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David Sutcliffe

Development

What Impact is the Gig Economy Having on Development and Worker Livelihoods?

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by David Sutcliffe

Reflecting on some of the key benefits and costs associated with these new digital regimes of work.

by David Sutcliffe

There are imbalances in the relationship between supply and demand of digital work, with the vast majority of buyers located in high-income countries (pictured). See full article for details.

As David Harvey famously noted, workers are unavoidably place-based because “labour-power has to go home every night.” But the widespread use of the Internet has changed much of that. The confluence of rapidly spreading digital connectivity, skilled but under-employed workers, the existence of international markets for labour, and the ongoing search for new outsourcing destinations, has resulted in organisational, technological, and spatial fixes for virtual production networks of services and money. Clients, bosses, workers, and users of the end-products of work can all now be located in different corners of the planet. A new article by Mark Graham, Isis Hjorth and Vili Lehdonvirta, “Digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods”, published in Transfer, discusses the implications of the spatial unfixing of work for workers in some of the world’s economic margins, and reflects on some of the key benefits and costs associated with these new digital regimes of work. Drawing on a multi-year study with digital workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-east Asia, it highlights four key concerns for workers: bargaining power, economic inclusion, intermediated value chains, and upgrading. As ever more policy-makers, governments and organisations turn to the gig economy and digital labour as an economic development strategy to bring jobs to places that need them, it is important to understand how this might influence the livelihoods of workers. The authors show that although there are important and tangible benefits for a range of workers, there are also a range of risks and costs that could negatively affect the livelihoods of digital workers. They conclude with a discussion of four broad strategies – certification schemes, organising digital workers, regulatory strategies and democratic control of online labour platforms—that could improve conditions and livelihoods for digital workers. We caught up with the authors to explore the implications of the study: Ed.: Shouldn’t increased digitisation of work also increase transparency (i.e. tracking,…

There are imbalances in the relationship between supply and demand of digital work, with the vast majority of buyers located in high-income countries (pictured). See full article for details.

Interviews, Wellbeing

Tackling Digital Inequality: Why We Have to Think Bigger

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by David Sutcliffe

While the UK government has financed technological infrastructure and invested in schemes to address digital inequalities, the outcomes of these schemes are rarely uniformly positive or transformative for the people involved.

by David Sutcliffe

Outcomes of the many schemes financed by the government to address digital inequalities are rarely uniformly positive or transformative for the people involved. Image: iPad by Sean MacEntee (Flickr).

Numerous academic studies have highlighted the significant differences in the ways that young people access, use and engage with the Internet and the implications it has in their lives. While the majority of young people have some form of access to the Internet, for some their connections are sporadic, dependent on credit on their phones, an available library, or Wi-Fi open to the public. Qualitative data in a variety of countries has shown such limited forms of access can create difficulties for these young people as an Internet connection becomes essential for socialising, accessing public services, saving money, and learning at school. While the UK government has financed technological infrastructure and invested in schemes to address digital inequalities, the outcomes of these schemes are rarely uniformly positive or transformative for the people involved. This gap between expectation and reality demands theoretical attention; with more attention placed on the cultural, political and economic contexts of the digitally excluded, and the various attempts to “include” them. Focusing on a two-year digital inclusion scheme for 30 teenagers and their families initiated by a local council in England, a qualitative study by Huw C. Davies, Rebecca Eynon, and Sarah Wilkin analyses why, despite the good intentions of the scheme’s stakeholders, it fell short of its ambitions. It also explains how the neoliberal systems of governance that are increasingly shaping the cultures and behaviours of Internet service providers and schools—that incentivise action that is counterproductive to addressing digital inequality and practices—cannot solve the problems they create. We caught up with the authors to discuss the study’s findings: Ed.: It was estimated that around 10% of 13 year olds in the study area lacked dependable access to the Internet, and had no laptop or PC at home. How does this impact educational outcomes? Huw: It’s impossible to disaggregate technology from everything else that can affect a young person’s progress through school. However, one school in our…

Outcomes of the many schemes financed by the government to address digital inequalities are rarely uniformly positive or transformative for the people involved. Image: iPad by Sean MacEntee (Flickr).

Ethics, Governance & Security, Wellbeing

Five Pieces You Should Probably Read On: Reality, Augmented Reality and Ambient Fun

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by David Sutcliffe

Things you should probably know, and things that deserve to be brought out for another viewing. This week: Reality, Augmented Reality and Ambient Fun!

by David Sutcliffe

This is the third post in a series that will uncover great writing by faculty and students at the Oxford Internet Institute, things you should probably know, and things that deserve to be brought out for another viewing. This week: Reality, Augmented Reality and Ambient Fun! The addictive gameplay of Pokémon GO has led to police departments warning people that they should be more careful about revealing their locations, players injuring themselves, finding dead bodies, and even the Holocaust Museum telling people to play elsewhere. Our environments are increasingly augmented with digital information: but how do we assert our rights over how and where this information is used? And should we be paying more attention to the design of persuasive technologies in increasingly attention-scarce environments? Or should we maybe just bin all our devices and pack ourselves off to digital detox camp? 1. James Williams: Bring Your Own Boundaries: Pokémon GO and the Challenge of Ambient Fun 23 July 2016 | 2500 words | 12 min | Gross misuses of the “Poké-” prefix: 6 “The slogan of the Pokémon franchise is ‘Gotta catch ‘em all!’ This phrase has always seemed to me an apt slogan for the digital era as a whole. It expresses an important element of the attitude we’re expected to have as we grapple with the Sisyphean boulder of information abundance using our woefully insufficient cognitive toolsets.” Pokémon GO signals the first mainstream adoption of a type of game—always on, always with you—that requires you to ‘Bring Your Own Boundaries’, says James Williams. Regulation of the games falls on the user; presenting us with a unique opportunity to advance the conversation about the ethics of self-regulation and self-determination in environments of increasingly persuasive technology. 2. James Williams: Orwell, Huxley, Banksy 24 May 2014 | 1000 words | 5 min “Orwell worried that what we fear could ultimately come to control us: the “boot stamping on a human…

Ethics, Interviews, Wellbeing

Exploring the world of digital detoxing

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by David Sutcliffe

Advocates of “digital detoxing” view digital communication as eroding our ability to concentrate, to empathise, and to have meaningful conversations.

by David Sutcliffe

The new (old) inbox. Camp Grounded tries to build up attendees’ confidence to be silly and playful, with their identities less tied to their work persona—in a backlash against Silicon Valley’s intense work ethic. Photo by Pumpernickle.

As our social interactions become increasingly entangled with the online world, there are some who insist on the benefits of disconnecting entirely from digital technology. These advocates of “digital detoxing” view digital communication as eroding our ability to concentrate, to empathise, and to have meaningful conversations. A 2016 survey by OnePoll found that 40% of respondents felt they had “not truly experienced valuable moments such as a child’s first steps or graduation” because “technology got in the way”, and OfCom’s 2016 survey showed that 15 million British Internet users (representing a third of those online), have already tried a digital detox. In recent years, America has sought to pathologise a perceived over-use of digital technology as “Internet addiction”. While the term is not recognised by the DSM, the idea is commonly used in media rhetoric and forms an important backdrop to digital detoxing. The article Disconnect to reconnect: The food/technology metaphor in digital detoxing (First Monday) by Theodora Sutton presents a short ethnography of the digital detoxing community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her informants attend an annual four-day digital detox and summer camp for adults in the Californian forest called Camp Grounded. She attended two Camp Grounded sessions in 2014, and followed up with semi-structured interviews with eight detoxers. We caught up with Theodora to examine the implications of the study and to learn more about her PhD research, which focuses on the same field site. Ed.: In your forthcoming article you say that Camp Grounded attendees used food metaphors (and words like “snacking” and “nutrition”) to understand their own use of technology and behaviour. How useful is this as an analogy? Theodora: The food/technology analogy is an incredibly neat way to talk about something we think of as immaterial in a more tangible way. We know that our digital world relies on physical connections, but we forget that all the time. Another thing it does in lending a dietary…

The new (old) inbox. Camp Grounded tries to build up attendees’ confidence to be silly and playful, with their identities less tied to their work persona—in a backlash against Silicon Valley’s intense work ethic. Photo by Pumpernickle.

Interviews, Social Data Science, Wellbeing

Estimating the Local Geographies of Digital Inequality in Britain: London and the South East Show Highest Internet Use—But Why?

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by David Sutcliffe

Britain has one of the largest Internet economies in the developed world, and the Internet contributes an estimated 8.3 percent to Britain’s GDP.

by David Sutcliffe

Despite the huge importance of the Internet in everyday life, we know surprisingly little about the geography of Internet use and participation at sub-national scales. A new article on Local Geographies of Digital Inequality by Grant Blank, Mark Graham, and Claudio Calvino published in Social Science Computer Review proposes a novel method to calculate the local geographies of Internet usage, employing Britain as an initial case study. In the first attempt to estimate Internet use at any small-scale level, they combine data from a sample survey, the 2013 Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS), with the 2011 UK census, employing small area estimation to estimate Internet use in small geographies in Britain. (Read the paper for more on this method, and discussion of why there has been little work on the geography of digital inequality.) There are two major reasons to suspect that geographic differences in Internet use may be important: apparent regional differences and the urban-rural divide. The authors do indeed find a regional difference: the area with least Internet use is in the North East, followed by central Wales; the highest is in London and the South East. But interestingly, geographic differences become non-significant after controlling for demographic variables (age, education, income etc.). That is, demographics matter more than simply where you live, in terms of the likelihood that you’re an Internet user. Britain has one of the largest Internet economies in the developed world, and the Internet contributes an estimated 8.3 percent to Britain’s GDP. By reducing a range of geographic frictions and allowing access to new customers, markets and ideas it strongly supports domestic job and income growth. There are also personal benefits to Internet use. However, these advantages are denied to people who are not online, leading to a stream of research on the so-called digital divide. We caught up with Grant Blank to discuss the policy implications of this marked disparity in (estimated) Internet use across…

Ethics, Politics & Government

Five Pieces You Should Probably Read On: Fake News and Filter Bubbles

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by David Sutcliffe

Do social media divide us, hide us from each other? Are you particularly aware of what content is personalised for you, what it is you’re not seeing?

by David Sutcliffe

This is the second post in a series that will uncover great writing by faculty and students at the Oxford Internet Institute, things you should probably know, and things that deserve to be brought out for another viewing. This week: Fake News and Filter Bubbles! Fake news, post-truth, “alternative facts”, filter bubbles—this is the news and media environment we apparently now inhabit, and that has formed the fabric and backdrop of Brexit (“£350 million a week”) and Trump (“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period”). Do social media divide us, hide us from each other? Are you particularly aware of what content is personalised for you, what it is you’re not seeing? How much can we do with machine-automated or crowd-sourced verification of facts? And are things really any worse now than when Bacon complained in 1620 about the false notions that “are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein”? 1. Bernie Hogan: How Facebook divides us [Times Literary Supplement] 27 October 2016 | 1000 words | 5 minutes “Filter bubbles can create an increasingly fractured population, such as the one developing in America. For the many people shocked by the result of the British EU referendum, we can also partially blame filter bubbles: Facebook literally filters our friends’ views that are least palatable to us, yielding a doctored account of their personalities.” Bernie Hogan says it’s time Facebook considered ways to use the information it has about us to bring us together across political, ideological and cultural lines, rather than hide us from each other or push us into polarised and hostile camps. He says it’s not only possible for Facebook to help mitigate the issues of filter bubbles and context collapse; it’s imperative, and it’s surprisingly simple. 2. Luciano Floridi: Fake news and a 400-year-old problem: we need to resolve the ‘post-truth’ crisis [the Guardian] 29 November 2016 | 1000…

Politics & Government

Five Pieces You Should Probably Read On: The US Election

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by David Sutcliffe

Here are five pieces that consider the interaction of social media and democracy—the problems, but also potential ways forward.

by David Sutcliffe

Image from Gage Skidmore via Flickr Creative Commons

This is the first post in a series that will uncover great writing by faculty and students at the Oxford Internet Institute, things you should probably know, and things that deserve to be brought out for another viewing. This week: The US Election. This was probably the nastiest Presidential election in recent memory: awash with Twitter bots and scandal, polarisation and filter bubbles, accusations of interference by Russia and the Director of the FBI, and another shock result. We have written about electoral prediction elsewhere: instead, here are five pieces that consider the interaction of social media and democracy—the problems, but also potential ways forward. 1. James Williams: The Clickbait Candidate 10 October 2016 | 2700 words | 13 minutes “Trump is very straightforwardly an embodiment of the dynamics of clickbait: he is the logical product (though not endpoint) in the political domain of a media environment designed to invite, and indeed incentivise, relentless competition for our attention […] Like clickbait or outrage cascades, Donald Trump is merely the sort of informational packet our media environment is designed to select for.” James Williams says that now is probably the time to have that societal conversation about the design ethics of the attention economy—because in our current media environment, attention trumps everything. 2. Sam Woolley, Philip Howard: Bots Unite to Automate the Presidential Election [Wired] 15 May 2016 | 850 words | 4 minutes “Donald Trump understands minority communities. Just ask Pepe Luis Lopez, Francisco Palma, and Alberto Contreras […] each tweeted in support of Trump after his victory in the Nevada caucuses earlier this year. The problem is, Pepe, Francisco, and Alberto aren’t people. They’re bots.” It’s no surprise that automated spam accounts (or bots) are creeping into election politics, say Sam Woolley and Philip Howard. Demanding bot transparency would at least help clean up social media—which, for better or worse, is increasingly where presidents get elected. 3. Phil Howard:…

Image from Gage Skidmore via Flickr Creative Commons

Ethics, Governance & Security

Should there be a better accounting of the algorithms that choose our news for us?

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by David Sutcliffe

The algorithms technology rely upon create a new type of curated media that can undermine the fairness and quality of political discourse.

by David Sutcliffe

The Facebook Wall, by René C. Nielsen (Flickr).

A central ideal of democracy is that political discourse should allow a fair and critical exchange of ideas and values. But political discourse is unavoidably mediated by the mechanisms and technologies we use to communicate and receive information—and content personalisation systems (think search engines, social media feeds and targeted advertising), and the algorithms they rely upon, create a new type of curated media that can undermine the fairness and quality of political discourse. A new article by Brent Mittlestadt explores the challenges of enforcing a political right to transparency in content personalisation systems. Firstly, he explains the value of transparency to political discourse and suggests how content personalisation systems undermine open exchange of ideas and evidence among participants: at a minimum, personalisation systems can undermine political discourse by curbing the diversity of ideas that participants encounter. Second, he explores work on the detection of discrimination in algorithmic decision making, including techniques of algorithmic auditing that service providers can employ to detect political bias. Third, he identifies several factors that inhibit auditing and thus indicate reasonable limitations on the ethical duties incurred by service providers—content personalisation systems can function opaquely and be resistant to auditing because of poor accessibility and interpretability of decision-making frameworks. Finally, Brent concludes with reflections on the need for regulation of content personalisation systems. He notes that no matter how auditing is pursued, standards to detect evidence of political bias in personalised content are urgently required. Methods are needed to routinely and consistently assign political value labels to content delivered by personalisation systems. This is perhaps the most pressing area for future work—to develop practical methods for algorithmic auditing. The right to transparency in political discourse may seem unusual and farfetched. However, standards already set by the U.S. Federal Communication Commission’s fairness doctrine—no longer in force—and the British Broadcasting Corporation’s fairness principle both demonstrate the importance of the idealised version of political discourse described here. Both precedents…

The Facebook Wall, by René C. Nielsen (Flickr).

Politics & Government

Can we predict electoral outcomes from Wikipedia traffic?

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by David Sutcliffe

Data show that the relative change in page views to the general Wikipedia page on the election can offer an estimate of the relative change in election turnout.

by David Sutcliffe

2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump in a residential backyard near Jordan Creek Parkway and Cody Drive in West Des Moines, Iowa, with lights and security cameras. Image by Tony Webster (Flickr).

As digital technologies become increasingly integrated into the fabric of social life their ability to generate large amounts of information about the opinions and activities of the population increases. The opportunities in this area are enormous: predictions based on socially generated data are much cheaper than conventional opinion polling, offer the potential to avoid classic biases inherent in asking people to report their opinions and behaviour, and can deliver results much quicker and be updated more rapidly. In their article published in EPJ Data Science, Taha Yasseri and Jonathan Bright develop a theoretically informed prediction of election results from socially generated data combined with an understanding of the social processes through which the data are generated. They can thereby explore the predictive power of socially generated data while enhancing theory about the relationship between socially generated data and real world outcomes. Their particular focus is on the readership statistics of politically relevant Wikipedia articles (such as those of individual political parties) in the time period just before an election. By applying these methods to a variety of different European countries in the context of the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament elections they firstly show that the relative change in number of page views to the general Wikipedia page on the election can offer a reasonable estimate of the relative change in election turnout at the country level. This supports the idea that increases in online information seeking at election time are driven by voters who are considering voting. Second, they show that a theoretically informed model based on previous national results, Wikipedia page views, news media mentions, and basic information about the political party in question can offer a good prediction of the overall vote share of the party in question. Third, they present a model for predicting change in vote share (i.e., voters swinging towards and away from a party), showing that Wikipedia page-view data provide an important increase…

2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump in a residential backyard near Jordan Creek Parkway and Cody Drive in West Des Moines, Iowa, with lights and security cameras. Image by Tony Webster (Flickr).

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