Why are citizens migrating to Uber and Airbnb, and what should governments do about it?

protested fair taxi laws by parking in Pioneer square. Organizers want city leaders to make ride-sharing companies play by the same rules as cabs and Town cars. Image: Aaron Parecki (Flickr). — Protest for fair taxi laws in Portland; organizers want city leaders to make ride-sharing companies play by the same rules as cabs and Town cars. Image: Aaron Parecki (Flickr).

Cars were smashed and tires burned in France last month in protests against the ride hailing app Uber. Less violent protests have also been staged against Airbnb, a platform for renting short-term accommodation. Despite the protests, neither platform shows any signs of faltering. Uber says it has a million users in France, and is available in 57 countries. Airbnb is available in over 190 countries, and boasts over a million rooms, more than hotel giants like Hilton and Marriott. Policy makers at the highest levels are starting to notice the rise of these and similar platforms. An EU Commission flagship strategy paper notes that “online platforms are playing an ever more central role in social and economic life,” while the Federal Trade Commission recently held a workshop on the topic in Washington.

Journalists and entrepreneurs have been quick to coin terms that try to capture the essence of the social and economic changes associated with online platforms: the sharing economy; the on-demand economy; the peer-to-peer economy; and so on. Each perhaps captures one aspect of the phenomenon, but doesn’t go very far in helping us make sense of all its potentials and contradictions, including why some people love it and some would like to smash it into pieces. Instead of starting from the assumption that everything we see today is new and unprecedented, what if we dug into existing social science theory to see what it has to say about economic transformation and the emergence of markets?

Economic sociologists are adamant that markets don’t just emerge by themselves: they are always based on some kind of an underlying infrastructure that allows people to find out what goods and services are on offer, agree on prices and terms, pay, and have a reasonable expectation that the other party will honour the agreement. The oldest market infrastructure is the personal social network: traders hear what’s on offer through word of mouth and trade only with those whom they personally know and trust. But personal networks alone couldn’t sustain the immense scale of trading in today’s society. Every day we do business with strangers and trust them to provide for our most basic needs. This is possible because modern society has developed institutions — things like private property, enforceable contracts, standardized weights and measures, consumer protection, and many other general and sector specific norms and facilities. By enabling and constraining everyone’s behaviours in predictable ways, institutions constitute a robust and more inclusive infrastructure for markets than personal social networks.

Modern institutions didn’t of course appear out of nowhere. Between prehistoric social networks and the contemporary institutions of the modern state, there is a long historical continuum of economic institutions, from ancient trade routes with their customs to medieval fairs with their codes of conduct to state-enforced trade laws of the early industrial era. Institutional economists led by Oliver Williamson and economic historians led by Douglass North theorized in the 1980s that economic institutions evolve towards more efficient forms through a process of natural selection. As new institutional forms become possible thanks to technological and organizational innovation, people switch to cheaper, easier, more secure, and overall more efficient institutions out of self-interest. Old and cumbersome institutions fall into disuse, and society becomes more efficient and economically prosperous as a result. Williamson and North both later received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

It is easy to frame platforms as the next step in such an evolutionary process. Even if platforms don’t replace state institutions, they can plug gaps that remain the state-provided infrastructure. For example, enforcing a contract in court is often too expensive and unwieldy to be used to secure transactions between individual consumers. Platforms provide cheaper and easier alternatives to formal contract enforcement, in the form of reputation systems that allow participants to rate each others’ conduct and view past ratings. Thanks to this, small transactions like sharing a commute that previously only happened in personal networks can now potentially take place on a wider scale, resulting in greater resource efficiency and prosperity (the ‘sharing economy’). Platforms are not the first companies to plug holes in state-provided market infrastructure, though. Private arbitrators, recruitment agencies, and credit rating firms have been doing similar things for a long time.

What’s arguably new about platforms, though, is that some of the most popular ones are not mere complements, but almost complete substitutes to state-provided market infrastructures. Uber provides a complete substitute to government-licensed taxi infrastructures, addressing everything from quality and discovery to trust and payment. Airbnb provides a similarly sweeping solution to short-term accommodation rental. Both platforms have been hugely successful; in San Francisco, Uber has far surpassed the city’s official taxi market in size. The sellers on these platforms are not just consumers wanting to make better use of their resources, but also firms and professionals switching over from the state infrastructure. It is as if people and companies were abandoning their national institutions and emigrating en masse to Platform Nation.

From the natural selection perspective, this move from state institutions to platforms seems easy to understand. State institutions are designed by committee and carry all kinds of historical baggage, while platforms are designed from the ground up to address their users’ needs. Government institutions are geographically fragmented, while platforms offer a seamless experience from one city, country, and language area to the other. Government offices have opening hours and queues, while platforms make use of latest technologies to provide services around the clock (the ‘on-demand economy’). Given the choice, people switch to the most efficient institutions, and society becomes more efficient as a result. The policy implications of the theory are that government shouldn’t try to stop people from using Uber and Airbnb, and that it shouldn’t try to impose its evidently less efficient norms on the platforms. Let competing platforms innovate new regulatory regimes, and let people vote with their feet; let there be a market for markets.

The natural selection theory of institutional change provides a compellingly simple way to explain the rise of platforms. However, it has difficulty in explaining some important facts, like why economic institutions have historically developed differently in different places around the world, and why some people now protest vehemently against supposedly better institutions. Indeed, over the years since the theory was first introduced, social scientists have discovered significant problems in it. Economic sociologists like Neil Fligstein have noted that not everyone is as free to choose the institutions that they use. Economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie has pointed out that even institutions that are efficient for those who participate in them can still sometimes be inefficient for society as a whole. These points suggest a different theory of institutional change, which I will apply to online platforms in my next post.

Vili Lehdonvirta is a Research Fellow and DPhil Programme Director at the Oxford Internet Institute, and an editor of the Policy & Internet journal. He is an economic sociologist who studies the social and economic dimensions of new information technologies around the world, with particular expertise in digital markets and crowdsourcing.

How big data is breathing new life into the smart cities concept

“Big data” is a growing area of interest for public policy makers: for example, it was highlighted in UK Chancellor George Osborne’s recent budget speech as a major means of improving efficiency in public service delivery. While big data can apply to government at every level, the majority of innovation is currently being driven by local government, especially cities, who perhaps have greater flexibility and room to experiment and who are constantly on a drive to improve service delivery without increasing budgets.

Work on big data for cities is increasingly incorporated under the rubric of “smart cities”. The smart city is an old(ish) idea: give urban policymakers real time information on a whole variety of indicators about their city (from traffic and pollution to park usage and waste bin collection) and they will be able to improve decision making and optimise service delivery. But the initial vision, which mostly centred around adding sensors and RFID tags to objects around the city so that they would be able to communicate, has thus far remained unrealised (big up front investment needs and the requirements of IPv6 are perhaps the most obvious reasons for this).

The rise of big data – large, heterogeneous datasets generated by the increasing digitisation of social life – has however breathed new life into the smart cities concept. If all the cars have GPS devices, all the people have mobile phones, and all opinions are expressed on social media, then do we really need the city to be smart at all? Instead, policymakers can simply extract what they need from a sea of data which is already around them. And indeed, data from mobile phone operators has already been used for traffic optimisation, Oyster card data has been used to plan London Underground service interruptions, sewage data has been used to estimate population levels … the examples go on.

However, at the moment these examples remain largely anecdotal, driven forward by a few cities rather than adopted worldwide. The big data driven smart city faces considerable challenges if it is to become a default means of policymaking rather than a conversation piece. Getting access to the right data; correcting for biases and inaccuracies (not everyone has a GPS, phone, or expresses themselves on social media); and communicating it all to executives remain key concerns. Furthermore, especially in a context of tight budgets, most local governments cannot afford to experiment with new techniques which may not pay off instantly.

This is the context of two current OII projects in the smart cities field: UrbanData2Decide (2014-2016) and NEXUS (2015-2017). UrbanData2Decide joins together a consortium of European universities, each working with a local city partner, to explore how local government problems can be resolved with urban generated data. In Oxford, we are looking at how open mapping data can be used to estimate alcohol availability; how website analytics can be used to estimate service disruption; and how internal administrative data and social media data can be used to estimate population levels. The best concepts will be built into an application which allows decision makers to access these concepts real time.

NEXUS builds on this work. A collaborative partnership with BT, it will look at how social media data and some internal BT data can be used to estimate people movement and traffic patterns around the city, joining these data into network visualisations which are then displayed to policymakers in a data visualisation application. Both projects fill an important gap by allowing city officials to experiment with data driven solutions, providing proof of concepts and showing what works and what doesn’t. Increasing academic-government partnerships in this way has real potential to drive forward the field and turn the smart city vision into a reality.

OII Resarch Fellow Jonathan Bright is a political scientist specialising in computational and ‘big data’ approaches to the social sciences. His major interest concerns studying how people get information about the political process, and how this is changing in the internet era.

How big data is breathing new life into the smart cities concept

How can big data be used to advance dementia research?

Caption — Image by K. Kendall of “Sights and Scents at the Cloisters: for people with dementia and their care partners”; a program developed in consultation with the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Columbia University, and the Alzheimer’s Association.

Dementia affects about 44 million individuals, a number that is expected to nearly double by 2030 and triple by 2050. With an estimated annual cost of USD 604 billion, dementia represents a major economic burden for both industrial and developing countries, as well as a significant physical and emotional burden on individuals, family members and caregivers. There is currently no cure for dementia or a reliable way to slow its progress, and the G8 health ministers have set the goal of finding a cure or disease-modifying therapy by 2025. However, the underlying mechanisms are complex, and influenced by a range of genetic and environmental influences that may have no immediately apparent connection to brain health.

Of course medical research relies on access to large amounts of data, including clinical, genetic and imaging datasets. Making these widely available across research groups helps reduce data collection efforts, increases the statistical power of studies and makes data accessible to more researchers. This is particularly important from a global perspective: Swedish researchers say, for example, that they are sitting on a goldmine of excellent longitudinal and linked data on a variety of medical conditions including dementia, but that they have too few researchers to exploit its potential. Other countries will have many researchers, and less data.

‘Big data’ adds new sources of data and ways of analysing them to the repertoire of traditional medical research data. This can include (non-medical) data from online patient platforms, shop loyalty cards, and mobile phones — made available, for example, through Apple’s ResearchKit, just announced last week. As dementia is believed to be influenced by a wide range of social, environmental and lifestyle-related factors (such as diet, smoking, fitness training, and people’s social networks), and this behavioural data has the potential to improve early diagnosis, as well as allow retrospective insights into events in the years leading up to a diagnosis. For example, data on changes in shopping habits (accessible through loyalty cards) may provide an early indication of dementia.

However, there are many challenges to using and sharing big data for dementia research. The technology hurdles can largely be overcome, but there are also deep-seated issues around the management of data collection, analysis and sharing, as well as underlying people-related challenges in relation to skills, incentives, and mindsets. Change will only happen if we tackle these challenges at all levels jointly.

As data are combined from different research teams, institutions and nations — or even from non-medical sources — new access models will need to be developed that make data widely available to researchers while protecting the privacy and other interests of the data originator. Establishing robust and flexible core data standards that make data more sharable by design can lower barriers for data sharing, and help avoid researchers expending time and effort trying to establish the conditions of their use.

At the same time, we need policies that protect citizens against undue exploitation of their data. Consent needs to be understood by individuals — including the complex and far-reaching implications of providing genetic information — and should provide effective enforcement mechanisms to protect them against data misuse. Privacy concerns about digital, highly sensitive data are important and should not be de-emphasised as a subordinate goal to advancing dementia research. Beyond releasing data in a protected environments, allowing people to voluntarily “donate data”, and making consent understandable and enforceable, we also need governance mechanisms that safeguard appropriate data use for a wide range of purposes. This is particularly important as the significance of data changes with its context of use, and data will never be fully anonymisable.

We also need a favourable ecosystem with stable and beneficial legal frameworks, and links between academic researchers and private organisations for exchange of data and expertise. Legislation needs to account of the growing importance of global research communities in terms of funding and making best use of human and data resources. Also important is sustainable funding for data infrastructures, as well as an understanding that funders can have considerable influence on how research data, in particular, are made available. One of the most fundamental challenges in terms of data sharing is that there are relatively few incentives or career rewards that accrue to data creators and curators, so ways to recognise the value of shared data must be built into the research system.

In terms of skills, we need more health-/bioinformatics talent, as well as collaboration with those disciplines researching factors “below the neck”, such as cardiovascular or metabolic diseases, as scientists increasingly find that these may be associated with dementia to a larger extent than previously thought. Linking in engineers, physicists or innovative private sector organisations may prove fruitful for tapping into new skill sets to separate the signal from the noise in big data approaches.

In summary, everyone involved needs to adopt a mindset of responsible data sharing, collaborative effort, and a long-term commitment to building two-way connections between basic science, clinical care and the healthcare in everyday life. Fully capturing the health-related potential of big data requires “out of the box” thinking in terms of how to profit from the huge amounts of data being generated routinely across all facets of our everyday lives. This sort of data offers ways for individuals to become involved, by actively donating their data to research efforts, participating in consumer-led research, or engaging as citizen scientists. Empowering people to be active contributors to science may help alleviate the common feeling of helplessness faced by those whose lives are affected by dementia.

Of course, to do this we need to develop a culture that promotes trust between the people providing the data and those capturing and using it, as well as an ongoing dialogue about new ethical questions raised by collection and use of big data. Technical, legal and consent-related mechanisms to protect individual’s sensitive biomedical and lifestyle-related data against misuse may not always be sufficient, as the recent Nuffield Council on Bioethics report has argued. For example, we need a discussion around the direct and indirect benefits to participants of engaging in research, when it is appropriate for data collected for one purpose to be put to others, and to what extent individuals can make decisions particularly on genetic data, which may have more far-reaching consequences for their own and their family members’ professional and personal lives if health conditions, for example, can be predicted by others (such as employers and insurance companies).

Policymakers and the international community have an integral leadership role to play in informing and driving the public debate on responsible use and sharing of medical data, as well as in supporting the process through funding, incentivising collaboration between public and private stakeholders, creating data sharing incentives (for example, via taxation), and ensuring stability of research and legal frameworks.

Dementia is a disease that concerns all nations in the developed and developing world, and just as diseases have no respect for national boundaries, neither should research into dementia (and the data infrastructures that support it) be seen as a purely national or regional priority. The high personal, societal and economic importance of improving the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and cure of dementia worldwide should provide a strong incentive for establishing robust and safe mechanisms for data sharing.

Read the full report: Deetjen, U., E. T. Meyer and R. Schroeder (2015) Big Data for Advancing Dementia Research. Paris, France: OECD Publishing.

How can big data be used to advance dementia research?

Read the full report: Deetjen, U., E. T. Meyer and R. Schroeder (2015) Big Data for Advancing Dementia Research. Paris, France: OECD Publishing.

Monitoring Internet openness and rights: report from the Citizen Lab Summer Institute 2014

根据相关法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示 could be a warning message we will see displayed more often on the Internet; but likely translations thereof. In Chinese, this means “according to the relevant laws, regulations, and policies, a portion of search results have not been displayed.” The control of information flows on the Internet is becoming more commonplace, in authoritarian regimes as well as in liberal democracies, either via technical or regulatory means. Such information controls can be defined as “[…] actions conducted in or through information and communications technologies (ICTs), which seek to deny (such as web filtering), disrupt (such as denial-of-service attacks), shape (such as throttling), secure (such as through encryption or circumvention) or monitor (such as passive or targeted surveillance) information for political ends. Information controls can also be non-technical and can be implemented through legal and regulatory frameworks, including informal pressures placed on private companies. […]” Information controls are not intrinsically good or bad, but much is to be explored and analysed about their use, for political or commercial purposes.

The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab organised a one-week summer institute titled “Monitoring Internet Openness and Rights” to inform the global discussions on information control research and practice in the fields of censorship, circumvention, surveillance and adherence to human rights. A week full of presentations and workshops on the intersection of technical tools, social science research, ethical and legal reflections and policy implications was attended by a distinguished group of about 60 community members, amongst whom were two OII DPhil students; Jon Penney and Ben Zevenbergen. Conducting Internet measurements may be considered to be a terra incognita in terms of methodology and data collection, but the relevance and impacts for Internet policy-making, geopolitics or network management are obvious and undisputed.

The Citizen Lab prides itself in being a “hacker hothouse”, or an “intelligence agency for civil society” where security expertise, politics, and ethics intersect. Their research adds the much-needed geopolitical angle to the deeply technical and quantitative Internet measurements they conduct on information networks worldwide. While the Internet is fast becoming the backbone of our modern societies in many positive and welcome ways, abundant (intentional) security vulnerabilities, the ease with which human rights such as privacy and freedom of speech can be violated, threats to the neutrality of the network and the extent of mass surveillance threaten to compromise the potential of our global information sphere. Threats to a free and open internet need to be uncovered and explained to policymakers, in order encourage informed, evidence-based policy decisions, especially in a time when the underlying technology is not well-understood by decision makers.

Participants at the summer institute came with the intent to make sense of Internet measurements and information controls, as well as their social, political and ethical impacts. Through discussions in larger and smaller groups throughout the Munk School of Global Affairs – as well as restaurants and bars around Toronto – the current state of the information controls, their regulation and deployment became clear, and multi-disciplinary projects to measure breaches of human rights on the Internet or its fundamental principles were devised and coordinated.

The outcomes of the week in Toronto are impressive. The OII DPhil students presented their recent work on transparency reporting and ethical data collection in Internet measurement.

Jon Penney gave a talk on “the United States experience” with Internet-related corporate transparency reporting, that is, the evolution of existing American corporate practices in publishing “transparency reports” about the nature and quantity of government and law enforcement requests for Internet user data or content removal. Jon first began working on transparency issues as a Google Policy Fellow with the Citizen Lab in 2011, and his work has continued during his time at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In this talk, Jon argued that in the U.S., corporate transparency reporting largely began with the leadership of Google and a few other Silicon Valley tech companies like Twitter, but in the Post-Snowden era, has been adopted by a wider cross section of not only technology companies, but also established telecommunications companies like Verizon and AT&T previously resistant to greater transparency in this space (perhaps due to closer, longer term relationships with federal agencies than Silicon Valley companies). Jon also canvassed evolving legal and regulatory challenges facing U.S. transparency reporting and means by which companies may provide some measure of transparency— via tools like warrant canaries— in the face of increasingly complex national security laws.

Ben Zevenbergen has recently launched ethical guidelines for the protection of privacy with regards to Internet measurements conducted via mobile phones. The first panel of the week on “Network Measurement and Information Controls” called explicitly for more concrete ethical and legal guidelines for Internet measurement projects, because the extent of data collection necessarily entails that much personal data is collected and analyzed. In the second panel on “Mobile Security and Privacy”, Ben explained how his guidelines form a privacy impact assessment for a privacy-by-design approach to mobile network measurements. The iterative process of designing a research in close cooperation with colleagues, possibly from different disciplines, ensures that privacy is taken into account at all stages of the project development. His talk led to two connected and well-attended sessions during the week to discuss the ethics of information controls research and Internet measurements. A mailing list has been set up for engineers, programmers, activists, lawyers and ethicists to discuss the ethical and legal aspects of Internet measurements. A data collection has begun to create a taxonomy of ethical issues in the discipline to inform forthcoming peer-reviewed papers.

The Citizen Lab will host its final summer institute of the series in 2015.

Photo credits: Ben Zevenbergen, Jon Penney. Writing Credits: Ben Zevenbergen, with small contribution from Jon Penney.

Ben Zevenbergen is an OII DPhil student and Research Assistant working on the EU Internet Science project. He has worked on legal, political and policy aspects of the information society for several years. Most recently he was a policy advisor to an MEP in the European Parliament, working on Europe’s Digital Agenda.

Jon Penney is a legal academic, doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a Research Fellow / Affiliate of both The Citizen Lab an interdisciplinary research lab specializing in digital media, cyber-security, and human rights, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School for Global Affairs, and at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University.

Past and Emerging Themes in Policy and Internet Studies

In the journal’s inaugural issue, founding Editor-in-Chief Helen Margetts outlined what are essentially two central premises behind Policy & Internet’s launch. The first is that “we cannot understand, analyze or make public policy without understanding the technological, social and economic shifts associated with the Internet” (Margetts 2009, 1). It is simply not possible to consider public policy today without some regard for the intertwining of information technologies with everyday life and society. The second premise is that the rise of the Internet is associated with shifts in how policy itself is made. In particular, she proposed that impacts of Internet adoption would be felt in the tools through which policies are effected, and the values that policy processes embody.

The purpose of the Policy and Internet journal was to take up these two challenges: the public policy implications of Internet-related social change, and Internet-related changes in policy processes themselves. In recognition of the inherently multi-disciplinary nature of policy research, the journal is designed to act as a meeting place for all kinds of disciplinary and methodological approaches. Helen predicted that methodological approaches based on large-scale transactional data, network analysis, and experimentation would turn out to be particularly important for policy and Internet studies. Driving the advancement of these methods was therefore the journal’s third purpose. Today, the journal has reached a significant milestone: over one hundred high-quality peer-reviewed articles published. This seems an opportune moment to take stock of what kind of research we have published in practice, and see how it stacks up against the original vision.

At the most general level, the journal’s articles fall into three broad categories: the Internet and public policy (48 articles), the Internet and policy processes (51 articles), and discussion of novel methodologies (10 articles). The first of these categories, “the Internet and public policy,” can be further broken down into a number of subcategories. One of the most prominent of these streams is fundamental rights in a mediated society (11 articles), which focuses particularly on privacy and freedom of expression. Related streams are children and child protection (six articles), copyright and piracy (five articles), and general e-commerce regulation (six articles), including taxation. A recently emerged stream in the journal is hate speech and cybersecurity (four articles). Of course, an enduring research stream is Internet governance, or the regulation of technical infrastructures and economic institutions that constitute the material basis of the Internet (seven articles). In recent years, the research agenda in this stream has been influenced by national policy debates around broadband market competition and network neutrality (Hahn and Singer 2013). Another enduring stream deals with the Internet and public health (eight articles).

Looking specifically at “the Internet and policy processes” category, the largest stream is e-participation, or the role of the Internet in engaging citizens in national and local government policy processes, through methods such as online deliberation, petition platforms, and voting advice applications (18 articles). Two other streams are e-government, or the use of Internet technologies for government service provision (seven articles), and e-politics, or the use of the Internet in mainstream politics, such as election campaigning and communications of the political elite (nine articles). Another stream that has gained pace during recent years, is online collective action, or the role of the Internet in activism, ‘clicktivism,’ and protest campaigns (16 articles). Last year the journal published a special issue on online collective action (Calderaro and Kavada 2013), and the next forthcoming issue includes an invited article on digital civics by Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, with commentary from prominent scholars of Internet activism. A trajectory discernible in this stream over the years is a movement from discussing mere potentials towards analyzing real impacts—including critical analyses of the sometimes inflated expectations and “democracy bubbles” created by digital media (Shulman 2009; Karpf 2012; Bryer 2012).

The final category, discussion of novel methodologies, consists of articles that develop, analyze, and reflect critically on methodological innovations in policy and Internet studies. Empirical articles published in the journal have made use of a wide range of conventional and novel research methods, from interviews and surveys to automated content analysis and advanced network analysis methods. But of those articles where methodology is the topic rather than merely the tool, the majority deal with so-called “big data,” or the use of large-scale transactional data sources in research, commerce, and evidence-based public policy (nine articles). The journal recently devoted a special issue to the potentials and pitfalls of big data for public policy (Margetts and Sutcliffe 2013), based on selected contributions to the journal’s 2012 big data conference: Big Data, Big Challenges? In general, the notion of data science and public policy is a growing research theme.

This brief analysis suggests that research published in the journal over the last five years has indeed followed the broad contours of the original vision. The two challenges, namely policy implications of Internet-related social change and Internet-related changes in policy processes, have both been addressed. In particular, research has addressed the implications of the Internet’s increasing role in social and political life. The journal has also furthered the development of new methodologies, especially the use of online network analysis techniques and large-scale transactional data sources (aka ‘big data’).

As expected, authors from a wide range of disciplines have contributed their perspectives to the journal, and engaged with other disciplines, while retaining the rigor of their own specialisms. The geographic scope of the contributions has been truly global, with authors and research contexts from six continents. I am also pleased to note that a characteristic common to all the published articles is polish; this is no doubt in part due to the high level of editorial support that the journal is able to afford to authors, including copyediting. The justifications for the journal’s establishment five years ago have clearly been borne out, so that the journal now performs an important function in fostering and bringing together research on the public policy implications of an increasingly Internet-mediated society.

And what of my own research interests as an editor? In the inaugural editorial, Helen Margetts highlighted work, finance, exchange, and economic themes in general as being among the prominent areas of Internet-related social change that are likely to have significant future policy implications. I think for the most part, these implications remain to be addressed, and this is an area that the journal can encourage authors to tackle better. As an editor, I will work to direct attention to this opportunity, and welcome manuscript submissions on all aspects of Internet-enabled economic change and its policy implications. This work will be kickstarted by the journal’s 2014 conference (26-27 September), which this year focuses on crowdsourcing and online labor.

Our published articles will continue to be highlighted here in the journal’s blog. Launched last year, we believe this blog will help to expand the reach and impact of research published in Policy and Internet to the wider academic and practitioner communities, promote discussion, and increase authors’ citations. After all, publication is only the start of an article’s public life: we want people reading, debating, citing, and offering responses to the research that we, and our excellent reviewers, feel is important, and worth publishing.

Read the full editorial: Lehdonvirta, V. (2014) Past and Emerging Themes in Policy and Internet Studies. Policy & Internet 6(2): 109-114.

References

Bryer, T.A. (2011) Online Public Engagement in the Obama Administration: Building a Democracy Bubble? Policy & Internet 3 (4).

Calderaro, A. and Kavada, A. (2013) Challenges and Opportunities of Online Collective Action for Policy Change. Policy & Internet (5) 1.

Hahn, R. and Singer, H. (2013) Is the U.S. Government’s Internet Policy Broken? Policy & Internet 5 (3) 340-363.

Karpf, D. (2012) Online Political Mobilization from the Advocacy Group’s Perspective: Looking Beyond Clicktivism. Policy & Internet 2 (4) 7-41.

Margetts, H. (2009) The Internet and Public Policy. Policy and Internet 1 (1).

Margetts, H. and Sutcliffe, D. (2013) Addressing the Policy Challenges and Opportunities of ‘Big Data.’ Policy & Internet 5 (2) 139-146.

Shulman, S.W. (2009) The Case Against Mass E-mails: Perverse Incentives and Low Quality Public Participation in U.S. Federal Rulemaking. Policy & Internet 1 (1) 23-53.

The complicated relationship between Chinese Internet users and their government

David:For our research, we surveyed postgraduate students from all over China who had come to Shanghai to study. We asked them five questions to which they provided mostly rather lengthy answers. Despite them being young university students and being very active online, their answers managed to surprise us. Notably, the young Chinese who took part in our research felt very ambiguous about the Internet and its supposed benefits for individual people in China. They appreciated the greater freedom the Internet offered when compared to offline China, but were very wary of others abusing this freedom to their detriment.

Ed: In your paper you note that the opinions of many young people closely mirrored those of the government’s statements about the Internet — in what way?

David: In 2010 the government published a White Paper on the Internet in China in which they argued that the main uses of the Internet were for obtaining information, and for communicating with others. In contrast to Euro-American discourses around the Internet as a ‘force for democracy’, the students’ answers to our questions agreed with the evaluation of the government and did not see the Internet as a place to begin organising politically. The main reason for this — in my opinion — is that young Chinese are not used to discussing ‘politics’, and are mostly focused on pursuing the ‘Chinese dream’: good job, large flat or house, nice car, suitable spouse; usually in that order.

Ed: The Chinese Internet has usually been discussed in the West as a ‘force for democracy’ — leading to the inevitable relinquishing of control by the Chinese Communist Party. Is this viewpoint hopelessly naive?

David: Not naive as such, but both deterministic and limited, as it assumes that the introduction of technology can only have one ‘built-in’ outcome, thus ignoring human agency, and as it pretends that the Chinese Communist Party does not use technology at all. Given the intense involvement of Party and government offices, as well as of individual party members and government officials with the Internet it makes little sense to talk about ‘the Party’ and ‘the Internet’ as unconnected entities. Compared to governments in Europe or America, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government have embraced the Internet and treated it as a real and valid communication channel between citizens and government/Party at all levels.

Ed: Chinese citizens are being encouraged by the government to engage and complain online, eg to expose inefficiency and corruption. Is the Internet just a space to blow off steam, or is it really capable of ‘changing’ Chinese society, as many have assumed?

David: This is mostly a matter of perspective and expectations. The Internet has NOT changed the system in China, nor is it likely to. In all likelihood, the Internet is bolstering the legitimacy and the control of the Chinese Communist Party over China. However, in many specific instances of citizen unhappiness and unrest, the Internet has proved a powerful channel of communication for the people to achieve their goals, as the authorities have reacted to online protests and supported the demands of citizens. This is a genuine change and empowerment of the people, though episodic and local, not global.

Ed: Why do you think your respondents were so accepting (and welcoming) of government control of the Internet in China: is this mainly due to government efforts to manage online opinion, or something else?

David: I think this is a reflex response fairly similar to what has happened elsewhere as well. If e.g. children manage to access porn sites, or an adult manages to groom several children over the Internet the mass media and the parents of the children call for ‘government’ to protect the children. This abrogation of power and shifting of responsibility to ‘the government’ by individuals — in the example by parents, in our study by young Chinese — is fairly widespread, if deplorable. Ultimately this demand for government ‘protection’ leads to what I would consider excessive government surveillance and control (and regulation) of online spaces in the name of ‘protection’ and the public’s acquiescence of the policing of cyberspace. In China, this takes the form of a widespread (resigned) acceptance of government censorship; in the UK it led to the acceptance of GCHQ’s involvement in Prism, or of the sentencing of Deyka Ayan Hassan or of Liam Stacey, which have turned the UK into the only country in the world in which people have been arrested for posting single, offensive posts on microblogs.

Ed: How does the central Government manage and control opinion online?

David: There is no unified system of government control over the Internet in China. Instead, there are many groups and institutions at all levels from central to local with overlapping areas of responsibility in China who are all exerting an influence on Chinese cyberspaces. There are direct posts by government or Party officials, posts by ‘famous’ people in support of government decisions or policies, paid, ‘hidden’ posters or even people sympathetic to the government. China’s notorious online celebrity Han Han once pointed out that the term ‘the Communist Party’ really means a population group of over 300 million people connected to someone who is an actual Party member.

In addition to pro-government postings, there are many different forms of censorship that try to prevent unacceptable posts. The exact definition of ‘unacceptable’ changes from time to time and even from location to location, though. In Beijing, around October 1, the Chinese National Day, many more websites are inaccessible than, for example in Shenzhen during April. Different government or Party groups also add different terms to the list of ‘unacceptable’ topics (or remove them), which contributes to the flexibility of the censorship system.

As a result of the often unpredictable ‘current’ limits of censorship, many Internet companies, forum and site managers, as well as individual Internet users add their own ‘self-censorship’ to the mix to ensure their own uninterrupted presence online. This ‘self-censorship’ is often stricter than existing government or Party regulations, so as not to even test the limits of the possible.

Ed: Despite the constant encouragement / admonishment of the government that citizens should report and discuss their problems online; do you think this is a clever (ie safe) thing for citizens to do? Are people pretty clever about negotiating their way online?

David: If it looks like a duck, moves like a duck, talks like a duck … is it a duck? There has been a lot of evidence over the years (and many academic articles) that demonstrate the government’s willingness to listen to criticism online without punishing the posters. People do get punished if they stray into ‘definitely illegal’ territory, e.g. promoting independence for parts of China, or questioning the right of the Communist Party to govern China, but so far people have been free to express their criticism of specific government actions online, and have received support from the authorities for their complaints.

Just to note briefly; one underlying issue here is the definition of ‘politics’ and ‘power’. Following Foucault, in Europe and America ‘everything’ is political, and ‘everything’ is a question of power. In China, there is a difference between ‘political’ issues, which are the responsibility of the Communist Party, and ‘social’ issues, which can be discussed (and complained about) by anybody. It might be worth exploring this difference of definitions without a priori acceptance of the Foucauldian position as ‘correct’.

Ed: There’s a lot of emphasis on using eg social media to expose corrupt officials and hold them to account; is there a similar emphasis on finding and rewarding ‘good’ officials? Or of officials using online public opinion to further their own reputations and careers? How cynical is the online public?

David: The online public is very cynical, and getting ever more so (which is seen as a problem by the government as well). The emphasis on ‘bad’ officials is fairly ‘normal’, though, as ‘good’ officials are not ‘newsworthy’. In the Chinese context there is the additional problem that socialist governments like to promote ‘model workers’, ‘model units’, etc. which would make the praising of individual ‘good’ officials by Internet users highly suspect. Other Internet users would simply assume the posters to be paid ‘hidden’ posters for the government or the Party.

Ed: Do you think (on balance) that the Internet has brought more benefits (and power) to the Chinese Government or new problems and worries?

David: I think the Internet has changed many things for many people worldwide. Limiting the debate on the Internet to the dichotomies of government vs Internet, empowered netizens vs disenfranchised Luddites, online power vs wasting time online, etc. is highly problematic. The open engagement with the Internet by government (and Party) authorities has been greater in China than elsewhere; in my view, the Chinese authorities have reacted much faster, and ‘better’ to the Internet than authorities elsewhere. As the so-called ‘revelations’ of the past few months have shown, governments everywhere have tried and are trying to control and use Internet technologies in pursuit of power.

Although I personally would prefer the Internet to be a ‘free’ and ‘independent’ place, I realise that this is a utopian dream given the political and economic benefits and possibilities of the Internet. Given the inevitability of government controls, though, I prefer the open control exercised by Chinese authorities to the hypocrisy of European and American governments, even if the Chinese controls (apparently) exceed those of other governments.

Dr David Herold is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he researches Chinese culture and contemporary PRC society, China’s relationship with other countries, and Chinese cyberspace and online society. His paper Captive Artists: Chinese University Students Talk about the Internet was presented at the presented at “China and the New Internet World”, International Communication Association (ICA) Preconference, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, June 2013.

David Herold was talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

Chinese Internet users share the same values concerning free speech, privacy, and control as their Western counterparts

Free Internet in Shanghai airport — There are now over half a billion Internet users in China, part of a shift in the centre of gravity of Internet use away from the US and Europe. Image of Pudong International Airport, Shanghai, by ToGa Wanderings.

Ed: You recently presented your results at the OII’s China and the New Internet World ICA preconference. What were people most interested in?

Gillian: A lot of people were interested in our finding that China was such a big online shopping market compared to other countries, with 60% of our survey respondents reporting that they make an online purchase at least weekly. That’s twice the world’s average. A lot of people who study the Chinese Internet talk about governance issues rather than commerce, but the fact that there is this massive investment in ecommerce in China and a rapid transition to a middle class lifestyle for such a large number of Chinese means that Chinese consumer behaviours will have a significant impact on global issues such as resource scarcity, global warming, and the global economy.

Others were interested in our findings concerning Internet use in ’emerging’ Internet countries like China. The Internet’s development in Western Europe and the US was driven by people who saw the technology as a platform for freedom of expression and peer-to-peer applications. In China, you see this optimism but you also see that a lot of people coming online move straight to smart phones and other locked-down technologies like the iPad, which you can only interact with in a certain way. Eighty-six percent of our Chinese respondents reported that they owned a smart phone, which was the highest percentage of all of the 24 countries we examined individually. A lot of these people are using those devices to play games and watch movies, which is a very different initial exposure to the Internet than we saw in early adopting Western countries.

Ed: So, a lot of significant differences between usages in emerging versus established Internet nations. Any similarities?

Gillian: In general, we find that uses are different but values are similar. People in emerging nations share the same values concerning free speech, privacy, and control as their Western counterparts. These are values that were embedded in the Internet’s creation and that have spread with it to other countries, regardless of national policy rhetorics. Many people – even in China – see the Internet as a tool for free speech and as a place where you can expect a certain degree of privacy and anonymity.

Ed: But isn’t there a disconnect between the fact that people are using more closed technologies as they are coming online and yet are sharing the same values of freedom associated with the Internet?

Gillian: There’s a difference between uses and values. People in emerging countries produce more content, they’re more sociable online, they listen to more music. But the way that people express their values doesn’t always match what they actually do. There is no correlation between whether someone approves of government censorship and their concern of being personally censored. There’s also no correlation in China between the frequency with which people post political opinions online and a worry that their online comments will be censored.

Ed: It seems that there are a few really interesting results in your study that run counter to accepted wisdom about the Internet. Were you surprised by any of the results?

Gillian: I was, particularly, surprised by the high levels of political commentary in emerging nations. We know that levels of online political expression in the West are very low (around 15%). But 40% of respondents in the emerging nations we surveyed reported posting a political opinion online at least weekly. That’s a huge difference. Even China, which we expected to have lower levels of political expression than the general average, followed a similar pattern. We didn’t see any chilling effect – i.e. any reduction of the frequency of posting of political opinions among Chinese users.

This matches other studies of the Chinese Internet that have concluded that there is very little censorship of people expressing themselves online – that censorship only really happens when people start to organise others. However, I was surprised by the extent of the difference: 18% of users in the US and UK reported posting a political opinion online at least weekly, 13 percent in France, and 3 percent in Japan; but 32% of Chinese, 51% of Brazilians, 50% of Indians, and 64% of Egyptians reported posting online at least weekly. This shows that these conclusions we have drawn about low levels of online political participation based on studies of Western Internet users are likely not applicable to users in other countries.

Of course, we have to remember that this is an online survey and so our results only reflect what Internet users report their activities and attitudes to be. However, the incentive to over-report activities is probably about the same for the US and for China. The thing that may be different in different countries is what people interpret as a political comment. Many more types of comments in China might be seen as political since the government controls so much more. A comment about the price of food might be seen as political speech in China, for example, since the government controls food prices, whereas a similar comment may not be seen as political by US respondents.

Ed: This research is interesting because it calls into question some fundamental assumptions about the Internet. What did you take away from the project?

Gillian: A lot of scholarship on the Internet is presented as applicable to the whole world, but isn’t actually applicable everywhere. The best example here is the very low percentage of people participating in the political process in the West, which needs to be re-evaluated with these findings. It shows that we need to be much more specific in Internet research about the unit of analysis, and what it applies to. However, we also found that Internet values are similar across the world. I think this shows that discourses about the Internet as a place for free expression and privacy are distributed hand-in-hand with the technology. Although Western users are declining as an overall percentage of the world’s Internet population, these founding rhetorics remain powerfully associated with the technology.

Read the full paper: Bolsover, G., Dutton, W.H., Law, G. and Dutta, S. (2013) Social Foundations of the Internet in China and the New Internet World: A Cross-National Comparative Perspective. Presented at “China and the New Internet World”, International Communication Association (ICA) Preconference, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, June 2013.

Gillian was talking to blog editor Heather Ford.

Is China changing the Internet, or is the Internet changing China?

The rising prominence of China is one of the most important developments shaping the Internet. Once typified primarily by Internet users in the US, there are now more Internet users in China than there are Americans on the planet. By 2015, the proportion of Chinese language Internet users is expected to exceed the proportion of English language users. These are just two aspects of a larger shift in the centre of gravity of Internet use, in which the major growth is increasingly taking place in Asia and the rapidly developing economies of the Global South, and the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India — and China.

The 2013 ICA Preconference “China and the New Internet World” (14 July 2013), organised by the OII in collaboration with many partners at collaborating universities, explored the issues raised by these developments, focusing on two main interrelated questions: how is the rise of China reshaping the global use and societal implications of the Internet? And in turn, how is China itself being reshaped by these regional and global developments?

As China has become more powerful, much attention has been focused on the number of Internet users: China now represents the largest group of Internet users in the world, with over half a billion people online. But how the Internet is used is also important; this group doesn’t just include passive ‘users’, it also includes authors, bloggers, designers and architects — that is, people who shape and design values into the Internet. This input will undoubtedly affect the Internet going forward, as Chinese institutions take on a greater role in shaping the Internet, in terms of policy, such as around freedom of expression and privacy, and practice, such as social and commercial uses, like shopping online.

Most discussion of the Internet tends to emphasise technological change and ignore many aspects of the social changes that accompany the Internet’s evolution, such as this dramatic global shift in the concentration of Internet users. The Internet is not just a technological artefact. In 1988, Deng Xiaoping declared that “science and technology are primary productive forces” that would be active and decisive factors in the new Chinese society. At the time China naturally paid a great deal of attention to technology as a means to lift its people out of poverty, but it may not have occurred to Deng that the Internet would not just impact the national economy, but that it would come to affect a person’s entire life — and society more generally — as well. In China today, users are more apt to shop online, but also to discuss political issues online than most of the other 65 nations across the world surveyed in a recent report [1].

The transformative potential of the Internet has challenged top-down communication patterns in China, by supporting multi-level and multi-directional flows of communication. Of course, communications systems reflect economic and political power to a large extent: the Internet is not a new or separate world, and its rules reflect offline rules and structures. In terms of the large ‘digital divide’ that exists in China (whose Internet penetration currently stands at a bit over 40%, meaning that 700 million people are still not online), we have to remember that this digital divide is likely to reflect other real economic and political divides, such as lack of access to other basic resources.

While there is much discussion about how the Internet is affecting China’s domestic policy (in terms of public administration, ensuring reliable systems of supply and control, the urban-rural divide and migration, and policy on things like anonymity and free speech), less time is spent discussing the geopolitics of the Internet. China certainly has the potential for great influence beyond its own borders, for example affecting communication flows worldwide and the global division of power. For such reasons, it is valuable to move beyond ‘single country studies’ to consider global shifts in attitudes and values shaping the Internet across the world. As a contested and contestable space, the political role of the Internet is likely to be a focal point for traditional discussions of key values, such as freedom of expression and assembly; remember Hilary Clinton’s 2010 ‘Internet freedom’ speech, delivered at Washington’s Newseum Institute. Contemporary debates over privacy and freedom of expression are indeed increasingly focused on Internet policy and practice.

Now is not the first time in the histories of the US and China that their respective foreign policies have been of great interest and importance to the other. However this might also be a period of anxiety-driven (rather than rational) policy making, particularly if increased exposure and access to information around the world leads to efforts to create Berlin walls of the digital age. In this period of national anxieties on the part of governments and citizens — who may feel that “something must be done” — there will inevitably be competition between the US, China, and the EU to drive national Internet policies that assert local control and jurisdiction. Ownership and control of the Internet by countries and companies is certainly becoming an increasingly politicized issue. Instead of supporting technical innovation and the diffusion of the Internet, nations are increasingly focused on controlling the flow of online content and exploiting the Internet as a means for gauging public sentiment and opinion, rather than as a channel to help shape public policy and social accountability.

For researchers, it is time to question a myopic focus on national units of analysis when studying the Internet, since many activities of critical importance take place in smaller regions, such as Silicon Valley, larger regions, such as the global South, and in virtual spaces that are truly global. We tend to think of single places: “the Internet” / “the world” / “China”: but as a number of conference speakers emphasized, there is more than one China, if we consider for example Taiwan, Hong Kong, rural China, and the factory zones — each with their different cultural, legal and economic dynamics. Similarly, there are a multitude of actors, for example corporations, which are shaping the Chinese Internet as surely as Beijing is. As Jack Qui, one of the opening panelists, observed: “There are many Internets, and many worlds.” There are also multiple histories of the Internet in China, and as yet no standard narrative.

The conference certainly made clear that we are learning a lot about China, as a rapidly growing number of Chinese scholars increasingly research and publish on the subject. The vitality of the Chinese Journal of Communication is one sign of this energy, but Internet research is expanding globally as well. Some of the panel topics will be familiar to anyone following the news, even if there is still not much published in the academic literature: smart censorship, trust in online information, human flesh search, political scandal, democratisation. But there were also interesting discussions from new perspectives, or perspectives that are already very familiar in a Western context: social networking, job markets, public administration, and e-commerce.

However, while international conferences and dedicated panels are making these cross-cultural (and cross-topic) discussions and conversations easier, we still lack enough published content about China and the Internet, and it can be difficult to find material, due to its recent diffusion, and major barriers such as language. This is an important point, given how easy it is to oversimplify another culture. A proper comparative analysis is hard and often frustrating to carry out, but important, if we are to see our own frameworks and settings in a different way.

One of the opening panelists remarked that two great transformations had occurred during his academic life: the emergence of the Internet, and the rise of China. The intersection of the two is providing fertile ground for research, and the potential for a whole new, rich research agenda. Of course the challenge for academics is not simply to find new, interesting and important things to say about a subject, but to draw enduring theoretical perspectives that can be applied to other nations and over time.

In returning to the framing question: “is China changing the Internet, or is the Internet changing China?” obviously the answer to both is “yes”, but as the Dean of USC Annenberg School, Ernest Wilson put it, we need to be asking “how?” and “to what degree?” I hope this preconference encouraged more scholars to pursue these questions.

Reference

[1] Bolsover, G., Dutton, W.H., Law, G. and Dutta, S. (2013) Social Foundations of the Internet in China and the New Internet World: A Cross-National Comparative Perspective. Presented at “China and the New Internet World”, International Communication Association (ICA) Preconference, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, June 2013.

The OII’s Founding Director (2002-2011), Professor William H. Dutton is Professor of Internet Studies, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Balliol College. Before coming to Oxford in 2002, he was a Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where he is now an Emeritus Professor. His most recent books include World Wide Research: Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities, co-edited with P. Jeffreys (MIT Press, 2011) and the Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (Oxford University Press, 2013). Read Bill’s blog.