Towards a "Mindful" Web

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Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014 Towards a “Mindful” Web Srinath Srinivasa Web Sciences Lab http://cds.iiitb.ac.in/wsl/ Center for Data Sciences http://cds.iiitb.ac.in/ IIIT Bangalore – India http://www.iiitb.ac.in/

description

Slides for my talk at Trinity College, Dublin, on what Web Science means to me. ABSTRACT It is common to view any artificially created entity as an extension of our human faculties. So it was with our early understanding of the World Wide Web. In the initial years, the Web was viewed variously as a very large database, a digital library or even as an extension of our thoughts. In this talk, I will argue that, far from the Web being an extension of ourselves, *we* are individual appendages to a large emergent characteristic space created by the Web. This is called the "Socio-Cognitive Space". Much like the "economy" -- an entity created by us, which in turn affects our financial well being, the socio-cognitive space that is created by us in turn influences what we think and even how we feel. The socio-cognitive space can satiate our scientific curiosity or strengthen our cognitive biases, stroke our inner-most desires or make us deeply outraged, create wise crowds or unruly mobs, and create a livelihood or drive people to suicide. The socio-cognitive space is immersive and specific in its influence. Two people from the same family could be affected very differently by the Web, depending on their own innate characteristics. We are only beginning to understand the impact of this very powerful space, which is only going to increase in the coming years. I will also argue that arguments that view the Web as a whole as a great opportunity or a great threat, are both inherently missing the essence of the socio-cognitive space. Instead, I will draw concepts from Eastern philosophy to view the space as a collective "state of being" characterized by different levels of harmony or disharmony.

Transcript of Towards a "Mindful" Web

Page 1: Towards a "Mindful" Web

Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014

Towards a “Mindful” WebSrinath Srinivasa

Web Sciences Labhttp://cds.iiitb.ac.in/wsl/Center for Data Sciences

http://cds.iiitb.ac.in/IIIT Bangalore – Indiahttp://www.iiitb.ac.in/

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Recent additions to our vocabulary

● Social media● Tweeting● #hashtags● SEO● Wikipedia● Netbanking● MOOC● Crowdsourcing● Big Data

● Phishing● Trolling● SEO● Cyberstalking● Cyber squatting● Identity theft● Online privacy● Big Data

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The World Wide WebWhat started as a means for managing documents, is now an integral part of the lives of more than 360 million users worldwide

Models of the Web

Very large database

Digital library

A cognitive extension of ourselves

Socio­cognitive space

 

Image source: http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html

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Web as a Database

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

Focused on the “semi­structured” 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

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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]

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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

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Web as a Socio­cognitive SpaceCharacteristic paradigm of Web 2.0 approaches

Web as an active, participatory, social space 

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

Characteristic elements of the socio­cognitive space paradigm:

Crowdsourcing

Participatory authoring (Ex: Wikis)

Social bookmarking 

Recommendations 

Push­based notifications

Social media and information diffusion modeling

Personalized search

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The Socio­cognitive SpaceFrom web users to web participants

Active “behavior molding” from other participants and web elements (User feedback, likes, +1, ­1; algorithmic ranking and recommendations)

“Ask not what the Web can do for you, ask what you can do for the Web”

“If any online social space provides services for free, then you are not the customer, you are the product!”

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The Socio­cognitive Space

Immersive and individualized experience

“Karmic” gratification

Social nature of mass media

Individualized nature of “social” media

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Survival in the “Space”

Three things to know:

Actor, agent and identity

Spread of ideas versus spread of emotions

Crowds, herds and mobs

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Actor and Agent

Two forms of identity:

Actor: Our externally projected set of characteristics

Agent: Our set of innate characteristics 

Actor: Who we are in a social setting

Agent: Who we are when we are alone

“Moral” Actor and “Selfish” Agent [FSO 14]

Agnostic to cultural variations  

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Actor and Agent Collectives

Predominantly­actor societies

Society made of people contributing their “actor” selves to the collective

Values collective good over individual freedom

Values manners and political correctness over direct honesty

Low collective dissonance, but high individual dissonance 

Predominantly­agent societiesSociety made of people contributing their “agent” selves to the collective

Passionate and enthusiastic

Values honesty and transparency over political correctness

Lesser individual dissonance, but may witness more conflicts compared to predominantly­actor collectives

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Actor and Agent

The web is likely to be a predominantly­agent space

Even more so, when participation is anonymous! 

Anonymity, invisibility and lack of eye contact brings out the “agent” and obviates need for the “actor” [NB 12] 

Possible explanation for the “online disinhibition effect” [Suler 04]

Online social  life likely to be more passionate and more conflict­prone than offline social lives.

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Ideas and EmotionsSpread of ideas

Spreads by dynamics of (bounded) rationality 

Facilitated by connectivity

Hampered by “too much” connectivity (conformance psychology)

Needs critical connectivity and rational motivation

Spread of emotions

Spreads by emotional contagion

Facilitated by connectivity

Unhampered by too much connectivity

No rational basis for spread

Triggered by any form of dissonance

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Entrenchment and the 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]

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Mental Models, Weak Ties and the Emotional Contagion

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Mental Models, Weak Ties and the Emotional Contagion

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Mental Models, Weak Ties and the Emotional Contagion

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Mental Models, Weak Ties and the Emotional Contagion

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Mental Models, Weak Ties and the Emotional Contagion

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Mental Models, Weak Ties and the Emotional Contagion

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The Web and the 

Emotional Contagion

Spread of ideas hampered by entrenchment effects and conformance pressures

Spread of emotions facilitated in entrenched and tightly­knit networks

Interactions over the Web typically span across mental models

Interaction across mental­models increases dissonance and emotionally charged conversations

Emotions spread faster on the Web than ideas!

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The Wisdom of Crowds..

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Crowdsourcing is all fine, but..

Not all groups of people form“wise” crowds!

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Crowds, Herds and MobsCrowds– A shared­attention group debating about a topic

– Rich in diversity of viewpoints and argumentation– Wisdom of the Crowd

Herds– A shared mental­model group, all possessing the same or similar beliefs

– Potent in strength of conviction of beliefs– Unwise as a collective and potentially manipulable – Herd Mentality

Mobs– A shared emotional­state group, all possessing the same emotional state, but no shared 

mental model or attention– Extremely unpredictable, unwise and potent as a collective– Mob fury

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Crowds, Herds and MobsCrowds:Members act as individualsHigh cognitive loadUnstable

Herds:Members comply to collectiveLow cognitive loadStable

Mobs:Deindividualized membersNo self-awareness as individualsExpansive

degeneration

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Perspectives towards the Web

The Web is an Opportunity

The Web is a Threat

                        The Web is.

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The “Mindful” WebFrom:

Web as an object of interest

Problem­solving  

Objectification (de­personalization)

Transactional and specific interventions

Imperative control actions (Do this, Do that..)

To:

Web as a collective state of being

Harmonizing

Self­awareness 

Ongoing relationship with generic interventions

Declarative control actions (This needs to be achieved..)

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The “Mindful” Web

WWW

Web-state modeling center(s)

Web observatory

Participatoryweb site

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Engineering a “Mindful” Web

One or more “State of the Web” model­building centers

Powered by inputs from a distributed array of “Web Observatories”

Providing strategic, declarative, aggregate­level inputs to participatory websites like social media sites

Managed in an open and transparent fashion by public  endowments

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Towards a “Mindful” Web

Rich area of inter­disciplinary research

Several open problems – including legal and ethical dilemmas 

Ex: Is it advisable to dampen the spread of some news simply because it can induce an intense negative emotional reaction?

Web Science : Humanities :: Cognition : Being Human

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Thank You!

All images used in this presentation have a CC public license or their licensing terms were unspecified. Copyright rests with the creators.

Icons source: http://findicons.com/ http://velyrhorde.livejournal.com/73019.html

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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 large­scale 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, 107­117. 

[Eng 98] Carlos F. Enguix. 1998. Database querying on the World Wide Web: UniGuide, an object­relational search engine for Australian universities. Comput. Netw. ISDN Syst. 30, 1­7 (April 1998), 567­572. DOI=10.1016/S0169­7552(98)00080­4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0169­7552(98)00080­4

[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 space­­­structure in hypermedia systems: links, objects, time and space­­­structure in hypermedia systems (HYPERTEXT '98). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 225­234.  

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

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References[Suler 04] Suler, John. "The online disinhibition effect." Cyberpsychology & behavior 7.3 (2004): 321­326.

[NB 12] Lapidot­Lefler, Noam, and Azy Barak. "Effects of anonymity, invisibility, and lack of eye­contact on toxic online disinhibition." Computers in Human Behavior 28.2 (2012): 434­443. 

[FSO 14] Frimer, J. A., N. K. Schaefer, and H. Oakes. "Moral actor, selfish agent." Journal of personality and social psychology 106.5 (2014): 790­802.

Google IR Research http://research.google.com/pubs/InformationRetrievalandtheWeb.html

When crowdsourcing goes wrong: Reddit, Boston and missing student Sunil Tripathi http://www.newstatesman.com/world­affairs/2013/04/when­crowdsourcing­goes­wrong­reddit­boston­and­missing­student­sunil­tripathi

The 5 Most Entertaining Crowdsourcing Disasters http://www.businessinsider.com/the­5­most­entertaining­crowdsourcing­disasters­2009­9/ifail­20­1?IR=T#ifail­20­1

The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the­story­behind­the­worst­movie­on­imdb/  

Web Observatory http://wstweb1.ecs.soton.ac.uk/web­observatory/