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I knew I wanted to look at Economics and Psychology (as I’ve always been interested in them but never really had to opportunity to ‘formally’ study them’) and have decided that I’m going to pin my research on the issue of online reputation. Although my thoughts are still rather immature at this stage, I’m really interested in how individuals in web communities can actively develop and project their reputations in order to  influence others, be in a position to set agendas or simply ‘stand out’ from the crowd. An example would be the underground extremist forum. In the absence of  a formal ‘feedback mechanism’, such as that employed by eBay, how do users become ‘leaders’? Is it simply the amount of time they spend in the forum (and their related post count), or are other, more subtle factors at play? And, if there is, is there any kind of ‘blueprint for success’ that can be developed? Alongside this i’d also like to explore how companies, who are operating in an altogether more ‘legitimate’ environment, tackle the same issue. What are their strategies for establishing online reputation with consumers, and positioning themselves as pre-eminent in their field? Are there any parallels between the forum user and the fortune 500?

While i think the  tie in with psychology is reasonably clear, the economics link is possibly somewhat more tenuous. I think exploring  the concept of social capital and its relative worth could prove fruitful in the company example, but whether or not it will have any relevance to the forum user I’m not at this stage clear. It could be the case that i have to abandon economics in favour of sociology once i get a bit further in with my reading, but for now I’m going to keep my fingers crossed i can find enough linkages to make the exploration worthwhile.

My current reading list is as such focused on economics:

Economics, Parkin, Powell & Matthews (Seventh Edition, 2008)

The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life, Thaler, 1994

Liquid Love, Bauman, 2003

The issue of cyber-warfare is an increasingly topical one, as indicated by its high profile presence in the news the morning of our first COMP6044 lecture, hence my choosing of it as the issue to focus on for the interdisciplinary learning. The news that morning was focused on the Stuxnet virus, a complex and inherently suspicious virus, designed to target systems not connected to the Internet, and its effects on the Iranian civil nuclear programme (Radio 4 Today article). As this issue emerges from the realms of science fiction to reality, I intend to look into the effects it may have have on society, through the disciplines of Economics and Politics.

The first subject, Economics, can be viewed from two viewpoints. Both the Economics from the aggressors point of view and the victim’s. Wtih cyber-ware being conducted in virtual worlds, does this make warfare much cheaper to conduct than the more conventional methods and what effects might this have? Will conducting warfare become something that is much more readily pursued than traditional warfare if the costs of starting a war are much lower? Also will this have an effect on the structure and focus of a nation’s economy as a whole with less money being spent on conventional forces and more being redirected to research into cyber-warfare and cyber terrorism? From the victim’s point of view, what effects can a cyber-attack have on an economy? With infrastructure such as power stations and possibly airports being targeted, how might this damage an economy and what lasting effects may it leave in its wake?

Politics also comes into play, in particular the area of International Relations. Cyber-warfare gives politicians new avenues of attacking or maybe even controlling external powers. Cyber-warfare also allows for a certain degree of anonymity allowing one nation to effect another without the source of the attack being known. How might this affect international relations both with allies and enemies? Will the new and potential future developments lead to relations changing in unforeseen and unpredictable manners? Also cyber-warfare may allow for many such developments to remain hidden from the general public, allowing politicians to keep (more) secrets from those that elected them into power.

What’s evident from the range of questions brought up here (and there are many more not covered in this blog post) is that cyber-warfare covers an awful lot of areas in these two disciplines alone (not to mention many other disciplines that could also be looked at). In the hope of possibly answering some of these questions however I aim to look into some books covering the basics of Economics and economic infrastructure as well as the economic motives behind international relationships. From a Politics perspective I shall aim to read into the world of International Relations and the scientific theories that help to explain them.

Will

The growth of the web has empowered consumer, irreversibly changing the way society conducts economic transactions. Individuals can now source goods from across the globe, rather than simply relying on local suppliers, escaping what some have labelled the tyranny of location. Consumers increased search ability has inevitably allowed consumers to source better value, and hence gain more for their money, in turn allowing for increased investment.

I plan to investigate the changes in consumer behaviour and a shift towards a more open economy which have been facilitated by the web. I plan to look at this from the perspective of both the consumer and the producer/ retailer, possibly going towards discussing the growth of the prosumer, for example within the entertainment industry. I also intend to look at the growth of online auction sites, such as eBay and consider whether the growth of such sites it solely due to them allow the consumer to access specific goods, at generally lower price, or whether being a member of such community has its own non tangible benefits, possibly talking a slight detour discussing whether or not such sites allow for the development of a social identity, and rank, and whether or not this can be considered a unique selling point, and benefit of using such a service.

One of the disciplines I plan to use to discuss this with is sociology, discussing how a change in social norms and attitude has facilitated the changes. I intend to look at both large scale macro theories, such as functionalism and Marxism but also looking at more specific and detailed micro theories, such as the development of social norms within online communities. It would also be interesting to look at whether there is a global shift or whether the changes are limited to key small populations or demographics, it may be that many lack the skills, time or equipment required to take advantage of the cheaper prices available online, and as such are still locale bound. If many are not taking advantage, it would be prudent to look at why not.   

The discipline I plan to contrast this with is economics, discussing the models that are available to illustrate the paradigm shift. For example discussing how the growth of the web has allowed suppliers to outsource parts of their business, allowing for lower prices, which could be passed to the consumer or held as greater profit margins, alternatively how companies do not need to rent shop spare or hire large teams of retail staff if they are primarily operating online, this further reduces company cost, allowing for them to retail such goods at lower prices, allowing to consumer to purchase more. As I currently know very little regarding academic economics, I hope this will provide a far more mathematical reasoning and will hopefully contrast well with the methodology and theories of sociology. It would also be interesting to do some future gazing, we all know that due to the recession businesses are facing increasing hard times, with consumers having considerably less disposable income, and expenses such as rent/ mortgages growing, is it inevitable that the vast majority of transactions will migrate to being online in the coming decades?

Upon deciding which disciplines to investigate I started to read through Sociology, Themes and perspectives, by Haralambos and Holborn, which focuses on the main macro theories of sociology and applies them to a variety of variant topic areas, I needed to look at this type of work as I have not looked at this topic area before, I intend to look at more specific works once I have established a grounding. I have made considerably less progress with my reading regarding foundations economics, progressing little further than reading the Wikipedia entries for both economics and game theory. This week I intend to build my economics foundation to allow to start to look at more specific texts.

Recent study is mainly focusing on the 4^th version of Sociology by Giddens and also linking the economic aspect to think about the impacts of the Web in globalization; and then moving on to the part of business models which is influenced by the Web.

To understand the society, firstly we should put the eyes on the broader range of areas. Throughout the world, the multinational company became a phenomenon after World War II, and strongly promoted the process of economic globalization. Nowadays, multinational companies are considered as the core of economic globalization. Through the bridge multinational companies offered, markets and trades are linked closely between different countries. Trading information are transferring frequently from one country to another breaking the barriers of time and spaces.

However, in this globalization trend, the participants are just involving the companies or a small part of people who are conducting this business. For most people, maybe they can use the cup made in thousands miles away from their hometown, however, they have not opportunities to participate this amazing project until the Web came out. Because the main members of the society have engaged in the information global sharing activity, the globalization has been infiltrated into people’s daily lives. The Web is the main force to push and accelerate the process of globalization. The information explosion covers every detail of the lives across the world. People have the channels to obtain and publish information about what they like, what they want, what they are doing and so on. The information is mass but has intangible value inside. At that movement, BBS became a huge container to gather people of like interests. Usually, one BBS is organized by subjects, such as music, food, feeling, education and so on. Members of this BBS will around those subjects to leave their comments and reviews. For wisdom marketers, they know that better understanding of their customers is one of the best ways to gain competitive advantages. Therefore, through those BBSs, they can refine the contents and pick up the useful part for their business. (Of course, there are some issues about online fake information or advertisements, but at this stage we just assumed the number of them is quite few which can be ignored.) Unfortunately, at most situations this kind of job is heave, especially when operated manually. But the platform that presents the people’s interests throughout the world and the way to find out valuable ideas about the business and market is worth firmly.  The Web provides a creative platform to gather information generated all over the world, which is valuable for the economic globally. Google’s success can be explained by this information aggregated. They provide the accurate search results for people based on the search key words, while putting the related advertisements on the same web page. This business model helps Google gain high profit. However, this kind way of putting advertisements based on the search engines is relatively passive for the potential customers, as it needs people to search firstly and then see the related information. Therefore, the issue put in front of us is that which way will be better to get information accurately and directly and how to build a positive business model.

To be continued…

Issues

The Web has been always studied as a technology. The features of it usually are associated with technology invention rather than evaluating its value in the market. For example, people want to press their blogs and contribute to the Wikipedia without any money returns, which are considered as a social activity. That is true. However, how to transfer this activity into real market to make profit should be considered as well.

The issue I want to address in this module is to find out how to measure the value of user-generated content and also the valuable assets in the Semantic Web, which is one of the open questions in the economist’s view of Web Science. The Web has been changing without a break since it was released in the world. It changes from a system to publish information into a platform in which people can edit and publish their contents freely and easily. One of the reasons that bring this change within the Web is coming from Web 2.0, especially the user-generated feature of Web 2.0. Although it is the freeness and openness that promotes people to participate in the content construction with a great enthusiasm, it does not mean that the nature is to generate contents only. However, there should be a market to make these activities valuable. Consequently, how to dig out the element of economic stimulus and at the same time without losing the passion of people to build those contents is becoming a question to be studied in further researches. Moreover, the next generation Web visibly tends to be the Semantic Web which will integrate information and supply intelligent services through intelligent agents rather than artificially. The value therefore will not only come from the services, but also stay in the mechanism and the intelligences on the Web. So it is worth digging out the value of the Semantic Web and transferring it into the society and the market as well.

Disciplines

There are two disciplines in this research which are economics and sociology. The main focus of this research is standing in the economic point of view to measure the economic value of the Web. Therefore, it is very necessary to do research in economic aspect. Meanwhile, as economics cannot be applied without the society, it is helpful to combine the sociology with economics to get deep understanding about it. The sociology is based on the whole society to understand the structure, function and the law of development of our society through studying the social relations and social behaviors. Due to the enlarging influence of the Web, the social relations and social behaviors have been changed correspondingly. Consequently, by studying the nature of society and the changes caused by the Web, we can sufficiently to understand the society in nowadays and the development tendency, catching the insight to apply on the economic analysis.

Current Reading List

Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw , Mark P. Taylor

This book is about the basic concept of economics. It will help to understand how the economy works in the society.

Innovation Management and New Product Development by Dr Paul Trott

It is a useful book for transferring the technology into the real market. It is also used in the innovation module to help find a suitable way to connect different disciplines from technology aspect to the management aspect. The most important part is to tell us how to apply the new technology within the real market to improve the society.

Sociology Work and Industry by Tony J. Watson

This book describes how the discipline of sociology are understood and used in industry aspect. In the book, what is sociology is explained first and then connected with the industry to give wider understanding.

Understanding Classical Sociology by John A. Hughes, Wes W.Sharrock, Peter J. Martin

The prevailing assumption of cybercrime is that it is a massive threat that could cause unimaginable chaos to society. However, this is just a virtual threat. The reality is that cybercrimes most often involve small impact bulk victimisations which can be individually insignificant but collectively significant. Most cybercriminals target the long tail of crime where they prefer to commit more crimes with less gain. An example of that would be a cybercriminal scamming 50 million people for £1.

Such a model of crime has several advantages over traditional models of crime as individually insignificant amount of losses means:
1. Victims would be less bothered about reporting the crime
2. Police less likely to get involved
3. Credit card companies less bothered

For more information, please see the presentation on “Organized Crime and the Organization of Cybercrime” given by David Wall.

The study of cybercrime requires a multidisciplinary approach as the society is affected. Economics, law, sociology, psychology and criminology are just some of the disciplines involved. It is my intention to understand cybercrimes from the economics and criminology perspective so that I can have a better understanding on why cybercrimes occur.

Economics

After reading the presentation on “How Economics and Information Security Affects Cyber Crime and What This Means in the Context of a Global Recession” given by Peter Guerra, I believe that by understanding more about the economic incentives behind cybercrime, that is, the incentives to commit crime and the incentives to protect from crime, I would gain a better understanding of the rationale behind cybercrimes and whether critical points can be identified using economic theories.

The economic books which I’m proposing to read are:

1. Microeconomics: Principles and analysis by F.A. Cowell
2. Economics (6th Ed) by J. Sloman

Criminology

Criminology is the study of crimes and by studying criminology, I’m looking to develop an understanding on the theories in criminology and an imaginative mind on crimes so that not only I can understand why crimes occur but can also anticipate when and where crime is likely to occur. There are three textbooks I’ve found which are relevant:

1. Criminology: The Basics by Sandra Walklate
2. The Oxford Handbook of Criminology by Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert Reiner
3. Cybercrime: The Transformation of Crime in the Information Age by David S. Wall
4. Handbook of Internet Crime by Yvonne Jewkes and Majid Yar