Thursday, January 31, 2008

Journal of Information Technology

Journal of Information Technology

Mission Statement
The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP) seeks high-quality manuscripts on the challenges and opportunities presented by information technology in politics and government. The primary objectives of the journal are to:
  • promote a better understanding of how evolving information technologies interact with political and governmental processes and outcomes at many levels,
  • encourage the development of governmental and political processes that employ IT in novel and interesting ways, and
  • foster the development of new information technology tools and theories that can capture, analyze, and report on these developments.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

BBC NEWS | Special Reports | 2003 | The iGeneration

BBC NEWS | Special Reports | 2003 | The iGeneration: "Digital snapshots Global picture of the net's spread and gaps"

Pew Internet: Riding the Waves of "Web 2.0"

Pew Internet: Riding the Waves of "Web 2.0": "“Web 2.0” has become a catch-all buzzword that people use to describe a wide range of online activities and applications, some of which the Pew Internet & American Life Project has been tracking for years. As researchers, we instinctively reach for our spreadsheets to see if there is evidence to inform the hype about any online trend. This article provides a short history of the phrase, along with new traffic data from Hitwise to help frame the discussion."

America: The Growing Digital Divide

America: The Growing Digital Divide: "A new study (pdf) published by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that there is a growing digital divide across America. John B. Horrigan’s analysis of America’s use of Web 2.0 and information and communications technology in the broader sense shows that whilst a reasonable number of Americans are embracing new technology and Web 2.0, a disturbing number are either not getting the message, or are choosing not to participate."

Digital Divide.org

Digital Divide.org: "'Digital Divide' refers to the gap between those who benefit from digital technology and those who do not. (See www.itu.int/ITU-D/digitaldivide) It took digital-divide researchers a whole decade to figure out that the real issue is not so much about access to digital technology but about the benefits derived from it. Examining the situation more closely, it turns out that upper-to-middle classes have high-quality access to digital technology because the profit motive pushes technologists to work hard at creating 'solutions' designed specifically for them. In this equation, however, the poor are ignored because the assumption is that designing solutions for them will not be profitable.[1] The result is that even where the poor are provided access to digital technology, it is low-quality. Furthermore, the digital technology they do have access to is often of a design that ends up being harmful rather than beneficial. This, in turn, widens the digital divide."

The Digital Divide Network

The Digital Divide Network:

"The Digital Divide Network is the Internet's largest community for educators, activists, policy makers and concerned citizens working to bridge the digital divide. At DDN, you can build your own online community, publish a blog, share documents and discussions with colleagues, and post news, events and articles. You can also find the archived discussion lists of the DIGITAL DIVIDE listserv. Membership is free and open to all, so join today!"

Saturday, October 27, 2007

SAGUARO SEMINAR - Civic Engagement in America

Some excellent resources from the SAGUARO SEMINAR - Civic Engagement in America: "Technology " section. http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/interestingarticles.htm retrieved Oct. 27, 2007 by JMS

On Harvard's Complexity Blog, Ben Waber describes research in a German bank using the Sociometric Badge; the badge developed by the MIT Media Lab, is worn for extended periods of time and measures in real time the proxmity of badge wearers to other badge wearers. When coupled with e-mail logs, the data gathered showed that proximity and e-mail use were strongly negative related. Other findings included the fact that the volume of communication was negative related to its perceived quality. Waber's paper is being presented at the 2007 NetSci conference.Weinberg, Bruce & Williams, Christine (2006).

The 2004 US Presidential campaign: Impact of hybrid off-line and on-line 'meetup' communities.Journal of direct, data and digital marketing practice. 8 (1), 46-57. They looked at 820 people who attended meetups for presidential candidates between January 22 and March 10, 2004, they found that meetup attendance was positively related to various imeasures of campaign effectiveness, such as donations, volunteering and candidate support and advocacy (encouraging others to learn about, work for or vote for the candidate). They concluded that "Meetup may be a useful vehicle for acquiring ‘attractive’ customers" and newcomers to campaigns. They classify Meetup as an e2f (electronic-to-face) community that couples the strengths of technology (stronger search, easier to readh strangers, etc.) wtih the strength of face-to-face ties in building trust.

Glenn Sparks and Hannah Kirk (Purdue) conducted experiments (12/06) to see TV's effect on social interaction. Participants were asked to bring a friend to the sessions, and randomized which pairs were exposed to TV during their 10 minutes in the waiting room. Questionnaires of the participants revealed that people made twice the amount of eye contact with the TV off and their enjoyment of the time with their friend rose about 40% when the TV was off (from 67% to 94%). They have not yet explored how the content of the TV programs affects social interaction.

Thomas Sander, “E-Associations? Using Technology to Connect Citizens: the Case of Meetup.com” Paper for American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Conference in Washington, DC, September 2005. Another version of this paper available as a Taubman Center Working Paper.

Vincent Price, Citizens Deliberating Online: Theory and Some Evidence (2006) from Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice. Todd Davies and Beth Simone Noveck (eds.). Price has conducted two online experiments in discussion and deliberation: one in discussing politics during the 2000 campaign (in Liberal groups, Conservative groups and mixed groups) and one recently on healthcare policy (with segmented or mixed groups of experts, the Attentive Public, and random Americans). All conversations were text-only discussions with minimally intrusive moderators, but Price found that participation in such groups led to modest increases in social trust, civic engagement, political participation, and political efficacy. The discussions were frank but civil, and participants most valued hearing others' perspectives. There was little evidence of serious polarization from these groups and "speaking" in the groups was relatively equitably distributed. And the people who were less politically knowledgeable and less technologically savvy liked participation the most.

Shanyan Zhao, Do Internet Users Have More Social Ties? A Call For Differentiated Analyses of Internet Use (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(3), article 8) . [But article in our estimation makes the mistake of assuming that all friendships are equal, and that a friend made and sustained on-line in a chat room affords the same social capital benefits that one would get from a friendship sustained in the real, non-virtual world. Our strong hypothesis is that the real-world friend one would be much more likely to trust, would be much more likely to visit you if you were in the hospital, etc.] The Strength of Internet Ties (Jeff Boase, Barry Wellman, 2006). The report shows how Americans use e-mail to supplement ties to others by phone or in-person rather than using the Internet to replace their other forms of social connection.

Keith Hampton, e-Neighbors: Neighborhoods in the Network Society. 2006. [Paper is under review, but an abstract can be found here.] A 'flash' presentation of Keith's findings is available here.

Nancy Baym, Yan Bing Zhang, Mei-Chen Lin, Social Interactions Across Media. 2004. (New Media and Society, 6(3):299-318.

William Davies has an interesting booklet written in the U.K. about how technology can be used to enhance communication.Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm."112 Yale Law Journal 3 (December 2002) on how and why people collaborate on e-based projects without the hope of financial reward, like Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia), Slashdot, Linux, etc. A few parts are rather technical and quantitative, but the article is quite interesting.

Paul Resnick has an interesting paper 'Impersonal Sociotechnical Capital, ICTs, and Collective Action Among Strangers' (2004). Some of the research on t-government (transformational government) has started to focus on the issue of co-production, like this article by Stephen King, Citizen Relationship Management: The Rocky Road from Transactions to Empowerment. Co-production, in which the citizens help craft governmental service or are co-producers in the results (like clients taking partial responsibility for improving their health) dates back to this 1980 article: Gordon Whitiker, Coproduction: Citizen Participation in Service Delivery (Public Administration Review).

Benjamin A. Olken's NBER paper Do Television and Radio Destroy Social Capital? Evidence from Indonesian Villages uses quasi-experimental evidence (which Indonesian villages are blocked by mountains from receiving transmissions) to show that villages with greater TV access and watching are associated with lower levels of social capital. (2006) Duncan Watts and colleagues have an experiment called the Small World experiment to try to replicate Stanley Millgram's lost letter experiment that produced the '6 degrees of separation' conclusion. In the experiment, volunteers try to find out in how few links through friends they can find others who are very distant worldwide (geographically and socially).Networks, Netwars, and the Fight For The Future (First Monday, by David Ronfeldt and John Arequilla)