Big Data and the Computable Society

Algorithms and People in the Digital World

Domenico Talia

• Publisher: WSPC (EUROPE)
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786346933
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Mining
• Index: Computer Science

Data and algorithms are changing our life. The awareness of importance and pervasiveness of the digital revolution is the primary element from which to start a path of knowledge to grasp what is happening in the world of big data and digital innovation and to understand these impacts on our minds and relationships between people, traceability and the computability of behavior of individuals and social organizations.

This book analyses contemporary and future issues related to big data, algorithms, data analysis, artificial intelligence and the internet. It introduces and discusses relationships between digital technologies and power, the role of the pervasive algorithms in our life and the risk of technological alienation, the relationships between the use of big data, the privacy of citizens and the exercise of democracy, the techniques of artificial intelligence and their impact on the labor world, the Industry 4.0 at the time of the Internet of Things, social media, open data and public innovation.

Each chapter raises a set of questions and answers to help the reader to know the key issues in the enormous maze that the tools of info-communication have built around us.

Contents:

• Preface
• About the Author
• Digital Swarms and Apparent Power
• Accountable Men and Algorithms
• Consciousness and Technological Alienation
• Anticipatory Shipping
• Forgetting is More Difficult Than Remembering
• The Hypermnesia of the Network
• Dis-Education and Inverted Reality
• Beware of that Data!
• The Inventable Future and Netnography
• The Money with Which We Pay the Web
• The Privacy and the Toaster
• When a Machine Learns Theology
• Data Brokers Know Us Without Being Our Friends
• Open Data and the Story of a Woman Who Knows Their Meaning
• The Work of the Future and the Future of Work
• A Strategy of Public Innovation
• Spied Democracy or Transparent Society?
• Digital Politics, Votes, and Polls
• The Internet Information Model and the Weakness of Old Media
• A Computable Society from Big Data Anajysis
• Getting Value from Mining Big Data
• Who is the Owner of Facebook Data?
• The Network Digs Inside Us
• Amazon Bracelet, Amazon Go and Workers
• Toward a New Cognitive Paradigm
• Surveillance and Digital Politics
• Imagine or Govern Our Future?
• The Tristanian Syndrome
• Toward a Possible Conclusion: Digital Twilights
• Index

Readership: Scholars in many fields: of computer science, artificial intelligence, Big Data analysis, social media, anthropology and social studies, digital democracy, internet computing.Big Data;Artificial Intelligence;Data Analysis;Digital Politics;Social Media;Open Data;Data Privacy00

Chapter 1

Digital Swarms and Apparent Power

In his essay In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, the Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han [1] wonders about the “new” people who live immersed in the world of digital media and that he calls digital swarm — a community composed of anonymous individuals who only apparently share thoughts and actions, but they are often lost in counting of “Like” and cannot find effective ways to express their collective energies.

According to Han, a characteristic of the expression of the state of excitement of the digital swarm is represented by the forms of emotional and informal writing that fast digital communication promotes:

Digital communication makes possible an instantaneous manifestation of the state of excitation.

We know that those that flow down in digital channels are rapid and imperfect communications, they are close to the forms of speech for immediacy and imperfection, even if they are written and therefore potentially more meditated. These are communications that in most cases deserve to be dispersed in the air, like the sound of words, yet in their almost totality they remain in the memories of the devices for years or forever. Snapchat represents an exception to this model. Among the many instant network communication systems, Snapchat is in fact one of the very few to be based on the elimination of messages immediately after they have been read (whatis.snapchat.com). As in the spoken forms, in Snapchat, the read messages disappear forever from the devices of those who sent them and who received them. In fact, one of the main concepts of Snapchat is that pictures, videos, and messages are only available for a short time before they become inaccessible. The app has evolved from originally focusing on person-to-person photo sharing to presently featuring “Stories” of 24-hour chronological content, along with “Discover” to let brands show ad-supported short-form entertainment.

Communications supported by social media, even when they have relevance and need for persistence, are conditioned by digital dynamism and do not reach an expressive form equal to that of paper communication. They do not have the same writing time, the same meditation.

The digital one, unlike that of power (Communication of power is not dialogical) and of most traditional communication media (press, radio, television), is a dialogic and potentially symmetrical communication. However, potential communication symmetry does not necessarily imply an equally factual symmetry. Indeed, digital communication can change the relationships between people, groups and organizations. It can make relationships direct and may bypass roles and hierarchies, but often this disintermediation only occurs in appearance, because the power relations and the consolidated forms of relationship are not easily short-circuited by the informality and speed of digital communications. Rather, the owners of power (including the communicative one) carefully use the communication to transmit their message, exploiting the pervasive modes facilitated and favored by the digital medium.

Paraphrasing the principle of sovereignty defined by Carl Schmitt [2] in the last century, Han ironically writes that Sovereign is the one who has the shitstorms on the net. In reality, the possibility of mass criticism through the digital media is today only an apparent sovereignty that gratifies but does not solve. It allows a momentary, contingent outburst to all those who fail to have a voice in the places of decision and where dialectical discussion is practiced. It is a protest made of digital screams, which does not change the power relationships. It does not modify the decisions and the rules. It acts as a sort of placebo of authority, of autonomy, of influence that, when the wave flattens, leaves the collective and/or individual state in an unperturbed condition.

As Han argues, digital protest is often ephemeral, contingent, sometimes sterile, and now increasingly replaces historical forms of protest as defined and developed over the last two centuries.

The waves of indignation are very effective in mobilizing and keeping alert. … however, they are not able to structure the speech … they suddenly grow up and dissolve just as quickly.

In its replacement, the digital protest, in fact, cancels the classic forms of social criticism and protest. First, because it rises much faster than traditional ones that require physical expression and presence, and for this it seems to make them obsolete and of little practical effectiveness. Second, because, in most cases, it goes off just as quickly as a fire of low consistency, ephemeral, lacking the places and times of the classical protests to whose physicality we were educated. Physical places and times customary to us that allow a persistence that is hardly erased from the next topic of which we are indignant, as frequently, with rapid periodicity, happens in the network that is the connective bone structure of the global digital machine. A post or a tweet appears sufficient to confide but does not produce stable real movements, mature social criticism, or organized opposition. We need a more continuous and stable activity of communication and interconnection, as sometimes happens by managing to produce consolidated effects in the external world. In this context, the younger audience is more involved in digital sensationalism with its peaks that regularly turn off into flat calm or are neutralized by new peaks that are always short-lived.

The network creates a digital social dimension in which everyone can communicate with everyone on any subject, without requiring real reflection and sufficient knowledge of the issues in the field. Thus, despite the enormous capacity that the digital medium has in distributing data and information to everyone, indistinctly and at the same time, everyone ends up amplifying himself and does not contribute to the collective amplification of criticism and protest. This phenomenon contributes to giving the impression to the digital mass, above all to the less experienced portion of it, of being able to conquer a role, to assume notoriety, without asking the problem of doing it in a society that would be collectively better. As Han writes, we do not build a stable We, and, we add, a better and well-structured We. A We capable of being the protagonist of the transformation of the state of things.

According to the Korean philosopher:

Today’s indignant mass is extremely superficial and distracted.

Paradoxically, the digital mass, unlike the mass of individuals in the classical sense of the term, has a very low consistency/density and does not respect the definition of Isaac Newton, which requires the presence of a quantity of matter that seems to lack the digital mass, preventing it from acquiring a weight to be used at the social, civil, and political level, nor that of Karl Marx, which unites in that term an emergent collectivity of individuals with significant shared elements who intend to act jointly for a common goal. In short, today we are faced with an evanescent mass that appears and disappears like a low-density gaseous body with a negligible weight, often ephemeral:

… the new crowd is called a digital swarm. … The digital swarm is made up of isolated individuals.

Han emphasizes the fact that the mass of people acting in the digital world does not have the spirit of traditional crowds and is not be able to express except as a group of isolated voices. In fact, even if his words identify the weakness of digital aggregations, it should be noted that these are not really isolated individuals, but beings weakly connected from the human and social point of view. The fragility and dynamism of digital connections, in spite of their speed, do not make them almost never stable until they can compose a connective tissue capable of consistent proposals, well structured and consolidated to the point where they can actually influence reality as can do a numerous, articulated, and mature crowd. Digital connections are slim and informal from the point of view of internal relationships and fail to reach a coherent vision and to exert a measurable effect on the world outside them to the recipients of potential actions that should stem from their ideas of protest or proposal.

The digital swarms express an ephemeral and very apparent power that lives, too many times, the life of a butterfly. It is a noise of protest against the real powers, first of all financial power and political power, against which the complaint, which is able to have even global visibility, is not able to record persistent effects. The digital multitude confirms the disappearance of the social classes as political subjects, rather it is orthogonal to the social classes. It crosses them indistinctly and fails to be characterized by the instances of one or more similar classes. For these reasons, the digital crowd is unable to take the form of a counter-power. On this side, Han is critical of the optimistic positions of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri [3] who believe in the power of the multitude in opposition to the power of capitalism (what they call the Empire).

Even the question of the de-medialization of information that the new digital media have put in place, flattening or even reversing the relationships between producers and consumers that newspapers, television, and radio had built, does not always have positive implications. In fact, although the dialectical and symmetrical nature of the new digital media has positively modified and scattered informational power and it has also allowed the production and dissemination of information by so many who had never had the opportunity, the obtained effects are new and different. More specifically, they are not located only in the positive quadrant of the space of the results obtained. In fact, there are more and more reproducing fake news producers who, exploiting in a restricted way the functionalities of digital media, limit they role to receiving and disseminating information — many times false or unfounded. Digital beings acting as passive transmitters of signals produced by others without verification or critical analysis actions. A large mass of individuals contribute to the post-truth era, digital neo-proletarians of an informational massification that weakens cultural and civic values and subtracts meaning to information sharing.

Alongside this multitude of replicating transmitters, there is however a much smaller set of original producers of information, opinions, and analysis. These subjects consciously use digital communication as a new and original form of expression and are equipped dialectically for supporting the symmetry of digital media and being active agents in the so-called attention economy that considers the attention of people as a precious resource in the epoch of information overload and cognitive chaos: Individuals who are able to build new opportunities for communication and for sharing information and knowledge. These are the real active protagonists of de-medialization who will play a progressive and advanced role in the social and informative dynamics of the digital age.

References

1.Han, B.-C. (2017). In the Swarm, Digital Prospects (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA).

2.Schmitt, C. (2006). Political Theology, Four Chapters in the Concept of Sovereignty (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, USA).

3.Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2001). Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, USA).

Chapter 2

Accountable Men and Algorithms

An algorithm is an ordered sequence of operations that produces a result in a finite time. Whenever we solve a problem or perform a task, we actually carry out an algorithm. The word “algorithm” is over a 1,000 years old (it actually derives from the 9th Century mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsāal’Khwārizmī, latinized ‘Algoritmi’), but until just over 50 years ago, algorithms were the exclusive subject of mathematicians and engineers. Since the algorithms have become software programs and are executed by computers, they have assumed a special role in many areas and moments of our life and in the future they could also take the upper hand over the whole of humanity.

Stefano Rodotà in his essay [1] recalls the relationship between the rights of people and the threats that new technologies can bring to their privacy. Rodotà reminds us that the internet is a great opportunity and that we all have the right to access the information that the web makes available, but at the same time warns us of the risks of the “dictatorship of the algorithm” for the person’s prerogatives:

In the society of the algorithm vanish guarantees that should have put people protected from technological power, from the expropriation of their individuality by machines. A European directive and many national laws provide that everyone has the right to know the “logic applied in automated data processing” and prohibit any decision “based exclusively on automated processing of data intended to evaluate certain aspects of her/his personality”. These rules tell us that the world of automated information processing cannot exists without rules and that resorting to the algorithm cannot become a form of de-contributing to the subjects who use it.

Algorithms are necessary to make computers work, so that they can perform many operations useful to us and simplify many human activities, but it is absolutely necessary not to leave the sequences of instructions, with their cycles and their conditions, to decide what is right for us or even what we ourselves are.

Today, computer algorithms manage most of the purchases of goods and services. Algorithms rule most of the financial transactions in the world and they are able to drive cars without drivers or planes when the so-called auto-pilot is activated. It is the Google search algorithm that finds and indicates to billions of people the contents of the web that interest them. It is the algorithm of Facebook that decides which information of our contacts is the most important for us. Are data analysis and machine learning algorithms the ones that search through Big Data to discover hidden facts and information.

Through these algorithms, Big Data owners know facts and behaviors of people and use them for their own goals. Some make them available to those willing to pay them. All this can harm the rights of individuals and could be used for purposes contrary to us. These scenarios, in addition to the many advantages, also present elements of concern and danger for individuals and their rights. It therefore becomes necessary to protect people from the improper and irresponsible use of automatic software technologies that manage and transform information, avoiding that situations occur for which in the future someone is justified by saying: It is the fault of the algorithm.

To better understanding the potential and the impact on human lives of the pervasive use of algorithms, a simple example is sufficient. Recently, an algorithm has been created to ascertain whether a person who has read a short text has really understood its meaning. The algorithm, able to unmask those who say they understood what they read, was proposed by a group of researchers led by Prof. Julia Mossbridge, psychologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

That algorithm receives and processes neuronal signals emitted from the reader’s brain. Based on the patterns of the brain’s electrical signals, collected by some sensors, the algorithm is able, with an accuracy of 90%, to determine if the person who read that text really understood it. The team of researchers at Northwestern University collected the electroencephalograms of a group of 28 volunteers as they read the words of one text, one at a time. The text used for the test has been extracted from the first chapter of Doctor Pascal, the last novel written by Emile Zola that tells of a doctor who deals with the study of the nervous system. In one case, the words were put in the correct order to form the original text, in the other the same words were matched randomly. The brain waves measured by the electrodes placed on the front of the participants were very different when the text was really understood — as verified by a proper test of understanding — compared to when the text was composed at random and could not be understood. Models of those brain waves can be compared with those of a common reader to establish, with high accuracy, whether she/he has understood what she/he has read or not.

The case of this algorithm is not the only one in which a machine is capable of knowing acts and facts of a human being that humans themselves cannot grasp. The algorithm in question has obviously been written by experienced people who have transferred their intelligence to an artificial system that has become, at least in the specific case, more intelligent than themselves, much more able to discover hidden facts than they do men.

Actually, algorithms perform everything that happens on the internet. The enormous wealth and power of Google, Amazon and Facebook, are based on the algorithms and data that they collect and store in their data centers. The algorithms have led the man to the moon, every day they drive the airplanes and check the railway...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• About the Author
• Contents
• Chapter 1 Digital Swarms and Apparent Power
• Chapter 2 Accountable Men and Algorithms
• Chapter 3 Consciousness and Technological Alienation
• Chapter 4 Anticipatory Shipping
• Chapter 5 Forgetting is More Difficult than Remembering
• Chapter 6 The Hypermnesia of the Network
• Chapter 7 Dis-Education and Inverted Reality
• Chapter 8 Beware of that Data!
• Chapter 9 The Inventable Future and Netnography
• Chapter 10 The Money with Which We Pay the Web
• Chapter 11 The Privacy and the Toaster
• Chapter 12 When a Machine Learns Theology
• Chapter 13 Data Brokers Know Us Without Being Our Friends
• Chapter 14 Open Data and the Story of a Woman Who Knows Their Meaning
• Chapter 15 The Work of the Future and the Future of Work
• Chapter 16 A Strategy of Public Innovation
• Chapter 17 Spied Democracy or Transparent Society?
• Chapter 18 Digital Politics, Votes, and Polls
• Chapter 19 The Internet Information Model and the Weakness of Old Media
• Chapter 20 A Computable Society from Big Data Analysis
• Chapter 21 Getting Value from Mining Big Data
• Chapter 22 Who is the Owner of Facebook Data?
• Chapter 23 The Network Digs Inside Us
• Chapter 24 Amazon Bracelet, Amazon Go and Workers
• Chapter 25 Toward a New Cognitive Paradigm
• Chapter 26 Surveillance and Digital Politics
• Chapter 27 Imagine or Govern Our Future?
• Chapter 28 The Tristanian Syndrome
• Chapter 29 Toward a Possible Conclusion: Digital Twilights
• Index