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Lily Hay Newman

A Trippy Visualization Charts the Internet's Growth Since 1997

In November 2003, security researcher Barrett Lyon was finishing college at California State University, Sacramento, while working full time as a penetration tester—a hacker companies hire to find weaknesses in their own digital systems. At the beginning of each job, Lyon would do some basic reconnaissance of the customer's infrastructure: “case the joint,” as he puts it. He realized he was essentially refining and repeating a formula to map what the new target network looked like. “That formula ended up being an easy piece of software to write, so I just started having this software do all the work for me,” Lyon says.

At lunch with his colleagues one day, Lyon suggested that he could use his network mapper to sketch the entire internet. “They thought that was pretty funny, so they bet me 50 bucks I couldn't do it," he says. So he did.

What followed was a vast, celestial jumble of thin, overlapping lines, starbursts, and branches in a static image that depicted the global internet of the early 2000s. Lyon called the piece Opte, and while his betting colleagues were skeptical of the visual rats nests he produced at first, the final product immediately started attracting fans on Slashdot and beyond .

Lyon's original Opte Internet Map from 2003.

Now Opte is back in an entirely new and updated form . The original version used “traceroutes,” diagnostic commands that scout different paths through a network, to visualize the internet in all of its enormous complexity. But traceroutes can be blocked, spoofed, or have other inaccuracies. So in a 2010 exhibit of the original Opte at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Lyon explored an alternative. Instead of basing the map on traceroutes, Lyon used Border Gateway Protocol routing tables, the subway maps of the internet, to get a more accurate view. Now he's carried that approach into this next generation.

The original Opte was a still image, but the 2021 version is a 10K video with extensive companion stills, using BGP data from University of Oregon's Route Views project to map the global internet from 1997 to today. Lyon worked on the visualization for months and relied on a number of applications, tools, and scripts to produce it. One is a software package called Large Graph Layout, originally designed to render images of proteins, that attempts hundreds and hundreds of different visual layouts until it finds the most efficient, representative solution. Think of it as a sort of web of best fit, depicting all of the internet's sprawling, interconnected data routes. The closer to the center a network is, the bigger and more interconnected it is.

Present day, from Opte The Internet: 1997 - 2021.

While the concept—to map and visualize the whole internet—remains the same, animating its evolution and expansion over almost 25 years allows the new version of Opte to be more interactive. The materials are all free for non-commercial use and Lyon hopes the piece will be particularly valuable to educators and engaging for students. Viewers can see details about the different network regions, and Lyon made some diagrams and videos that call out specific points of interest. One shows China's network space, for example, with its two heavily controlled connections in and out. Lyon also highlights much of the United States military's internet presence, including NIPRNET, the Department of Defense's Non-Classified Internet Protocol Network, and SIPRNET, the Secret Internet Protocol Network.

Zooming in on China's internet, present day.

By Matt Burgess

By Dell Cameron

By Matt Kamen

By Will Knight

By moving through time, Opte also makes major internet events tangible, like Iran's national 2019 internet shutdown and Myanmar's recent internet blackout in the last few weeks. Lyon says he's still collecting data to give a robust picture of recent events. Opte even shows BGP route leaks , incidents where data meant to flow on a certain path was accidentally or maliciously redirected to travel over other parts of the network. The new project is constructed to be easily updatable so Lyon can revise it as time passes.

While Opte is a striking and powerful visualization of the internet's size and impact, Lyon says the piece also ultimately depicts the internet's failure to become truly decentralized and insuppressible in its current form, particularly in countries and geographic regions that have limited points of connectivity to the global internet.

“When I look at it, each one of those little squiggles and wiggles is human beings doing something,” Lyon says. “People actually using the network, building the network, literally going across oceans and mountains with fiber optic cables and digging ditches. All of that work is reflected in one snapshot. But some countries are not actually very connected and that enables control.”

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From Science to Arts, an Inevitable Decision?

The wonderful world of fungi, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, simultaneous translation technology – ever closer to reality, featured author, latest book, the impact of the internet on society: a global perspective, introduction.

The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commerce that it diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996 the first survey of Internet users counted about 40 million; in 2013 they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet users. Furthermore, for some time the spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-based telecommunications infrastructure in the emerging countries. This has changed with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, in 1991, there were about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into consideration the limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the efficiency and price of the service.

At the heart of these communication networks the Internet ensures the production, distribution, and use of digitized information in all formats. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and López 2011), 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks.

The speed and scope of the transformation of our communication environment by Internet and wireless communication has triggered all kind of utopian and dystopian perceptions around the world.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The media aggravate the distorted perception by dwelling into scary reports on the basis of anecdotal observation and biased commentary. If there is a topic in which social sciences, in their diversity, should contribute to the full understanding of the world in which we live, it is precisely the area that has come to be named in academia as Internet Studies. Because, in fact, academic research knows a great deal on the interaction between Internet and society, on the basis of methodologically rigorous empirical research conducted in a plurality of cultural and institutional contexts. Any process of major technological change generates its own mythology. In part because it comes into practice before scientists can assess its effects and implications, so there is always a gap between social change and its understanding. For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of alienation, isolation, depression, and withdrawal from society. In fact, available evidence shows that there is either no relationship or a positive cumulative relationship between the Internet use and the intensity of sociability. We observe that, overall, the more sociable people are, the more they use the Internet. And the more they use the Internet, the more they increase their sociability online and offline, their civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures—with the exception of a couple of early studies of the Internet in the 1990s, corrected by their authors later (Castells 2001; Castells et al. 2007; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.).

Thus, the purpose of this chapter will be to summarize some of the key research findings on the social effects of the Internet relying on the evidence provided by some of the major institutions specialized in the social study of the Internet. More specifically, I will be using the data from the world at large: the World Internet Survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future, University of Southern California; the reports of the British Computer Society (BCS), using data from the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan; the Nielsen reports for a variety of countries; and the annual reports from the International Telecommunications Union. For data on the United States, I have used the Pew American Life and Internet Project of the Pew Institute. For the United Kingdom, the Oxford Internet Survey from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, as well as the Virtual Society Project from the Economic and Social Science Research Council. For Spain, the Project Internet Catalonia of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC); the various reports on the information society from Telefónica; and from the Orange Foundation. For Portugal, the Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC) in Lisbon. I would like to emphasize that most of the data in these reports converge toward similar trends. Thus I have selected for my analysis the findings that complement and reinforce each other, offering a consistent picture of the human experience on the Internet in spite of the human diversity.

Given the aim of this publication to reach a broad audience, I will not present in this text the data supporting the analysis presented here. Instead, I am referring the interested reader to the web sources of the research organizations mentioned above, as well as to selected bibliographic references discussing the empirical foundation of the social trends reported here.

Technologies of Freedom, the Network Society, and the Culture of Autonomy

In order to fully understand the effects of the Internet on society, we should remember that technology is material culture. It is produced in a social process in a given institutional environment on the basis of the ideas, values, interests, and knowledge of their producers, both their early producers and their subsequent producers. In this process we must include the users of the technology, who appropriate and adapt the technology rather than adopting it, and by so doing they modify it and produce it in an endless process of interaction between technological production and social use. So, to assess the relevance of Internet in society we must recall the specific characteristics of Internet as a technology. Then we must place it in the context of the transformation of the overall social structure, as well as in relationship to the culture characteristic of this social structure. Indeed, we live in a new social structure, the global network society, characterized by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.

Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming from a libertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers, and their students, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001). The expansion of the Internet from the mid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:

• The technological discovery of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness to distribute the source code to improve it by the open-source contribution of a global community of users, in continuity with the openness of the TCP/IP Internet protocols. The web keeps running under the same principle of open source. And two-thirds of web servers are operated by Apache, an open-source server program.
• Institutional change in the management of the Internet, keeping it under the loose management of the global Internet community, privatizing it, and allowing both commercial uses and cooperative uses.
• Major changes in social structure, culture, and social behavior: networking as a prevalent organizational form; individuation as the main orientation of social behavior; and the culture of autonomy as the culture of the network society.

I will elaborate on these major trends.

Our society is a network society; that is, a society constructed around personal and organizational networks powered by digital networks and communicated by the Internet. And because networks are global and know no boundaries, the network society is a global network society. This historically specific social structure resulted from the interaction between the emerging technological paradigm based on the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. A primary dimension of these changes is what has been labeled the rise of the Me-centered society, or, in sociological terms, the process of individuation, the decline of community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general. This is not the end of community, and not the end of place-based interaction, but there is a shift toward the reconstruction of social relationships, including strong cultural and personal ties that could be considered a form of community, on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects.

The process of individuation is not just a matter of cultural evolution, it is materially produced by the new forms of organizing economic activities, and social and political life, as I analyzed in my trilogy on the Information Age (Castells 1996–2003). It is based on the transformation of space (metropolitan life), work and economic activity (rise of the networked enterprise and networked work processes), culture and communication (shift from mass communication based on mass media to mass self-communication based on the Internet); on the crisis of the patriarchal family, with increasing autonomy of its individual members; the substitution of media politics for mass party politics; and globalization as the selective networking of places and processes throughout the planet.

But individuation does not mean isolation, or even less the end of community. Sociability is reconstructed as networked individualism and community through a quest for like-minded individuals in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace and the local space. Individuation is the key process in constituting subjects (individual or collective), networking is the organizational form constructed by these subjects; this is the network society, and the form of sociability is what Rainie and Wellman (2012) conceptualized as networked individualism. Network technologies are of course the medium for this new social structure and this new culture (Papacharissi 2010).

As stated above, academic research has established that the Internet does not isolate people, nor does it reduce their sociability; it actually increases sociability, as shown by myself in my studies in Catalonia (Castells 2007), Rainie and Wellman in the United States (2012), Cardoso in Portugal (2010), and the World Internet Survey for the world at large (Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.). Furthermore, a major study by Michael Willmott for the British Computer Society (Trajectory Partnership 2010) has shown a positive correlation, for individuals and for countries, between the frequency and intensity of the use of the Internet and the psychological indicators of personal happiness. He used global data for 35,000 people obtained from the World Wide Survey of the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007. Controlling for other factors, the study showed that Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of security, personal freedom, and influence, all feelings that have a positive effect on happiness and personal well-being. The effect is particularly positive for people with lower income and who are less qualified, for people in the developing world, and for women. Age does not affect the positive relationship; it is significant for all ages. Why women? Because they are at the center of the network of their families, Internet helps them to organize their lives. Also, it helps them to overcome their isolation, particularly in patriarchal societies. The Internet also contributes to the rise of the culture of autonomy.

The key for the process of individuation is the construction of autonomy by social actors, who become subjects in the process. They do so by defining their specific projects in interaction with, but not submission to, the institutions of society. This is the case for a minority of individuals, but because of their capacity to lead and mobilize they introduce a new culture in every domain of social life: in work (entrepreneurship), in the media (the active audience), in the Internet (the creative user), in the market (the informed and proactive consumer), in education (students as informed critical thinkers, making possible the new frontier of e-learning and m-learning pedagogy), in health (the patient-centered health management system) in e-government (the informed, participatory citizen), in social movements (cultural change from the grassroots, as in feminism or environmentalism), and in politics (the independent-minded citizen able to participate in self-generated political networks).

There is increasing evidence of the direct relationship between the Internet and the rise of social autonomy. From 2002 to 2007 I directed in Catalonia one of the largest studies ever conducted in Europe on the Internet and society, based on 55,000 interviews, one-third of them face to face (IN3 2002–07). As part of this study, my collaborators and I compared the behavior of Internet users to non-Internet users in a sample of 3,000 people, representative of the population of Catalonia. Because in 2003 only about 40 percent of people were Internet users we could really compare the differences in social behavior for users and non-users, something that nowadays would be more difficult given the 79 percent penetration rate of the Internet in Catalonia. Although the data are relatively old, the findings are not, as more recent studies in other countries (particularly in Portugal) appear to confirm the observed trends. We constructed scales of autonomy in different dimensions. Only between 10 and 20 percent of the population, depending on dimensions, were in the high level of autonomy. But we focused on this active segment of the population to explore the role of the Internet in the construction of autonomy. Using factor analysis we identified six major types of autonomy based on projects of individuals according to their practices:

a) professional development b) communicative autonomy c) entrepreneurship d) autonomy of the body e) sociopolitical participation f) personal, individual autonomy

These six types of autonomous practices were statistically independent among themselves. But each one of them correlated positively with Internet use in statistically significant terms, in a self-reinforcing loop (time sequence): the more one person was autonomous, the more she/he used the web, and the more she/he used the web, the more autonomous she/he became (Castells et al. 2007). This is a major empirical finding. Because if the dominant cultural trend in our society is the search for autonomy, and if the Internet powers this search, then we are moving toward a society of assertive individuals and cultural freedom, regardless of the barriers of rigid social organizations inherited from the Industrial Age. From this Internet-based culture of autonomy have emerged a new kind of sociability, networked sociability, and a new kind of sociopolitical practice, networked social movements and networked democracy. I will now turn to the analysis of these two fundamental trends at the source of current processes of social change worldwide.

The Rise of Social Network Sites on the Internet

Since 2002 (creation of Friendster, prior to Facebook) a new socio-technical revolution has taken place on the Internet: the rise of social network sites where now all human activities are present, from personal interaction to business, to work, to culture, to communication, to social movements, and to politics.

Social Network Sites are web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

(Boyd and Ellison 2007, 2)

Social networking uses, in time globally spent, surpassed e-mail in November 2007. It surpassed e-mail in number of users in July 2009. In terms of users it reached 1 billion by September 2010, with Facebook accounting for about half of it. In 2013 it has almost doubled, particularly because of increasing use in China, India, and Latin America. There is indeed a great diversity of social networking sites (SNS) by countries and cultures. Facebook, started for Harvard-only members in 2004, is present in most of the world, but QQ, Cyworld, and Baidu dominate in China; Orkut in Brazil; Mixi in Japan; etc. In terms of demographics, age is the main differential factor in the use of SNS, with a drop of frequency of use after 50 years of age, and particularly 65. But this is not just a teenager’s activity. The main Facebook U.S. category is in the age group 35–44, whose frequency of use of the site is higher than for younger people. Nearly 60 percent of adults in the U.S. have at least one SNS profile, 30 percent two, and 15 percent three or more. Females are as present as males, except when in a society there is a general gender gap. We observe no differences in education and class, but there is some class specialization of SNS, such as Myspace being lower than FB; LinkedIn is for professionals.

Thus, the most important activity on the Internet at this point in time goes through social networking, and SNS have become the chosen platforms for all kind of activities, not just personal friendships or chatting, but for marketing, e-commerce, education, cultural creativity, media and entertainment distribution, health applications, and sociopolitical activism. This is a significant trend for society at large. Let me explore the meaning of this trend on the basis of the still scant evidence.

Social networking sites are constructed by users themselves building on specific criteria of grouping. There is entrepreneurship in the process of creating sites, then people choose according to their interests and projects. Networks are tailored by people themselves with different levels of profiling and privacy. The key to success is not anonymity, but on the contrary, self-presentation of a real person connecting to real people (in some cases people are excluded from the SNS when they fake their identity). So, it is a self-constructed society by networking connecting to other networks. But this is not a virtual society. There is a close connection between virtual networks and networks in life at large. This is a hybrid world, a real world, not a virtual world or a segregated world.

People build networks to be with others, and to be with others they want to be with on the basis of criteria that include those people who they already know (a selected sub-segment). Most users go on the site every day. It is permanent connectivity. If we needed an answer to what happened to sociability in the Internet world, here it is:

There is a dramatic increase in sociability, but a different kind of sociability, facilitated and dynamized by permanent connectivity and social networking on the web.

Based on the time when Facebook was still releasing data (this time is now gone) we know that in 2009 users spent 500 billion minutes per month. This is not just about friendship or interpersonal communication. People do things together, share, act, exactly as in society, although the personal dimension is always there. Thus, in the U.S. 38 percent of adults share content, 21 percent remix, 14 percent blog, and this is growing exponentially, with development of technology, software, and SNS entrepreneurial initiatives. On Facebook, in 2009 the average user was connected to 60 pages, groups, and events, people interacted per month to 160 million objects (pages, groups, events), the average user created 70 pieces of content per month, and there were 25 billion pieces of content shared per month (web links, news stories, blogs posts, notes, photos). SNS are living spaces connecting all dimensions of people’s experience. This transforms culture because people share experience with a low emotional cost, while saving energy and effort. They transcend time and space, yet they produce content, set up links, and connect practices. It is a constantly networked world in every dimension of human experience. They co-evolve in permanent, multiple interaction. But they choose the terms of their co-evolution.

Thus, people live their physical lives but increasingly connect on multiple dimensions in SNS.

Paradoxically, the virtual life is more social than the physical life, now individualized by the organization of work and urban living.

But people do not live a virtual reality, indeed it is a real virtuality, since social practices, sharing, mixing, and living in society is facilitated in the virtuality, in what I called time ago the “space of flows” (Castells 1996).

Because people are increasingly at ease in the multi-textuality and multidimensionality of the web, marketers, work organizations, service agencies, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the Internet, less and less setting up alternative sites, more and more being present in the networks that people construct by themselves and for themselves, with the help of Internet social networking entrepreneurs, some of whom become billionaires in the process, actually selling freedom and the possibility of the autonomous construction of lives. This is the liberating potential of the Internet made material practice by these social networking sites. The largest of these social networking sites are usually bounded social spaces managed by a company. However, if the company tries to impede free communication it may lose many of its users, because the entry barriers in this industry are very low. A couple of technologically savvy youngsters with little capital can set up a site on the Internet and attract escapees from a more restricted Internet space, as happened to AOL and other networking sites of the first generation, and as could happen to Facebook or any other SNS if they are tempted to tinker with the rules of openness (Facebook tried to make users pay and retracted within days). So, SNS are often a business, but they are in the business of selling freedom, free expression, chosen sociability. When they tinker with this promise they risk their hollowing by net citizens migrating with their friends to more friendly virtual lands.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the transformation of sociopolitical practices on the Internet.

Communication Power: Mass-Self Communication and the Transformation of Politics

Power and counterpower, the foundational relationships of society, are constructed in the human mind, through the construction of meaning and the processing of information according to certain sets of values and interests (Castells 2009).

Ideological apparatuses and the mass media have been key tools of mediating communication and asserting power, and still are. But the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy, has found in Internet and mobile communication networks a major medium of mass self-communication and self-organization.

The key source for the social production of meaning is the process of socialized communication. I define communication as the process of sharing meaning through the exchange of information. Socialized communication is the one that exists in the public realm, that has the potential of reaching society at large. Therefore, the battle over the human mind is largely played out in the process of socialized communication. And this is particularly so in the network society, the social structure of the Information Age, which is characterized by the pervasiveness of communication networks in a multimodal hypertext.

The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customized, in an ever-changing pattern.

As a result, power relations, that is the relations that constitute the foundation of all societies, as well as the processes challenging institutionalized power relations, are increasingly shaped and decided in the communication field. Meaningful, conscious communication is what makes humans human. Thus, any major transformation in the technology and organization of communication is of utmost relevance for social change. Over the last four decades the advent of the Internet and of wireless communication has shifted the communication process in society at large from mass communication to mass self-communication. This is from a message sent from one to many with little interactivity to a system based on messages from many to many, multimodal, in chosen time, and with interactivity, so that senders are receivers and receivers are senders. And both have access to a multimodal hypertext in the web that constitutes the endlessly changing backbone of communication processes.

The transformation of communication from mass communication to mass self-communication has contributed decisively to alter the process of social change. As power relationships have always been based on the control of communication and information that feed the neural networks constitutive of the human mind, the rise of horizontal networks of communication has created a new landscape of social and political change by the process of disintermediation of the government and corporate controls over communication. This is the power of the network, as social actors build their own networks on the basis of their projects, values, and interests. The outcome of these processes is open ended and dependent on specific contexts. Freedom, in this case freedom of communicate, does not say anything on the uses of freedom in society. This is to be established by scholarly research. But we need to start from this major historical phenomenon: the building of a global communication network based on the Internet, a technology that embodies the culture of freedom that was at its source.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century there have been multiple social movements around the world that have used the Internet as their space of formation and permanent connectivity, among the movements and with society at large. These networked social movements, formed in the social networking sites on the Internet, have mobilized in the urban space and in the institutional space, inducing new forms of social movements that are the main actors of social change in the network society. Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, and especially in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships; in Europe and the U.S. as forms of protest against the management of the financial crisis; in Brazil; in Turkey; in Mexico; and in highly diverse institutional contexts and economic conditions. It is precisely the similarity of the movements in extremely different contexts that allows the formulation of the hypothesis that this is the pattern of social movements characteristic of the global network society. In all cases we observe the capacity of these movements for self-organization, without a central leadership, on the basis of a spontaneous emotional movement. In all cases there is a connection between Internet-based communication, mobile networks, and the mass media in different forms, feeding into each other and amplifying the movement locally and globally.

These movements take place in the context of exploitation and oppression, social tensions and social struggles; but struggles that were not able to successfully challenge the state in other instances of revolt are now powered by the tools of mass self-communication. It is not the technology that induces the movements, but without the technology (Internet and wireless communication) social movements would not take the present form of being a challenge to state power. The fact is that technology is material culture (ideas brought into the design) and the Internet materialized the culture of freedom that, as it has been documented, emerged on American campuses in the 1960s. This culture-made technology is at the source of the new wave of social movements that exemplify the depth of the global impact of the Internet in all spheres of social organization, affecting particularly power relationships, the foundation of the institutions of society. (See case studies and an analytical perspective on the interaction between Internet and networked social movements in Castells 2012.)

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself. Yet, it has specific effects in altering the capacity of the communication system to be organized around flows that are interactive, multimodal, asynchronous or synchronous, global or local, and from many to many, from people to people, from people to objects, and from objects to objects, increasingly relying on the semantic web. How these characteristics affect specific systems of social relationships has to be established by research, and this is what I tried to present in this text. What is clear is that without the Internet we would not have seen the large-scale development of networking as the fundamental mechanism of social structuring and social change in every domain of social life. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and a variety of networks increasingly based on wireless platforms constitute the technological infrastructure of the network society, as the electrical grid and the electrical engine were the support system for the form of social organization that we conceptualized as the industrial society. Thus, as a social construction, this technological system is open ended, as the network society is an open-ended form of social organization that conveys the best and the worse in humankind. Yet, the global network society is our society, and the understanding of its logic on the basis of the interaction between culture, organization, and technology in the formation and development of social and technological networks is a key field of research in the twenty-first century.

We can only make progress in our understanding through the cumulative effort of scholarly research. Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time. A digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet it continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

These references are in fact sources of more detailed references specific to each one of the topics analyzed in this text.

Abbate, Janet. A Social History of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007).

Cardoso, Gustavo, Angus Cheong, and Jeffrey Cole (eds). World Wide Internet: Changing Societies, Economies and Cultures. Macau: University of Macau Press, 2009.

Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–2003.

———. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

———. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

———. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

Castells, Manuel, Imma Tubella, Teresa Sancho, and Meritxell Roca.

La transición a la sociedad red. Barcelona: Ariel, 2007.

Hilbert, Martin, and Priscilla López. “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” Science 332, no. 6025 (April 1, 2011): pp. 60–65.

Papacharissi, Zizi, ed. The Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networking Sites. Routledge, 2010.

Rainie. Lee, and Barry Wellman. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Trajectory Partnership (Michael Willmott and Paul Flatters). The Information Dividend: Why IT Makes You “Happier.” Swindon: British Informatics Society Limited, 2010. http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/info-dividend-full-report.pdf

Selected Web References.   Used as sources for analysis in the chapter

Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento. “Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC).” http://www.umic.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3026&Itemid=167

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. “Features, Press and Policy.” http://www.bcs.org/category/7307

Center for the Digital Future. The World Internet Project International Report. 4th ed. Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School, Center for the Digital Future, 2012. http://www.worldinternetproject.net/_files/_Published/_oldis/770_2012wip_report4th_ed.pdf

ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council). “Papers and Reports.” Virtual Society. http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/reports.htm

Fundación Orange. “Análisis y Prospectiva: Informe eEspaña.” Fundación Orange. http://fundacionorange.es/fundacionorange/analisisprospectiva.html

Fundación Telefónica. “Informes SI.” Fundación Telefónica. http://sociedadinformacion.fundacion.telefonica.com/DYC/SHI/InformesSI/seccion=1190&idioma=es_ES.do

IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute). UOC. “Project Internet Catalonia (PIC): An Overview.” Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, 2002–07. http://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic/eng/

International Telecommunication Union. “Annual Reports.” http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/sfo/annual_reports/index.html

Nielsen Company. “Reports.” 2013. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/reports/2013.html?tag=Category:Media+ and+Entertainment

Oxford Internet Surveys. “Publications.” http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/oxis/publications

Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Social Networking.” Pew Internet. http://www.pewinternet.org/Topics/Activities-and-Pursuits/Social-Networking.aspx?typeFilter=5

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The Internet

by Chris Woodford . Last updated: May 2, 2023.

W hen you chat to somebody on the Net or send them an e-mail, do you ever stop to think how many different computers you are using in the process? There's the computer on your own desk, of course, and another one at the other end where the other person is sitting, ready to communicate with you. But in between your two machines, making communication between them possible, there are probably about a dozen other computers bridging the gap. Collectively, all the world's linked-up computers are called the Internet . How do they talk to one another? Let's take a closer look!

Photo: What most of us think of as the Internet—Google, eBay, and all the rest of it—is actually the World Wide Web . The Internet is the underlying telecommunication network that makes the Web possible. If you use broadband , your computer is probably connected to the Internet all the time it's on.

What is the Internet?

Global communication is easy now thanks to an intricately linked worldwide computer network that we call the Internet. In less than 20 years, the Internet has expanded to link up around 230 different nations. Even some of the world's poorest developing nations are now connected.

Chart: Countries online: In just over a decade, between 1988 and 2000, virtually every country in the world went online. Although most countries are now "wired," that doesn't mean everyone is online in all those countries, as you can see from the next chart, below. Source: Redrawn by Explainthatstuff.com using data from Figure 1.1 "All online, but a big divide", ITU World Telecommunication Development Report: Access Indicators for the Information Society: Summary, 2003 , p.5 (blue bars, 1998–2003) and Percentage of Individuals using the Internet 2000–2021 [XLS spreadsheet format], International Telecommunications Union, December 2022 edition (2010 and 2021, green bars). Please note that the horizontal (year) axis is not linear beyond the blue bars.

Lots of people use the word "Internet" to mean going online. Actually, the "Internet" is nothing more than the basic computer network. Think of it like the telephone network or the network of highways that criss-cross the world. Telephones and highways are networks, just like the Internet. The things you say on the telephone and the traffic that travels down roads run on "top" of the basic network. In much the same way, things like the World Wide Web (the information pages we can browse online), instant messaging chat programs, MP3 music downloading, IPTV (TV streamed over the Internet), and file sharing are all things that run on top of the basic computer network that we call the Internet.

Artwork: "Information superhighway": The Internet is like a global road network on which many different kinds of traffic can travel. Much of it seems one way—from distant computers (servers) into your home—but in reality the traffic is always two-way.

The Internet is a collection of standalone computers (and computer networks in companies, schools, and colleges) all loosely linked together, mostly using the telephone network. The connections between the computers are a mixture of old-fashioned copper cables, fiber-optic cables (which send messages in pulses of light ), wireless radio connections (which transmit information by radio . waves), and satellite links.

Chart: Internet use around the world: This chart compares the estimated percentage of households with Internet access for different world regions and economic groupings. For each region or grouping, the lighter bar on the left shows the percentage for 2015, while the darker bar shows 2019. Although there have clearly been dramatic improvements in all regions, there are still great disparities between the "richer" nations and the "poorer" ones. The world average, shown by the black-outlined orange center bars, is still only 57 out of 100 (just over half). Not surprisingly, richer nations are well to the left of the average and poorer ones well to the right. Source: Percentage of Individuals using the Internet 2000–2019 [XLS spreadsheet format], International Telecommunications Union, 2020.

What does the Internet do?

The Internet has one very simple job: to move computerized information (known as data ) from one place to another. That's it! The machines that make up the Internet treat all the information they handle in exactly the same way. In this respect, the Internet works a bit like the postal service. Letters are simply passed from one place to another, no matter who they are from or what messages they contain. The job of the mail service is to move letters from place to place, not to worry about why people are writing letters in the first place; the same applies to the Internet.

Just like the mail service, the Internet's simplicity means it can handle many different kinds of information helping people to do many different jobs. It's not specialized to handle emails, Web pages, chat messages, or anything else: all information is handled equally and passed on in exactly the same way. Because the Internet is so simply designed, people can easily use it to run new "applications"—new things that run on top of the basic computer network. That's why, when two European inventors developed Skype , a way of making telephone calls over the Net, they just had to write a program that could turn speech into Internet data and back again. No-one had to rebuild the entire Internet to make Skype possible.

Photo: The Internet is really nothing more than a load of wires—metal wires, fiber-optic cables, and "wireless" wires (radio waves ferrying the same sort of data that wires would carry). Much of the Internet's traffic moves along ethernet networking cables like this one.

How does Internet data move?

Circuit switching.

Much of the Internet runs on the ordinary public telephone network—but there's a big difference between how a telephone call works and how the Internet carries data. If you ring a friend, your telephone opens a direct connection (or circuit) between your home and theirs. If you had a big map of the worldwide telephone system (and it would be a really big map!), you could theoretically mark a direct line, running along lots of miles of cable, all the way from your phone to the phone in your friend's house. For as long as you're on the phone, that circuit stays permanently open between your two phones. This way of linking phones together is called circuit switching . In the old days, when you made a call, someone sitting at a "switchboard" (literally, a board made of wood with wires and sockets all over it) pulled wires in and out to make a temporary circuits that connected one home to another. Now the circuit switching is done automatically by an electronic telephone exchange.

If you think about it, circuit switching is a really inefficient way to use a network. All the time you're connected to your friend's house, no-one else can get through to either of you by phone. (Imagine being on your computer, typing an email for an hour or more—and no-one being able to email you while you were doing so.) Suppose you talk very slowly on the phone, leave long gaps of silence, or go off to make a cup of coffee. Even though you're not actually sending information down the line, the circuit is still connected—and still blocking other people from using it.

Packet switching

The Internet could, theoretically, work by circuit switching—and some parts of it still do. If you have a traditional "dialup" connection to the Net (where your computer dials a telephone number to reach your Internet service provider in what's effectively an ordinary phone call), you're using circuit switching to go online. You'll know how maddeningly inefficient this can be. No-one can phone you while you're online; you'll be billed for every second you stay on the Net; and your Net connection will work relatively slowly.

Most data moves over the Internet in a completely different way called packet switching . Suppose you send an email to someone in China. Instead of opening up a long and convoluted circuit between your home and China and sending your email down it all in one go, the email is broken up into tiny pieces called packets . Each one is tagged with its ultimate destination and allowed to travel separately. In theory, all the packets could travel by totally different routes. When they reach their ultimate destination, they are reassembled to make an email again.

Packet switching is much more efficient than circuit switching. You don't have to have a permanent connection between the two places that are communicating, for a start, so you're not blocking an entire chunk of the network each time you send a message. Many people can use the network at the same time and since the packets can flow by many different routes, depending on which ones are quietest or busiest, the whole network is used more evenly—which makes for quicker and more efficient communication all round.

How packet switching works

What is circuit switching.

Picture: Circuit switching is like moving your house slowly, all in one go, along a fixed route between two places.

Suppose you want to move home from the United States to Africa and you decide to take your whole house with you—not just the contents, but the building too! Imagine the nightmare of trying to haul a house from one side of the world to the other. You'd need to plan a route very carefully in advance. You'd need roads to be closed so your house could squeeze down them on the back of a gigantic truck. You'd also need to book a special ship to cross the ocean. The whole thing would be slow and difficult and the slightest problem en-route could slow you down for days. You'd also be slowing down all the other people trying to travel at the same time. Circuit switching is a bit like this. It's how a phone call works.

What is packet switching?

Picture: Packet switching is like breaking your house into lots of bits and mailing them in separate packets. Because the pieces travel separately, in parallel, they usually go more quickly and make better overall use of the network.

Is there a better way? Well, what if you dismantled your home instead, numbered all the bricks, put each one in an envelope, and mailed them separately to Africa? All those bricks could travel by separate routes. Some might go by ship; some might go by air. Some might travel quickly; others slowly. But you don't actually care. All that matters to you is that the bricks arrive at the other end, one way or another. Then you can simply put them back together again to recreate your house. Mailing the bricks wouldn't stop other people mailing things and wouldn't clog up the roads, seas, or airways. Because the bricks could be traveling "in parallel," over many separate routes at the same time, they'd probably arrive much quicker. This is how packet switching works. When you send an email or browse the Web, the data you send is split up into lots of packets that travel separately over the Internet.

What are "clients" and "servers"?

There are hundreds of millions of computers on the Net, but they don't all do exactly the same thing. Some of them are like electronic filing cabinets that simply store information and pass it on when requested. These machines are called servers . Machines that hold ordinary documents are called file servers; ones that hold people's mail are called mail servers; and the ones that hold Web pages are Web servers. There are tens of millions of servers on the Internet.

A computer that gets information from a server is called a client . When your computer connects over the Internet to a mail server at your ISP (Internet Service Provider) so you can read your messages, your computer is the client and the ISP computer is the server. There are far more clients on the Internet than servers—billions of them, if you count smartphones!

Artwork: Ordinary computers ("clients"), like the one you're using right now, communicate with more powerful ones ("servers") that hold things like web pages, emails, and so on. This is called client-server computing. Clients can also communicate with other clients. This is called peer-to-peer (P2P) communication.

When two computers on the Internet swap information back and forth on a more-or-less equal basis, they are known as peers. If you use an instant messaging program to chat to a friend, and you start swapping party photos back and forth, you're taking part in what's called peer-to-peer ( P2P ) communication. In P2P, the machines involved sometimes act as clients and sometimes as servers. For example, if you send a photo to your friend, your computer is the server (supplying the photo) and the friend's computer is the client (accessing the photo). If your friend sends you a photo in return, the two computers swap over roles.

Apart from clients and servers, the Internet is also made up of intermediate computers called routers , whose job is really just to make connections between different systems. If you have several computers at home or school, you probably have a single router that connects them all to the Internet. The router is like the mailbox on the end of your street: it's your single point of entry to the worldwide network.

How the Net really works: TCP/IP and DNS

A brief history of the internet, 1960s: preparing for a global network, 1970s: the modern internet appears, 1980s: the internet gives birth to the web, 1990s: the web takes off, 2000s: internet and web for all, if you liked this article..., find out more, on this website.

• History of communication
• History of computers
• Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) (covers Internet telephony and Skype)
• Wireless Internet
• World Wide Web (WWW)

General overviews

Basic technical guides, more technical, facts, statistics, and reports.

• World Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2010: Monitoring the WSIS targets: 9th Edition, 2010 : A detailed report from the International Telecommunications Union that charts the spread of telephone and Internet technology around the world.

Text copyright © Chris Woodford 2006, 2023. All rights reserved. Full copyright notice and terms of use .

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The Internet Map: a visual representation of the relationship between 350,000 websites

The internet map is an impressive visualization of 350,000 websites and how they are linked to each other..

By Justin Rubio

Via Reddit | Source The Internet Map

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Imagine the web as a giant galaxy where the planets are sites clustered together by likeness, and what you might get is something like The Internet Map . Representing over 350,000 websites from 196 countries and all domain zones at the end of 2011, the map displays over 2 million site links based on topical similarities. Each site is represented by a circle, with size depending on the amount of traffic, and the space between each is determined by frequency, or strength, of the link created when user's jump from one website to another. If you want to get into the fine details of how the map's layout is calculated, the group behind the project has provided a few very technical mathematical and engineering resources. Feel free to move around the map while zooming in and out to view smaller sites, but be aware, there is a "vast porno cluster" hiding in there.

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The evolution of the Internet from 1997 to 2021

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How has the Internet changed over the years? The Opte Project, by Barrett Lyon, captures the evolution of the Internet from 1997 to 2021 . As the Internet is a network of networks, Barrett Lyon has leveraged the connections among all those networks to create a map of the Internet.

This visual representation of the Internet is a wonderful educational tool, as it offers a quick vision of the Internet and networking. It has indeed been used in many educational discussions, publications, books, museums, etc. to illustrate how the Internet looks like. The project is truly interesting to picture the immense size of the Internet and its constant evolution. The Internet’s rapid growth is also noticeable in facts such as the depletion of IPv4 or the significant increase in Internet traffic we are experiencing globally.

Video of the evolution of the Internet from 1997 to 2021

The following video by Barrett Lyon “materializes”, in two minutes, how the Internet has evolved during the last decades. It does so by showing how networks are connected among them. As explained by Barrett Lyon’s on the Opte Project ’s website:

“This video takes you through a journey of incredible engineering. Starting from the first routing table captures (provided by the University of Oregon’s RouteViews project) in 1997, we walk through the first Internet’s astonishing growth to 2021.”

Each Regional Internet Register (RIR) has been assigned a color:

• Green represents the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Center (RIPE NCC).
• Blue represents the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).
• Red represents the Asia-Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC).
• Yellow represents the African Network Information Center (AFRINIC).
• Pink represents the Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Center (LACNIC).

In addition to those colors, white is used for backbones and brown for the US Military. Besides, on the lower left corner, the name of the dominant networks is updated according to mergers, acquisitions and brand changes. On the project’s website, you can find more details about the Opte project and its raw resources.

Internet users growth from 1997 to 2021

The number of Internet users worldwide has also experienced an astonishing growth over the last decades. From 1997 to 2021, the number of Internet users around the world has increased from 70 million to more than 5,250 million.

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A Map Of The Internet Universe [Infographic]

By Emily Elert

Posted on Jan 26, 2013 3:51 AM EST

3 minute read

The Internet Map

As of last year, there were something like 650 million active web sites on the Internet. That number is growing fast, but even if it weren’t–even if it stopped dead in its tracks right now–you could spend the next 50 years surfing the web at a pace of five sites per minute, 12 hours a day, 365 days per year, and you’d still only visit (briefly) 10% of the Internet Universe.

Unlike the actual Universe, however, the Internet’s places do not exist in physical space–there’s no such thing as one website being “close” or “far” from another one; the two are either linked or they are not.

While those links don’t correspond directly to any kind of distance or direction, they do suggest a relationship. If, for example, someone built a personal website, and linked to their website through their Facebook page, people would really only arrive at the website via the Facebook page. Most likely, that would mean that not too many people visited the website; the website would be a tiny little out-of-the-way place in the Universe of the Internet.

That’s pretty much the logic employed by the architects of this interactive map of the Internet Universe .

The circles on the map represent over 350,000 web sites from 196 countries around the world:

Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.

If you’re already checking it out , you’ve probably noticed that those basic organizational rule gives rise to a few major patterns:

First, countries–represented in different colors–tend to form clusters, since people in any given country tend to move between their own country’s websites. Those clusters dominate regions of the internet universe: US websites abound in the middle in light blue, China occupies the mustard-colored region on the bottom left, Japan, in purple, dominates the bottom-right, and Russian websites, in red, are strewn across the top.

But you can also see how the popularity of a few websites and a couple topics disrupt the nation-based clustering. Indeed, the basic structure of the Internet Universe seems to be determined by the three biggest sites, Google, Facebook, and Youtube, which form a core at the center of the map, with countries radiating outward. (Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the Big Three do not appear to exert much gravity on China’s galaxy cluster, which sprawls out like a universe on its own.)

The most fascinating example of topical organization has to be the vast galactic cluster of porn near the bottom right, comprised (mostly) of U.S. websites, sandwiched between Japan and Brazil:

A few other points of interest:

1. Blogspot’s apparent popularity in Iran . Also, the way Iran is almost exclusively surrounded by China, South Korea, and Thailand

2. The way that so many of those weird sites that you can’t imagine anyone actually deciding to make lie huddled around popular social networking sites, sort of like little parasites.

3. The way that WordPress is super isolated and alone out on the fringes of the Universe . Why is that?

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Seeing the internet

What do you think of when you think about the internet? Do you think about some of the everyday ways in which you might use it: checking email, internet banking, an online supermarket order, ‘skyping’ friends? Or perhaps you think about the 'net' itself, the internet as a global infrastructure, connecting different places?

The image above is one of the most commonly used images of the internet, from The Opte Project. It was generated on 11 July 2015 and visualises connections between computers. The colours denote where the connections are:

Blue: North America Green: Europe Purple: Latin America Red: Asia Pacific Orange: Africa White: the backbone of the internet: the most highly connected networks

The world online

Wherever you are in the world, though, if you have a computer, a tablet at work or at home, a smartphone or a smart TV, then the chances are that you're on the internet a lot. You'll be communicating with friends, family and colleagues using email and/or social media. You might be using the internet to undertake household tasks like shopping or banking or arranging for your central heating to be serviced. You might stream music or a movie, or watch catch-up TV. And of course, if you’re an OU student you'll be using the internet for your studies!

But even in the case of people who don't have any of that technology – who don't own a smartphone or a tablet, and who, in the Global North, are more likely to be poor and old – a lot of what they do will be managed by digital technologies. The bus that runs into town will probably have a sensor on it sending wireless signals to an LED sign on a bus stop saying when it will arrive; traffic lights may be controlled by sensors counting traffic flow; the stock levels in local supermarkets are managed using software; the cash register where shopping is paid for, and the loyalty card that is swiped as part of that transaction, both take data from that sale and send it elsewhere, via the internet. Cities in particular are full of machines gathering digital data about all sorts of things.

We can think of the internet as a way of transmitting all the data that is generated by an activity. Data, according to Rob Kitchin in his book The Data Revolution, "are raw elements that can be abstracted from (given by) phenomena – measured and recorded in various ways. However, in general use, data refer to those elements that are taken: extracted through observations, computations, experiments, and record keeping" (p2). A variety of digital devices now capture lots of different kinds of data – from your supermarket purchases to your health records – and hold it in vast databases, where it can then be put to many uses. Many commentators argue that, while human societies have always created data, digital technologies are now gathering it as a speed and volume that is unprecedented historically.

Some scholars and campaigners, however, are worried that, while we're very familiar with digital screens and do lots of things with them, most of us are much less aware of the data that they gather, who owns that data, where it goes and what gets done with it. They suggest that this is in part because the internet itself – all those connections that send data between computers, the way that data is analysed and used – is invisible. They think the invisibility of the internet is a problem because it makes it harder to understand, or even to think about, what happens to that data.

So how can the internet be pictured - literally?

One approach adopted by some artists in response to this concern is to concentrate on the hardware – the physical supports of the internet – and map the sensors and devices that transmit data, the cables that carry it to servers and the servers where it's stored and processed.

Artist Ingrid Burrington, for example, has produced a guide to the streets of New York that points out all the ways in which the hardware of the internet is evident in an ordinary street. She lists manhole covers, street markings, antennae and buildings that house data centres. Ingrid and Dan Williams did something similar in London in late 2015, for an exhibition of data-based artwork. To Ingrid's list of New York internet infrastructure they added green BT utility cabinets. You can see her work at Seeing Networks and BigBangData  

Lots of digital data is also carried wirelessly, and artist/designer, Timo Arnall, developed a project that makes wireless signals visible by turning them into patterns of light. Timo Arnall has also documented a data-centre: that is, the building in which huge servers store data (in this case, the digital communication company, Telefonica).

You can see his work at Elastic Space, where the works Internet Machine and The Immaterials are most relevant for the sort of analysis I am discussing. These are just a couple of examples of artists making the internet visible by visualising its infrastructure.

Making the workers visible

Picturing the technological infrastructure of the internet is an important form of documentation. However it doesn't address the ways in which this infrastructure depends on all sorts of human workers for its construction and maintenance. Other artists have therefore decided to picture the human labour involved in creating the internet's infrastructure, and so too have many campaigning organisations.

Many digital technologies rely on rare metals – tin, copper, titanium, for example – to function. Mining for these metals causes devastating ecological damage, both in the extraction process itself and in how waste from that process is disposed of. Moreover, mining for these minerals in low-income countries is often poorly paid, with little concern for workers' safety and security.

And of course the internet requires all sorts of other labour too: the work of building its hardware (from cables and servers to smartphones and sensors), installing and maintaining that hardware, designing its software (from databases to apps), managing its data flows, not to mention all the things that are done with the internet in everyday code/spaces.

Campaigning organisations concerned about both the human and environmental consequences of this mining have used images to make those costs visible. For example, Friends of the Earth have published this photoessay about the environmental consequences of mining for tin in Indonesia's Bangka islands, or read the journalist David Nield’s introduction to the environmental costs of smartphone production.

Photographs of the people and objects that make up the internet show us some of the spaces and places of the internet's infrastructure: the mines where some of its components begin their lives, and the streets where many of them function. They also show us some of the components of the internet: its infrastructure and its workers.

But the internet is made up of one more thing: its data. 

Visualising digital data

Many artists and campaigners have also used the data that flows through the internet's cables and servers as material for their work. Artists have converted digital data into images, sculptures and installations, and 2015 and early 2016 saw several exhibitions in Europe that explored the diversity of this work. Academics have also tracked the patterns that different kinds of data make as they travel through the internet.

The image below is just one example of how the data that travels through the internet has its own geographies. This map looks at the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia; specifically it examines the location of the events, places and people mentioned in Wikipedia articles. What it shows is that most of the events, places and people mentioned are located in Western Europe.

In other work on what places are mentioned in Wikipedia, Mark Graham and his collaborators note that:

“There is a clear and highly uneven geography of information in Wikipedia. Europe and North America are home to 84% of all articles. Anguilla has the fewest number of geotagged articles (four), and indeed most small island nations and city states have less than 100 articles. However, it is not just microstates that are characterized by extremely low levels of wiki representation. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in the encyclopedia. Remarkably, there are more Wikipedia articles (7,800) written about Antarctica than any country in Africa or South America. Even China, which is home to the world’s biggest population of Internet users and is the fourth largest country on Earth contains fewer than 1% of all geotagged articles. Because of the high visibility of Wikipedia in online information ecosystems, countless decisions are made and countless opinions are formed based on information available in the encyclopedia. It is thus important to point out the digital terra incognita that covers much of the world and reproduces existing representational asymmetries.”

So, what do we see when we think about the internet?

I would suggest that, if we try, we can see infrastructure, digital workers and data., and we can see these in very different formats. Here, you've seen art documentary photography, video art, graphic art and maps – and other artists’ work to make software code visible.

But the most important thing that many of these images show, are the inequalities embedded at the heart of the internet. In both its physical infrastructure, the kind of labour it relies on, and the data it generates, the internet has a highly differentiated geography.

Further reading

Early in 2016, London hosted two exhibitions with lots of work looking at data and the interned: one was called Big Bang Data, and the other was called Electronic Superhighway. You can listen to a podcast that discusses those two shows and more at The Guardian website .

Geography Matters

Geography Matters: A Collection

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‘Citizen sensing’ and new forms of environmental monitoring

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• Originally published: Thursday, 18 May 2017
• Body text - Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 : The Open University
• Image 'Visualisation of the Routing Paths of the Internet' - Barrett Lyon / The Opte Project under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license
• Image 'The World Online map as described in the text' - Ralph Strauman, Mark Graham, geonet.oii.ox.ac.uk, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license
• Image 'Map showing 'The Geographically Uneven Coverage of Wikipedia' as described in the text' - Ralph Strauman, Mark Graham, geonet.oii.ox.ac.uk, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license
• Image 'The Legacy of Nuclear Power: Part 1' - cyocum under CC-BY licence under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license
• Image 'The Secret Geographies of Finance' - Nick Youngson under CC-BY licence under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license
• Image '‘Citizen sensing’ and new forms of environmental monitoring' - Riffle under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license
• Image 'Seeing the internet' - Barrett Lyon / The Opte Project under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license
• Image 'Geography Matters: A Collection' - Copyright: Artwork by Catherine Pain © The Open University
• Image 'Protecting Landscapes and Creating the Right Tools for the Job' - duncan c under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license

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• Many Tech Experts Say Digital Disruption Will Hurt Democracy
• 3. Concerns about democracy in the digital age

Table of Contents

• 1. Themes about the digital disruption of democracy in the next decade
• 2. Broader thoughts from key experts on the future of democracy at a time of digital disruption
• 4. Hopeful themes and suggested solutions
• 5. Tech will have mixed effects that are not possible to guess now
• About this canvassing of experts
• Acknowledgments

About half of the experts responding to this canvassing said people’s uses of technology will mostly weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation, but even those who expressed optimism often voiced concerns. This section includes comments about problems that were made by all respondents regardless of their answer to the main question about the impact of technology on democracy by 2030. These worries are organized under seven themes.

Empowering the powerful: Corporate and government agendas generally do not serve democratic goals or achieve democratic outcomes. They serve the goals of those in power

An internet pioneer and technology developer and administrator predicted, “My expectation is that by 2030, as much of 75% of the world’s population will be enslaved by artificial intelligence-based surveillance systems developed in China and exported around the world. These systems will keep every citizen under observation 24 hours a day, seven days a week, monitoring their every action.”

Dan Gillmor, co-founder of the News Co/Lab at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and professor of practice in digital media literacy commented, “Governments (and their corporate partners) are broadly using technology to create a surveillance state, and what amounts to law by unaccountable black-box algorithm, far beyond anything Orwell imagined. But this can only happen in a society that can’t be bothered to protect liberty – or is easily led/stampeded into relinquishing it – and that is happening in more and more of the Western democracies. The re-emergence of public bigotry has nothing to do with technology, except to the extent that bigots use it to promote their malignant goals. Meanwhile, the institutions that are supposed to protect liberty – journalism among them – are mostly failing to do so. In a tiny number of jurisdictions, people have persuaded leaders to push back on the encroachments, such as a partial ban on government use of facial recognition in San Francisco. But the encroachments are overwhelming and accelerating.”

Leah Lievrouw, professor of information studies at the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote, “To date, virtually no democratic state or system has sorted out how to deal with this challenge to the fundamental legitimacy of democratic processes, and my guess is that only a deep and destabilizing crisis (perhaps growing out of the rise of authoritarian, ethnic or cultural nationalism) will prompt a serious response.”

Seth Finkelstein, programmer, consultant and EFF Pioneer of the Electronic Frontier Award winner, wrote, “Warren Buffett has said, ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ We can examine how this class warfare changes with advances in technology, analogous to how military warfare has been affected by technology. But no weapons technology to date has inevitably produced democracy over dictatorship (or vice-versa). For example, there once was a type of boosterism that talked about how ordinary people could make websites and promoted its very rare cause célèbre success. But that storyline is now going out of fashion. It’s finally getting to be pundit knowledge that there’s a whole system behind which material gets promoted. Paid professional liars can both make websites themselves and work this system better than amateurs. There’s currently a national panic over Russian trolls. But native fiends can do the same thing, with more skill, incentive and opportunities.”

David Bray, executive director for the People-Centered Internet Coalition, commented, “The power of narratives is exactly their ability to shape and institutionalize norms and power distribution in our human communities. … Now, however, our world is much broader than our immediate environment, and this has dangerous side effects, such as challenges in reaching consensus or disputing the relevant facts for a situation. We are seeing increasing polarization in open societies, partly as a result of these questions of where we want to go not being considered in ways that can translate to action. An even larger question is where do different localities want to go in terms of progress in parallel to what values or norms they want to hold dear? This is a question that spans sectors. No one organization or influencer or group with power can either solely answer or execute actions toward that desired future state. In the absence of finding ways to build bridges that span sectors, power – through narratives, laws, or technologies – will be grabbed by whomever aspires to this. An important question for the future is can we build such bridges across sectors? Will our divisions be our undoing as open, pluralistic societies? Can we develop narratives of hope for open, pluralistic societies that bring people together?”

Technology can improve or undermine democracy depending on how it is used and who controls it. Right now, it is controlled by too few. Kevin Gross

Miguel Moreno, professor of philosophy at the University of Granada, Spain, an expert in ethics, epistemology and technology, commented, “There is a clear risk of bias, manipulation, abusive surveillance and authoritarian control over social networks, the internet and any uncensored citizen expression platform, by private or state actors. There are initiatives promoted by state actors to isolate themselves from a common internet and reduce the vulnerability of critical infrastructures to cyberattacks. This has serious democratic and civic implications. In countries with technological capacity and a highly centralized political structure, favorable conditions exist to obtain partisan advantages by limiting social contestation, freedom of expression and eroding civil rights.”

Richard Jones, an entrepreneur based in Europe, said, “Government will lag exploitation of data by state and corporate actors in unforeseen ways. Biased censorship (both well-intentioned and corrupt) and propaganda onslaughts will shape opinions as – combined with an anti-scientific revolution – confidence in the institutions and establishment figures essential to peaceful orderly improvement of societies crumbles further. Hysterical smear attacks will further intensify as attempts to placate minority pressure groups continue. Biased technocratic groupthink will continue its march toward authoritarianism. Charismatic leadership will flourish in truly liberal systems. Authoritarianism will take root elsewhere. Online preference surveys may be developed to guide many choices facing government, but it is not clear that can correct the current democratic deficit in a helpful way. As during the Gutenberg process, accompanying the digestion of ‘free-range’ information will be the reevaluation of secular and religious values and objectives.”

John Sniadowski, a systems architect based in the United Kingdom, wrote, “It is proving very difficult to regulate multinational corporations because of the variety of different national government agendas. A globally enacted set of rules to control multinationals is unlikely to happen because some sovereign states have very illiberal and hierarchical control over agendas and see technology as a way to dominate their citizens with their agendas as well as influence the democratic viewpoints of what they consider to be hostile states. Democracy in technological terms can be weaponized.”

Kevin Gross, an independent technology consultant, commented, “Technology can improve or undermine democracy depending on how it is used and who controls it. Right now, it is controlled by too few. The few are not going to share willingly. I don’t expect this to change significantly by 2030. History knows that when a great deal of power is concentrated in the hands of a few, the outcome is not good for the many, not good for democracy.”

Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, said, “As of 2015, the outcomes of upward of 25 of the national elections in the world were being determined by Google’s search engine. Democracy as originally conceived cannot survive Big Tech as currently empowered. If authorities do not act to curtail the power of Big Tech companies – Google, Facebook and similar companies that might emerge in coming years – in 2030, democracy might look very much as it does now to the average citizen, but citizens will no longer have much say in who wins elections and how democracies are run. My research – dozens of randomized, controlled experiments involving tens of thousands of participants and five national elections – shows that Google search results alone can easily shift more than 20% of undecided voters – up to 80% in some demographic groups – without people knowing and without leaving a paper trail (see my paper on the search engine manipulation effect ). I’ve also shown that search suggestions can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split – again, without people knowing they have been influenced. The content of answer boxes can increase the impact of the search engine manipulation effect by an additional 10% to 30%. I’ve identified about a dozen largely subliminal effects like these and am currently studying and quantifying seven of them. I’ve also shown that the ‘Go Vote’ prompt that Google posted on its home page on Election Day in 2018 gave one political party at least 800,000 more votes than went to the opposing party – possibly far more if the prompt had been targeted to the favored party.”

A longtime internet-rights activist based in South Africa responded, “Whether the powers of states and tech corporations can be reined in effectively is the current struggle. The genie is out of the bottle and it does not bode well for systems of democracy that have already been undermined in Western states. A state of global cyber war now exists and is likely to persist over the next decade. The oligopoly of state-supported tech companies, whether in the U.S. or China, will be difficult to break. It is trite to differentiate between a Google or an Alibaba – both received substantial state support from their respective governments – the Googles by failure to apply antitrust law to prevent monopolization, the Alibabas by state protection against competition in China.”

David P. Reed, a pioneering architect of the internet expert in networking, spectrum and internet policy, wrote, “‘Democracy’ in 2030 will be democracy in name only. The mechanisms of widespread corporate surveillance of user behavior and modification of user behavior are becoming so sophisticated that the citizen interests of democratic-structured countries will no longer be represented in any meaningful way. That is, by collecting vast amounts of information about user preferences and responses, and the use of highly targeted behavior modification techniques, citizens’ choices will be manipulated more and more in the interests of those who can pay to drive that system. The current forms of democracy limit citizen participation to election events every few years, where issues and candidates are structured by political parties into highly targeted single-vote events that do not represent individuals’ interests. Instead, a small set of provocative ‘wedge’ issues are made the entire focus of the citizen’s choice. This is not representation of interests. It is a managed poll that can easily be manipulated by behavior modification of the sort that technology is moving toward.”

A pioneering technology editor and reporter for one of the world’s foremost global news organizations wrote, “I do not have great faith that the institutions tasked with ensuring that online discourse is civil and adheres to standards of truth and fairness will be able to prevail over tendencies of autocratic governments and powerful private sector actors to use cyberspace for narrow political ends. … The internet has never had an effective governing body with any considerable clout to set policy that might guarantee network neutrality on a global scale, inhibit censorship and apply such conventions as the Universal Bill of Human Rights. Further, a handful of platforms whose moral compass has been questioned have come to dominate the online world. Some are dominated by governments. Others owe allegiance only to shareholders.”

Jerry Michalski, founder of REX, the Relationship Economy eXpedition, wrote, “‘Capital G’ Government has devolved into a phony consumer mass-marketing exercise. ‘Small g’ governance could involve active, ongoing collaboration among citizens, but it won’t as long as the major platforms they use have as their business models to addict them to TikTok videos, and to sell off their private data to companies that want to stalk them.”

Jonathan Kolber, author of “A Celebration Society: Solving the Coming Automation Crisis,” said, “Deepfakes will completely muddy the difference between facts and falsehood, a distinction that few citizens are equipped to make even now. This will have devastating effects upon democratic institutions and processes. … We are increasingly seeing George Orwell’s nightmare unfold as governments learn to use internet-enabled smart devices (televisions, smartphones, etc.) for surveillance. When the Internet of Things extends to smart cars, smart homes and so forth, the surveillance will be universal and unending. Governments are also increasingly redefining facts and history.”

A professor of computer science said, “Artificial intelligence technology, especially machine learning, has a feedback loop that strongly advantages first movers. Google’s advantages in being a better search engine have now been baked in by its ability to accumulate more data about user search behavior. This dynamic is inherently monopolistic, even more so than prior technological advances. Persuasive technologies built using these technologies are capable of refining and shaping public opinion with a reach and power that totalitarian governments of the 20th century could only dream of. We can be sure that today’s regulatory mood will either dissipate with nothing done, or more likely, become a driver that entrenches existing monopolies further by creating technical demands that no competitor can surmount. Democratic institutions will have a very difficult time countering this dynamic. Uber’s ‘greyball’ program, intended to defeat regulation and meaningful audit, is a harbinger of the future.”

Jonathan Taplin, author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy,” said, “Social media will continue to enable new and more-sophisticated forms of propaganda and disinformation. Artificial intelligence will enable deepfake videos that the average citizen will be taken in by. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter will continue to enable this content in their unending chase for revenue. Politicians will make noises about regulation, but since these platforms will become their primary source of advertising and publicity, they will never commit to the elimination of Safe Harbor and other rules that protect the social networks.”

Bulbul Gupta, founding adviser, Socos Labs, a think tank designing artificial intelligence to maximize human potential, responded, “Given the current state of tech and artificial intelligence ownership, I expect democracy to be even more unequal between the haves and have-nots by 2030, and a major uprising happening from the masses who are being quickly left behind. Tech and AI are owned by their creators, the top 1%, with decisions made about the 100% in every sector of society that have little to no transparency, human judgment or much recourse, and that may not get made the same if they were being forced to happen face to face. People will need their own personal AIs in their corner to protect their basic civil and human rights.”

Carlos Afonso, an internet pioneer and digital rights leader based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, wrote, “ Thomas Piketty and others demonstrate that inequality is, if anything, rising everywhere. Democracy understood as pluralist participation in political processes involving the electoral (supposedly unbiased) choices of government representatives, and the decision-making processes in building policies, legislation and regulation, cannot survive in these conditions. … One of the greatest achievements of the UN community was the consensus agreement on trying to reach the 17 sustainable development goals by 2030. However, conflicts of all kinds, internal and inter-country, give us no hope that the essential components of those goals will be achieved worldwide. Also, there is (partly in consequence of the various manifestations of a growing economic crisis with the financial speculators at the head of these processes) little chance that resources will increase to cover the essential needs of the majority.”

Even former pillars of democracy, Britain and France, are challenged by forces misusing digital tools. Norton Gusky

James Sigaru Wahu, assistant professor, media, culture and communication, New York University and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, wrote, “As we have seen across the Global North, tech has only worked to make worse offline tension. This has resulted in multiple challenges toward notions of democracy as shown by the Brexit debacle, 2016 presidential elections and violence against immigrant groups. We have also seen states get in the act through the use of technology to expand their surveillance powers, as is the case in China and in the UK (with its large CCTV camera presence). States in the Global South have also gotten into the surveillance game, which does not bode well for organizations and people advocating for human rights. What we have thus seen is countries like Russia and China growing in strength in tech surveillance and misinformation/disinformation while the United States and several police departments across the country rely on companies such as Palantir to expand their surveillance on citizens. Both of these have led to disastrous results.”

Lokman Tsui, professor at the School of Journalism and Communication of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, formerly Google’s Head of Free Expression in Asia and the Pacific, said, “The political economy of new technologies that are on the horizon leaves me with many concerns for how they will impact democracy and its institutions. First, many of the new technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data, are closed and centralized in nature. Unlike the open web before it, these technologies are closed and centralized, both in terms of technical design and also in terms of business model. The technology can indeed be used to improve democratic institutions and processes, but it will be hard and there will be many obstacles to overcome. Second, the new technologies are not only not helping democracies, but they, by their design, are also helping and strengthening non-democracies to further censorship and surveillance. While there are also technologies to counteract these tendencies, the balance tends to tip (heavily) in favor of the other side. Third, I’m concerned there is a global rat race toward the bottom when it comes to the collection of (personal) data, which has the potential to enable the suppression of many other rights.”

Norton Gusky, a futurist and advocate for implementing technology to empower people, commented, “For many years I truly believed that the internet would bring greater access to information that would strengthen democracy. However, in the past four to five years, I’ve witnessed a darker side to the internet. We now see countries like Russia interfering in the elections of not just the United States, but other countries throughout the world. I think there will be a swing, but for the next two to four years, the darker forces will prevail. We’ll see countries like Turkey, China and Egypt limiting the access to the ‘truth.’ Even former pillars of democracy, Britain and France, are challenged by forces misusing digital tools.”

Paola Ricaurte, fellow, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, wrote, “Even after we are aware of the negative implications that technology can have on democratic processes, we have not seen significant actions by the U.S. government to limit the power of tech corporations. The extraterritorial control of technology companies will be further expanded and will continue to have consequences for the democracies of the Global South. The knowledge gap between data-rich countries and data-poor countries will deepen.”

Ian O’Byrne, assistant professor of education at the College of Charleston, wrote, “Power and money ultimately influence decisions made by democratic bodies. With growing unrest, citizens can use social media and current/new digital tools to make themselves heard. Ultimately this will be pushed back again by existing powerholders and nothing may ultimately change. The existing powerholders will continue to exert their influence, and citizens will be left to continue to voice their opinions by shouting into the cyberverse.”

Jeffrey Alexander, senior manager for innovation policy at RTI International, said, “In societies where people are accustomed to power being centralized in a few institutions, and where central governments already exert power through surveillance and state authority, digital technology will facilitate intimidation, disinformation and other mechanisms for reducing individual liberty, suppressing minority opinion and enforcing authoritarian control. This will enable such governments to enhance the appearance of following democratic norms, such as offering ‘free and open’ elections, but use those mechanisms to reinforce their power by suppressing dissent well before voters reach the polls. In societies with strong individual education and a tradition of liberty and citizen-driven initiatives, digital technology could help thwart the rise of authoritarian rule, improve oversight and governance of law enforcement and policy processes, and enhance citizen involvement in government and politics.”

John Pike, director and founder of GlobalSecurity.org, said, “Democracy in 2030 will face the best of times and the worst of times. All the optimistic predictions about social media and other online implementations strengthening citizen participation will be realized. All the pessimistic predictions about the ease with which the surveillance state can manipulate public opinion will also be realized. Autocratic regimes such as Russia and China are skilled at such dark arts at home and will practice them globally. In the old days it was pretty obvious that the Communist Party USA member hawking the Daily Worker was working for Moscow, but now attribution is difficult and contested.”

Shane Kerr, an engineer for an internet security firm, said, “Those with resources will be able to harness technology more effectively to influence opinion and policies, ultimately working against democratic ideals. We already see this in a nascent form today, but it will likely evolve into such a pervasive narrative that the average citizen will not even be aware of it, unless they study history (assuming that ‘1984’-style revisionist history does not become the norm).”

[the fact that they]

Sasha Costanza-Chock, associate professor of civic media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote, “Core aspects of the democratic process are deeply stressed or broken. In the United States, we need significant reforms to enable broader and more meaningful participation in democratic decision-making, such as instant runoff or rank-order voting, expansion of voting days and times, expanded voting rights for formerly incarcerated people, campaign finance reform, rethinking the electoral college and much more. Unfortunately, most of these are extremely unlikely. Instead, we seem locked into an elitist and extremely expensive electoral system where the players with the most money and connection to wealthy backers rig the system to their advantage. In this context, many technological tools primarily advance those who can develop and customize them for their own ends – again, the biggest players. There are some countervailing forces such as the ability of insurgent candidates to leverage social media.”

Denise N. Rall, academic researcher of popular culture, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia, said, “I believe technology will help the dictators that we now have stay on top and control more aspects of all of our lives, worsening the prospects for democracy as has already happened in most economic powerhouses of the world (U.S., Russia, China, and right-wing elections in Europe, the absurdity of Brexit in the UK, North Korea, etc.). I think environmental degradation will increase exponentially and people will be fighting over resources like energy, water and food quite soon. I do not think technology will have the power to change these outcomes without real desire by governments to reduce resource consumption and a global birth control program of some kind.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “China has the potential to stall trends toward democracy and regime change through increased monitoring of their citizenry and refinement of their ‘social credit’ legislation/monetization of following the whims of their single party. There is a potential for China to help prop up regimes in developing countries where they have vested interests by distributing such technologies to undemocratic regimes that want to remain in power. I think that India could go either way depending on whether or not widespread corruptions in their political environment exploit or are thwarted by increased access to technology and information by their citizenry.”

Technologies of identification and surveillance will expand in usage, eating away at the private sphere of social life. Retired professor

Richard Lachmann, professor of political sociology at the State University of New York-Albany, said, “Democracy will continue to weaken but technology is only a secondary factor. More important in the decline of democracy are the disappearance or weakening of labor unions, the growing power of corporations in all sectors due to mergers, extreme levels of inequality and the ability of the rich and of political actors to manipulate ‘veto points’ to paralyze government initiatives, which then increases citizens’ cynicism about politicians and lessens their participation. All of these preceded the expansion of the internet and will not be significantly lessened by citizens’ online activities.”

Vince Carducci, researcher of new uses of communication to mobilize civil society and dean at the College of Creative Studies, wrote, “Institutional changes are occurring more as a function of power and money rather than technology, particularly in the selection of candidates and in the judicial system. Those are more of threat than technology.”

A cofounder of one of the internet’s first and best-known online communities wrote, “Democracy is under threat. The blame can’t ultimately go to the internet or to computer-aided automation or to artificial intelligence. The vast power of personal and corporate wealth to wield these technologies in support of their selfish interests will increasingly suppress egalitarian and democratic values.”

 A research scientist for a U.S. federal agency wrote, “We are in a period of growing isolationism, nativism and backlash that will weaken democracies around the world, and it will probably have reached a peak by 2030. Although technology and online dissemination of information will be a tool of information and disinformation, and it will be a tool of policing populations, the underlying economic and environmental shifts are mostly responsible for changes resulting in weaker democracies.”

A retired professor commented, “Corporations will have more power over employees and customers. This will be achieved as part of the ongoing corporate takeover of democratic institutions, which U.S. President Eisenhower warned of long ago. Technologies of identification and surveillance will expand in usage, eating away at the private sphere of social life. Social media will continue to reinforce strong social ties among family and friends while reducing the formation of the weak social ties among acquaintances that support intergroup cooperation necessary in a diverse society. Worsening climate and its consequences for health, agriculture and infrastructure will create increasing irrational forms of blame and global conflict. Global conflicts will include electronic and biological forms of aggression against the militarily powerful countries. More citizen backlash is to be expected, but will likely be directed against inappropriate targets. Societies as we know them will stumble from disaster to disaster, toward a massive die-off of our species. I hope I’m wrong. I would like to see our species survive with its democratic values intact. I have grandchildren. I would like their grandchildren to inherit a better world than the one that our present technocratic capitalist economy is racing toward.”

Anonymous respondents commented:

• “The internet under capitalism will only serve the few, not the many, and democracy will weaken as a result. The problem is about competitive economic imperatives rather than technological affordances.”
• “It’s not the technology that will cause the changes, but the systems and structures that create various tech.”
• “The loudest voices will continue to be those that are heard. While the media may change, the elite will still run everything.”
• “Technology companies and governments have incentives to avoid doing things to address the damaging ways in which internet platforms damage democratic institutions.”
• “Power corrupts. Look at the tech giants today – manipulation and propaganda. They are elitists who think they know best.”
• “The combination of big data and supercomputing power seems to be having a negative effect on democracy, and I see no signs that that can be effectively policed or regulated, particularly given the power (and data troves) of very large internet companies and of governments.”
• “I do not believe that governments understand the tools, and they will fail repeatedly to regulate or organize them properly; I also do not have faith the private companies are democratic, and therefore they are apt to reinforce capitalism alone, not democracy.”

Diminishing the governed: Digitally networked surveillance capitalism creates an undemocratic class system pitting the controllers against the controlled

Charles Ess, professor of digital ethics, at the University of Oslo, said, “Democracy – its foundational norms and principles, including basic rights to privacy, freedom of expression and rights to contest and conscientiously disobey – may survive in some form and in some places by 2030; but there are many strong reasons, alas, to think that it will be pushed to the margins in even traditionally democratic countries by the forces of surveillance capitalism, coupled with increasing citizen feelings of powerlessness against these forces, along with manipulation of information and elections, etc. Not to mention China’s increasingly extensive exports of the technologies of ‘digital authoritarianism’ modelled on their emerging Social Credit System.”

There is simply no reason to believe that technology can strengthen democracy. Gina Neff

Rob Frieden, a professor of telecommunications law at Penn State who previously worked with Motorola and has held senior policy positions at the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said, “Technological innovations appear better suited for expanding government power versus improving the ability of individuals to evade surveillance. Across the entire spectrum of political ideology, national governments can justify increased budgets for ever-more-sophisticated surveillance technologies based on noble-sounding rationales, such as national security. Governments have little incentives and incur even fewer penalties when they fail to calibrate surveillance technology for lawful reasons. Innocent people will have reasonable privacy expectations eroded, particularly with technologies that have massive processing power and range coupled with an ambiguous mandate. Unless and until citizens push back, governments will use surveillance technologies to achieve goals beyond promoting national security. We risk becoming inured and numbed by ubiquitous surveillance, so much so that pushback seems too difficult and unproductive.”

Gina Neff, senior research fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, studying innovation and digital transformation, wrote, “There is simply no reason to believe that technology can strengthen democracy. Western democracies are grappling with the power from the increased concentration of financial capital and its response in the form of the rise of populism. Without attention to strengthening our core technology and communications infrastructure, those forces will continue to damage how people participate in – and indeed make – democracy.”

Zizi Papacharissi, professor of communication and political science, University of Illinois-Chicago, responded, “Our present system of governance supports strong capitalism/soft democracy. Until this balance is reorganized, to support soft capitalism/strong democracy, any technology we create will continue to underserve democracy. In short, the technology we have created was designed to generate profit, not to support democracy. It is possible to do both. We just have not designed it that way, however. By 2030, we will see a weakening of democratic and political processes facilitated by technology. This will happen not because there is something inherently bad or undemocratic about technology. It is because most technology is designed, implemented and/or deployed through mechanisms that support a strong capitalist model that was created centuries ago and needs to be updated in order to be compatible with contemporary societies, democratic and non.”

John Harlow, smart-city research specialist in the Engagement Lab at Emerson College, said, “Although there is rising anti-monopoly sentiment, 2030 is soon, and the dominant digital commons for speech (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) are likely to draw out (in the courts) any regulatory action to change their business models and/or practices. Currently, they are governed by algorithms designed to maximize ‘engagement’ time and thereby advertising revenue, and those algorithms have prioritized extreme content over accurate content (among other problems). This has enabled and supported the rise of the authoritarian far right the world over, and has destabilized faith and participation in democratic institutions and processes.”

An expert on online trust and identity active in the multistakeholder organizations that build and maintain the internet said, “Uses are shaped by social and economic factors that drive toward consolidation and control. Having created a prefect panopticon that maps every endpoint and every device on the network, and with the rise of middle-box collectors that use massive computing power to correlate identifiers, the end result will tilt toward command and control.”

An expert in socio-technical systems wrote, “Social media tech firms will continue to resist control and meaningful regulation in order to preserve their core business, aptly described by Shoshana Zuboff as ‘surveillance capitalism.’ The oligarchs, perhaps still aided by foreign interests, will continue to manipulate public opinion for their own benefit. Economic inequality will continue to increase, as will resentment, misdirected toward immigrants and the ‘elites.’”

An expert in human-computer design wrote, “The decay of democracy should be attributed foremost to capitalism itself, and thus only in a secondary way to technology. Capitalism seems overdue for major shock, enough so that predicting much of anything so far ahead as 2030 seems foolish. The present moment witnesses the close of a decade of ever-intensified distraction engineering.”

An expert in the law who previously worked for a U.S. government agency wrote, “Increasingly sophisticated marketing based on data and inferred data on every individual threatens to cross the line between persuasion and manipulation and coercion, and the First Amendment restraints on government will require a substantial degree of proof of coercion before the government will be able to intervene to safeguard individuals from clear overreaching. The threat of manipulation – and we saw the first signs of that in 2018 with the Cambridge Analytica fiasco – is real and growing. Whether industry or government can curb it is an open question. Industry of course has a conflict of interest – the more successful its manipulation is, the more money industry makes. And government has the restraints of the First Amendment that limit its role.”

[cyberspace as a venue for war, along with land, sea, air, space]

The problem with everyone having a megaphone is that we get drowned in more noise than useful information. Sam Adams

Emilio Velis, executive director, Appropedia Foundation, said, “The way user participation has been shaped by technological platforms for the past 10 years turned the power of decentralized information back to the big corporations, platforms and stakeholders. Or, even worse, it has weakened the capacity of individuals of action while maintaining a false perception that they have control.”

Peter Lunenfeld, professor of design, media arts and digital humanities, University of California-Los Angeles, and author of “Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine,” wrote, “Commercial platform-driven communication technologies like Facebook, Twitter and their eventual successors are unlikely to strengthen representative democracy in the coming decades of the 21st century. They may add ‘voices’ to the conversation, but they will be unlikely to support and sustain the 20th century’s dominant forms of successful democracies – those that designated representatives to debate and legislate on their behalf, from coherent parties that had established ideologies and platforms. What we are starting to see is the development of dialoguing ‘communities’ that mimic the give and take of true democratic action without offering actual power to its participants, like the Italian Five Star Movement, or the emergence of personality-driven, single-issue pop-ups like Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. Like Five Star and the Brexit Party, future political movements will use social media to offer the affordances of democratic dialogue without actually empowering participants to control or direct the movements. Social media technologies are creating skeuomorphs of democracies; they will have design attributes that look and feel democratic, but they will be authoritarian to the core.”

An anonymous responden t commented, “The degree of tracking of comments by individuals will increase dramatically in the future as DeepMind-style algorithms are applied to internet-based material. It will become much harder for people to make comments without knowing that their attitudes are being logged and accumulated by organisations of all manner, so there will be a reluctance to speak one’s mind. Hence ‘free speech’ will be constrained and thus the democratic process hindered.”

A distinguished professor of electrical engineering and computer science who is an expert in the future of communications networks at a U.S. university wrote, “Social media makes it possible to reach voters in targeted ways and deliver information from a distance that is tailored to specific goals, rather than fostering local community discussion and participation. The lack of privacy in internet service platforms, along with artificial intelligence and big data, now make it possible for candidates to identify and influence voters in ways that could not have been imagined only a few years ago. Without corrective action (such as new election rules limiting the use of private citizen information), these new capabilities could lead to increased political instability and possibly the breakdown of entire democratic systems. The U.S. appears to be the first such casualty in the Western world.”

Sam Adams, a 24-year veteran of IBM now working as a senior research scientist in artificial intelligence for RTI International, architecting national-scale knowledge graphs for global good, said, “The internet provides a global megaphone to everyone in that anyone can publish their opinions and views instantly and essentially for free. The problem with everyone having a megaphone is that we get drowned in more noise than useful information. This is even more problematic since interest groups from all sides have used their power and resources to amplify their own voices far above the average citizen, even to the point of effectively silencing the average citizen by burying their smaller voice under a landslide of blaring voices controlled by wealthy interest groups. Given the interest-driven news cycles and echo chambers of social media, only the loudest or most extreme voices get repeated. This further exacerbates the level of emotion in the public discussion and drives listeners to the extremes instead of more common ground. A democracy must fairly represent its people’s views if it is to succeed. And part of that fairness in this technology-dominant world must include balancing the volume of the voices.”

Philip Rhoades, a business futurist and consultant based in Australia, wrote, “The neoliberal, developed Western world is sliding into fascism as the world’s sixth mass extinction reaches its inevitable conclusion. As this ecological collapse and political regression proceeds, modern technology will mostly be used for suppression of the great majority of people/citizens. Some technology may help defend the populations against state suppression and terror, but its effectiveness will be minor in the greater scheme of things.”

David Noelle, professor and researcher into computational cognitive neuroscience, University of California-Merced, wrote, “In the U.S., policy and public opinion have been increasingly shaped so as to support powered interests rather than the interests of the people. Regulation is dismissed as a threat to our troubled economy, encouraging corporate powers to pursue dangerous short-sighted strategies for producing return for investors. The unrepresented have been all but muted by electoral processes designed to sustain those in power. The most influential technologies of our times have been designed to depend on large centralized infrastructure. Data drives many new innovations, and few are in a position to collect and aggregate extensive data on the people. The focus on technologies that depend on controllable infrastructure, whether privately held or manipulated by political powers, will strengthen the positions of those currently in power, increasingly limiting the ability of the people to demand democratic representation. Note that this opinion is not intended as a call to limit technology but as a cry to radically alter political and economic institutions so as to provide representation to all of the people. A more democratic system will produce more democratic technologies.”

Deirdre Williams, an independent internet activist based in the Caribbean, commented, “We are being taught that convenience is the most important priority. ‘Innovation’ is killing ingenuity. I would expect that over the next 10 years the pendulum will swing in the opposite direction, but it will take a while to repair the divide that has been (deliberately?) introduced between citizen and government, and to remind governments of their duty of care to all of the citizens.”

Giacomo Mazzone, head of institutional relations, European Broadcasting Union and Eurovision, wrote, “I don’t believe that internet platforms will be able to self-reform, despite all announcements and efforts shown. And so only a break-up solution or ‘publicization’ of the internet giants could change the future. The amount of power that has been transferred by citizens and by states to these actors that are not accountable to anybody (even to the U.S. government) is too big to think that they could renounce voluntarily. Do you remember ‘Sliding Doors’ – the 1998 movie with Gwyneth Paltrow as leading actor? The future could (in a 50/50 chance) go totally wrong or fantastically well. A digital interconnected society based on trust and respect of individual and human rights could be the next arcadia. A digital interconnected and mass-surveillance-oriented society based on exploitation of human weakness and on polarization of society could be the perfect implementation of the Orwell dystopia of ‘1984.’ The two futures are equally possible. It’s up to government and civil society to decide in which direction we shall go.”

Scott B. MacDonald, an experienced chief economist and international economic adviser, said, “The future has a very real potential to be a dark Orwellian place, transfixed between strong technology under the control of a few wealthy and powerful and the great unwashed masses made economically redundant by machines and waiting for their daily dose of Soylent Green. One big change is that people may no longer have to go and vote but vote from hand-held or implanted communications devices. If we are not careful technology will be a device for greater control, not democracy, much as in China. Facial recognition anyone?”

Estee Beck, author of “A Theory of Persuasive Computer Algorithms for Rhetorical Code Studies,” commented, “Unless Congress takes action and passes protective consumer legislation to limit private industry powers with technological growth, i.e., surveillance and privacy erosion, democratic institutions will face greater dangers from domestic and foreign threats, loss of trust among the American public and devaluation of private technological companies among the marketplace. The infrastructure of technology, with faulty programming that allows for penetration and deep hacks, the decisions made now with select leaders in technology companies driving pro-China surveillance growth, anti-U.S. and Mexico relations via border surveillance, marketing of biosecurity technologies and the eventual promotion of artificial intelligence consumer goods and services will divide the faith of the nation and leave the American public ill-trusting of Congress to take action for the public good.”

Matt Colborn, a freelance writer and futurist based in Europe, said, “I do not deny the potential for technology to strengthen or even revolutionise democracy. In fact, this is what I hoped for at the beginning of the revolution in the 1990s. However, from a citizen perspective, the new technology seems to me to have already reduced mental autonomy and the capacity for intelligent choice. Why? 1) Platforms like YouTube seem to be more appropriate for distributing propaganda and for involuntary brainwashing because of the algorithms used. 2) Extreme tribalism has also increased because of the ‘echo chamber’ nature of personalised media. 3) Government and corporations are demolishing any kind of privacy. Neurotech, where thoughts are read, is the ‘final frontier’ of this. The problem, too, is the toxic interaction between archaic authoritarian institutions, right-wing populism and new tech. These effects mean that democracy is diluted whilst a ‘surveillance’ state is strengthened and while deep tribal divisions are exacerbated. Although there are certainly counter movements to this, economic inequality is such that basically the rich and powerful are in a position to cash in on these developments and the rest of us are not. Those who want political innovation will find it tough in this environment.”

Democratic regimes could become less democratic from the misuse of surveillance systems with the justification of national security. Anonymous respondent

An artificial intelligence expert predicted, “‘Democracy’ is likely to be even more of an elitist endeavor by 2030 than it is now. Life is good if you’re a big corporation, but not if you’re an ordinary working-class citizen. Who has a voice in this world will depend even more on money and power. Civic technologists will first promise to save democracy with technology but then start charging for it after five years because ‘someone has to pay for maintenance.’ And they will get away with it, because no one will remember that political rights are a basic right and not a commodity.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “Recently Hong Kong protesters had to buy single-trip transit cards with cash to be able to exercise democratic power; this will be impossible when mass face-recognition technology is implemented. Essentially, it is becoming almost impossible to behave democratically.”

• “Technology is going to aggregate people’s individual voices and remove individual democracy.”
• “Democratic regimes could become less democratic from the misuse of surveillance systems with the justification of national security.”
• “I am sadly confident that democratic institutions will not be affected in any positive way in future by citizen’s perspectives; instead, technology will continue to create disenfranchised, disempowered citizens.”

Exploiting digital illiteracy: Citizens’ lack of digital fluency and their apathy produce an ill-informed and/or dispassionate public, weakening democracy and the fabric of society

James S. O’Rourke IV, a University of Notre Dame professor whose research specialty is reputation management, said, “As Neil Postman wrote in 1985, ‘We no longer engage in civil public discourse. We are simply amusing ourselves to death.’ Among the more insidious effects of digital life has been a reduction in tolerance for long-form text. People, particularly the young, will read, but not if it involves more than a few paragraphs. Few among them will buy and read a book. News sites have discovered that more people will click on the video than scroll through the text of a story. Given how easy it now is to manipulate digital video images, given how easy it is to play to people’s preconceptions and prejudice, and given how indolent most in our society have become in seeking out news, opinion and analysis, those who seek to deceive, distract or bully now have the upper hand. Jesuits have long cautioned that ‘No man can understand his own argument until he has visited the position of a man who disagrees.’ Such visits are increasingly rare. The long-predicted ‘filter bubble’ effect is increasingly visible. People will simply not seek out, read or take time to understand positions they do not understand or do not agree with. A sizeable majority now live with a thin collection of facts, distorted information and an insufficient cognitive base from which to make a thoughtful decision. Accurate information is no longer driving out false ideas, propaganda, innuendo or deceit.”

Bernie Hogan, senior research fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, said, “Technology without civics is capitalism with crystallised logic and unbounded scope. Democratic institutions and civic societies are premised on boundaries and intelligible scales, like the ‘local paper’ or the ‘provincial radio.’ Technology is allowing for the transcendence of scale, which we might think is great. Certainly, from a logistics and delivery side it is very impressive. But social cohesion requires levels of understanding that there’s a coherent bounded population to care about and define one’s identity through and against. It requires people seeing and doing things as more than consumers and occasional partisan voters.”

People don’t know what to believe, so they often choose either to believe nothing or to believe whatever their gut tells them. Research scientist

Larry Rosen, a professor emeritus of psychology at California State University-Dominguez Hills, known as an international expert on the psychology of technology, wrote, “I worry that many in the public will and do not have the skills to determine truth from fiction, and twisted truth can and does lead to misunderstanding the content.”

Carolyn Heinrich, professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University, said, “As internet content is increasingly customized for us by who we know and where we click, the range of information and perspectives we are exposed to will narrow unless we make the effort to read more widely ourselves. To minimize the negative effects, we have to proactively make the effort to broaden our circles of communication and sources of information/knowledge. As technology increasingly pervades our K-12 school curricula, we also need to examine exactly what technology vendors are conveying in their content, and who is the ‘face’ of that content in instructional videos. That is something we are currently investigating in our research .”

Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy and political science, Rutgers University, responded, “In the U.S. anyway, increasing political apathy has accompanied increasing use of technology. It has, on the one hand, been diversional from attention to matters of governance and citizenship. On the other, the centrifugal forces of interests made more available by increasing technology has eroded the core knowledge base of citizens, as well as the norms of citizenship. It does allow for mass movements to organize more quickly and put pressure on leaders, but the right-wing, post-recession populism and withdrawal from globalism is not, in my judgment, a good thing.”

An anonymous respondent said, “Unfortunately, fundamentally undemocratic processes in the United States, like the electoral college, will continue to be undermined by fake news and technology-backed manipulation of rural states, which have outsized electoral college voting power but typically lack education and will likely remain vulnerable to such exploits.”

A fellow at a major university’s center for internet and society wrote, “I am worried that the ease with which hostile powers and trolls can manipulate public opinion will only increase and become more sophisticated, leading to voters having increasingly lower levels of factual information at their disposal or, worse yet, increasing apathy toward or cynicism about voting and the democratic process entirely.”

Eric Royer, assistant professor of political science, Saint Louis University, said, “The breakdown of norms creates an environment of false truths that is directly tied to political polarization, especially among the fringes, and citizen mistrust and apathy with anything ‘government.’ Technology, especially in social media platforms, holds unlimited potential to make the world less of an unfamiliar place, however, its manipulation and influence in our daily lives is truly misunderstood at the current expense of democratic processes and institutions globally and domestically.”

A research scientist focused on fairness, transparency and accountability in artificial intelligence said, “The rise of fake news and manipulated media like deepfakes has sown a greater distrust of media and institutions that is undermining democracy, leading to a less-informed and less civically engaged population. People don’t know what to believe, so they often choose either to believe nothing or to believe whatever their gut tells them. Moreover, foreign actors that use social media manipulation tactics to sway elections further undermine democracy’s legitimacy.”

Continuous media weakens people’s ability to seek information and form their own opinion. Gretchen Steenstra

Mark Andrejevic, associate professor of communications, University of Iowa, wrote, “Much of my career has been built around my profound concerns about the impact that technology is having on democratic processes of deliberation, public accountability and representation. This is because technology needs to be understood within the context of the social relations within which it is deployed, and these have been conducive to privileging an abstract consumerist individualism that suppresses the underlying commitment to a sense of common, shared or overlapping interests necessary to participation in democratic society. I see the forms of hyper-customization and targeting that characterize our contemporary information environment (and our devices and mode of information ‘consumption’) as fitting within a broader pattern of the systematic dismantling of social and political institutions (including public education, labor unions and social services) that build upon and help reproduce an understanding of interdependence that make the individual freedoms we treasure possible. Like many, I share concerns about rising political polarization and the way this feeds upon the weaponization of false and misleading information via automated curation systems that privilege commercial over civic imperatives. These trends predate the rise of social media and would not have the purchase they do without the underlying forms of social and civic de-skilling that result from the offloading of inherently social functions and practices onto automated systems in ways that allow us to suppress and misrecognize underlying forms of interdependence, commonality and public good. I am not optimistic that anything short of a social/political/economic disaster will divert our course.”

Carlos Afonso, an internet pioneer and digital rights leader based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, wrote, “Thinking here of a planet with 7 billion-plus persons, most of them (including many of the supposedly ‘connected’) are unable to discern the many aspects of disinformation that reaches them through traditional (entrepreneurial) media, social networking apps and local political influences.”

A longtime CEO and internet and telecommunications expert commented, “Citizens will increasingly act absent of any understanding of critical analysis and reasoning, fact-checking or even rule of law. Under the guise of ‘acting out against injustice’ we will continue to see cyber vigilantism, whereby social media firestorms effectively ‘try and convict’ anyone accused of word or deed not supportive of their values.”

Gretchen Steenstra , a technology consultant for associations and nonprofit organizations, wrote, “I am concerned about higher velocity of information that does not include all critical and supporting information. Data is used to inform one view without context. Consumers do not fact-check (on many issues regardless of party). Americans are not focused on social responsibility or downstream impacts – they only want instant results. Continuous media weakens people’s ability to seek information and form their own opinion. Constant connectedness prevents reflection and allows your brain to relax. No one can argue with the desire for understanding.”

A fellow at a think tank’s center for technology and innovation wrote, “Democracy will be driven by more artificial intelligence systems, which will automate a range of decisions. Consequently, individuals may have limited input into their own decisions because data will be extrapolated from machines. What this will mean is a looser connection to democratic processes or connections driven by what one sees, hears and senses through dominant platforms. Without some level of policy restraint when it comes to specific use cases, such as voting, technology may serve to erode public trust, while simultaneously relying less on actual public input due to the level of sophistication that emerging technologies offer.”

Ayden Férdeline, technology policy fellow, Mozilla Foundation, responded, “Technology will continue to be exploited by those who seek to increase political apathy and undermine our trust in established institutions. This may happen more subtly than in the past, but the corrosive effect on democracy will be just the same.”

The internet amplifies trends that have been with us for a while – extremism and apathy. Pamela McCorduck

Philip J. Salem, professor emeritus, Texas State University, expert in complexity of organizational change, said, “People will become increasingly more careful about how they use the internet. Each person must be more mindful of use. My concern is that reflexive, non-mindful reactions can spread so fast and have more tragic consequences with the speed of the internet.”

Jeff Johnson, a professor of computer science, University of San Francisco, who previously worked at Xerox, HP Labs and Sun Microsystems, said, “Today’s social media encourages the spread of unverified information, which can skew policymaking and elections. People tend to be lazy and do not even read most of the articles they comment on, much less check the truth of the articles. In the TV era, before social media, putting out false information about a political opponent or ballot measure was expensive and subject to laws against ‘false advertising.’ Political hit pieces had to be well-funded, vaguely worded and carefully timed (to just before the election) in order to sway elections. That is no longer true. Strong regulation of social media could perhaps mitigate this, but such regulation seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.”

Pamela McCorduck, writer, consultant and author of several books, including “Machines Who Think,” said, “I am not sanguine about democracy right now. The internet amplifies trends that have been with us for a while – extremism and apathy. Our proportion of potential voters who actually vote only rose once or twice in the past few elections. Mostly it is dismal. Partly this is a result of voter suppression (not just removing voters from the rolls, but also making the process of voting far more cumbersome than it needs to be). Partly this is the realization by voters that elected officials are more beholden to dark money than to the people who elected them. I hope I am wrong about the future of this country I love.”

Luis German Rodriguez, researcher and consultant on knowledge society and sociotechnical impact based at Universidad Central de Venezuela, commented, “Democracy is likely to be weakened by 2030. … Authoritarian rule seems to be growing stronger wherever you look, supported by the emerging technologies.”

• “People will not use the internet to research the issue, rather, they will simply go with whatever biased opinion is put in front of them.”
• “The problem is that with the erosion of critical-thinking skills, true journalism versus opinion journalism (and the prevalence of ‘sound bites’ in lieu of serious debate based on facts) lack of proper policy and governance principles, these tools are being used to spread false information.”
• “The public made more gullible by a short attention spans, eroding reasoning skills, becomes a malleable target for those who seek to erode the fundamental institutions of our democracy.”
• “I’m less concerned about technology than I am the ability and willingness of my fellow citizens to educate themselves about the sources of information they consult.”
• “The biggest threat to democracy is people’s lack of critical-thinking skills to be able to distinguish between information and misinformation.”

Waging info-wars: Technology can be weaponized by anyone, anywhere, anytime to target vulnerable populations and engineer elections

Richard Bennett, founder of the High-Tech Forum and ethernet and Wi-Fi standards co-creator, wrote, “The economic model of social media platforms makes it inevitable that these tools will do more harm than good. As long as spreading outrage and false information generates more profits than dealing in facts, reason, science and evidence, the bad guys will continue to win. Until we devise a model where doing the right thing is more profitable than exploiting the public’s ignorance, the good guys will keep losing. … One hypothetical change that I would like to see would be the emergence of social media platforms that moderate less for tone and emotion and more for adherence to standards of truthfulness and evidence. Making this approach succeed financially is the major obstacle.”

Mutale Nkonde, adviser on artificial intelligence at Data & Society and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, wrote, “Without significant regulation, our future elections will be ruled by the parties that can optimize social media recommendation algorithms most effectively. In the present moment, those are parties like Cambridge Analytica who used fear, racism and xenophobia to influence elections across the world.”

Eduardo Villanueva-Mansilla, associate professor of communications at Pontificia Universidad Catolica, Peru, and editor of the Journal of Community Informatics, said, “The lack of agreement about how to deal with these issues among governments is a serious threat to democracy, as much as the potential for misuse of technological innovations. In the next decade, the complete control by a few multinational firms will be completely outside of regulatory and policy reach of developing countries’ governments. This will increase the instability that has been normalized as a feature of governance in these countries.”

This is not like armed revolution; this is small numbers of employees able to affect what thousands, if not millions, see. Rich Salz

An expert in the ethics of autonomous systems based in Europe said, “Digital devices provide more and more new means to enhance the power of leaders to control people and to manipulate an inferior substitute for democracy to their benefit. They simulate and broadcast false flavours of democratic representations to the population. Decisions that restrict people’s rights, autonomy and freedom are promoted as necessary for enhancing the security, care and well-being of the population, while in fact the purpose is to protect the interests of those who seek power and influence. New digital means (biometrics, facial recognition, big data, deep learning, artificial intelligence) allow those in power to recognize and to profile people (position, behavior, location, ways of thinking, ideas, political opinions, level of life, health, origins, money, social relationships and so on). Stakeholders can use these devices to make appropriate decisions concerning what they consider subversive people and moreover to fight them if necessary. Robots and autonomous AI systems will be very efficient slaves to help to educate people who will not fit the requirements and rules imposed by the dominant class. This model will be developed in more and more states in the world and will progressively narrow freedom and decrease the quality of life of ordinary people belonging to medium and low social classes. At the same time, the field of available jobs will be more and more narrow because AI and robots will replace human beings in most areas and lead the majority of people to be unable to find means to work to support and fulfill themselves.”

Larry Masinter, internet pioneer, formerly with Adobe, ATT Labs, Xerox PARC, who helped create internet and web standards with IETF and W3C, said, “Traditional democracy and democratic institutions rely on geographically defined boundaries for constituencies. Enabling technology will accelerate the rise of cross-jurisdictional malfeasance, whether it’s called collusion or something else.”

An anonymous respondent warned, “Authoritarians will weaken checks and balances, turn courts into extensions of those in power and thus undermine representative democracy – enabled by the manipulation of digital media to stoke fear and mask inconvenient truths. … Extreme partisanship is putting all of our democratic institutions at risk to the point that shared power and orderly transitions may not exist in 10 years. Civil unrest seems inevitable.”

Rich Salz, senior architect, Akamai Technologies, wrote, “Individual citizens cannot stand up to the organized ‘power’ of other countries. This is not like armed revolution; this is small numbers of employees able to affect what thousands, if not millions, see.”

Heywood Sloane, entrepreneur and banking and securities consultant, said, “The current U.S. administration is leading the way to misuse technology. It permeates the public air with disinformation and lies, while putting a heavy hand on the scale in the background. It welcomes trolls to conferences in the White House and encourages them. Even if the administration changes it will take time and work to undo the damage. Media technology corporations have lost control of their platforms and marketing staffs – witness Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Already we have rogue state sponsors altering our dialogues, yet we ignore them and chortle away with their leaders.”

An associate dean of research for science and engineering said, “Over the next 10 years, we will see an increase in the current trend of using technology to further engineer elections (including gerrymandering) and to target those most vulnerable to manipulation (on all political sides). A result is overrepresentation in elected government of self-interested minority points of view (extremes on many sides), increased obstacles to ousting parties from power (especially in two-party systems like the U.S.), and, for a while at least, the continued divisiveness of political discourse.”

A consultant who works for U.S. government agencies said, “The biggest fear of technology will be the use of artificial intelligence. While at present we have control of AI, in time we will lose that control. As systems are augmented with AI, it will remove the human element over time. We can say what we like about technology and our control of technology, but in time external forces will replace the human element. This will happen in all areas of technology, including the governmental technology world. At some point it will go beyond its own programing doing what it believes is in our best interest.”

Sowing confusion: Tech-borne reality distortion is crushing the already-shaky public trust in the institutions of democracy

The leader of a technology innovation group at one of the world’s top five technology organizations wrote, “Technology has already and will continue to place huge strains on democracy. First, digital technology makes it immensely easy for a small number of leveraged actors to exercise great control over our public discourse. We see this as they exercise control over the information made available and presented to citizens. Second, digital technology makes it immensely easy for actors to hide or obscure their involvement and their intent. Third, digital technology makes it immensely easy to erode truth through fabrications or amplifications.”

Hate, polarization, oversimplification and lack of well-considered thought are and will be on the increase. Alejandro Pisanty

Nigel Cameron, president emeritus, Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, said, “I fear deepening distortions in public perception by the leveraging of digital media on the part of governments (our own and foreign), tech corporations and other actors – as new technologies like fake video make it even easier to shape opinion. It will be some time before (assuming it happens) we have the will and the tech to rein in these abuses. As things stand, partisanship by politicians and the ‘sorry, not sorry’ approach of Mark Zuckerberg and the other tech leaders portend deepening problems.”

[Technology]

Alejandro Pisanty, professor at UNAM, the National University of Mexico, and an activist in multistakeholder internet governance, wrote, “Hate, polarization, oversimplification and lack of well-considered thought are and will be on the increase. They are orders of magnitude easier to construct and propagate than the ways of countering them (the ‘bullshit asymmetry’ principle, on steroids). Manipulation of elections and other processes will continue to be rife as long as there exist those who want to do it and those susceptible to manipulation. Among the hardest hit will be the U.S., which has a gullible population unable to see the meta-layers of attack they are subjected to. There is hope for improvement in a smaller, smarter, more-democratic sector of society fighting the acritical reactions of the naive and uneducated. Better information, resilient systems (by design) and deliberations nested at all levels from the ultra-local to the global, an architecture of multistakeholder deliberations and decisions, and a lot of luck, may lead to improvement. Otherwise splintering and other forms of dark days loom.”

Rich Ling, professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; expert on the social consequences of mobile communication, said, “The forces that want to confuse/undercut legitimate information are learning how to best use these systems. They are also learning how to calibrate the messages they send so as to enhance their divisiveness. This division plays on confirmation bias and, in turn, undercuts the common ground that is needed for effective governing and democracy.”

Karl Auerbach, chief technology officer, InterWorking Labs, active in internet design since the early 1970s, had less faith in multistakeholder organizations, writing, “Democracy is dying at the hands of a concept called ‘stakeholder.’ This has little to do with technology except that people are being led to believe that they are not skilled enough or smart enough to decide for themselves, that technological experts ought to decide on their behalf. We are moving toward not improved democracy (direct or indirect) but closer to an oligarchy of ‘stakeholders.’”

Glyn Moody, a prolific technology journalist, blogger and speaker based in Europe, said, “Lies propagate more easily than truth. It is proving far easier to use the latest technology to undermine the things we thought were safe and stable. It is proving very hard to counter that abuse of technology.”

A computing science professor emeritus from a top U.S. technological university wrote, “As artificial intelligence technologies are employed to create ever-more-realistic disinformation videos and as multiplication of software AI disinformation bots can be replicated and spread easily by individuals or small groups, more and more people will be fooled by disinformation, thus weakening our democracy.”

A professor of sociology at a major California university said, “Powerful governments and their allies are using technology to destroy the concept of a single, accepted truth. While not always succeeding in implanting particular beliefs in the minds of citizens and residents, the constant assault on truth leads to fatigue and resignation, that the actual truth cannot be known, or that all political actors are equally bad. This resignation, moving into apathy, allows those in power to behave badly and centralize their power. The wild card is whether new technologies can detect bots and fake video/audio, and whether mainstream media and social media companies behave responsibly to bring an accepted truth back to life.” Alan Honick, project director for PROSOCIAL, said, “My work is focused on the need to make the internet and associated information technologies trustworthy and reliable. … The most important variable for the question at hand is whether or not information technology can move in the direction of becoming a trusted and reliable source of information, and at present the trend seems to indicate not.”

Annemarie Bridy, professor of law specializing in the impact of new technologies on existing legal frameworks, said, “Social media platforms have a steep hill to climb over the coming years when it comes to dealing effectively with disinformation and coordinated inauthentic behavior aimed at manipulating voters and electoral outcomes. Viral disinformation online will continue to be a serious threat to democratic institutions and the integrity of elections.”

Garth Graham, a longtime leader of Telecommunities Canada, said, “The digital age is characterised by a disintermediation of authority. Authority as a principle for structural organization is disappearing. Democracy is predicated by the agreement to accept authority to represent. Most people are no longer willing to accept that anyone else can represent them.”

Stephanie Fierman, partner, Futureproof Strategies, said, “Many parties have an incentive to issue false and damaging statements and content that people believe. Until we return to a world in which a fact is a fact is a fact, we will see a continuing degradation of truth and the existence of checks and balances, both of which being so vital to the presence of democracy.”

Stuart Umpleby, retired professor of management and director of research at George Washington University, commented, “The operators of social media platforms, such as Facebook, need to take responsibility for content. Otherwise they benefit by distributing falsehoods.”

Viral disinformation online will continue to be a serious threat to democratic institutions and the integrity of elections. Annemarie Bridy

Satish Babu, founding director of the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software, said, “If the world does not recognize the pitfalls and take corrective action, technology is likely to adversely impact the quality and practice of democracy. In particular, the pragmatics of democracy will deteriorate into an ‘anything goes,’ free-for-all fight where artificial intelligence will be used to dig up or magnify or even create antecedents of candidates from historical records and social media will be used to push such ‘facts’ to every citizen.”

A professor of sociology and public policy wrote, “Bot armies and databases of persuadable people that include information on what sets them off empower the worst nationalistic and international actors to tear down democracies. Via technology, people can enter alternate realities where others reinforce their fantasies and strengthen them – flat earthers, those who believe in vaccine and climate conspiracies, moon landing hoaxers and so forth. These are problematic in their own right, but also lend themselves to further manipulation, destruction of trust in institutions, scapegoat seeking, and the rejection of science.”

Filippo Menczer, a grantee in the Knight Foundation’s Democracy Project and professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University, said, “Technology … mediates our access to information and opinions. This will in part strengthen democracy, for example making it easier to check facts. It will also weaken democracy, as vulnerabilities due to the interplay of cognitive, social and algorithmic biases continue to be exploited and new ones are discovered. On balance, my prediction is that things will get worse before they get better. We are only just beginning discussions about the legal implications of countermeasures, for example the issues related to social bots, disinformation campaigns, suppression of speech and the First Amendment in the U.S.”

Nancy Heltman , manager of a state agency based in the U.S., wrote, “The negative aspects of bots and influencers driving opinions are likely to outweigh the positive aspects of increasing involvement in the political process.”

David Gans, musician, songwriter and journalist, said, “I fear that deliberate falsehoods will continue to crowd objective reality out of the discourse. The social networks seem neither able nor particularly willing to intervene on behalf of the truth, and there are powerful and well-funded entities with a strong interest in misinforming the public.”

A research leader for a U.S. federal agency said, “Working to be respectful of First Amendment rights while not allowing the perpetuation of mis- or disinformation is of critical concern. I don’t expect that to be resolved within the next 10 years. We are living in the times of 50 shades of gray. In many cases, the determination is not black and white. The headline may be misleading, but not entirely untrue. I think that’s appealing to the media right now.”

Kenneth R. Fleischmann, associate professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas-Austin, wrote, “Technology will have complex effects on society that will be difficult to predict, that depend on the decisions of tech companies, governments, the press and citizens. … Trust will be key, not just blind trust, but trust based on transparent provenance of information that can help users exercise their autonomy and agency.”

• “Technology will weaken our ability to come to consensus; by nurturing smaller communities and fringe ideas, it will make compromise and finding a modus vivendi much more difficult.”
• “Social media will continue to erode faith in facts and reason; echo chambers and emotion-driven communications plus security problems in voting will undermine public discourse and faith in elections.”
• “There seems to be no realistic way to check the effects of IT on polarization and misinformation. The true beliefs and actions of political leaders will continue to have decreasing influence on voting.”
• “Foreign countries and hate groups will grow more sophisticated in their ability to infiltrate the web with biased stories and ads designed to suppress or sway voters and negatively impact public opinion.”
• “While it enables voices to be heard, tech has already weakened democracy by enabling governments and corporations to erode privacy and silence those who might otherwise speak out.”
• “We don’t need mass armies anymore. New technology enables centralized control to a degree never imagined before.”
• “In 2030, there will still be splintering and increased political polarization as individuals are able to challenge democratic ideals and influence political processes through anonymous activities.”
• “Democracy is, and will always be, filled with fake news and preposterous bloviation.”

Weakening journalism: There seems to be no solution for problems caused by the rise of social media-abetted tribalism and the decline of trusted, independent journalism

Christopher Mondini, vice president of business engagement for ICANN, commented, “The decline of independent journalism and critical thinking and research skills resulting from easy reliance on the internet make citizens more susceptible to manipulation and demagoguery. A growing proportion of politically active citizens are digital natives with no recollection of life before social media became the primary medium for debate and influence. The pursuit of clicks, retweets and page views encourages extremist or provocative rhetoric. Viral memes and soundbites distract from thoughtful analysis, deliberation and debate. Of course, the vast majority of citizens are not politically active, but they increasingly consume news and adopt a worldview shaped by their online communities. Participation in political processes may rise because of newly inflamed passions brought about by online discourse, but they may crowd out more measured voices.”

Yaakov J. Stein, CTO, RAD Data Communications, based in Israel, responded, “Social media as they are at present have a polarizing effect that destabilizes democracy. The reason is that advertising (and disinformation) is targeted at and tailored to people according to their preexisting views (as predicted based on their social media behavior). This strengthens these preexisting views, reinforces disparagement of those with opposing views and weakens the possibility of being exposed to opposing views. The result is that free press no longer encourages democracy by enabling people to select from a marketplace of ideas. Instead the right to free press is being used to protect the distribution of disinformation and being manipulated to ensure that people are not exposed to the full spectrum of viewpoints. Perhaps an even more insidious result is that people attempting to keep open minds can no longer trust information being offered online, but that free information online has led to the bankruptcy of traditional news outlets that spend resources on fact-checking.”

The decline of independent journalism and critical thinking and research skills resulting from easy reliance on the internet make citizens more susceptible to manipulation and demagoguery. Christopher Mondini

Rey Junco, director of research at CIRCLE in the Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University, said, “We can expect that attempts to influence public perceptions of candidates and elections are not only ongoing, but that they will continue to be successful. Technology use by citizens, civil society and governments will first weaken core aspects of democracy and democratic representation before there is a restructuring of technological systems and processes that will then help strengthen core aspects of democracy. There are two issues at play: 1) Ideological self-sorting in online spaces that is bolstered by algorithmic polarization and 2) The relative unwillingness of technology companies to address misinformation on their platforms. Individuals who get their news online (a larger proportion who are young – Pew Research ) choose media outlets that are ideologically similar and rarely read news from the opposing side (Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2018). In fact, these individuals are rarely exposed to moderate viewpoints (Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2018). Social media, in turn, allow for not just informational self-sorting as with online news, but such self-sorting is bolstered through algorithmic curation of feeds that promotes ideological separation. … Although major technology companies are aware of how misinformation was promoted and propagated through their networks during the 2016 elections and resultant congressional hearings on the topic, little has been done to mitigate the impact of such deliberate spreading of misinformation. Analyses from the security and intelligence communities show that state actors continue their attempts to manipulate public sentiment in social spaces, while the increased polarization of traditional outlets has minimized the impact of these reports. State actors are emboldened by the fact that the United States has not addressed the spread of misinformation through technological change or through public education.”

An associate professor of computer science who previously worked with Microsoft, said, “I worry about three related trends: 1) the increasing decentralization of news generation, 2) the lack of easy-to-use, citizen-facing mechanisms for determining the validity of digital media objects like videos and 3) personalization ecosystems that increase the tendency toward confirmation bias and intellectual narrowing. All three trends decrease the number of informed voters and increase social division. Governments will eventually become less averse to regulating platforms for news generation and news dissemination, but a key challenge for the government will be attracting top tech talent; currently, that talent is mostly lured to industry due to higher salaries and the perception of more interesting work. Increasing the number of technologists in government (both as civil servants and as politicians) is crucial for enabling the government to proactively address the negative societal impacts of technology.”

Kenneth Sherrill, professor emeritus of political science, Hunter College, said, “When I’m pessimistic, I believe that the fragmentation of information sources will interact with selective attention – the tendency only to follow news sources that one expects to agree with. This will generate even greater polarization without any of the moderating effects and respect for democratic processes that come from genuine participation. This can lead to the collapse of democratic processes. Right now, I’m pessimistic. The 2020 election may be the test.”

Eric Keller, lecturer in international relations and U.S. foreign policy, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, wrote, “Social media will heighten the current strong polarization that we already have. This is mainly from ‘information stovepipes’ and mutually reinforcing narratives that demonize the opposition. This creates the danger of democratic institutions being degraded in the name of ‘saving’ them from the opposing political party.”

A Europe-based internet governance advocate and activist said, “If current trends continue, there won’t be a real democracy in most countries by 2030. The internet’s funding model based on targeted advertising is destroying investigative journalism and serious reporting. More and more of what is published is fake news. Citizens cannot make informed decisions in the absence of reliable information.”

The coordinator of a public-good program in Bulgaria wrote, “By 2030 we will still see fighting between small groups and communities that leads to extremes. This will give ground to governments to become more authoritative and build up even stronger control via the internet.”

Bill D. Herman, researcher working at the intersection of human rights and technology said, “The combination of news fragmentation, systematic disinformation and motivated reasoning will continue to spiral outward. We’re headed for a civil war, and the hydra-headed right-wing hate machine is the root of the problem.”

An internet pioneer and technology developer and administrator said, “The foundation of democracy is an informed public. By undermining the economic foundation of journalism and enabling the distribution of disinformation on a mass scale, social media has unleashed an unprecedented assault on the foundation of democracy. The decline of newspapers, to just highlight one downside, has had a quantifiable effect (as measured in bond prices) on governmental oversight and investor trust.”

A professor and expert in learning in 3D environments said, “The explosion in the volume of information has led to the majority of people tending to rely on or trust the major platforms to filter and distribute information rather than managing their own personal learning environments with feeds from trusted independent sources. … As the filtering mechanisms become more sophisticated and more personalized to the individual, the opportunities for the wealthy to manipulate opinion will become even greater. The democratic system depends fundamentally on free access to reliable information, and once this is gone the system will effectively become less and less democratic.”

Mike Douglass, an independent developer, wrote, “Facebook sold people on the idea that a race to accumulate ‘friends’ was a good thing – then people paid attention to what those ‘friends’ said. As we now know, many of those ‘friends’ were bots or malicious actors. If we continue in this manner, then things can only get worse. We need to reestablish the real-life approach to gaining friends and acquaintances. Why should we pay any attention to people we don’t know? Unfortunately, technology allows mis/disinformation to spread at an alarming rate.”

Eric Goldman, professor and director of the High-Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law, commented, “Our politicians have embraced internet communications as a direct channel to lie to their constituents without the fact-checking of traditional media gatekeepers. So long as technology helps politicians lie without accountability, we have little hope of good governance.”

Janet Salmons, consultant with Vision2Lead, said, “The internet, with unregulated power in the hands of commercial entities that have little sense of social responsibility, will continue to unravel Western-style democracies and civic institutions. Companies profiting from sales of personal data or on risky practices have little self-interest in promoting the kinds of digital and advanced literacy people need to discern between fact and fiction. In the U.S., the free press and educational systems that can potentially illuminate this distinction are under siege. As a result, even when presented with the opportunity to vote or otherwise inveigh on decision-making, they do so from weak and uninformed positions. The lowest common denominator, the mass views based on big data, win.”

A researcher and teacher of digital literacies and technologies said, “In the early internet days, there was a claim it would bring a democratization of power. What we’re seeing now is the powerful having larger and more overwhelming voices, taking up more of the space rather than less. This leads to polarization, rather than a free-flowing exchange of ideas. Anyone falling within the middle of a hot issue is declared a traitor by both sides of that issue and is shamed and/or pushed aside.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “Increased engagement is largely a product of the media environment, and – in places where the press is absent, restricted or has become blatantly politicized – that engagement will bear the marks of a distorted information environment.”

Responding too slowly: The speed, scope and impact of the technologies of manipulation may be difficult to overcome as the pace of change accelerates

The core concepts of democracy, representation, elections and tenure of government will be greatly undermined by artificial intelligence. Emmanuel Edet

Kathleen M. Carley, director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University, said, “Disinformation and deepfakes in social media as well as the ability of individuals and media-propaganda teams to manipulate both who is and can communicate with whom and who and what they are talking about are undermining democratic principles and practice. Technological assistants such as bots, and information tools such as memes, are being used in ways that exploit features of the social media and web platforms, such as their prioritization rules, to get certain actors and information in front of people. Human cognitive biases, and our cognitive tendencies to view the world from a social or group perspective, are exploited by social media-based information maneuvers. The upshot is that traditional methods for recognizing disinformation no longer work. Strategies for mitigating disinformation campaigns as they play out across multiple media are not well understood. Global policies for 1) responding to disinformation and its creators, and 2) technical infrastructure that forces information to carry its provenance and robust scalable tools for detecting that an information campaign is underway, who is conducting it and why do not exist.”

Jason Hong, professor of Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University, said, “Basically, it’s 1) easier for small groups of people to cause lots of damage (e.g., disinformation, deepfakes), and 2) easier for those already in power to use these technologies than those who need to organize. In the early days of the internet, new technologies empowered new voices, which led to a lot of utopian views. However, we’ve seen in recent years that these same technologies are now being used to entrench those already in power. We see this in the form of targeted advertising (being used for highly targeted political campaigns), analytics (being used for gerrymandering), disinformation and fake news (being used both domestically and by foreign powers, both unintentionally and intentionally) and filter bubbles where people can seek out just the information that they want to hear. All of this was possible before the internet, but it was harder because of natural barriers. We also haven’t seen the political effects of deepfakes and are just starting to see the effects of widespread surveillance by police forces.”

Mark Raymond, assistant professor of international security, University of Oklahoma, wrote, “Over the next 30 years, democracy faces at least three kinds of technology-based risks. First, actual or apparent manipulation of voting data and systems by state actors will likely undermine trust in democratic processes. Second, social media manipulation (by states and by political campaigns and other nonstate actors) will compound echo chamber effects and increase societal polarization. Decreased trust will heighten social conflict, including, but not limited to, conflict over elections. Third, ‘deepfakes’ will undermine confidence even in video-based media reports. Taken together, there is the risk that these trends could increase the willingness of voters to accept fundamentally authoritarian shifts in their politics. Absent that, it is still likely that increased polarization will make the operation of democratic systems (which are heavily dependent on mutual acceptance of informal norms) incredibly difficult.”

Emmanuel Edet, legal adviser, National Information Technology Development Agency, Nigeria, said, “The core concepts of democracy, representation, elections and tenure of government will be greatly undermined by artificial intelligence. The use of social media coupled with faceless artificial intelligence-driven opinions can manipulate popular opinion that will deny people the right to express their choice for fear of going against the crowd.”

Matt Moore, innovation manager at Disruptor’s Handbook, Sydney, Australia, said, “The issue is not that essential democratic institutions will change, it is that they will not change enough. Elections, voting, representatives, parties – none of these things will go away. They may mean more or less (likely less) than they used to. The number of democracies in the world is likely to decrease as weak or destabilised states fall into authoritarian populism. Western democracies will continue to age and grow more economically unequal. States like China will continue to grow in power, often using new technologies to control their populations. Everyone is talking up the potential of blockchain for democracy. This is mostly nonsense. The issue is not that people do not have the opportunity to vote enough. It is that no one really knows what that vote means. Many of those who vote – or rather, who do not vote – have no sense of what their vote means. Many of those who are voted for, also do not know what that vote means – which is why they rely on polling and focus groups. Deliberative democracy offers a potential new form of political engagement and decision-making – if (and this is a big ‘if’) it can be made to work beyond isolated experiments.”

Mike O’Connor, retired, a former member of the ICANN policy development community, said, “There is cause for hope – but it’s such a fragile flower compared to the relative ease with which the negative forces prevail. ‘A lie can get around the world while truth is getting its boots on’ – pick your attribution.”

A longtime technology journalist for a major U.S. news organization commented, “Our laws and Constitution are largely designed for a world that existed before the industrial age, not to mention the information age. These technologies have made the nation-state obsolete and we have not yet grasped the ways they facilitate antidemocratic forces.”

Hume Winzar, associate professor and director of the business analytics undergraduate program at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, said, “Corporations and government have the information and the technology to create highly targeted messages designed to favour their own agendas. We, as citizens, have demonstrated that we rarely look beyond our regular news sources, and often use easily digested surrogates for news (comedy shows, social media). We also seem to have very short memories, so what was presented as a scandal only a year ago is usual, even laudable, now. … None of this is new. The British and the U.S. have been manipulating foreign news and propaganda for many decades with great success, and the church before them. But now the scale and the speed of that manipulation is perhaps too great to combat.”

Ian Fish, ICT professional and specialist in information security based in Europe, said, “I expect the imbalance of power between the major global corporations and democratic national governments will increase to the detriment of democracy. I also expect non-democratic governments’ disruption of democratic norms to increase faster than the democracies can react.”

Puruesh Chaudhary, a futurist based in Pakistan, said, “Democracy needs to develop the capacity to negotiate in the interest of an ordinary citizen, who may not have direct influence on how key decisions play out in geopolitics but is invariably affected by it. The democratic institutions have to have systems that operate at the pace of technological advancements that have an impact on the society.”

Trust suffers when people’s infatuation with technology entices them away from human-to-human encounters

Several respondents argued there were circumstances when humans’ “slowness” was an advantage, but that technology was thwarting that side of life. They believe that a major cause of the loss of trust is the fact that many people are spending more time online in often-toxic environments than they spend in face-t0-face, empathy-enabling non-digital social situations.

Angela Campbell, professor of law and co-director, Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University, said, “We are just seeing the beginning of how technology is undercutting democracy and social relations necessary to a democratic society. We don’t have good ways of telling what is true and what is false, what is opinion and what is fact. Most people do not yet understand how power technologies (especially combined with a lack of privacy protections) allow them to be manipulated. In addition, as people spend more time using technology, they spend less time interacting with other people (in person) and learning important social skills like respect and empathy.”

Yves Mathieu, co-director at Missions Publiques, Paris, France, responded, “Technology creates new forms of communications and messaging that can be very rough and divisive. Some contributors are rude, violent, expressing very poor comments, insulting or threatening elected citizens. There will be a strong need for face-to-face format, as the technologies will not allow process of deliberation. There will be need for regular meetings with voters, in meetings where people will have the time and the possibility to exchange arguments and increase their understanding of each other’s position. Being associated with media, this will reduce the divide that we know today, as it will increase mutual understanding.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “The expanded use of technology with respect to the democratic processes will tend to weaken one of the most important aspects of democracy and the democratic processes – the use of technology instead of person-to-person dialogue seriously degrades (or removes altogether) meaningful dialogue and exchange of ideas between individuals. When individuals use technology to express their political views/opinions instead of having direct human interactions, these views tend to be more extremely stated than if that person is speaking a view/opinion to another person. Also, in many cases, if someone else expresses a different view from what the original individual expressed, the first person is much less likely to pay any attention to a view expressed using technology than if that view were expressed in a person-to-person discussion. Additionally, the increased use of technology for analyzing segments of society to ‘shape’ delivery of messages for particular segments will result in an increase of messages that distort the reality of the message or distort the results of what the message is describing.”

The future will include a complex interplay of increased online activity but also increased skepticism of those virtual interactions and an enhanced appreciation of offline information and conversations. Melissa Michelson

A futurist and consultant said, “Democracy currently has a crisis in global leadership. Without significant change in 2020, for which I am hopeful, I can’t hold a lot of hope for democracy in 2030. I’m afraid the question is not what will change, but what must change. Without changes in democratic institutions, the future of democracy itself is in question. There is an urban/rural split at work in tandem with a severe disparity in the distribution of wealth – with climate change overshadowing it all. Technology will have a hand in providing as well as impeding solutions.”

Arthur Asa Berger, professor emeritus of communications, San Francisco State University, commented, “People who use Facebook are affected in negative ways by a ‘net effect,’ in which they exhibit impulsivity, grandiosity, etc., as explained in my book, ‘Media and Communication Research Methods’ (Sage). Some young people text 100 times a day and never talk on the phone with others, leading to a radical estrangement from others and themselves. The internet is used by hate groups, neofascists, right-wing ideologues, terrorist organizations and so on.”

An anonymous U.S. policy and strategy professional said, “Technology allows the creation of a bullying environment that polarizes people to the point at which they do not attempt to understand other opinions or views, weakening public discourse and driving outrage and attacks on minority views.”

Japheth Cleaver, a systems engineer, commented, “At the moment, the major social media networks function not by neutrally and dispassionately connecting disparate communicators (like the phone system), but are designed reinforce engagement to sell as many targeted ads as possible. This reinforcement creates resonant effects throughout a society’s culture, and in-person contextual interaction drops away in favor of the efficiencies that electronic communication offers, but without any of the risk of the ‘bubble’ of the like-minded being dropped, as that would hurt engagement. Internet as communications overlay is fine. Internet as a replacement for public space seems detrimental.”

Melissa Michelson, professor of political science, Menlo College, and author, “Mobilizing Inclusion: Redefining Citizenship Through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns,” said, “The future will include a complex interplay of increased online activity but also increased skepticism of those virtual interactions and an enhanced appreciation of offline information and conversations. As more adults are digital natives and the role of technology in society expands and becomes more interconnected, more and more aspects of democracy and political participation will take place online. At the same time, the increasing sophistication of deepfakes, including fake video, will enhance the value of face-to-face interactions as unfiltered and trustworthy sources of information.”

• “Unless there is transparency, tech will be the new digital atomic bomb – it has moved faster than individuals’ or the law’s understanding of its unintended consequences and nefarious uses.”
• “At the current rate of disregard and lack of responsibility by those who own and run large tech companies, we are headed toward a complete lack of trust in what is factual information and what is not.”
• “Public institutions move slowly and thoughtfully. People doing nefarious things move more quickly, and with the internet, this will continue to challenge us.”
• “It is the personal and social norms that we’re losing, not the technology itself, that is at the heart of much of our problems. People are a lot less civil to each other in person now than they were just a few decades ago.”
• “More access to data and records more quickly can help citizens be informed and engaged, however more information can flood the market, and people have limited capacity/time/energy to digest information.”

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Visual Representation of the Internet Consumption in the European Union

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• First Online: 01 April 2023
• Cite this conference paper

• Telma Rodrigues   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6904-7550 10 ,
• Catarina Maçãs   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4511-5763 10 &
• Ana Rodrigues   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4787-1260 10  

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13988))

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• International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (Part of EvoStar)

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The impact of internet usage on the environment is a contradictory topic. While it can help reduce carbon emissions, with smart grids or the automation of services and resources, it can also increase e-waste that end up affecting the environment. To draw attention to the impact of energy consumption on the environment, we proposed and developed a computational artifact that unites the areas of Data Aesthetics and Interaction Design. The artifact, displayed in an interactive installation, was divided into three panels: (i) the left panel, which represents the countries—from the European Union (EU)—with the lowest energy consumption impact on the environment; (ii) the central panel, which use swarming boids to represent the internet usage at the installation site and its impact; and (iii) the right panel, which represents the EU countries with the highest energy impact on the environment. The arrangement of the three panels in a single interactive installation aims to establish a visual connection between the energy consumption in the EU and the energy consumption in the installation’s site and to promote awareness of its impact on the environment.

This work is funded by the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P./MCTES through national funds (PIDDAC), within the scope of CISUC R &D Unit - UIDB/00326/2020.

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Telma Rodrigues, Catarina Maçãs & Ana Rodrigues

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Nereida Rodríguez-Fernández

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Sérgio M. Rebelo

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Rodrigues, T., Maçãs, C., Rodrigues, A. (2023). Visual Representation of the Internet Consumption in the European Union. In: Johnson, C., Rodríguez-Fernández, N., Rebelo, S.M. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design. EvoMUSART 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13988. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29956-8_16

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Network visualization: A detailed guide

A comprehensive overview of network visualization and its applications, with links to videos, blogs and other resources from subject specialists.

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• 1. What is network visualization?
• 2. Why visualize networks?
• 3. Who visualizes networks?
• 4. How to build a network visualization
• 5. Best practice resources
• 6. Common visualization challenges

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• • Graph database visualization
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What is network visualization?

Network visualization, also known as graph visualization or link analysis, is the process of visually presenting networks of connected entities as links and nodes.

Nodes represent data points, and links represent the connections between them.

To look beyond your flat data model and understand connections in your data, you need powerful network visualization tools.

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Why visualize networks?

The world is densely connected. If there’s an interesting relationship in your data, you’ll find value in visualizing networks.

It’s intuitive

Exploring networks as node-link structures instantly makes sense, even to people who’ve never worked with connected data before.

Our brains are great at spotting patterns, but only when the info is in a tangible format. Visualizing data as a network helps you identify trends and outliers quickly.

It’s flexible

Interactive network visualization simplifies complexity, revealing context and connections on demand. It’s ideal for getting a quick overview or focusing on specific connections.

It’s insightful

Through interactive data analysis, you gain deeper knowledge and understand context. That’s hard to achieve with a static, aggregated visualization.

New to network visualization?

If you’re new to visualizing networks, we’ve got a library of resources, blog posts and tutorials to help. A good place to begin is our DataViz 101 blog category

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Who uses network visualization?

Connected data is all around us. We help organizations solve their biggest challenges.

Cyber threat analysts…

…need interactive visualization to reveal network vulnerabilities, detect malware and discover trends.

Cyber security visualization

IT infrastructure managers…

…rely on network mapping software to discover bottlenecks and manage vulnerabilities.

Network mapping software

Security analysts…

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Security & Intelligence

Fraud analysts…

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Fraud detection & investigation

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…are under pressure to uncover fast insights in noisy pharmaceutical data. Network visualization is the perfect solution.

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Supply chain managers…

…identify inefficiencies, manage regulatory compliance and find new ways to innovate using connected data visualization.

Supply chain data visualization

Exploring real-world network visualization

In this webinar, data visualization expert Corey Lanum looks at use cases that show:

• how network diagrams can help you tell a story and even predict the future
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He does this with examples from the worlds of intelligence, cyber security and financial crime.

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What types of networks can be visualized?

We think there are no networks that CAN’T be visualized. If your data contains complex connections, you’ll find value in visualizing it. We’ve even started mapping the internet.

Here are a few more common examples we’ve worked on with our customers:

Infrastructure

From the internet to gas pipelines, corporate IT systems to global telecoms networks: network and timeline visualization are the best tools for making sense of complex infrastructure data.

Network mapping software for infrastructure

IT networks

Understanding big, complex telecoms networks is challenging. With the help of network visualization, it doesn’t need to be.

Network alert and network topology visualization

Supply chain

More and more businesses are digitizing their supply chain processes. Our latest demo shows how KronoGraph, our time-based visual analytics toolkit, can support a reliable management tool with supply chain data visualization at its heart.

Supply chain: the spinach story

Visualizing the internet

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Decentralizing the internet

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Recommended viewing: The right tools for the job

In this short video, you’ll learn about the benefits of using KeyLines and ReGraph, our JavaScript software development kits, for your connected data visualization project.

Network visualization best practices

Building a great user experience.

Visual network analysis dashboards that work

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Get the perfect look & feel for your data visualizations

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Getting the perfect UX

Visualizing networks that evolve over time

Dynamic network visualization methods explained

Most connected data has a time-stamped element. Sometimes, that time element holds the insight that unlocks everything else. A time bar gives users the ability to filter and summarize time-based connected data without overwhelming them.

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KronoGraph: the timeline visualization toolkit

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Visualizing data at scale

Layouts for visualizing large networks

There’s no more famous network than the internet itself. But highly connected networks present data visualization challenges. In this blog, we’ll map out the shape of a small portion of the internet with a network chart.

Mapping a section of the internet

Understanding big, complex network topologies, like IT infrastructure or telecoms networks is challenging. With the help of network visualization, it doesn’t need to be.

Visualizing network topologies

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There are standalone tools, or community-built open source code libraries, or you can create something in-house from scratch. If you want the best of all worlds, our commercial SDKs are market leaders. They deliver the customizability and flexibility of in-house components, with the reliability, robustness, performance and advanced functionality of a technology backed by a dedicated team of experts.

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Some common network visualization challenges

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The map of the Internet

Like any other map, The Internet map is a scheme displaying objects’ relative position; but unlike real maps (e.g. the map of the Earth) or virtual maps (e.g. the map of Mordor), the objects shown on it are not aligned on a surface. Mathematically speaking, The Internet map is a bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the Internet. Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.

Charges and springs

To draw an analogy from classical physics, one may say that websites are electrically charged bodies, while links between them are springs. Springs pull similar websites together, and the charge does not let the bodies adjoin and pushes websites apart if there is no link between them. Originally, all such electrified bodies (websites) are randomly scattered on the surface of the map. Springs are stretched, repulsion energy is high – the system is far from being at equilibrium. Then the websites start moving under the influence of the forces exerted and in a while come to a halt – forces of attraction now become equal to forces of repulsion, the system has reached its equilibrium. It is exactly that state that is shown on The Internet map.

Also, an analogy can be drawn from quantum physics. In this case, a website is a physical body with a finite mass, a single user is the mass quantum – the much-spoken-about, yet-to-be-found Higgs’ boson (NB: was found in 2012), whereas the act of user’s switching between sites is the gravitational quantum – the graviton, another hypothetical particle.

Anyway, the real algorithm of plotting The Internet map is quite far from the analogies given above. For those interested, the closest description of the mathematical model can be found in the research [1] , and the engineering solution looks very similar to what has been described in [2] . Google Maps engine has been used as the platform for displaying.

Semantic web

The map of the Internet is a photo shot of the global network as of end of 2011. It encompasses over 350 thousand websites from 196 countries and all domain zones. Information about more than 2 million links between the websites has joined some of them together into topical clusters. As one might have expected, the largest clusters are formed by national websites, i.e. sites belonging to one country. For the sake of convenience, all websites relative to a certain country carry the same color. For instance, the red zone at the top corresponds to Russian segment of the net, the yellow one on the left stands for the Chinese segment, the purple one on the right is Japanese, the large light-blue central one is the American segment, etc.

Importantly, clusters on the map are semantically charged, i.e. they join websites together according to their content. For example, a vast porno cluster can be seen between Brazil and Japan as well as a host of minor clusters uniting websites of the same field or similar purposes.

The Internet Phenomenon

The Internet global network is a phenomenon of technological civilization, and its exceptional complexity surpasses anything mankind has ever created. In essence, what we are dealing with here is a huge quantity of utterly unstructured information. The Internet map is an attempt to look into the hidden structure of the network, fathom its colossal scale, and examine that which is impossible to understand from the bare figures of statistics.

Map of human diseases

A scientific project was inspired by and used concept of the Internet map – disease-map.net . You may also find interesting an article describing the layout algorithm – Disease universe: Visualisation of population-wide disease-wide associations .

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I will appreciate any feedback. Please use the address [email protected] and check out the blog also.

The Internet map is a non-commercial project. You can share my expenses and let more people see beauty of the Internet.

Poster of the Internet map

Here you can buy a unique product – a physical representation of the Internet. The poster can decorate a wall in your office or in living room. It will attract attention of your friends and clients and lead to atmosphere of creativity and innovations. It can be an excellent present for those who love Internet.

The poster is printed on high-quality paper with high-resolution. Many sizes are available to choose from. Bigger size allows to see the smallest web sites and feel the fractal structure of the Internet. If you need even bigger size please contact us directly [email protected] .

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Apr 7 The Map of the Internet

The Map of the Internet is an ambitious project from Peer 1 Hosting that maps the network of hosts and routing connections that are the foundation of the Internet.  Clicking on the image above takes you to the poster in an interactive zooming viewer so you can see the details.  You can also read about the making of the poster in this post on the Peer 1 Hosting blog .

It’s a layout of all the networks that are interconnected to form the internet. Some are run by small and large ISPs, university networks, and customer networks - such as Facebook and Google. It’s visual representation of all those networks interconnecting with one another, forming the internet as we know it. Based on the size of the nodes and the thickness of the lines, it speaks to the size of those particular providers and the connections.  In technical speak, you’re looking at all the autonomous systems that make up the internet. Each autonomous system is a network operated by a single organization, and has routing connections to some number of neighbouring autonomous systems. The image depicts a graph of 19,869 autonomous system nodes, joined by 44,344 connections. The sizing and layout of the autonomous systems is based on their eigenvector centrality, which is a measure of how central to the network each autonomous system is: an autonomous system is central if it is connected to other autonomous systems that are central.

My apologies for being late posting this one here on the blog.  They were giving out free printed 24”x36” posters at SxSW in Austin, TX a couple weeks ago, but the high-resolution PDF is available from the Peer 1 Hosting site.

Thanks to Shobhita for sending me the information and the link!

Apr 11 Evolution of the Cell Phone #infographic

Apr 1 April Fools 2011 On The Web infographic

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Mar 21 Map of the Internet 2021

Feb 10 The Internet Map

Mar 31 Map of the Internet 2.0 Poster

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Visual Representation Of The Evolution Of The Internet Truly Leaves You Speechless

In 2003 Barrett Gibson Lyon created the Opte Project, an internet mapping project that uses virtual graphics and open source software to provide an accurate map of the internet.

It all began when the internet entrepreneur was finishing his studies at California State University in Sacramento while also working as a penetration tester. Which, in essence, is an ethical hacker that helps businesses identify and resolve vulnerabilities that affect their digital security. And the formula he came up with at work put the basis of the network mapping visualization that is the Opte Project.

The Electric Eye – The Opte Project

“ That formula ended up being an easy piece of software to write, so I just started having this software do all the work for me, ” state Lyon.

The  maps  looked like a nebula of countless, overlapping starbursts connected by branch-like lines that represent the internet at a specific point in time. 

“ What you’re looking at is not a real world. You’re looking at a representation of this different dimension, so to speak, ” says Lyon. “T he Internet is really big, very connected, and extremely complex. It’s this whole world you can’t see. That’s the fun part of visualizing it. ”

The growth of the Internet from 1997 to 2021.

For instance,  in a 2003 print screen of such a map   from the project, the different colored lines indicate the location of the IP space, while each line shows the communication between two internet protocol (IP) addresses and the length of the lines denotes the delay between the two nodes. Red lines, for example, represent Asia and the Pacific Islands, while the dark blue ones correspond to North America. 

The image itself “ was based on a technology called ‘traceroute, ’” that displays possible routes and measures the transit delays of packets across an Internet Protocol network. “ It would be like driving each road in the world systematically and then drawing that out, ” explains Lyon.

“When I look at it, each one of those little squiggles and wiggles is human beings doing something,” Lyon says. “People actually using the network, building the network, literally going across oceans and mountains with fiber optic cables and digging ditches. All of that work is reflected in one snapshot. But some countries are not actually very connected and that enables control.”

The Opthe Project is as much art as it is research and documentation.

However, a  2010 exhibit  of the original Opte viewable at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and in an edition of Discover Magazine, used Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as data points instead of traceroutes, in order to create a more accurate view of the internet. More recent maps even show BGP route leaks, which are incidents that involve “ the propagation of routing announcement(s) beyond their intended scope ” according to The Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) definition, or more exactly, events where the data that was meant to go on a certain path was accidentally or maliciously redirected to other parts of the network.

The Opte Project Can Also Teach Humanity

What’s even more interesting is that the visualizations can also detect the effects of natural disasters and wars, since these are mostly always accompanied by large-scale internet service outages. Such incidents include this year’s Myanmar internet disruptions that were ordered by the military after people mobilized for protests amid reports of uprisings and the detention of political leaders or Iran’s Internet blackout from 2019. An event which was ordered by the Supreme National Security Council and imposed by the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology (Ministry of ICT) following “Bloody November” a series of nationwide civil protests caused by a staggering 50%–200% increase in fuel prices. Lyon confirmed that he is collecting more data in order to create a more accurate picture of any major recent events. 

Ever since its conception, the Opte Project has gathered worldwide recognition and has been featured by Time, Cornell University, New Scientist, and Kaspersky Lab, while several of its maps are displayed in art galleries and exhibits such as The Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Science. Opte’s creator, Lyon has even been called a hero by the American Organization the National Public Radio for his contributions in tracking down Russian extortion groups responsible for denial of service attacks (DoS attacks), cyber-attacks that shut down a computer or a network by disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. His work has even been featured in the cyber-thriller “Fatal System Error” while his help and the information he provided to multiple law enforcement groups led to the capture of three Russian men responsible for extorting money from banks, Internet casinos, and other web-based businesses.

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A visual representation of the Internet as a Graph

http://internet-map.net/ is an interactive website in which you can zoom in and out of a large map of what initially seems to just be a bunch of circles. However, as you zoom in, it becomes apparent that each circle is representative of a certain website on the Internet, with websites with more traffic appearing larger on the map. Websites also appear closer together on the map if there is a stronger link and more traffic between them. In the description, the creator explains that the algorithm he uses to determine the relative size of each circle is analogous to the relationships between electrically charged bodies in classical physics. Each website circle is also color-coded, with each color corresponding to the country to which the domain name belongs. By far, the largest circles are google.com, facebook.com, yahoo.com, and youtube.com, which also all appear relatively close to each other, as seen in the screenshot below.

The light blue color corresponds to an American domain name.

Although this isn’t a traditional representation of a network with visible edges, this Internet Map is relevant to many of the topics we have discussed in class. In particular, it shows one way how the Internet can be represented as a graph. In addition, the relative sizes of the websites to one another also relate to the balance of power in a network. The larger nodes such as Google and Facebook are clearly more powerful, and changes made to those websites will have a greater impact on the numerous websites surrounding them. The sizes are determined by the relative strength between two websites, which is very similar to the strong and weak ties we discussed in class. Websites with strong ties (more traffic) appear closer together, while websites with weak ties (less traffic) appear farther apart.

October 19, 2015 | category: Uncategorized

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Artificial Intelligence and gender equality

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The world has a gender equality problem, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) mirrors the gender bias in our society.

Although globally more women are accessing the internet every year , in low-income countries, only 20 per cent are connected . The gender digital divide creates a data gap that is reflected in the gender bias in AI. 

Who creates AI and what biases are built into AI data (or not), can perpetuate, widen, or reduce gender equality gaps.

What is AI gender bias? 

A study by the Berkeley Haas Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership analysed 133 AI systems across different industries and found that about 44 per cent of them showed gender bias , and 25 per cent exhibited both gender and racial bias.

Beyza Doğuç, an artist from Ankara, Turkey, encountered gender bias in Generative AI when she was researching for a novel and prompted it to write a story about a doctor and a nurse. Generative AI creates new content (text, images, video, etc.) inspired by similar content and data that it was trained on, often in response to questions or prompts by a user.

The AI made the doctor male and the nurse female. Doğuç continued to give it more prompts, and the AI always chose gender stereotypical roles for the characters and associated certain qualities and skills with male or female characters. When she asked the AI about the gender bias it exhibited, the AI explained it was because of the data it had been trained on and specifically, “word embedding” – which means the way certain words are encoded in machine learning to reflect their meaning and association with other words – it’s how machines learn and work with human language. If the AI is trained on data that associates women and men with different and specific skills or interests, it will generate content reflecting that bias.

“Artificial intelligence mirrors the biases that are present in our society and that manifest in AI training data,” said Doğuç, in a recent interview with UN Women.

Who develops AI, and what kind of data it is trained on, has gender implications for AI-powered solutions.

Sola Mahfouz, a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University, is excited about AI, but also concerned. “Is it equitable? How much does it mirror our society’s patriarchal structures and inherent biases from its predominantly male creators,” she reflected. 

Mahfouz was born in Afghanistan, where she was forced to leave school when the Taliban came to her home and threatened her family. She eventually escaped Afghanistan and immigrated to the U.S. in 2016 to attend college.

As companies are scrambling for more data to feed AI systems, researchers from Epoch claim that tech companies could run out of high-quality data used by AI by 2026 .

Natacha Sangwa is a student from Rwanda who participated in the first coding camp organized under the African Girls Can Code Initiative last year. “I have noticed that [AI] is mostly developed by men and trained on datasets that are primarily based on men,” said Sangwa, who saw first-hand how that impacts women’s experience with the technology. “When women use some AI-powered systems to diagnose illnesses, they often receive inaccurate answers, because the AI is not aware of symptoms that may present differently in women.” 

If current trends continue, AI-powered technology and services will continue lacking diverse gender and racial perspectives, and that gap will result in lower quality of services, biased decisions about jobs, credit, health care and more. 

How to avoid gender bias in AI?

Removing gender bias in AI starts with prioritizing gender equality as a goal, as AI systems are conceptualized and built. This includes assessing data for misrepresentation, providing data that is representative of diverse gender and racial experiences, and reshaping the teams developing AI to make them more diverse and inclusive.

According to the Global Gender Gap Report of 2023, there are only 30 per cent women currently working in AI .  

“When technology is developed with just one perspective, it’s like looking at the world half-blind,” concurred Mahfouz. She is currently working on a project to create an AI-powered platform that would connect Afghan women with each other. 

“More women researchers are needed in the field. The unique lived experiences of women can profoundly shape the theoretical foundations of technology. It can also open new applications of the technology,” she added. 

“To prevent gender bias in AI, we must first address gender bias in our society,” said Doğuç from Turkey.

There is a critical need for drawing upon diverse fields of expertise when developing AI, including gender expertise, so that machine learning systems can serve us better and support the drive for a more equal and sustainable world.

In a rapidly advancing AI industry, the lack of gender perspectives, data, and decision-making can perpetuate profound inequality for years to come.

The AI field needs more women, and that requires enabling and increasing girls’ and women’s access to and leadership in STEM and ICT education and careers.

The World Economic Forum reported in 2023 that women accounted for just 29 per cent of all science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workers. Although more women are graduating and entering STEM jobs today than ever before, they are concentrated in entry level jobs and less likely to hold leadership positions.

How can AI governance help accelerate progress towards gender equality?

International cooperation on digital technology has focused on technical and infrastructural issues and the digital economy, often at the expense of how technological developments were affecting society and generating disruption across all its layers – especially for the most vulnerable and historically excluded. There is a global governance deficit in addressing the challenges and risks of AI and harnessing its potential to leave no one behind.

“Right now, there is no mechanism to constrain developers from releasing AI systems before they are ready and safe. There’s a need for a global multistakeholder governance model that prevents and redresses when AI systems exhibit gender or racial bias, reinforce harmful stereotypes, or does not meet privacy and security standards,” said Helene Molinier, UN Women’s Advisor on Digital Gender Equality Cooperation in a recent interview with Devex.

In the current AI architecture, benefits and risks are not equitably distributed, with power concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, States and individuals, who control talent, data and computer resources. There is also no mechanism to look at broader considerations, like new forms of social vulnerability generated by AI, the disruption of industries and labour markets, the propensity for emerging technology to be used as a tool of oppression, the sustainability of the AI supply chain, or the impact of AI on future generations.

In 2024, the negotiation of the Global Digital Compact (GDC) offers a unique opportunity to build political momentum and place gender perspectives on digital technology at the core of a new digital governance framework. Without it, we face the risk of overlaying AI onto existing gender gaps, causing gender-based discrimination and harm to be left unchanged – and even amplified and perpetuated by AI systems.

UN Women position paper on the GDC provide concrete recommendations to harness the speed, scale, and scope of digital transformation for the empowerment of women and girls in all their diversity, and to trigger transformations that set countries on paths to an equitable digital future for all.

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Forms of Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition - Volume Three: Concept Formation

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At cannes, cate blanchett calls for more women and lgbtq directors: ‘when is this going to deeply, profoundly shift’.

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Stacy Smith, Cate Blanchett and Coco Francini attend Kering Talks Women In Motion during the 77th ... [+] Cannes Film Festival

Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett was back at the Cannes Film Festival this year for the premiere of her new movie, Rumours, directed by Guy Maddin, which she also produced. The actress launched in 2023 Proof of Concept, a program aiming to push women and LGBTQ representation through the next generation of young filmmakers.

During a Kering Women in Motion Talk, Cate Blanchett and her collaborators, Dr. Stacy L. Smith and Coco Francini discussed how the film industry was still lacking diversity, LGBTQ and women’s representation. Their program will support up to 11 filmmakers to make their first film or television project, and will be funded at $50,000. These filmmakers will also be mentored and connected to industry leaders.

The selection committee for this program includes Greta Gerwig, who was also the president of the jury of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Jane Campion, Lily Gladstone, Eva Longoria, Emma Corin, Chloé Zhao, Janicza Bravo and Lilly Wachowski.

Cate Blanchett said, “This is a bunch of women who are undeniably at the pinnacle of the industry, incredibly talented and diversely so.”

She added: “They are also individuals who really understand struggles, they really understand how difficult it is to have found the producers and the organizations who believe in them, and for them to keep developing in the way that they have as artists.”

The goal of this program is also to let these filmmakers express themselves and to not make them feel obligated and pigeonholed to only tell stories about their own lived experiences.

Coco Francini, Stacy Smith and Cate Blanchett attend Kering Talks Women In Motion during the 77th ... [+] Cannes Film Festival

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Cate Blanchett, who recently attended a forum that supports emerging filmmakers in the Middle East and North Africa region, recalled meeting a filmmaker who was facing this problem. She said, “One was a woman who actually missed the Proof of Concept deadline, so hopefully next year, but she was saying, ‘It’s really hard because I have two labels, that I have to get to before I can get to filmmaker. I am female and I am a refugee, when can I just tell a story?’”

Cate Blanchett added: “It was interesting, because a lot of the submissions, say by trans or non-binary filmmakers, didn't speak to that experience, but because they have a lived experience, their point of view in whatever story, in whatever genre they tell, will be different from somebody who has grown up a white, middle class male. It is a different perspective, they'll put the camera in a different place in the room.”

Cate Blanchett then addressed the fact that she hasn't worked with as many female directors as she would have liked. She said, “I do the head count, and I’m back in the same place, working with men that I love working with and respect. But I’m walking on set and if there’s 50 people on set, there’s three women. When is this going to deeply, profoundly shift?”

She added: “The amount of times that women are at a press conference, say, in a festival like this, and they get asked about women representation in film. And there are two men sitting on this panel, I would love for you to ask them that question. Why do I always have to? Is it my problem? It’s my reality. But why are you asking me to solve it? And so we have to obviously mentor, it’s super important, but the change is slow. It’s two steps forward, two steps back sometimes.”

To support her argument, Dr. Stacy L. Smith said, “Right now, we’re at 2010 level, we shifted on screen, in terms of women's representation, leading narratives, we’re back to 2010.”

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