es of using new forms of digital data
and computational methods for social research,
15, 16 and Web Science has
progressed Social Machines that let us
collaborate, yet work independently in
distributed fashion.
23
And yet there is much more to do. As
a topical and critical example, we need
to understand how the Web influences
our democracies. Democracy builds
on pillars like the representation of
all, the rule of law, publicity and quality of information, temporality of decisions, and autonomy of individuals.
The Web affects these pillars: online
intimidation may threaten individuals
and, silence them. Groups may organize online to ignore the law. Misinformation in echo chambers lowers the
publicity and quality of information.
In light of too much online transparency, compromises—which are vital
in democracy—become infeasible.
And, autonomy may be jeopardized by
intrusion into private spheres. For all
that, the Web continues to offer positive opportunities—voice to the otherwise silenced, connections between
fragmented populations, mobilization
of those who lack other means or are
repressed—it is clear that these opportunities have come at a cost and—
more broadly—that we may need to
reconsider the pillars of democracy in
digital society. These questions make
Web Science more important now
than ever. While Europe strives to respond to them in EU projects.d and
various national endeavors thrive (for
example, the Alan Turing Institute in
the U.K. and, the German Internet Institute) we have only begun to face the
challenges.
The Sociotechnical Challenges
There is nothing inevitable about the
future of the Web. Its history to date
has been made at the intersection of
technical innovation and everyday
practice with wider social processes
and power relations, defying any prediction of fixed or finished outcomes.
While this poses profound challenges—we cannot simply engineer the
Web into a preferred state—we must
develop integrated and in-depth socio-technical understandings of the Web if
we are to influence its future direction.
d For example, http://coinform.eu/
As new users began to embrace the op-
portunities on offer—for government
and commerce in particular—content
began to change. More than this, new
users began to shape Web technolo-
gies—for example enabling user-gen-
erated content, video streaming, and
secure online payments—in ways that,
in turn, opened up new possibilities
both positive, and less so.
The Web has changed the world and
the world has changed the Web. And
this is only set to continue, as the platform economy, the Internet of Things
and new artificial intelligences offer
new opportunities and shape the Web
into the future.
For the past decade, Web Science
has been building the interdisciplinary expertise to face the challenges and
realize the value of this rapidly growing and diversifying Web. This task
transcends the work of any single academic discipline.
7 While our universities continue—overwhelmingly—to be
organized in siloes established in the
20th century, or much earlier, the Web
demands expertise from computer
science, sociology, business, mathematics, law, economics, politics, psychology engineering, geography, and
more. Web Science exists to integrate
knowledge and expertise from across
fields, integrating this into systematic,
robust, and reliable research that provides an action base for the future of
the Web.
Evidence of our endeavors in-
cludes the networks of Web science
labs, a number of undergraduate and
postgraduate educational programs
across Europe, summer schools on
Web Science, and an ACM conference
series.b We have understood how we
may target to build ‘objective’ technol-
ogy, yet end up with social stereotypes
we wanted to avoid.
2 We have learned
about the social and the technical pro-
cesses that are needed to provide open
data for the social good,c the method-
ological and epistemological challeng-
b http://webscience.org on labs, conference,
educational programs and summer schools.
c https://theodi.org/
How do we
engage the public
in meaningful
dialogue and
decision making
about the future of
the Web?