphor conceals the fact that there is no such thing as one reality that can be revealed. But multiple, lived are made through mediations and human and technological assemblages. Refugees’ realities of intersecting intelligences are shaped by the ethico- episteme-ontological politics of big data.

      Big, sweeping statement that helps frame how big data could be better conceptualized as a complex, socially contextualized, temporal artifact.

    3. Burns (2015) builds on this to investigate how within digital humanitarianism discourses, big data produce and perform subjects ‘in need’ (individuals or com-munities affected by crises) and a humanitarian ‘saviour’ community that, in turn, seeks answers through big data

      I don't understand what Burns is arguing here. Who is he referring to claims that DHN is a "savior" or "the solution" to crisis response?

      "Big data should therefore be be conceptualized as a framing of what can be known about a humanitarian crisis, and how one is able to grasp that knowledge; in short, it is an epistemology. This epistemology privileges knowledges and knowledge- based practices originating in remote geographies and de- emphasizes the connections between multiple knowledges.... Put another way, this configuration obscures the funding, resource, and skills constraints causing imperfect humanitarian response, instead positing volunteered labor as ‘the solution.’ This subjectivity formation carves a space in which digital humanitarians are necessary for effective humanitarian activities." (Burns 2015: 9–10)

    4. Crises are often not a crisis of information. It is often not a lack of data or capacity to analyse it that prevents ‘us’ from pre-venting disasters or responding effectively. Risk management fails because there is a lack of a relational sense of responsibility. But this does not have to be the case. Technologies that are designed to support collaboration, such as what Jasanoff (2007) terms ‘technologies of humility’, can be better explored to find ways of framing data and correlations that elicit a greater sense of relational responsibility and commitment.

      Is it "a lack of relational sense of responsibility" in crisis response (state vs private sector vs public) or is it the wicked problem of power, class, social hierarchies, etc.?

      "... ways of framing data and correlations that elicit a greater sense of responsibility and commitment."

      That could have a temporal component to it to position urgency, timescape, horizon, etc.

    5. In some ways this constitutes the production of ‘liquid resilience’ – a deflection of risk to the individuals and communities affected which moves us from the idea of an all-powerful and knowing state to that of a ‘plethora of partial projects and initiatives that are seeking to harness ICTs in the service of better knowing and governing individuals and populations’ (Ruppert 2012: 118)

      This critique addresses surveillance state concerns about glue-ing datasets together to form a broader understanding of aggregate social behavior without the necessary constraints/warnings about social contexts and discontinuity between data.

      Skimmed the Ruppert paper, sadly doesn't engage with time and topologies.

    6. Indeed, as Chandler (2015: 9) also argues, crowdsourcing of big data does not equate to a democratisation of risk assessment or risk governance:

      Beyond this quote, Chandler (in engaging crisis/disaster scenarios) argues that Big Data may be more appropriately framed as community reflexive knowledge than causal knowledge. That's an interesting idea.

      *"Thus, It would be more useful to see Big Data as reflexive knowledge rather than as causal knowledge. Big Data cannot help explain global warming but it can enable individuals and household to measure their own energy consumption through the datafication of household objects and complex production and supply chains. Big Data thereby datafies or materialises an individual or community’s being in the world. This reflexive approach works to construct a pluralised and multiple world of self-organising and adaptive processes. The imaginary of Big Data is that the producers and consumers of knowledge and of governance would be indistinguishable; where both knowing and governing exist without external mediation, constituting a perfect harmonious and self-adapting system: often called ‘community resilience’. In this discourse, increasingly articulated by governments and policy-makers, knowledge of causal connections is no longer relevant as communities adapt to the real-time appearances of the world, without necessarily understanding them."

      "Rather than engaging in external understandings of causality in the world, Big Data works on changing social behaviour by enabling greater adaptive reflexivity. If, through Big Data, we could detect and manage our own biorhythms and know the effects of poor eating or a lack of exercise, we could monitor our own health and not need costly medical interventions. Equally, if vulnerable and marginal communities could ‘datafy’ their own modes of being and relationships to their environments they would be able to augment their coping capacities and resilience without disasters or crises occurring. In essence, the imaginary of Big Data resolves the essential problem of modernity and modernist epistemologies, the problem of unintended consequences or side-effects caused by unknown causation, through work on the datafication of the self in its relational-embeddedness.42 This is why disasters in current forms of resilience thinking are understood to be ‘transformative’: revealing the unintended consequences of social planning which prevented proper awareness and responsiveness. Disasters themselves become a form of ‘datafication’, revealing the existence of poor modes of self-governance."*

      Downloaded Chandler paper. Cites Meier quite a bit.

    7. ut Burns finds that humanitarian staff often describe the local communities and ‘crowds’ as the ‘eyes, ears and sensors’ of UN staff, which does not index a genuine collaborative relationship. He states: ‘In all these cases, the discourse talks of putting local people “in the driving seat” when in reality the direction of the journey has already been decided’ (Burns 2015: 48). Burns (2015: 42) also notes that this leads to a transformation of social responsibility into individual responsibility.Neoliberalism’s promotion of free market norms is therefore much more than the simple ideology of free market economics. It is a specific form of social rule that institutionalises a rationality of competition, enterprise indi-vidualised responsibility. Although the state ‘steps back’ and encourages the free conduct of individuals, this is achieved through active intervention into civil society and the opening up of new areas to the logic of private enter-prise and individual initiative. This is the logic behind the rise of resilience

      Burns criticism of humanitarian response as not truly collaborative and an abdication of the state's responsibility for social welfare to the private sector.

    8. The UNHCR has even called for the refugees themselves to also develop their own data solutions and ideas (see Palmer 2014) as a way to help build their ideologies into the data infrastructures and thus bring their prisms into view. This could create a richer situational awareness and a better ability to understand and deal with unfolding and future crises by supporting resilient communities through giving them the means of data producing and sharing

      Participatory-design and community-centered design could be very helpful in this regard but this argument seems overstated.

      Evokes concerns about "distant suffering" (see: Chouliaraki, 2008): Who gets to share? What community? Refugees are not homogeneous.

    9. Doing so switches the discourse from vulnerability, where there is a need for external protection mobilised from above to come in and rescue the refugees, to one of resilience, where self- sufficiency and autonomy are part of the equation (Meier 2013).

      The dichotomy between state-led response vs community-coordinated response as the only ways to deliver aid seems unnecessarily limited.

      It can be both and other models/new ideas.

      Conflict- and persecution-driven humanitarian needs are often rife with complexity and receive scant attention outside of the humanitarian INGO sector.

    10. Yet, at the same time as power is exercised by both the state and corporations, power is gathering from the bottom up in new ways. In disaster response, a dynamic interplay between publics and experts is captured by the concept of social collective intelligence (Büscher et al. 2014); a disruptive innovative force that is challenging the social, economic, political and organisational practices that shape disaster response.

      Cited paper references social media and DHN work.

    11. Since the data is already being collected on a regular basis by ubiquitous private firms, it is thought to contain information that will increase opportunities for intelligence gathering and thereby security. This marks a shift from surveillance to ‘dataveillance’ (van Dijck 2014), where the impetus for data processing is no longer motivated by specific purposes or suspicions, but opportunistic discovery of anomalies that can be investigated. For crisis management this could mean benefits such as richer situation awareness, increased capacity for risk assess-ment, anticipation and prediction, as well as more agile response

      Dataveillance definition.

      The supposed benefits for crisis management don't correspond to the earlier criticisms about data quality, loss of contextualization, and predictive analytics accuracy.

      The following paragraph clears up some of the overly optimistic promises. Perhaps this section is simply overstated for rhetorical purposes.

    12. lthough Snowden’s revelations shocked the world and prompted calls for a public debate on issues of privacy and transparency

      I understand the desire to use a topical hook to explain a complex topic but referring to the highly contentious Snowden scandal as a frame seems risky (alienating) and could potentially undermine an important argument about the surveillance state should new revelations be revealed about his motives/credibility.

    13. While seemingly avoiding the traps of exerting top- down power over people the state does not yet have formal control over, and simultaneously providing support for self- determination and choice to empower individuals for self- sufficiency rather than defining them as vulnerable and passive recipients of top- down protection (Meier 2013), tying individual aid to mobile tracking puts refugees in a situation where their security is dependent upon individual choice and the private sector. Apart from disrupting traditional dynamics of responsibility for aid and protection, public–private sharing of intel-ligence brings new forms of dataveillance

      If the goal is to improve rapid/efficient response to those in need, is it necessarily only a dichotomy of top-down institutional action vs private sector/market-driven reaction? Surely, we can do better than this.

      Data/predictive analytics abuses by the private sector are legion.

      How does social construction vs technological determinism fit here? In what ways are the real traumas suffered by crisis-affected people not being taken into account during the response/relief/resiliency phases?

    14. However, with these big data collections, the focus becomes not the individu-al’s behaviour but social and economic insecurities, vulnerabilities and resilience in relation to the movement of such people. The shift acknowledges that what is surveilled is more complex than an individual person’s movements, communica-tions and actions over time.

      The shift from INGO emergency response/logistics to state-sponsored, individualized resilience via the private sector seems profound here.

      There's also a subtle temporal element here of surveilling need and collecting data over time.

      Again, raises serious questions about the use of predictive analytics, data quality/classification, and PII ethics.

    15. Andrejevic and Gates (2014: 190) suggest that ‘the target becomes the hidden patterns in the data, rather than particular individuals or events’. National and local authorities are not seeking to monitor individuals and discipline their behaviour but to see how many people will reach the country and when, so that they can accommodate them, secure borders, and identify long- term social out-looks such as education, civil services, and impacts upon the host community (Pham et al. 2015).

      This seems like a terribly naive conclusion about mass data collection by the state.

      Also:

      "Yet even if capacities to analyse the haystack for needles more adequately were available, there would be questions about the quality of the haystack, and the meaning of analysis. For ‘Big Data is not self-explanatory’ (Bollier 2010: 13, in boyd and Crawford 2012). Neither is big data necessarily good data in terms of quality or relevance (Lesk 2013: 87) or complete data (boyd and Crawford 2012)."

    16. as boyd and Crawford argue, ‘without taking into account the sample of a data set, the size of the data set is meaningless’ (2012: 669). Furthermore, many tech-niques used by the state and corporations in big data analysis are based on probabilistic prediction which, some experts argue, is alien to, and even incom-prehensible for, human reasoning (Heaven 2013). As Mayer-Schönberger stresses, we should be ‘less worried about privacy and more worried about the abuse of probabilistic prediction’ as these processes confront us with ‘profound ethical dilemmas’ (in Heaven 2013: 35).

      Primary problems to resolve regarding the use of "big data" in humanitarian contexts: dataset size/sample, predictive analytics are contrary to human behavior, and ethical abuses of PII.

    17. Second, this tracking and tracing of refugees has become a deeply ambiguous process in a world riven by political conflict, where ‘migration’ increasingly comes to be discussed in co- location with terrorism.

      Data collection process for refugees is underscored as threat surveillance, whether it is intended or not.

    18. Surveillance studies have tracked a shift from discipline to control (Deleuze 1992; Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Lyon 2014) exemplified by the shift from monitoring confined populations (through technologies such as the panopticon) to using new technologies to keep track of mobile populations.

      Design implication for ICT4D and ICT for humanitarian response -- moving beyond controlled environment surveillance to ubiquitous and omnipresent.

    19. As Coyle and Meier (2009) argue, disasters are often seen as crises of information where it is vital to make sure that people know where to find potable water, how to ask for help, where their relatives are, or if their home is at risk; as well as providing emergency response and human-itarian agencies with information about affected populations. Such a quest for information for ‘security’, in turn, provides fertile ground for a quest for technological solutions, such as big data, which open up opportunities for the extended surveillance of everyday life. The assumption is that if only enough information could be gathered and exchanged, preparedness, resilience and control would follow. This is particularly pertinent with regard to mobile pop-ulations (Adey and Kirby 2016)

      The Information is Aid perspective that drives my research agenda.

    20. hird, at this juncture, control is being equated with visibility and visibility with personal security. But how these individuals are made visible matters for both privacy and security, let alone the politics of conflating refugees, migration and terrorism. Indeed, working with specific data framing mechanisms affects how the causes and effects of disasters are identified and what elements and people are considered (Frickel 2008

      A finer point on threat surveillance that stems from how classifications and categories are framed.

      This also gets at post-colonial interpretations of people, places, and events.

      See: Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics? See: Bowker and Star, Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. See: Irani, Post-Colonial Computing

    21. First, there is a double dynamic to the generation of data in the refugee crisis.

      Data is used by the state to mobilize resources for protective services (border management and immigration/asylum systems) and data is used to count/track refugees in order to provision assistance.

    22. Datafication refers to the fact that ‘we can now capture and calculate at a much more comprehensive scale the physical and intangible aspects of existence and act on them’ (Mayer- Schönberger and Cukier 2013: 97

      Datafication definition

      It also incorporates metadata as well as information gleaned from typical sources.

    23. There is an uneasy coming together of diverse computational and human intelligences in these intersections, and the ambiguous nature of intelligence – understood, on the one hand, as a capacity for perceiving, learning and under-standing and, on the other, as information obtained for strategic purposes – marks complex relationships between ‘good’ and ‘dark’ aspects of big data, surveil-lance and crisis management.

      The promise and peril of gathering collective intelligence, surveillance, and capturing big data during humanitarian crises.

    1. The goal of this framework is to envision afuture of crowd work that cansupport more complex, creative, and highly valued work. At the highest level, a platformis needed for managing pools of tasksandworkers. Complex tasks must be decomposed into smaller subtasks, each designed with particular needs and characteristics which must be assignedto appropriate groups of workerswho themselves must be properly motivated, selected(e.g., through reputation), and organized (e.g., through hierarchy). Tasks may be structured through multi-stage workflowsin which workers may collaborateeither synchronously or asynchronously. As part of this, AImay guide (and be guided by) crowd workers. Finally, quality assuranceis needed to ensure each worker’s output is of high quality and fits together.

      Proposed framework to address crowdwork management challenges: shared resources, relationships, and crowd labor.

    2. n human computation, people act as computational components and perform the work that AI systemslack the skillstocomplete

      Human computation definition.

    3. A promising approach that addresses some worker output issues examines the way that workers do their work rather than the output itself, using machine learning and/or visualization to predict the quality of a worker’s output from their behavior [119,120]

      This process improvement idea has some interesting design implications for improving temporal qualities of SBTF data: • How is the volunteer thinking about time? • Where does temporality enter into the data collection workflow? • What metadata do they rely on? • What is their temporal sensemaking approach?

    4. Of the research foci, quality control has arguably received the most attention so far. Approaches for quality control largely fall into two camps: up-front task design and post-hoc result analysis. Task design aimsto design tasks that are resistant to low-quality work.

      Quality control processes is definitely a tension for SBTF.

      A better integrated task design and verification process at the end of activations could be more effectively address information quality concerns.

    5. Many tasks worth completing require cooperation –yet crowdsourcing has largely focused on independent work. Distributed teams have always facedchallenges in cultural differences and coordination[60], but crowd collaboration now must createrapport over much shorter timescales(e.g., one hour) and possibly wider culturalor socioeconomic gaps

      In Kittur's example, synchronous collaboration describes a temporal aspect (timescale and tempo of the work) related to how the collaboration is structured or not.

      "Short periods of intense crowd collaboration call for fast teambuilding and may require the automatic assignment of group members to maximize collective intelligence."

    6. Finally, it will be amajor research undertaking to invent and describe the tasks and techniques that succeed with synchronous collaboration

      Could this be a theme of the SBTF time study?

    7. The two core challenges for realtime crowdsourcing will be 1) scaling upto increased demand for realtime workers, and 2) making workers efficient enough to collectively generateresultsahead of time deadlines.

      One aspect of temporality in Kittur's study is related to "realtime" which they describe as the time need to scale up workers and efficiency speed of workers.

      The other temporal aspect is synchronicity of workers.

    8. Volunteer crowdsourcing platforms have evolved their own hierarchies and decision-making processes [104,156], appropriating techniques from other online communities where appropriate [101]. Most paid approaches have workers make hierarchical decisions collectively: for example, task decomposition and integration[75,80],quality oversight of each others’ contributions[78,100], and leader elections to represent collective opinions[83].

      Examples of hierarchical decision-making by both volunteer and paid crowd workers.

    9. Complex tasks have dependencies, changing requirements, and require multiple types of expertise.

      Characteristics of complex crowd work.

      Later, Kittur refers to complex crowd work as those involving "creativity, brainstorming, essay writing, music composition or civic planning."

      Temporality is definitely a work flow issue for SBTF.

      However, "realtime" is the only temporal attribute noted in this study but it seems to relate only to completion speed and present/immediacy of tasks.

    10. n the sections below, we survey and analyze the 12research focithat comprise our model. First, we consider the future of the work processesand how the workis organized and accomplished. Second, we consider the integration of crowd work and computation, including the symbiosis between human cognition, artificial intelligence(AI), and computationally-enabled crowd platforms. Finally, we consider crowd workers and how we can develop jobs, reputation systems, motivations, and incentives that will benefit them.

      Research foci

      Crowd work processes: Workflow, task assignment, hierarchy, realtime crowd work, synchronous collaboration. quality control

      Crowd computation: Crowds guiding AI, AIs guiding crowds, crowdsourcing platforms

      Crowd worker future: Job design, reputation/credentials, motivation/rewards

    11. Unlike traditional organizations in which workers possess job security and managers can closely supervise and appropriately reward or sanction workers, or distributed computing systems in which processors are usually highly reliable, crowd work poses uniquechallenges for both workers and requestersranging fromjob satisfactiontodirection-setting, coordination, and quality control.

      In the literature, quality tends to be used as an attribute of the output (content, HIT, etc.) but could/should it also refer to the crowd worker experience, as Kittur notes: "job satisfaction, direction-setting, coordination, and quality control"?

      How are these factors incorporated into the process and incentive system?

    12. These same requirements exist in distributed computing, in which tasks need to be scheduled so that they can be completed in the correct sequence and in a timely manner, with data being transferred between computing elements appropriately.

      time factors in crowd work include speed, scheduling, and sequencing

    13. However, crowd work can bea double-edged sword,equally capable of enhancing or diminishing the quality of workers’ lives.We maysee echoes of past labor abuses in globally distributed crowd work: extremely low pay for labor,with marketplaces such as Amazon’s Mechanical

      Crowd work offers flexibility to both workers and requesters to overcome labor shortages, need for expertise, and geographic boundaries.

      However, they are very real concerns about exploitation, piecemeal wages, unethical/dubious work, emphasis on speed over quality, and dehumanizing work conditions.

    14. We focus this paper on paid,onlinecrowd work, which we define here as the performance of tasks online by distributed crowd workers who are financially compensated by requesters(individuals, groups, or organizations). In this sense, crowd work is a socio-technical work systemconstituted through a set of relationships that connect organizations, individuals, technologies and work activities

      Kittur's definition of crowd work:

      "...performance of online tasks by crowd workers who are financially compensated by requesters."

    15. A variety of terminology is currently used in regard to crowds, e.g. crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, human computation, serious games,peer production, and citizen science

      Social coordination activities are defined in numerous ways.

    1. A related series of studies have sought to unpack the dynamics of collabo-ration and to understand which features of peer productions support the cre-ation of higher quality content. This topic has been studied especially closelyin the case of Wikipedia, where particular organizational attributes, routines,norms, and technical features impact the quality of individual contributionsas well as the final, collaborative product.

      Benkler provides examples of studies that examined quality of content as a function of community norms, participant motives, and newbie abuse by experienced editors.

      Has Wikipedia learned anything from these studies? Have they adopted any recommended strategies for improvement? What are the design implications for addressing these issues.

      More here from INFO 5501 reading responses:

      https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1H0_DTmOspYZ3EwDJGVkBU2RaFeiibr6w?ogsrc=32

    2. A more fruitfulapproach considers variation in peer production success to understand whenand where it works better and worse.

      Benkler's examples of quality studies of large peer groups seems focused on community evaluation of the output rather than what constitutes a high-performing community (process) or a quality values (norms).

      Note: He cover process and norms several paragraphs later.

    3. Just as peer produced goods vary in their nature and form, there is alsoenormous variation between and within projects in terms of the dimensionsalong which quality might be evaluated. In the case of Wikipedia, scholarshave assessed the encyclopedia in terms of factual accuracy, scope of coverage,political bias, expert evaluation, and peer evaluation – often drawing differentconclusions about the quality of Wikipedia or particular articles.

      The quality of Wikipedia articles can vary considerably. Studies point to uneven socioeconomic/cultural/gender/language representation with the ranks of editors.

      The consensus view is that Wikipedia topics are driven by editor interests which results in variations in coverage.

    4. Although this hasconstituted an inconvenient fact in peer production practice, it also reflects animportant opportunity for future research. By focusing only on the projectsthat successfully mobilize contributors, researchers interested inwhenpeerproduction occurs or the reasonswhyit succeeds at producing high qualityoutputs have systematically selected on their dependent variables. An impor-tant direction for peer production research will be to study these failures.

      Failed peer production projects offer potentially interesting insights and should be studied.

    5. Infollowing these three paths, scholars have begun to consider variation withinpeer production projects to understand when and why peer production leadsto different kinds of high quality outputs

      Recent quality studies have explored projects that: • have not attracted sufficiently large communities to wash out bias/inaccuracies, • large communities that have not functioned to create quality information, • different measures/definitions of quality

    6. Both for-profit andnon-profit organizations that have incorporated peer production models havethrived in the networked environment, often overcoming competition frommore traditional, market- and firm-based models.

      But is this a matter of quality or satisficing a need with a free, easily accessible public platform?

    7. Recent work hasbegun to probe more deeply into different dimensions along which qualitycan be conceptualized and measured. This new scholarship has given rise toa more nuanced understanding of the different mechanisms through whichhigh quality resources arise, and founder, in peer production.

      Benkler notes that output "quality" was the focus of early research and has evolved to exploring how it is "conceptualized and measured." Defining and understanding information quality is also connected to my crowdsourcing work.

      However, I'm curious if quality studies also look at the process, in addition to the output.

    8. Peer production successfully elicits contributions from diverse individu-als with diverse motivations – a quality that continues to distinguish it fromsimilar forms of collective intelligence

      Benkler makes a really bold statement here about how peer production differs from collective intelligence. Not sure I buy this argument.

      Brabner on crowdsourcing:

    9. Resolving the tensions between different motivations and incentives presentsa design challenge for peer production systems and other collective intelli-gence platforms. The complex interdependence of motivations, incentive sys-tems, and the social behaviors that distinct system designs elicit has led Krautand Resnick (2012) to call for evidence-based social design and Benkler (2009,2011) for cooperative human system design.

      Benkler cites research where incentives clash re: "material and prosocial rewards". Also, motivations can be temporally-based which demands flexibility in the incentive system as participants' reasons to contribute change and habits/practices/norms become entrenched.

    10. Evidence from this newer body of research shows that motivations are di-versewithincontributors and that different contributors have different mixesof motivations.

      Because motives are diverse and often entangled between intrinsic and extrinsic motives, as well as within/between different groups of participants, designing incentive systems is tricky. Recent research has found that impacts/effects of one type of incentive can't be separated from impacts/effects on other motivational drivers.

    11. The most important insight provided by some of this newer workis that contributors act for different reasons, and that theories based on a sin-gle uniform motivational model are likely to mischaracterize the motivationaldynamics.

      Field and lab experiments have found that motives are not uniform, are complex, vary due to contextual factors, involve social signaling, and have some temporal qualities.

    12. In particular, these neweraccounts have focused on social status, peer effects, prosocial altruism, groupidentification, and related social psychological dimensions of group behavior

      Again, tracking with organizational studies, intrinsic and extrinsic social psychological characteristics have been the focus of more recent work exploring motivations.

      See: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1H0_DTmOspYZ3EwDJGVkBU2RaFeiibr6w?ogsrc=32

    13. hat said, a growing number of stud-ies also suggest that these motives interact with each other in unpredictableways and, as a result, are vulnerable to “crowding out” when the introduc-tion of extrinsic incentives undermines intrinsic motivation

      As in the organizational studies of peer production, motivation studies have been conducted increasingly through ethnographic observational and field studies.

      Benkler notes that the varied rationales and patterns for participating in peer production are not singular, and "interact with each other in unpredictable ways."

      Intrinsic motivations (internal rewards) tend to give way to extrinsic motivations (external rewards or consequence avoidance)

    14. Other foundational research on motivation in peer production by Lernerand Schankerman (2010) and others has explored why organizations, firmsand governments, rather than individual users, choose to participate in opensource software.

      More recent motivational studies have focused on organizations' motives for engaging in FLOSS projects as a means to innovate, build knowledge/learning capacity, diversify sources and collaborate.

    15. Despite their differences in emphasis,scope, and genre, all of these surveys support the claim that motivations inpeer production are diverse and heterogeneous.

      Survey studies are widely used in peer production research.

      Observational/ethnographic have also been used to study participants. Results also reflected that motives were varied but also seem to indicate that participants self-selected their projects, collaborators, and specific production roles.

    16. Frequently cited motivations in foundational work by theseauthors, von Hippel and von Krogh (2003), von Krogh (2003), and others in-cluded: the use value of the software to the contributing developer; the hedo-nic pleasure of building software; the increased human capital, reputation,or employment prospects; and social status within a community of peers.Other early accounts analyzing examples of peer production beyond FLOSSsuggested additional motivations. For example, Kollock (1999) emphasizedreciprocity, reputation, a sense of efficacy, and collective identity as salientsocial psychological drivers of contribution to online communities and fo-rums.

      Per Benkler, social psychology constructs (individual behavior, feelings, and thoughts within a social context) offer better descriptions for understanding peer production motivations than economic theory.

      Cited studies in this passage are from:

      CSCW (Beenen, HICSS (Forte and Bruckman), ACM (Nov) GROUP (Panciera) Psychology (Rafarli and Ariel) Social Psychology (Cheshire) CMC (Cheshire and Antin) Law (Benkler) Open Source (Coleman and Hill) MIS (von Krogh et al)

    17. A second quality of peer production that challenged conventional economictheories of motivation and cooperation was the absence of clear extrinsic in-centives like monetary rewards. Traditional economic explanations of behav-ior rely on the assumption of a fundamentally self-interested actor mobilizedthrough financial or other incentives. In seeking to explain how peer produc-tion projects attract highly skilled contributors without money, much of theliterature on peer production has focused on questions of participant moti-vation.

      Peer production contrasts with other forms of labor in its varied non-monetary/economic incentives. Early research on participant motives was grounded in longstanding economic theory/frameworks about self-interested actors.

      The economic approach makes sense, however. Without prior work in peer production, attempting to apply/extend other labor frameworks would be an appropriate evaluation technique.

    18. A newer wave of work has stepped back from this approachand sought to explain how multiple motivational “vectors” figure in the cre-ation of common pool resources online – an approach that underscores a coreadvantage of peer production in its capacity to enable action without requir-ing translation into a system of formalized, extrinsic, carrots and sticks.

      Recent studies of motivation to participate in peer production consider a broader range of decentralized incentives.

      See Kraut et al (2012): http://wendynorris.com/kraut-et-al-2012-building-successful-online-communities-evidence-based-social-design/

    19. Future workcan also begin to address questions of whether, how, and why peer produc-tion systems have transformed some existing organizational fields more pro-foundly than others. An empirically-informed understanding of when andwhere organizational practices drawn from peer production provide efficientand equitable means to produce, disseminate, and access information can pro-vide social impact beyond the insights available through the study of any in-dividual community

      Future directions, suggested by Benkler.

    20. By structuring design changes as exper-iments, these studies make credible causal claims about the relationship oforganizational structure and project outcomes that previous work struggledto establish. By intervening in real communities, these efforts achieve a levelof external validity that lab-based experiments cannot

      The paper suggests that field experiments and intervention studies could offer new insights.

    21. Similar cross-organization studies in other areas of peer production, orstudies comparing across differenttypesof peer production, have remainedchallenging and rare. One difficulty with comparative work across organiza-tions, in general, is designing research capable of supporting inference intothe causes of organizational success and failure

      Benkler also points to a lack of "publicly-available large-scale comparative datasets for types of peer production projects outside of FLOSS" for a reason few comparative studies have been attempted.

    22. Although some of the earliest theories of the organization of peer pro-duction celebrated the phenomena as non-hierarchical, more recent work hasquestioned both the putative lack of hierarchy and its purported benefits (e.g.,Kreiss et al., 2011).

      Later foundational work focused on hierarchies within the various community structures — in contrast to the early perception that peer production was non-hierarchical/anarchistic.

      Benkler suggests that peer production uses a different form of governance and a lighter-weight hierarchical structure than other types of organizations -- not that these groups are anti-hierarchical.

      Cites Keegan's work on gate-keeping in peer production.

    23. More recent work on organizational aspects of peer production has begunto question the “stylized facts” that prevailed in earlier research.

      The second wave of peer production research includes exploration of community attributes and the work they produce, comparative analysis, and theoretical articulations.

    24. This research built on earlier work showing that contrib-utors to bulletin boards, newsgroups, forums, and related systems adopteddurable “social roles” through their patterns of contribution (e.g., Fisher et al.,2006) – an approach that was subsequently applied to Wikipedia by Welseret al. (2011) and McDonald et al. (2011)

      Curious why Benkler didn't cite Q&As and group blogs as peer production cases, e.g., Metafilter, DailyKos, etc., which operate quite differently than the examples listed here.

    25. A large body of descriptive work has also sought to characterize organi-zational dimensions of Wikipedia and the practices of its contributors.

      The cited Wikipedia literature intersect a number of focus areas including qualitative studies od participation, production process, governance, onboarding and socializing activities, leadership and quantitative/inductive studies of the organization.

      Again, is the number and depth of citations here simply a result of Benkler's interest/knowledge area? Or is there something fundamentally different between FLOSS and Wikipedia?

    26. Much of the earliest empirical research inductively sought to describe thestructure and organization of FLOSS communities

      The FLOSS literature that Benkler cites seems to be much more focused on organizational structures than the Wikipedia study examples in the next paragraph.

      I'm curious why that is the case? Is there a wider body of related work than Benkler is citing? Maybe the FLOSS production process is less accessible than Wikipedia which is entirely online and embedded in its site. Is this a convenience issue more so than a diverse interest issue?

    27. Other foundational accounts, like Moglen (1999) and Weber (2004),attended to the emergence of informal hierarchies and governance arrange-ments within communities.

      Other early work focused on organizational attributes, like how information goods were produced with flat/informal hierarchies, community values/norms, and governance structures.

    28. Peer productioncould, Benkler argued, outperform traditional organizational forms underconditions of widespread access to networked communications technologies,a multitude of motivations driving contributions, and non-rival informationcapable of being broken down into granular, modular, and easy-to-integrate

      Benkler's early work studied "the role of non-exclusive property regimes and more permeable organizational boundaries" for knowledge products.

    29. Initial scholarship on the organization of peer production emphasized the-oretical distinctions between peer production, bureaucracy, and transactioncost explanations of firms and markets.

      Description of early research

    30. Indeed, peer production com-munities perform all of the “classical” organizational functions like coordina-tion, division of labor, recruitment, training, norm creation and enforcement,conflict resolution, and boundary maintenance – but do so in the absence ofmany of the institutions associated with more traditional organizations.

      List of typical activities enacted in peer production communities. Early research sought to identify these activities and the unique nature of peer production work. Later studies examined the effectiveness of peer production and how the activities as communities mature.

      Benkler notes later in the same passage:

      "However, as peer production communities have aged, some have acquired increasingly formal organizational attributes, including bureaucratic rules and routines for interaction and control."

    31. In the rest of this chapter, we describe the development of the academicliterature on peer production and collective intelligence in three areas – or-ganization, motivation, and quality. In each area, we introducefoundationalworkconsisting primarily of earlier scholarship that sought to describe peerproduction and establish its legitimacy. Subsequently, we characterize work,usually more recent, that seeks to pursuenew directionsand to derive morenuanced analytical insights. Because FLOSS and Wikipedia have generatedthe majority of the peer production research to date, we focus on researchanalyzing those efforts. For each theoretical area, we briefly synthesize bothfoundational work and new directions and describe some of the challenges forfuture scholarship. Neither our themes nor our periodization are intended toencompass the complete literature on peer production. Instead, they reflectcore areas of research that speak most directly to the literature on collectiveintelligence and locate peer production within that broader phenomenon. Weconclude with a discussion of several issues that traverse our themes and impli-cations of peer production scholarship for research on collective intelligencemore broadly.

      Nice example of foregrounding and roadmapping for an essay/paper

    32. Although peer production is central to social scientific and legal researchon collective intelligence, not all examples of collective intelligence created inonline systems are peer production. First, (1) collective intelligence can in-volve centralized control over goal-setting and execution of tasks.

      Not all collective intelligence is peer production.

      Peer production must adhere to values: de-centralized control, broad range of motives/incentives and FLOSS/creative commons rights.

    33. Peer production is the most significant organizational in-novation that has emerged from Internet-mediated social practice, among themost visible and important examples of collective intelligence, and a centraltheoretical frame used by social scientists and legal scholars of collective intel-ligence.

      Benkler ranks peer production's place in the social science literature on collective intelligence.

    34. Following Benkler (2013), we define peer produc-tion as a form of open creation and sharing performed by groups online that:set and execute goals in a decentralized manner; harness a diverse range ofparticipant motivations, particularly non-monetary motivations; and sepa-rate governance and management relations from exclusive forms of propertyand relational contracts (i.e., projects are governed as open commons or com-mon property regimes and organizational governance utilizes combinationsof participatory, meritocratic and charismatic, rather than proprietary or con-

      Peer production definition per Benkler.

    35. Consistent with this exam-ple, foundational social scientific research relevant to understanding collec-tive intelligence has focused on three central concerns: (1) explaining the or-ganization and governance of decentralized projects, (2) understanding themotivation of contributors in the absence of financial incentives or coerciveobligations, and (3) evaluating the quality of the products generated throughcollective intelligence systems.

      Focus of related work in collective intelligence studies:

      • organizational governance • motives • product quality

    36. Historically,researchers in diverse fields such as communication, sociology, law, and eco-nomics have argued that effective human systems organize people through acombination of hierarchical structures (e.g., bureaucracies), completely dis-tributed coordination mechanisms (e.g., markets), and social institutions ofvarious kinds (e.g., cultural norms). However, the rise of networked systemsand online platforms for collective intelligence has upended many of the as-sumptions and findings from this earlier research.

      Benkler argues that the process, motives, and cultural norms of online network-driven knowledge work are different than systems previously studied and should be re-evaluated.

    1. mporal features. We have then to consider how organizational participants are affected by situations containing temporal features, but also how these actors shape, by their behavior and beliefs, local context according to their needs.

      This provides a good framework for the SBTF study that social coordination practices can sometimes be at odds with the "structures that bear significant temporal features."

      Could this mean data as well as events?

      Is this passage invoking activity theory, if it were an HCI study?

    2. To this extent, we have made tremendous advancements but we are still lacking reliable findings of the consistency and magnitude of the time effects at each level of an organization and on individuals. Perhaps, the last progresses that drawn upon the sructuration theory (Gomez, 2009; Kaplan & Orlikowski, 2013; Wanda J. Orlikowski & Yates, 2002; Reinecke & Ansari, 2015; Rowell, Gustafsson, & Clemente, 2016) has suffered the same faith of being judged as too notional and not providing enough guidance on how to conduct empirical studies based on this conception.

      Brunelle identified same gap as Nowotny, some 30 years later that theory is not serving empirical research.

    1. s a means for coordinating action among groups of users (e.g., Bardram, 2005, this volume)

      social coordination and activity theory

      get this paper

      Bardram, J.E. (2005, September). Activity-based computing: Support for mobility and collaboration in ubiquitous computing. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 9(5), 312–322.

    2. The hierarchical structure of the Boer et al. adaptation of the Activity Theory model can help to reconcile the differences in granularity and the difficulties of supporting collaboration identified in our work; future activity-centered user interfaces might take advantage of the zoomable user interface paradigm or feature control over the level of detail (LOD) represented in the interface to more accurately reflect the depth at which a given user conceptualizes their own tasks or the tasks of their colleagues.

      Boer extension attends to some of the challenges which began this paper

    3. Activities also span place; that is, it is common for work to take place outside of the immediate office environment. However, current office technologies sometimes present a very different view of information across different physical and virtual settings.

      "Activities exist across places"

      Here the paper conceptualizes "place" as physical location as well as mobile environment.

    4. The idea that activities may exist at different levels of granularity is not a new one. Boer, van Baalen & Kumar (2002) provide a model explaining how an activity at one level of analysis may be modeled as an action—a component of an activity—at another. This holds true for individual users, as in the example provided above, but is even more pronounced when a single activity is viewed from multiple participants’ perspectives.

      "Activities exist at different levels of granularity"

      Hierarchical level of analysis; Action < Activity

      The idea of granularity also seems to have a temporal component. See examples before this passage.

    5. Additionally, activities need to be represented in such a way that their contents can be shared, with the caveats that individual participants in an activity may have very different perceptions of the activity, they may bring different resources to play over the course of the activity, and, particularly for large activities in which many individual users participate, users themselves may come and go over the life of the activity.

      Large group social coordination challenges are particularly salient to the SBTF studies.

    6. Recognizing the mediating role of the digital work environment in enabling users to meaningfully collaborate is a critical step to ensuring the success of these systems.

      "Activities are collaborative"

      Activity representations are also crucial here, as is the "mediating role of the digital work environment" for collaboration.

      Flag this to connect to the Goffman reading (Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) and crowdsourcing/collective intelligence readings.

    1. Social identities have increasing difficulty in being construed in terms of stable social attributes in a highly mobile -both socially and geographically - society. They will have to rely on other, temporal dimensions, in what are becoming increasingly precari-ous, if not completely contingent, identities in constant need of redefi-nition. One's 'own', proper time situated in a momentous present which is extended on the societal level in order to accommodate the pressing overload of problems, choices and strategies, becomes a central value for the individual as well as a characteristic of the societal system (Nowotny, 1989a)

      I'm curious how this idea of mobility creates a precarious, contingent identity which forces people to use other temporal dimensions to situate themselves.

      This could be an interesting way to approach the situated time phenomena I'm seeing in the SBTF study.

    2. Major societal transformations are linked to information and communication technologies, giving rise to processes of growing global interdependence. They in turn generate the approxi-mation of coevalness, the illusion of simultaneity by being able to link instantly people and places around the globe. Many other processes are also accelerated. Speed and mobility are thus gaining in momentum, leading in turn to further speeding up processes that interlink the move-ment of people, information, ideas and goods.

      Evokes Virilio theories and social/political critiques on speed/compression, as cited by Adam (2004).

      Also Hassan's work, also cited by Adam (2004).

    3. ut it will also have to come to terms with confronting 'the Other' (Fabian, 1983), with 'the curious asymmetry' still prevailing as a result of advanced industrial societies receiving a mainly endogenous and synchronic analytic treatment, while 'developing' societies are often seen in exogenous, diachronic terms. Study of 'Time and the Other' presupposes, often implicitly, that the Other lives in another time, or at least on a different time-scale. And indeed, when looking at the integrative but also potentially divisive 'timing' facilitated by modern communication and information-processing technology, is it not correct to say that new divisions, on a temporal scale, are being created between those who have access to such devices and those who do not? Is not one part of humanity, despite globalization, in danger of being left behind, in a somewhat anachronistic age?

      Nowotny argues that "the Other" (non-western, developing countries, Global South -- my words, not hers) is presumed to be on a different time scale than industrial societies. Different "cultural variations and how societal experience shapes the construction of time and temporal reference..."

      This has implications for ICT devices.

    4. only structural functional theory, but all postfunctionalist 'successor' theories for their lack in taking up 'substantive' temporal issues, he was also pleading from the selective point of view of Third World countries for the exploration of theoretically possible alternatives or, to put it into other words, the delineation of what in the experience of western and non-western societies so far is universally valid and yet historically restric-ted. Such questions touch the very essence of the process of moderniz-ation. They evoke images of a closed past and an open or no longer so open future, of structures of collective memory as well as shifting collec-tive and individual identities of people who are increasingly drawn into the processes of world-wide integration and globalization. Anthropologi-cal accounts are extremely rich in different time reckoning modes and systems, in the pluritemporalism that prevailed in pre-industrialized societies. The theory of historical time - or times - both from a western and non-western point of view still has to be written. There exists already an impressive corpus of writings analysing the rise of the new dominant 'western' concept of time and especially its links with the process of industrialization. The temporal representations underlying the different disciplines in the social sciences allow not only for a reconceptualization of their division of intellectual labour, but also for a programmatic view forward towards a 'science of multiple times' (Grossin, 1989). However, any such endeavour has to come to terms also with non-western temporal experience.

      Evokes Adam's critique of colonialization of time, commodification/post-industrial views, and need for post-colonial temporal studies.

    5. Time' and time research is not ·an institutionalized subfield or subspeciality of any of the social sciences. By its very nature, it is recalcitrantly transdisciplinary and refuses to be placed under the intellectual monopoly of any discipline. Nor is time sufficiently recognized as forming an integral dimension of any of the more permanent structural domains of social life which have led to their institutionalization as research fields. Although research grants can be obtained for 'temporal topics', they are much more likely to be judged as relevant when they are presented as part of an established research field, such as studies of working time being considered a legit-imate part of studies of working life or industrial relations.

      Challenges of studying time and avoiding the false claim that is a neglected subject.

    6. The standardization of local times into standard world time is one of the prime examples for the push towards standardization and integration also on the temporal scale (Zerubavel, 1982).

      Get this paper.

      Zerubavel, E. (1982) 'The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective', American Journal of Sociology 1: 1-12.

    7. At present, information and communication technologies con-tinue to reshape temporal experience and collective time consciousness (Nowotny, 1989b)

      Get this paper.

      Nowotny, H. (1989b) 'Mind, Technologies, and Collective Time Consciousness', in J. T. Fraser (ed.) Time and Mind, The Study of Time VI, pp. 197-216. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.

    8. Despite the apparent diversity of themes, certain common patterns can be discerned in empirical studies dealing with time. They bear the imprint of the ups and downs of research fashions as well as the waxing and waning of influences from neighbouring disciplines. But they all acknowledge 'time as a problem' in 'time-compact' societies (Lenntorp, 1978), imbued with the pressures of time that come from time being a scarce resource.

      Overview of interdisciplinary, empirical time/temporality studies from late 70s to 80s. (contemporary to this book)

      Cites Carey "The Case of the Telegraph" -- "impact of the telegraph on the standardization of time"

      Cites Bluedorn -- "it is omnipresent indecision-making, deadlines andother aspects of organizational behaviour like various forms of group processes"

    9. Studies of time in organizations have long since recognized the importance of 'events' as a complex admixture which shapes social life inside an organiz-ation and its relationship to the outside world. 'Sociological analyses', we are told, 'require a theory of time which recognizes that time is a socially constructed, organizing device by which one set, or trajectory of events is used as a point of reference for understanding, anticipating and attempting to control other sets of events. Time is in the events and events are defined by organizational members' (Clark, 1985:36).

      Review how this idea about events in organizations as a way to study time is used by Bluedorn, Mazmanian, Orlikowski, and/or Lindley.

    10. The tension between action theory (or the theory of structuration) and sys-tems theory has not completely vanished, but at least the areas of dis-agreement have become clearer. The 'event' structure of time with its implicit legitimization through physics, but which is equally a central notion for historians (Grossin, 1989) holds a certain attraction for empiri-cal studies and for those who are interested in the definitional

      Nowotny revisits Elias' idea about the relationship between time and events as a framework that is multidisciplinary, complex, integral to sensemaking, and appeals to empirical research.

    11. The formation of time con epts and the making of time I measurements, i.e. the production of devices as well as their use and social function, become for him a problem of social knowledge and its formation. It is couched in the long-term perspective of evolution of human societies. Knowledge about time is not knowledge about an invariant part or object of nature. Time is not a quality inherent in things, nor invariant across human societies.

      Combine this with the notes on Norbert Elias above.

    12. As can be seen by these and other theor~tical formulations, the prob-lem of time in social theory, while gradu~ ly coming to new terms with social action, does not lend itself easily 'to providing bridges for the agents behind human agency, the social actors, nor to those who do empirical research in order to understand the world from an actor's perspective.

      Nowotny again raising the concern that social theory on time/temporality doesn't bridge well with the concreteness needed to apply it to empirical research.

    13. As Bergmann (1981), and more recently, Ltischer (1989) and Adam (1990) and before them Joas (1980, 1989) have shown, a radical change in perspective away from time as 'flow' or time as embedded in the intentionality of the actor, can already be found in the social philosophy of time by G. H. Mead (Mead, 1936, 1932/1959, 1964). His is also a theory in which it is not the actor and his/her motives, interests or the means-ends scheme which dominates, but where action is interpreted as event -moreover, an event which is both temporal and social in nature.

      Nowotny revisits the earlier mention of Mead's premise that "time is embedded in the intentionality of the actor."

      Come back to this.

      https://www.iep.utm.edu/mead/

    14. It may well be, as Edmond Wright has pointed out (personal communi-cation) that by leaving sui generis time to the physicists, i.e. by leaving it out of social theory altogether, there is the risk of losing sight of the 'real' temporal continuum which serves as standard reference for all other forms of times. It also impedes coming to terms with 'time embedded' in natural objects and technical artifacts, as Hagerstrand (1974, 1975, 1988) repeatedly emphasized.

      Nowotny argues that social theory is reduced to a narrow, dualistic society vs nature perspective by focusing on symbolism in social time and failing to consider other (sui generis) types of time.

      This is especially problematic when exploring how time is embedded in "natural objects and technical artifacts".

    15. The fundamen-tal question for Giddens then becomes how social systems 'come to be stretched across time and space' (i.e. how they constitute their tempor-ality (Giddens, 1984).

      Space-time distanciation theory.

      See also: Adam - 1990 - Time for Social Theory

    16. quite different and much more radical approach is followed by Niklas Luhmann, who proposes to replace the subject/ action scheme by a time/action scheme, thus eliminating the actors alto-gether and replacing them with expectations and attributions.

      Luhmann is a social systems theorist, whose work is not widely adopted in the US for being too complex. His work was also criticized by Habermas.

      Esoteric. Not worth mentioning in prelim response.

    17. To introduce time into present-day social theory means at its core to redefine its relation to social action and subsequently to human agency. It is there that the central questions arise, where differences begin to matter between action theory, structuration theory and system theory with regard to time.

      Nowotny outlines the basic friction points for updating the prevailing social theories.

    18. he third strategy is the unen-cumbered embracing of pluritemporalism. With or without awareness that the concept of an absolute (Newtonian) physical time broke down irrevocably at the turn of this century and that a different kind of plurit-emporalism has also been spreading in the physical sciences (Prigogine and Stengers, 1988; Hawking, 1988; Adam, 1990), social theory is free to posit the existence of a plurality of times, including a plurality of social times. In most cases this amounts to a kind of 'theoretical agnosti-cism' with regard to physical time. Pluritemporalism allows for asserting the existence of social time next to physical ( or biological) time without going into differences of emergence, constitution or epistemological

      Pluritemporalism (multiple types of time representations/symbols) recognizes that there is no hierarchy/order between different "modes" or "shapes" of time be they described as physical, social, etc.

    19. Another strategy in dealing with sui generis time consists in juxtaposing clock time to the various forms of 'social time' and considers the latter as the more 'natural' ones, i.e. closer to subjective perceptions of time, or to the temporality that results from adaptations to seasons or other kinds of natural (biological, environmental) rhythm. This strategy, often couched also in terms of an opposition between 'linear' clock time and 'cyclical' time of natural and social rhythms devalues, or at least ques-tions, the temporality of formal organizations which rely heavily on clock time in fulfilling their coordinative and integrative and controlling functions (Young, 1988; Elchardus, 1988).

      by contrasting social time (as a natural phenomenon) against clock time, allows for a more explicit perspective on linear time (clock) and social rhythms when examining social coordination.

    20. Searching to reconcile Darwinian evolutionary theory with Einsteinian relativity theory and, especially, its reconceptualization of simultaneity, Mead followed Whitehead's lead in locating the origins of all structuration of time in the notion of the 'event': without the interruption of the flow of time by events, no temporal experience would be possible (Joas, 1980, 1989)

      Mead used events as a unit of analysis in contrasting social time with sui generis time (all other unique times, natural, physical, etc.). This way, time can be still be viewed as a relationship between history/evolution (past) and events (past/present/future) and other temporal types.

      "Time therefore structures itself through interaction and common temporal perspectives are rooted in a world constituted through practice."

    21. Related to this encounter of the first kind, in which social theory meets the concept of time, is the question of the relationship between time in social systems with other forms of (physical, biological, 'natural') time or, as Elchardus calls it, 'sui generis time' (Elchardus, 1988).

      According to Elchardus, the idea of a relationship between social time and other forms ("sui generis time") is also studied by Giddens and Luhmann.

      Later in this passage, Nowotny writes: "Elchardus suggests defining the culturally induced temporality of systems when certain conditions (i.e. relative invariance and sequential order) are met. Time then becomes the concept used to interpret that temporality."

    22. By clarifying the concept of time as a conceptual symbol of evolving complex relationships between continua of changes of various kinds, Elias opens the way for grounding the concept of time again in social terms. The power of choosing the symbols, of selecting which continua are to be used, be it by priests or scientists, also beconies amenable to social analysis. The social matrix becomes ready once more to house the natural world or our conception of it in terms of its own, symbol-creating and continuously evolving capacity. The question of human agency is solved in Norbert Elias's case by referring to the process of human evolution through which men and women are enabled to devise symbols of increasing power of abstraction which are 'more adequate to reality'.

      Per Nowotny on Elias: thinking about time as a conceptual symbol it can more readily be described in social terms, it holds natural and social time together, and it accounts for human agency in creating symbols to understand time in practice and in the abstract.

    23. Unless one learns to perceive human societies, living in a world of symbols of their own making, as emerging and developing within the larger non-human universe, one is unable to attack one of the most crucial aspects of the problem of time. For Elias it consists, stated very briefly, in how to reconcile the highly abstract nature of the concept of time with the strong compulsion its social use as a regulatory device exerts upon us in daily life. His answer: time is not a thing, but a relationship. For him the word time is a symbol for a relationship which a group of beings endowed with the capacity for memory and synthesis establishes between two or more continua of changes, one of which is used by them as a frame of reference or standard of measurement for the other.

      Nowotny descrobes Norbert Elias' conception of social time not as a thing but a relationship between people and two more more continua of changes.

      continua = multiple ways to sequentially evaluate something that changes over past, present and future states.

      Requested the Elias book cited here.

    24. A definition of social time, like the one I attempted myself in the early 1970s, according to which the term social time 'refers to the experience of inter-subjective time created through social interaction, both on the behavioural and symbolic plane' now calls for a much more encompassing and dynamic definition, taking into account also the plurality of social times (Nowotny, 1975:326)

      Social time definition -- which incorporates notion of plural temporalities.

    25. Martins draws a distinction between two criteria of temporalism and/or historicism. One he calls 'thematic tem-poralism', indicated by the degree to which temporal aspects of social life, diachronicity, etc., are taken seriously as themes for reflection of meta theoretical inquiry. The other criterion is the degree or level of 'substantive temporalism', the degree to which becoming, process or diachrony are viewed as ontological grounds for socio-cultural life or as methodologically prior to structural synchronic analysis or explanations.

      Difference between "thematic temporalism" and "substantive temporalism."

      Thematic = "issues of time, change and history being taken seriously as objects of study" Substantive = "issues of becoming, process and change viewed as essential features of social life which help explain social phenomena"

      This book provides a better description:

      https://books.google.com/books?id=_kPswElSFRoC&lpg=PA165&ots=WgjNWOhNWk&dq=%22thematic%20temporalism%22%20&lr&pg=PA165#v=onepage&q=%22thematic%20temporalism%22&f=false

    26. There is also a widespread acknowledgement, especially in evidence in the empirical literature, of what I will call 'pluritemporalism'. This is an acknowledgement of the existence of a plurality of different modes of social time(s) which may exist side by side, and yet are to be distinguished from the time of physics or that of biology.

      Pluritemporalism defintion.

    27. The demise of structural-functionalism, he argues, has not brought about a substantial increment in the degree of temporalism and historicism in the theoretical constructs of general sociology, even though this was one of the major goals announced by the critics of functionalism, paramount to a meta-theoretical criterion of what an 'adequate' theory should con-sist of.

      Contested area for early social theorists -- suggested that "temporalism" should be a criterion for future social theory as a successor to structural-functionalism.

      Definition: Structural Functionalism is a sociological theory that attempts to explain why society functions the way it does by focusing on the relationships between the various macro-social institutions that make up society (e.g., government, law, education, religion, etc) and act as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. Robert Merton was a proponent of structural-functionalism.

    28. The question is, rather, why the repeated complaint about the neglect of time in social theory or in the social sciences in general?

      Nowotny lists a number of possible reasons for inaccurate complaints that time has been neglected in social theory or it has not been taken seriously despite the large body of literature.

      I would offer a simpler reason: The prior work is incredible dense, very abstract, and hard to relate to lived/social experience.

    29. Sorokin and Merton in 1937, entitled 'Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis' that some of the Durkheimian ideas were taken up again. This paper identified social time as qualitatively heterogeneous (e.g. holidays and market days), not quantitatively homogeneous as astronomical or physical time has it. Social time was seen as being divided into intervals that derive from collective social activities rather than being uniformly flowing. Local time systems, it was argued, function mainly in order to assure the coordination and synchronization of local activities which eventually become extended and integrated, thereby necessitating common time systems. The Durkheimian claim of the category of time being rooted in social activities, of time being socially constituted by virtue of the 'rhythm of social life' itself, buttressed by the analysis of the social functions it served, was a tacit rebuttal of Kant's a priori intuitions of time, space and causality.

      Sorokin and Merton extended Durkheim's work and staked the claim that social time was qualitative, varied, rhythmic and useful for social coordination in contrast to Kant's philosophy of time, space and causality.

      Kant in a nutshell: "In 1781, Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, one of the most influential works in the history of the philosophy of space and time. He describes time as an a priori notion that, together with other a priori notions such as space, allows us to comprehend sense experience. Kant denies that neither space or time are substance, entities in themselves, or learned by experience; he holds, rather, that both are elements of a systematic framework we use to structure our experience. Spatial measurements are used to quantify how far apart objects are, and temporal measurements are used to quantitatively compare the interval between (or duration of) events. Although space and time are held to be transcendentally ideal in this sense, they are also empirically real—that is, not mere illusions." via Wikipedia Philosophy of space and time

    30. The claim to the existence of a concept of 'social time', distinct from other forms of time, was thus made early in the history of social thought. It continues to focus upon the claims of the peculiar nature of the 'social constitution' or the 'social construction' of time. These claims evidently put the category of 'social time' into the wider realm of 'symbolic time', a cultural phenomenon, the constitution of which has remained the object of inquiry of more disciplines than sociology alone, but which separates it from time in nature, embedded in things and artifacts.

      Early work in social time focused on the social construction of time and symbolic/semiotic representations (see Zerubavel).

      Sociology and other disciplines see time as "embedded in things and artifacts" apart from what Adam refers to as natural time.

    31. In the then undeveloped sociology of knowledge, Durkheim held as the most general conclusion that it is the rhythm of social life which is the basis of the category of time itself (Durkheim, 1912:7). These obser-vations opened up important questions about the social origins and func-tions of the category of time and how social time can be distinguished and is distinct from astronomical time.

      Early history of "social time" via Durkheim.

    1. “If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.”

      In prior generations, if you couldn't borrow dad's car, you didn't exist...

      Cross reference the 1955 cultural touchstone film Rebel Without a Cause. While the common perception is that James Dean, portraying Jim Stark, was the rebel (as seen in the IMDB.com description of the film "A rebellious young man with a troubled past comes to a new town, finding friends and enemies."), it is in fact Plato, portrayed by Sal Mineo, who is the true rebel. Plato is the one who is the disruptive and rebellious youth who is always disrupting the lives of those around him. (As an aside, should we note Plato's namesake was also a rebel philosopher in his time?!?)

      Plato's first disruption in the film is the firing of the cannon at school. While unstated directly, due to the cultural mores of Hollywood at the time, Plato is a closeted homosexual who's looking to befriend someone, anyone. His best shot is the new kid before the new kid manages to find his place in the pecking order. Again Jim Stark does nothing in the film but attempt to fit into the social fabric around him, his only problem is that he's the new guy. Most telling here about their social structures is that Jim has ready access to an automobile (a literal rolling social club--notice multiple scenes in the film with cars full of teenagers) while Plato is relegated to an old scooter (a mode of transport focused on the singleton--the transport of the outcast, the rebel).

      The Rebel Plato, with his scooter--and a gun, no less! Plato as portrayed by Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Notice that as the rebel, he's pictured in the middleground with a gun while his scooter protects him in the foreground. In the background is the automobile, the teens' coveted source of freedom at the time.

    2. identity why do teens seem strange online?292privacy why do youth share so publicly?543addiction what makes teens obsessed with social media?774danger are sexual predators lurking everywhere?1005bullying is social media amplifying meanness and cruelty?1286inequality can social media resolve social divisions?1537literacy are today’s youth digital natives?1768searching for a public of their own199

      Just reading this table of contents reminds me that this "analysis of teens" seems a lot like the perennial contemplations of adults who think that the generations of teenagers coming behind them is different, weird, or even deviant.

      A typical case in point is that of the greatest generation looking at the long-haired 60's hippy teens who came after them. "Why do they like rock and roll? They do too many drugs. There's no hope for the future." "Damn kids. Get off of my lawn!"

      Is the way that current teens and millennials react to social just another incarnation of this general idea?

    1. Sorokin and Merton (1937) may be said to have provided the 'definitive' classic statement on the distinction between social and natural time. They associate the physical time of diurnal and seasonal cycles with clock time and define this time as 'purely quantitative, shorn of qualitative variation' (p. 621). 'All time systems', Sorokin and Merton suggest further, 'may be reduced to the need of providing means for synchronising and co-ordinating the activities and observations of the constituents of groups' (p. 627).

      classic definition of "social time" vs "natural time". This thinking is now contested.

    1. I had been a victim of something the sociologists Alice Marwick and danah boyd call context collapse, where people create online culture meant for one in-group, but exposed to any number of out-groups without its original context by social-media platforms, where it can be recontextualized easily and accidentally.
    1. Ten years ago, if I knew someone primarily through online means, you could guarantee they had their own domain name. It was just before the big explosion in social media use which meant that if you wanted a space online, you had to create it. This provided a barrier to entry in terms of the digital literacy skills required to register a domain, set up the necessary software and, of course, design, build and upload a website. The upside was that your digital identity was yours.

      Why have we gotten away from this? In short, I think it's because it was easier for big companies with massive resources to do the initial heavy lifting.

      If we look at history, Gutenberg created the first printing press and guarded it heavily for years. Eventually others figured out how to do it and printing presses spread like wildfire.Now, with some modest means and some time, almost anyone can publish.

      With simple standards and accessible hosting people can now broadly own their own domain name and create their own websites using a variety of content management systems. In a few years, this will be even more ubiquitous. Facebook is going to be just like Gutenberg attempting to hold onto his monopoly, but failing miserably.

      The best part, I think, is that the speed of digital technology means that the Facebook edifice is going to crumble faster than Gutenberg's.

  3. Jul 2018
    1. Brown and Eisenhardt studied change and project management in com­puter firms and found that firms with less successful project portfolios demon­strated very low amounts of communication across projects. This was part of the context in which projects were planned, divided into small tasks, and then executed in a “structured sequence of steps” (1997, p. 14). A structured sequence is, of course, a monochronic strategy, and the low amount of communication is consistent with the proposition that monochronic strategies generate less awareness of other activities and tasks. One of the managers in their study re­marked, “Most people only look at their part” (p. 14); another, “The work of everyone else doesn’t really affect my work” (p. 14). These responses contrasted with the pattern of work in the companies that managed their portfolios of projects more successfully, which Brown and Eisenhardt characterized as “it­erative” (p. 14). Iterative (repetitive) patterns are suggestive of the back and forth flow of polychronic strategies

      Iterative/repetitive work patterns suggest "back and forth flow of polychronic strategies."

      Key point for SBTF social coordination: "At the less successful it was difficult to adjust projects in changing conditions because 'once started, the process took over.' It was hard to backtrack or reshape product specifications as circumstances changed."

      Polychronic strategy: Higher level of willingness to adjust/correct work per feedback.

      Monchronic strategy: Greater degree of satisificing in decision making.

    2. in a more polychronic culture, people would stand closer to each other while talking. So time and space are related in the social as well as the physical world.

      Could the relationship between polychronicity and physical proximity help to explain the use of situated and/or spatial language in globalized, virtual social coordination work?

      Note: National studies of polychronicity have been conducted through qualitative methods (observation and interviews)

    1. Then I used Gephi, another free data analysis tool, to visualize the data as an entity-relationship graph. The coloured circles—called Nodes—represent Twitter accounts, and the intersecting lines—known as Edges—refer to Follow/Follower connections between accounts. The accounts are grouped into colour-coded community clusters based on the Modularity algorithm, which detects tightly interconnected groups. The size of each node is based on the number of connections that account has with others in the network.
    2. Using the open-source NodeXL tool, I collected and imported a complete list of accounts tweeting that exact phrase into a spreadsheet. From that list, I also gathered and imported an extended community of Twitter users, comprised of the friends and followers of each account. It was going to be an interesting test: if the slurs against Nemtsov were just a minor case of rumour-spreading, they probably wouldn't be coming from more than a few dozen users.
    1. The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones called Twitter a “self-cleaning oven,” suggesting that false information could be flagged and self-corrected almost immediately. We no longer had to wait 24 hours for a newspaper to issue a correction.
    1. Dissemination MechanismsFinally, we need to think about how this content is being disseminated. Some of it is being shared unwittingly by people on social media, clicking retweet without checking. Some of it is being amplified by journalists who are now under more pressure than ever to try and make sense and accurately report information emerging on the social web in real time. Some of it is being pushed out by loosely connected groups who are deliberately attempting to influence public opinion, and some of it is being disseminated as part of sophisticated disinformation campaigns, through bot networks and troll factories.
    1. Bronislaw Malinowski addressed the functions of time as fol­lows: “A system of reckoning time is a practical, as well as a sentimental, ne­cessity in every culture, however simple. Members of every human group have the need of coordinating various activities, of fixing dates for the future, of placing reminiscences in the past, of gauging the length of bygone periods and of those to come” (1990, p. 203). Sixty-three years later Barbara Adam would state it thus: “As ordering principle, social tool for co-ordination, orientation, and regulation, as a symbol for the conceptual organisation of natural and so­cial events, social scientists view time as constituted by social activity” (1990, p. 42).

      Hominid development: time as a tool for social coordination.

      Cites Adam (1990).

    1. Time is a social construction, or more properly, times are socially constructed, which means the concepts and values we hold about various times are the prod­ucts of human interaction (Lauer 1981, p. 44). These social products and beliefs are generated in groups large and small, but it is not that simple. For contrary to Emile Durkheim’s assertion, not everyone in the group holds a common time, a time “such as it is objectively thought of by everybody in a single civilization” (1915, p. 10). This is so because in the perpetual structuration of social life (Gid­dens 1984) individuals bring their own interpretations to received social knowl­edge, and these interpretations add variance to the beliefs, perceptions, and val­ues.

      Social construction of time. The various definitions are nuanced according to the theorists' disciplines.

      Giddens' work on structuration of social life and its effect on how individuals interpret received social knowledge is salient from Bluedorn's org studies perspective. Structuration offers less grounding when viewed through the lens of technology (see Orlikowski's 1992 critique in Mendeley).

    1. A third paradox is only hinted at by Vmho, when he suggests that conflict is to be expected between democracy and dromocracy, the politics that take account of time and the speed of movement across space.20 It concerns the sociopolitical and socioeconomic relations associated with advances in transport speed, which affect dif­ferent indivi�uals, groups and classes of society in uneven ways.

      Transportation speed is entangled with social equity and power: time-poor, cash-rich can "buy" time through labor, efficient technologies but the time-rich, cash-poor cannot trade time to become wealthy wealth.

    2. In the light of this evidence, which is fully supported by transport research, 17 Virilio formulated the �romological law, which states that increase in speed mcreases the potential for gridlock.

      Virilio's dromological law: "increase in speed, increases the potential for gridlock."

      This evokes environmental concerns as well as critiques of political privilege/power wrt to elites with access to fast transport options and those with less clout relegated to public transportation, traffic jams, less reliable options, etc.

    3. The task for social theory, therefore, is to render the invisible visible, show relations and intercon­nections, begin tbe process of questioning the unquestioned. Before we can identify some of these economic relations of temporal inequity, however, we first need to understand in what way the sin of usury was a barrier to the develop­ment of economic life as we know it today in industrial societies.

      Citing Weber (integrated with Marx), Adam describes how time is used to promote social inequity.

      Taken for granted in a socio-economic system, time renders power relationships as invisible

    1. Leshed and Sengers’s research reminds us that calendars are not just tools for the management of time, but are also sites of identity work where people can project to themselves and others the density of their days and apparent ‘success’ at doing it all[26]. These seemingly innocuous artifacts can thus perpetuate deeper normative logics a

      The dark side of time artifacts and the social pressure of busyness/industriousness as a virtue.

    2. . When creating tools for schedulingandcoordination, it is crucial to provide ways for people to take into account not just the multiplicity of (potentially dissonant) rhythms [22, 46], but also the differential affective experiencesof time rendered by such rhythms.

      Design implication: How to accommodate rhythms and obligation with social coordination work?

      ".. one 'chunk' of time is not equivalent to any other 'chunk'"