Digital divide is generally defined as gap in access to digital technology marked by age, disability, race, gender, culture, religion, location , and socioecomic status.
The advent of the Internet and the invention of the world wide web has transformed our societies. The potential of this transformation is not in doubt, however, what will happen to the gap between “information haves” and “Information have nots”? Will the gap be eroded or aggravated?
The series of post will focus on causes and consequences of the inequalities and inequities (if any) that exist in the digital world.
Historically, there are two poles to the issue of digital divide – optimist and pessimist views. The optimists see the transformation into the digital world as an opportunity for social change where digital technology will significantly increase the quality of life and remedy the inequalities of the non-digital world whereas the pessimists posit that the inequalities and other ills of the pre-digital world would be reproduced in the digital world as such digital technology is not an opportunity for social change.

The definition of digital divide suggests that digital divide is dimensional in space, time, and context. As a result, recourse to the fields of demography and design science is a requirement for understanding these dimensions.
Demography as the study of size and composition of population, internal changes to the composition , and the relationship between the sociophysical changes and the environment. The demographic arm will provide qualitative and quantitative handles to explore the space and time dimensions of digital divide.

If digital technology is artificial then it could be treated as a work of art. With design science, a clearer insight into designing can be gained. Design science is a system of logically related knowledge, which should contain and organize the complete knowledge about and for designing. This knowledge will facilitate the understanding of digital technology in context. Is digital technology a misfit? Watch out!!

Likewise, design science as a system of logically related knowledge, which should contain and organize the complete knowledge about and for designing is crucial to the understanding of digital technology in context. Is digital technology a misfit? Watch out!!

Bibliography
Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander
Demography: The Study of Human Population 2nd ed. by David Yaukey and Douglas L. Anderton
Digital Divide by Pippa Norris

In the online ethnographic (or netnographic) study by Markus Gielser[1], he describes Napster the original peer-to-peer music sharing service, operating between 1999 and 2001, as a consumer gift-giving system meeting classic anthropological requirements. Giesler details the key qualities which define the service as a gift-giving system: social distinctions, e.g. between gift-giving to build social cohesion and commercial exchange; the norm of reciprocity, i.e. the basic exchange rules identified and owned by Napster users and embodied in the software; and the rituals and symbolisms, e.g. the meaningful user names chosen by people to indicate their musical areas of expertise.

Where else do gift-giving systems exist on the web, other than in peer-to-peer file- sharing systems? In Open Source, where time and intellectual capital is shared freely in software development groups? In online user communities around products and services (e.g. Mac Forums[2]) or question resolution and advice giving sites such as Stackoverflow[3] and Quora[4]?

Do web businesses deploy gift-giving systems in the permutations of the Freemium[5] business models used for services with online communities? And if yes, are they used to build social cohesion, is there reciprocity and is there evidence of rituals and symbolism? In the popular music sharing service Soundcloud[6] users upload original music and seek and give comments from and to peers. The heart of the basic free service is the online community in which people with meaningful identities  reciprocally gift-give, according to unwritten rules of exchange, both music and critical appreciation to develop social networks.The premium upgrade does not provide additional community features, it gives increased music file storage to support promotional use by professional musicians. Soundcloud exemplifies how the Freemium model can both support classic group gift-giving behaviours and use the commercial exchange model in a complementary way.

For some time I have been very interested in how people use the Web at work and the discussions surrounding this practice at different levels in the organisation. Over the years many have talked, written and passionately lobbied about the many issues that have emerged. I also joined this discussion and tried to present a balanced argument for the Web in the workplace, even if only for personal use. Yet, there still seems to be some confusion about how to best manage Web usage in organisations.

Taming the Web in the Caribbean Workplace

In the Caribbean, there is a predominantly negative perception of Web usage at work, especially among the management of large established organisations. There is a very real fear that Web usage in the workplace makes the organisation vulnerable to taking legal liability for related unlawful activities, security breaches, bandwidth drain and productivity losses. As a result, many organisations in the region have adopted an approach where they rather be safe than sorry. Unfortunately, based on my experience, measures used to manage risk are then usually excessive and outweigh the amount of risk posed.

Organisations have attempted to manage employee Web usage utilising several methods. Sometimes blocking and or requiring written permission to access certain sites and services, using monitoring software to enforce strict policies and providing training to employees on ‘proper’ Web usage in the workplace. However, barriers to unrestricted access are quickly being removed with the introduction of affordable 4G mobile Internet access and very strong adoption of smart phones (e.g., iPhone and Blackberry) by employees in the region. Unsurprisingly, this has prompted some organisations to respond by taking an even tougher approach to managing Web usage in the workplace on any device.

My Lens: Finding Responsible Ways to Embrace the Web in the Workplace

The above scenario, though somewhat extreme, does not only exist in the Caribbean region but is also likely to be present in organisations all over the world in varying forms. Given this, I have chosen to explore the disciplines of technoethics and risk management and their inherent approaches to the current issue. There is also hope to discover new ways organisations can go about creating effective strategies to encourage employees to use the Web at work in more responsible ways that does not put the organisation, themselves and the Web at risk.

Notes

This & Last Week’s Plan

1. Identify the simplest books to read that will give an easy to understand introduction to the disciplines you picked.
2. Make notes on books read.
3. Even if it is the last thing you do, prepare a blog post that gives an overview of what you want to work on by Monday.
4. Publish a blog post that introduces technoethics.
5. Publish a blog post that introduces risk management.
6. Outline a reading plan for moving forward.

Current Readings

• Ethics: A Very Short Introduction – Simon Blackburn
• Handbook of Research on Technoethics – Rocci Luppicini & Rebecca Adell
• Risk: A Very Short Introduction – Baruch Fischhoff
• Fundamentals of Risk Management Understanding, Evaluating and Implementing Effective Risk Management – Paul Hopkin

The opportunities that marketers are provided with in cyberspace have led them to seek means to facilitate a two-way communication with consumers aiming at building a relationship of trust with them. Given that marketing is much broader than selling as it encompasses the entire business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view, the ability of marketers to glean the types of information needed often depends on consumer’s willingness to volunteer such information.

This essay aims to examine to what extent consumers’ behaviour in cyberspace differs from the ‘real-world’ behaviour and whether concerns about privacy as well as scepticism about how marketers use data prevent consumers from disclosing personal information. The fact that marketing is based on the study of the psychological characteristics of consumers who engage in voluntary self-disclosure, combined with the application of psychological theories and techniques to marketing, indicate the close relationship between these two disciplines.

In order to unfold the different approaches on the abovementioned issue, I decided to first get myself familiar with the basic concepts and techniques of psychology. Psychology is both an applied and academic field that studies the human mind and behaviour. Research in psychology seeks to describe human thought and behaviour, explain why these behaviours occur, predict how, why and when these behaviours will occur again in the future and modify and improve behaviours to better the lives of individuals and society as a whole. There are three types of research methods, causal, descriptive and rational, while psychologists use a range of techniques including naturalistic observation, experiments, case studies and questionnaires. Topics and questions in psychology can be looked at in a number of different ways; some of the major perspectives in psychology include the biological, cognitive, behavioural, evolutionary, humanistic perspective.

Given that the web has created a new type of society where the presence of other human beings is implied rather than actual, I particularly focused my interest on the discipline of Social Psychology which aims to understand and explain the impact of the social environment on the thought, feeling and behaviour of individuals. A basic concept of social psychology that describes our everyday interactions is the concept of self-disclosure which is defined as ‘the voluntary making available of information about one’s self that would not ordinarily be accessible to the other at that moment.’

Self-disclosure has received considerable attention from consumer psychologists as it plays a vital role in relationship development and maintenance. Although self-disclosure research has shown that people are reluctant to divulge information about themselves, one notable exception to this rule involves the norm of reciprocity which refers to the tendency for recipients to match the level of intimacy in the disclosure they return with the level of intimacy in the disclosure they receive; people are more likely to engage in self-disclosure if they first become the recipients of such disclosures from their conversational partners. A few researchers have suggested that consumers interact with the source of electronic communications in the same way they interact with other people; therefore reciprocity could make consumers more involved in self-disclosure even in cyberspace. Thus, theoretically, in order to trigger the reciprocity principle, a company would first have to reveal some information about itself to the consumer.

Botha, B., Strydom, J., Brink, A. (2004) Introduction to Marketing. South Africa: Juta and Co Ltd

Cialdini, R. B. (1993). Influence: Science and practice. New York: HarperCollins.

Derlega,V. J.,& Chaikin, A. L. (1977). ‘Privacy and self-disclosure in social relationships’. Journal of Social Issues, 33, pp. 102–115

Gross, R. (2010) Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour. London: Hodder Education

Hill, C. T., & Stull, D. E. (1982). ‘Disclosure reciprocity: Conceptual and measurement

Issues’. Social Psychology Quarterly, 45, pp. 238-244

Holtgraves,T. (1990). The language of self-disclosure. In H. Giles & W. P. Robinson (Eds.), Handbook of language and social psychology. Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley

Joinson, A.N. (2001). ‘Self-disclosure in computer-mediated communication: The role of selfawareness and visual anonymity’. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31, pp. 177–192

This week I have looked at the discipline of anthropology. In order to get a good introduction I still found is useful to read a few different introductory texts as each presents the discipline in slightly different ways. Here is what I found about anthropology as a discipline.

“The most scientific of the humanities, the most humanist of sciences”

Eric Wolf (in Erisken 2010, p. 1)

Source: http://markandrews.edublogs.org/page/2/

All the authors reviewed place anthropology at the intersection of social sciences and humanities. Peoples and Bailey outline 5 subfields of the discipline: physical/biological anthropology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, anthropological linguistics and applied anthropology. For the rest of this project, I will equate anthropology with the cultural anthropology subfield, which is also sometimes known as cultural and social anthropology (to satisfy both the American and British strands which emphasise culture and society respectively (Monaghan & Just, p. 12)). Eriksen defines anthropology as ‘the comparative study of cultural and social life’, with a focus on the ‘whole of human society’. He states that the discipline is about ‘how different people can be, but it also tries to find out in what sense it can be said that all humans have something in common’ (Eriksen 2010, pp. 1-4). This latter aspect of the discipline is highlighted in all three readings as something deeply fundamental.

Before proceeding to consider the approaches and methodologies of the field, I thought it would be useful to go through a brief history of anthropology, to emphasise preconceptions and misperceptions. Eriksen (2010, p. 10) notes its recent origins as an academic discipline during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  All the authors reviewed recognise that there is a romanticised version of the anthropologist as the intrepid explorer, out to discover and study ‘unspoilt’ societies. This, they agree, might have been true until the 1970s when all of this changed (Peoples & Bailey 2000, p. 6). The traditional focus of anthropological research on, small, non-Western, ‘exotic’ societies (to demarcate it from the discipline of sociology which traditionally focused on large, Western ones) was abandoned and topics such as American bodybuilders, the decline of the middle class and family life at Silicon Valley now form part of contemporary anthropological research projects (Peoples & Bailey, p. 6). This, coupled with the fact that anthropology is no longer the prerogative of Western scholars, is important to note in our study of the discipline itself, but also of its perspective on the topic of the global digital divide.

Next week I will present the various approaches and methodologies prevalent in the field.

References 

Eriksen, T. H. (2010) Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology 3^rd edition, New York: Pluto Press

Monaghan, J. and Just, P. (2000) Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Peoples, J. and Bailey, G. (2000) Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 5^th ed., Belmont: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning

With an initial plan to scour the world for an insight into email hacking from the viewpoint of  economists and psychologists, it suddenly came to me that I would be playing too safe a game. With Marketing being a subject so diverse and multi-disciplined, that encompassed areas of psychology in buyer behaviour and economics in statistics analysis, it seemed I had bound myself to a study area that appears difficult to steer away from wholly.

As our world is overrun by hackers and a growing abundance of readily made hacking software and programmers keen to get their hands on whatever they seek it seems bizarre that we still are ready to advertise ourselves on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and many other ‘self-branded’ web sources. The web is such an intrinsic part of our everyday life that we become so wound up in its beauty that we are unaware of any imminent attacks on our personal data.

From e-mail to database systems, from banking to business data, we are inundated with those who wish to hack into our lives for every penny and every piece of information that we hold dear. From recent personal experience, I had been faced with the dilemma of attempting to redeem my own personal e-mail account from those who ‘hacked’ it. I believed this to be an arduous task that is morally, socially and, potentially, financially unacceptable. After this event, I felt that I would like to pursue an understanding of it from a different perspective and realised that this would be the perfect opportunity to do so.

I have now chosen two very different subjects: moral philosophy and politics. From my initial understanding of moral philosophy is an ethical analysis of the self, and the awareness of ethical (mis)representations of action or communication. From further reading, it is believed that moral philosophy is dependant on a number of different issues including cultural values, heritage, environment and obligation (Schneewind, 1992). The cultural values specifically interest me as it is not without doubt that the varying cultures will determine various perceptions of what is morally acceptable.

My second subject is in politics, which a subject that can both be the cause and consequence of societal change in any nation. This subject helps to define our understanding of culture, psychology, finance and communications and reveals itself as a tug-of-war between power and peace (Morgenthau, 1993), greed and ethics. Furthermore, it can help to define a nation and its outlook on the rest the world through the ideologies of various political leaders whether in a dictated land or otherwise.

It appears that subjects would have, although different, solid perspectives on communications hacking and extenuate the need for this issue to subside.  I will follow up my research by looking into how moral philosophy develops according to nation, race and culture. I will also seek further knowledge of political advances on e-mail hacking, whether they use it for unfair advantage or whether it is heavily moderated.

Guyer, P. (1992). The Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Morgenthau, H.J. (1993). Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. Boston:McGraw-Hill

In the previous week I listed several books on politics I was considering as reading for introductory texts. Having looked into each of these; I found they were either very dense in their content or too specific in their details to give a broad enough introduction. Having re-examined recommended pre-reading and undergraduate introductory texts I came across the Routledge “Very Short Introductions” books and the recommendation of one university of the “Very Short Introduction to Politics”.

My initial reading of this text has prompted my decision to change my topic of discussion from “cryptography” to “citizenry on social media”. Having decided on Politics as my topic area over Politics Science; this offers the ability to make a variety of historical comparisons and contrast the developments of states and their relationships with their citizens against the development of social media sites and their relationships with users.

The book gave a relatively detailed account of the varieties of social organisation that have been implemented throughout history ranging from ancient despotism and feudalism to modern dictatorships and democracies. There are clear distinctions to be drawn between different components of these organisations and the emergence of social media. However, it is interesting how the development of end-user agreements and the rights that they hold/with-hold have mirrored some aspect of the development of many political histories.

Not wishing to miss out on a greater level of factual content I also completed readings of “Very Short Introductions” to “Democracy” and “Communism” and intend to look briefly at “Socialism”, “Human Rights” and “The United Nations” to bolster my contextual knowledge. I have also looked into the further reading of undergraduate texts on globalisation with a view to contrasting the interaction and relationships of states with the interactions between and relationships of users with different social media sites.

This week I have also completed notes on the topics of:

Jean Baudrillard
Marxist Sociology
Ethnocentrism
Emile Durkheim
The Chicago School of Sociology   
Critical Theory and
Post-Structuralism

I will be looking to do some study on the nature of social media this coming week along with developing my knowledge of “modernity” in sociology with a particular focus on the nature of Post-Modernism.