As I missed the conference dinner last night, I am pretty fresh this morning for the final day of ACM Web Science 2012 #WebSci12, and walking in to the Management School at Northwestern University I was struck by a couple more general thoughts.
- Necessarily there has been a focus at the conference on understanding current activity on the web (given the discipline is early in its development). There has been more limited consideration of the application of this understanding to address societal issues, aside from to improving (online) marketing. I believe there must be scope to apply, and value in applying this understanding of the web in other areas - so plenty of thinking for do (for me anyway) on if/how to reconcile the understanding of the web with action to create a more sustainable society.
- Danah Boyd (@zephoria) summed up her excellent and inspiring keynote with an impassioned call to act to self regulate big/social data before Government action (suggesting blunt regulatory instruments are on the horizon). Implicit in this call was a belief that the web/social media is different from other utilities (energy, water, telecoms) that tend to be heavily regulated to shape them (and address market failures) - I guess I struggle to see why the web/social media is so different (why it would be immune to market failures and self regulation + ethical understanding will deliver enough)? Of course there would be downsides to regulation - but could the downsides of unregulated activity in this space been even bigger?
No comments:
Post a Comment