Communications of the ACM

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/