Digital Citizenship

09

New World?

Is our world better or worse because of digital representation? In the past few years, many new ways of communication have arisen due to technology: SMS and other chat/messaging apps, social media: Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter, etc., video conferencing: Zoom Hangouts, etc. Even school tried going entirely online for a whole year. How has this impacted your life?

In this course, when we talk about the social implications of computing, most of the focus is on the risks and challenges of new technologies. That's because you mostly know about the good implications: the ability to communicate with friends worldwide, the explosion in creative expression, information at your fingertips, and so on. The risks and challenges need attention, but we shouldn't completely neglect the benefits of computing, as it has inspired advances in a wide range of fields, including the arts, science, engineering, and communications.

Social media are designed to improve lives by helping people communicate and collaborate, but cyberbullying was an unexpected, illegal, and unethical misuse. It would have been better if the programmers who invented social media had anticipated these possibilities (although it's not obvious what they would have done differently). Today, responsible programmers do try to predict possible misuses of their software before they release it to the world. But it's not possible for programmers to anticipate all of the possible misuses of a technology.

Technical Terminology

Censorship vs Free Speech

Computing can play a role in social and political debates, which in turn often raise legal and ethical concerns. There are already concerns over free speech and what it means in the United States, but how do these policies translate to the digital space, if at all? There are legitimate concerns that authorities must protect against cyberbullying, harassment, and threats that are made on social media. As a result, when they are drafting laws, state and the federal lawmakers struggle with how to balance First Amendment free speech rights with the interests of individuals who want to be free from harassment, fear, and intimidation on the Internet. Even more: the Internet is global and bits flow all over the world. Each country can have laws for what is allowed or not allowed on the Internet, but what happens when countries (or even states in the US) have different laws?

Citizen Science & Crowdsource

One purpose of the computing innovations is creative expression. Music synthesizers, for example, are electronic musical instruments that allow musicians to simulate the sound of dozens of different kinds of instrument without actually having or being able to play them. When synthesizers were first invented, some artists considered this cheating. The 1975 Queen album A Night at the Opera, the one with "Bohemian Rhapsody" on it, for example, had the words "No synthesizers!" featured in the liner notes. Today, of course, digital synthesizers (as well as more specialized computerized instruments such as drum machines) are commonplace in popular music. The new technology often changes people's expectations and expands the reach of human creativity.

People also create computing innovations to solve problems; every branch of science has been transformed by modern computers. In biology, the central example is DNA sequencing. DNA, the fundamental "blueprint" for all living organisms, consists of very long molecules; human DNA includes over three billion tiny building blocks. Modern supercomputers make it possible for human researchers to perform computations to analyze these sequences.

Another important topic in biochemistry is protein folding. When your body needs to produce a protein molecule, it "folds" another molecule into the right shape. Certain diseases are the result of proteins folding incorrectly, and researchers want to find the correct folding (the correct shape) for every protein. But trying every possibility requires enormous amounts of computer time. So, the Folding@home group at Stanford University asks people to download a protein folding program that will run on your computer or phone only when you're not doing something else with it. Working together, tens of thousands of computers are like a very large supercomputer, except that supercomputers are expensive, while putting your computer's idle time to work doesn't cost anything.

Folding@home is just one of several citizen science projects. The first one was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which uses volunteered computer time to search for large prime numbers, which are of importance in public key cryptography. Another early citizen science project, probably the most famous, is SETI@home, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, created by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley. This project searches the pictures produced by large telescopes for radio signals that could be produced by intelligent life on a faraway planet. (SETI@home hasn't found any signs of intelligent aliens so far, although it has found candidate radio signals for further study.)

Citizen science apps rely on a concept called crowdsourcing, where data or information is collected from a large number of people via the Internet. Crowdsourcing allows people to collaborate on a project by each contributing a small portion of the data, the funding, etc.

Advances in technology have also allowed widespread access to information and public data, which facilitates the identification of problems, the development of solutions, and dissemination of the results. In medicine, for example, some combinations of medicines can be very dangerous, and doctors have to know whether the any new medication they prescribe is safe in combination with the ones the patient is already taking. There are thousands of prescription medications available in the United States, and there are medicines available without a prescription that may interact as well. Doctors can't possibly remember the drug interactions for every pair of medicines, but they can use medical databases to check for drug interactions online. Another example that's designed for the public is websites like opensecrets.org, which collect and summarize information about major contributors to political candidates' campaign funds so that people look up who has privileged access to the people who are supposed to be representing you.

Benefits and Harms

Sometimes the impacts of a computing technology can be viewed as both beneficial and harmful. Whatever the intentions of the programmers, they don't always anticipate all the consequences—good and bad. Facebook started as a way for college students to find their friends (their in-person friends, initially) when they go away, for example to a different college. But it turned out also to be good for organizing group activities, such as political protests and disaster support; computing innovations often have unintended beneficial effects in other fields. Facebook's ability to make money could have been based on charging a fee for a Facebook account, but instead they chose to make the accounts free and to make money by using people's data to provide advertising targeted to that user's interests. But one thing Facebook didn't intend was the ability of political campaigns and foreign countries to post content lying about opposing candidates that spreads rapidly throughout the network. This is a harmful impact on society. Technological innovations can also have harmful effects on economy or culture in addition to the many possible benefits.

When Facebook started, it was available only to Harvard students. If that were still the case, neither its good nor its bad effects would matter very much. When Facebook expanded to include almost everyone with a computer or a smartphone, its impact expanded, and now dishonest political messages can spread around the world very quickly.

A single effect of an innovation can be viewed as both beneficial and harmful by different people, or even by the same person. You might not like your personal data being collected and shared with other companies, but violating people's privacy isn't bad for Mark Zuckerberg; on the contrary, it made him one of the richest people on Earth. And you might appreciate seeing advertisements that are relevant to you and still dislike the privacy violation.

Digital Collaboration

The worldwide nature of the Internet both requires and enables collaborative design. Human capabilities can be enhanced by collaboration via computing. Computers these days are so small and so inexpensive that nearly everyone has one in their pocket. So, for a software project to be successful, it must meet the needs of people at all levels of expertise; it must meet the cultural expectations of users from every country, of every economic class, every race, every gender, and every other social division; it must meet (or create) a need of all those people.

Nobody has enough experience with enough cultures to design for all these expectations. Instead, innovations are designed by a team that includes potential users, from a variety of cultures, ideally by choosing diverse technical experts (programmers, graphic artists, user interface experts, and others) who'll do the actual implementation and who clearly understand the purpose of the innovation. In addition, modern innovators survey large numbers of users outside their team to double-check that everyone's expectations are satisfied. This is why you may see invitations from a company to "alpha test" a new program. It's only partly to help catch out-and-out bugs; it also finds out early if some users are going to get angry about something the developers never considered.

Another reason a variety of people on the design team is desirable is to help avoid bias in the innovation. In some early testing of self-driving cars, it was found that they weren't good at detecting pedestrians who were people of color. This wasn't deliberate, of course; the artificial intelligence program that detected pedestrians had been trained on a vast collection of photographs of people, in which all the people happened to be light-skinned. Luckily this problem was discovered in early testing, before the self-driving cars were really sent out on the road.

How do computers and the Internet enable collaboration? The way that's most taken for granted is the worldwide telephone system. Telephones are older than computers, but the early telephone systems didn't have area codes, let alone country codes. You could dial people in your town, but to call anyone else you had to ask an operator (a telephone company worker) to connect you by hand. Today, connecting telephone calls is done by computer, and you can dial just about any telephone on Earth yourself.

Besides talking with each other, developers can collaborate on multi-author documents using software that allows them to share the ownership of an online document. The best-known such system is Google Docs; like Skype, it's free in the money sense but not in the sense of sharing the software that implements it.

Copyright Rebalanced

In order for Citizen Science and Digital Collaboration to occur, we must also take into account the legalities of use and ownership of digital media, including copyrighted media. Material created on a computer is the intellectual property of the creator or an organization. Ease of access and distribution of digitized information raises intellectual property concerns regarding ownership, value, and use. Measures should be taken to safeguard intellectual property, for example by citing work that is used but not your own. The use of material created by someone else without permission and presented as one's own is plagiarism and may have legal consequences.

While anything the government is public, other examples of legal ways to use materials created by someone else include:

Still Curious?