The Web and the Mind

Bangalore Science Forum, February 2016

The Web and the Mind

Srinath SrinivasaWeb Science Lab

IIIT Bangalorehttp://cds.iiitb.ac.in/wsl

http://cds.iiitb.ac.in/wsl


Outline

A brief history of the WWW

Models of the Web– Web as a Database/Repository

– Web as a Cognitive Extension of us

– Web as a socio-cognitive spaceSocial Machines

Web Science

Abstraction and Expression on the Web

Characterizing Online Collectives


Some Recent News Topics

Re-emergence of the free-speech debate

Personal liberty, sedition, Sec 66A, annoyance, …

“The right to be forgotten”

Privacy, accountability, personal liberty, …

Net Neutrality

Bridging the digital divide, neo-colonialism, “data darwinism”, …


Some Recent News Topics

Re-emergence of the free-speech debate

Personal liberty, sedition, Sec 66A, annoyance, …

“The right to be forgotten”

Privacy, accountability, personal liberty, …

Net Neutrality

Bridging the digital divide, neo-colonialism, “data darwinism”, …

W W WW W W



1989

CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee lays out a proposal for information management called “Mesh”

Original proposal available from http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

1990

Berners-Lee changes name to “World Wide Web” while writing code for the Mesh

Creates three fundamental building blocks:

HTML

URL (later called URI)

HTTP

http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html



1990

First web page appears on the Internet

1991

Web available for access to people outside of CERN

1993

WWW code made available for free on a royalty-free basis forever by CERN

1994

Berners-Lee joins MIT to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Original logo for the WWWImage source: Wikipedia



Design principles for WWW adopted by the W3C:

Decentralization (no one controls content on the web)

Non-discrimination (net neutrality)

Bottom-up design (Open source, participatory approach to maintaining web code)

Universality (Agnostic to computing platforms or hardware)

Consensus (Participatory approach to web standards)

Source: webfoundation.org



1993

Mark Andreessen from NCSA releases Mosaic – the first graphical browser for the web

1994

Andreessen, with two colleagues form Mosaic Communications Corporation and release the first commercial web browser: Netscape Navigator

First International WWW conference is organized at CERN in May 1994

1996—2000

Dot com boom (“Get large or get lost” mantra) and birth of several first generation search engines and e-commerce sites (Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Altavista, Amazon, …)



2001—2002

Dot com bust. Major web and Internet companies go bankrupt (Excite, Lycos, Nortel Networks, Worldcom,...)

2002–

Web 2.0. Web reinvents itself as a participatory social medium bringing social science and psychology central to thinking about the web.


Models of the Web

The web is unlike any other technology developed so far

Unlike say cars or washing machines, there is only one web

Is the web a “technology” or a “tool” that we use or is it something else?

Notable paradigms of the Web considered by researchers:

Very large database

Digital library / Repository

A cognitive extension of ourselves

Participatory socio-cognitive space


Web as a Database

Early approaches (mid '90s) to model the Web

Focused on the “semi-structured” nature of the Web and as a special case of managing structured (RDBMS) databases

Research objectives: structured and rich query semantics

Examples include: [AMM 97], [Eng 98], WebQL

An example WebQL query

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebQL


Web as a Digital Library

Shift from:

Strict notions of “query” Looser notions of “retrieval” and “relevance”

Strict notions of “schema” Looser notions of “ontology”

Emphasis still on retrieving information

Web still seen as a passive repository of information

Examples: [GR+ 97], [HMA 03]


Web as a Cognitive Extension of Ourselves

Rooted in Vannevar Bush's interpretation of hypertext reflecting the way information is organized in human brains

Focus on interpreting hyperlinks, rather than (just) data on web pages

Hyperlink as a(n):– Relevance indicator

– Endorsement

– Attention pathway

Examples: PageRank [BP 98], HITS [GKR 98]

Memex


Web as a Socio-cognitive Space

Most contemporary paradigm for understanding the web

Web as an active, participatory, social space – people are no longer users, but participants

Shift of emphasis from retrieving information from the web to engaging users with the web

The Web uses us as much as we use the Web! Examples:

Crowdsourcing, Participatory authoring, Push notifications on social media, Click-baiting, etc.

The global mind and superintelligence


The Socio-cognitive Space

Image source:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/4433299610614823/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin


Web Science

From www.webscience.org

“Nothing like the Web has ever happened in all of human history. The scale of its impact and the rate of its adoption are unparalleled. This is a great opportunity as well as an obligation. If we are to ensure the Web benefits the human race we must first do our best to understand it.

The Web is the largest human information construct in history. The Web is transforming society. In order to understand what the Web is, engineer its future and ensure its social benefit we need a new interdisciplinary field that we call Web Science.”

http://www.webscience.org/


Social Machines

Represents a class of environments comprising of interplay between humans and technology

Outputs of social machines a result of both human and algorithmic decisions

Building blocks of the global socio-cognitive space

“The Web is an engine to create abstract social machines”

– Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web [BH 09]

About Social Machines https://youtu.be/8Iz7ZqSOJGU

https://youtu.be/8Iz7ZqSOJGU


Social Machines


Web Observatory and Telescope

Image source: http://www.iconsmind.com/

http://www.iconsmind.com/


Perspectives towards the Web

The Web is an Opportunity

The Web is a Threat

The Web is.


GlobalSocio-cognitive

Space

Aggregators

Twitter diplomacy

MOOC

Cognition

Attention

Emotions

Mental models

Macro

Effects

MicroEffects



On the micro effects of the global socio-cognitive space


A (highly) Simplified Model of Cognition

Declarative memory

Semantic

Episodic

Procedural memory

Reflexes

Motor control

Active mental model

Emotion and limbic subsystem

Long-termmemory

Working memoryFrontal lobe

Amygdala


The psychological dimension of theonline free-speech debates


The Free Speech Conundrum


The Free Speech Conundrum

The holy grail of democratic societies – freedom of speech (and expression) – is suddenly at the center of a new found controversy

At the core of this debate is a call to distinguish between “free speech” and “bad speech”


Free Speech and Bad Speech

The line is not always clear:

Disagreeing with popular opinion (free speech)

Supporting/opposing a political party (free speech)

Racial slur (bad speech)

Inciting mob violence publicly (bad speech)

Scholarly writing criticizing government or specific religions (free speech considered bad speech in some places)

Artistic depiction that offends religious sentiments (let's not even go there!)


Characterizing Speech

Claim:

The free speech versus bad speech debate presents a false dilemma, which can never be completely resolved

Need:

Semantic characterization of speech and conversations and creating awareness and tool-support for online conversations based on this characterization


Abstraction and Expression

Articulation of our objective understanding of something

Communicates an idea

Articulation of our subjective feeling about something

Communicates an emotion


Abstraction and Expression

Reporting: mostly abstraction

Opinion: mix of abstraction and expression

Emotional reaction: mostly expression


Abstraction

● Semantic meta-construct used to build our world view

● Processing is resource intensive (“System 2” in Prospect Theory [KT79] terminology)

● Subject to innate cognitive resistance in assimilation due to factors like bounded rationality and conformance pressures

Images source: Wikipedia


Abstraction and Conformance

Asch Conformity Experiments


Conformance and Diffusion of Ideas

Information diffusion is faster in sparsely connected parts of a network, rather than densely connected (entrenched) parts due to conformance effects.

Node d in the above figure does not switch to the new idea because of conformance pressures from nodes e, f and g

Image Source: [Sri 06]


Models for Diffusion of Ideas

Typically based on an element of “criticality” balancing: ability to communicate new idea, and pressure to conform to existing ideas

Example models [EK 10]

Percolating clusters

Ising model

Cluster density based diffusion


Expression● Semantic construct encapsulating

our emotional state for communication

● Subconsciously affects receiver's emotional state by means of emotional contagion

● Emotional contagion also spreads through the web (Ex: Facebook Experiment [KGH 14])

● Characteristically different from spread of ideas, which have a natural resistance to assimilation

Images source: Wikipedia


Spread of Emotions

Models based on spread of epidemics, useful in modeling spread of emotions

Emotions are psychosomatic phenomena causing both cognitive and physical affect

Intense emotional states induce a state of trauma that have long range repercussions like PTSD

Example epidemic models [EK 10]

– SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered/Resistant) useful for modeling spread of intense emotions in a population

– SIS (Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible) useful for modeling spread of mild emotions in a population


Abstraction versus Expression

Objective belief

Asserts an idea

Humans have innate resistance towards ideas thrown at them

We need to have an “open mind” to entertain new abstractions

Subjective emotion

Communicates a feeling

Humans have innate “anti-resistance” towards emotions thrown at them

We need to be “mindful” of our emotional state to be unaffected by an incoming emotion


Mental Model

Axiomatic framework within which we perform reasoning.

Encapsulates underlying assumptions, ground truths and inference rules

Active mental model

Reasoning and deduction carried out within the framework of the currently active mental model

Any input that challenges the currently held mental model usually elicits an emotional reaction (laughter, terror, etc.)

Linking Abstractions and Expressions


Characterizing Online Communication

Mental model 1 Mental model 2



Characterizing Online Communication


End Result?



The Intense Online World

Online communication tend to be more intense and overwhelming due to following factors:– Lack of coherence between mental models (due to

anonymity, asynchrony, solipsism, etc.)

– Interplay between abstractive and expressive content in conversation

Emotions spread faster than ideas due to anti-resistance

Spread of emotions greatly complicates the spread of ideas


Online Collectives


Wisdom of Crowds?

Not all groups of people form“wise” crowds!


Coagulation

Abstraction and Expression can affect group behaviour in different ways

A given abstraction or expression can “coagulate” over a group of people (most people in the group think the same way / most people in the group feel the same way)

Coagulation in abstraction and expression can explain some failures of crowdsourcing efforts


Classification of Groups [SS 15]

Some coherence inabstractions(Ex: NPOV, NOR,Vfor Wikipedia)

High coagulation

Low coagulation


Classification of Groups

Crowds

Group of people having shared attention but no shared abstraction or shared expression

Rich in insights due to diverse opinions

No major emotional contagion

Members act as individuals

Pose high cognitive load on members

Unstable

Wise Crowds

Share some common abstraction in the form of “ground rules” to facilitate management of diverse opinions without degenerating



Herds

Group sharing a common abstraction

“Herd mentality” pertains to every member of the group thinking in the same way

High in persuasive power

Low on collective insight

Manipulable by external forces if the characteristics of the herd are known



Mobs

Groups sharing a common emotional state

Common emotional state could be either positive emotion (jubilant football fans) or negative emotion (lynch mobs)

Need not have common abstraction (members of an angry mob may each be venting personal frustrations through the mob)

Highly unpredictable behaviour



Gangs

Groups sharing both a common abstraction and common emotion

All members of the group think and feel the same way about something

Passionate and highly persuasive

Common emotion could be positive (The researcher “gang of four” on design patterns) or negative (bandits and other organized criminals)

Powerful and highly impactful collective actions


A Computational Model



User Evaluation

Dataset comprising of tweets pertaining to #DelhiPolls, #DelhiElections

35 evaluators given a set of 20 randomly picked tweets

Evaluators were asked a set of indirect questions seeking their opinion about coagulation levels of abstractions and expressions



Evaluation Results


Free Speech Revisited

What appears as the online free speech conundrum is actually a complex phenomenon caused by abstraction, expression, dissonance across mental models and group coherence of abstractions and expressions and amplified by the scale of the Web

The issue is not (just) a question of what is or should be legal provisions around online speech

We need better models to understand cognitive and emotional aspects of human communication and their impacts on a global scale

Linearly extrapolating existing models from social psychology bound to fail because, never before in human history was there a global socio-cognitive conversational space like the Web



The web is affecting what we think and feel – thus molding us at a very fundamental level, offering both opportunities and challenges

Our understanding of web-scale cognitive phenomena too premature to advocate any form of social or regulatory solutions

Web Science: A rich area of research for enthusiastic and curious minds!


May you be born in interesting times...-- an ancient Chinese curse

Thank You!


References

[AMM 97] G.O. Arocena, A.O. Meldelzon and G.A. Mihaila, Applications of a Web query language, in: Proc. of the 6th International World Wide Web Conference, April 7–11, 1997, Santa Clara, California, USA, http://www6.nttlabs.com/HyperNews/get/PAPER267.html

[GR+ 97] Gudivada, V.N.; Raghavan, V.V.; Grosky, William I; Kasanagottu, R., "Information retrieval on the World Wide Web," Internet Computing, IEEE , vol.1, no.5, pp.58,68, Sep/Oct 1997

[BP 98] Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. 1998. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine. In Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web 7 (WWW7), Philip H. Enslow, Jr. and Allen Ellis (Eds.). Elsevier Science Publishers B. V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, The Netherlands, 107-117.

[Eng 98] Carlos F. Enguix. 1998. Database querying on the World Wide Web: UniGuide, an object-relational search engine for Australian universities. Comput. Netw. ISDN Syst. 30, 1-7 (April 1998), 567-572. DOI=10.1016/S0169-7552(98)00080-4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0169-7552(98)00080-4

[GKR 98] David Gibson, Jon Kleinberg, and Prabhakar Raghavan. 1998. Inferring Web communities from link topology. In Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia : links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems: links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems (HYPERTEXT '98). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 225-234.

[HMA 03] Ian Horrocks, Deborah L. McGuinness, and Christopher A. Welty. 2003. Digital libraries and web-based information systems. In The description logic handbook, Franz Baader, Diego Calvanese, Deborah L. McGuinness, Daniele Nardi, and Peter F. Patel-Schneider (Eds.). Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA 427-449.

http://www6.nttlabs.com/HyperNews/get/PAPER267.html

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0169-7552(98)00080-4


References

[BH 09] Berners-Lee, Tim; J. Hendler (2009). "From the Semantic Web to social machines: A research challenge for AI on the World WideWeb" (PDF). Artificial Intelligence. doi:10.1016/j.artint.2009.11.010.

[EK 10] David Easley, Jon Kleinberg. Networks, Crowds and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

[KA 79] Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. "Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk." Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society (1979): 263-291.

[KGH 14] Kramer, Adam DI, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.24 (2014): 8788-8790.

[SS 15] Nirmal Kumar Sivaraman, Srinath Srinivasa. Abstractions, Expressions and Online Collectives. Proceedings of ACM WebSci 2015, Oxford, UK, June 2015.

The Web and the Mind

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