Draft September 26, 2001

Bringing the Social into CITRIS

Thomas Kalil

Comments welcome:

Premises

  • Involvement of social scientists is important to the ultimate success of CITRIS. (I want to use “social scientists” as a short-hand to include economists, sociologists, lawyers, anthropologists, political scientists, historians, scholars of public policy, business-school professors, etc.)
  • The project is off to a good start with respect to the involvement of social scientists (e.g. Castells, Linn, Samuelson, Saxenian, Varian, etc.) but more can and should be done.

Why social scientists can and should be involved

Social scientists could play a number of important roles in CITRIS. For example, they could:

  1. Address some of the risks associated with the new technologies – and propose alternative approaches: Although CITRIS will undoubtedly demonstrate social benefits of IT, is important to deal with the potential downsides as well. Samuelson, for example, is interested in addressing the potential of ubiquitous networked sensors to erode individual privacy. Ideally, engineers could work with the appropriate stakeholders to address the social consequences of technology at the design stage. An example of this is the decision of the World Wide Web Consortium to establish the Web Accessibility Initiative, which has helped make the Web more accessible to people with disabilities. Core Web standards such as HTML and SMIL have been designed from the beginning to be as accessible as possible, and the W3C has also developed guidelines for accessible Web browsers, content, and authoring tools.
  1. Help identify policies and the economic, social, and legal factors that will either slow or accelerate the deployment of societal-scale information systems: The deployment of societal-scale information systems is much more complex than traditional university tech transfer or the formation of a university-based spin-off. The use of e-health applications, for example, has been delayed by such issues as:
  • State licensure and liability issues surrounding remote consultation;
  • Privacy and security issues, especially those related to computer-based patient records;
  • Lack of consensus on the technical standards (e.g. security, reliability, interoperability) needed to enable a health information infrastructure;
  • Controversy surrounding the creation of unique personal identifiers;
  • FDA regulation of software as a “medical device”;
  • User acceptance by health care professionals and patients;
  • Concern about the wide range in the quality and reliability of consumer health information on the Web; and
  • Current legal restrictions on Medicare reimbursement for telemedicine services.

The involvement of social scientists in CITRIS projects can help flag some of these issues, and suggest possible solutions. Kalil (1999) identifies 10 kinds of public policies that have been used to accelerate the deployment of IT applications, including:

  • Supporting pilot projects and test-beds to encourage experimentation.
  • Making state and federal agencies better users of IT to deliver government services or carry out their missions more effectively.
  • Sponsoring evaluation research to identify best practices and the costs and benefits of using IT for a particular application.
  • Reducing legal or regulatory obstacles, such as those mentioned above in the context of e-health.
  • Supporting the development of open standards by paying for the development of “reference implementations” or by using the leverage of the government’s procurement power to support them in the marketplace.
  • Establishing national goals, such as the goal set by President Clinton to connect every K-12 classroom to the Internet by the year 2000.
  • Supporting education and training for end-users or IT application developers. Examples include NIH support for graduate programs in medical informatics, or the Department of Education’s program to help prepare new teachers to use technology effectively in the classroom.
  1. Help improve the design of information systems: In recent years, there has been growing collaboration between engineers and social scientists on the design of information systems, particularly on topics such as computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), requirements engineering, and human-computer interaction. For example, a wide range of disciplines have made contributions to human computer interaction, including computer science, cognitive psychology, social psychology, perceptual psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and anthropology. Furthermore, many IT companies are now hiring anthropologists for insights into user requirements and how their products are actually used:
  • In 1979, Xerox PARC hired anthropology graduate student Lucy Suchman. The film she did of people struggling to use a Xerox machine highlighted the importance of simplicity, and led to all Xerox copiers having a big green button.
  • A Motorola study found that Chinese in rural areas with no phone service had developed an elaborate system of using pagers to send coded messages. This discovery led Motorola developing a two-way pager for the Chinese market.
  1. Suggest new application areas and themes for CITRIS

Social scientists could also suggest new application areas and themes for CITRIS,

such as expanding “digital opportunity” in the U.S. and abroad. [One earlier effort to describe the major economic and social benefits of IT is a series of 1994 white papers on 15 application domains prepared by the White House Information Infrastructure Task Force.]

Digital Opportunity in the U.S.: To date, most of the discussion around the “digital divide” has concentrated on disparities in access to computer hardware and the Internet by income, race, educational level, and geography. More attention should be devoted to identifying and prototyping applications that would help empower low-income individuals and communities. Some current and possible examples include:

-Public health information systems that increase rates of childhood immunization by generating automatic reminder notices to parents, doctors, and school principals;

-Geospatial information systems that can help target efforts to reduce childhood lead poisoning, by combining information on household income, presence of young children, and age of housing stock;

-Software and effective delivery systems for adult literacy and adult basic education that would approach the effectiveness of a one-on-one tutor by using speech recognition, text-to-speech, and natural language processing;

-Neighborhood Early Warning Systems that identify when a community is in distress on the basis of property delinquencies, arsons, etc; and

-Locally-generated content that helps address community problems.

Digital Opportunity in developing countries: There is growing evidence that IT can play an important role in the development process in the Third World. For example, farmers in rural Sri Lanka were able to double the price that they got for their crops merely by gaining access to price information in Colombo, the capital city. Access to real-time prices eliminated the “information asymmetry” that had existed between farmers and the middlemen. However, further innovation in technologies and in business models is needed to expand access to IT in developing countries:

-New technologies should be developed that meet the unique requirements of developing countries, including ultra low-cost, little or no access to a wired telecommunications infrastructure or power grid, low levels of literacy, support for multiple languages. Recent work in organic semiconductors, for example, could dramatically reduce the cost of displays and memory.

-Experimentation with business models that provide access to the Internet at affordable rates in developing countries is also necessary. One promising innovation is the “shared access” model (e.g. GrameenPhone in Bangladesh), so that access to telephony and the Internet is at least available in every village.

  1. Computational social science

CITRIS PIs are already exploring ways in which new information technologies could be used for social science applications. Varian and Hellerstein, for example, are exploring how the “deep Web” (data available on networked databases as opposed to static Web pages) could be tapped for purposes such as regional economic forecasting.

Beyond CITRIS

In recent years, social scientists in a wide range of disciplines have become increasingly interested in the dizzying array of economic, legal, social, political, cultural and policy issues raised by the widespread adoption of new information technologies. A recent National Academy of Science workshop (1998) chaired by Hal Varian concluded, “the growth of computing and communications technology is exceeding our understanding of its economic and social impacts.” The report called for an expansion of interdisciplinary research, workshops, curricula, and fellowships, and for more extensive, more timely, and new sources of data.

The importance of IT to our economy, society, and political system is sufficient to warrant new research and education initiatives that address questions that go beyond the CITRIS agenda. Although the list below is not meant to be comprehensive, it does give a sense for the range of questions that social scientists and policy-makers are grappling with:

  • Will IT eventually undermine the ability of authoritarian regimes to control the flow of information, or will it be used to consolidate their power?
  • What impact will the global Internet have on key legal concepts such as jurisdiction? What happens when different nation-states impose different standards on conduct over the Internet (e.g. France’s legal action against Yahoo’s sale of Nazi memorabilia)?
  • Under what circumstances does the Internet and other new technologies increase the relative power of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as compared to nation-states?
  • How will the widespread availability of near real-time, high-resolution imagery (1 meter or better) impact the stability of the international security system?
  • Under what circumstances is self-regulation an effective alternative to traditional legislation and regulation on issues such as privacy?
  • How do we balance competing values such as freedom of information and privacy (e.g. online availability of previously obscure court records)?
  • Are we really headed for an “electronic Pearl Harbor” – or are threats to our critical infrastructure (financial, power, telecom, Internet, air traffic control) overblown? How can the federal government defend against cyber-attack when much of the relevant infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector?
  • What is the nature of “community” in cyberspace? Can community networks contribute to the formation of “social capital” in place-based communities?
  • What lessons about the possible impact of the Internet can we learn from the introduction of other technologies, such as electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio?
  • What can or should governments do to encourage the private sector to invest in upgrading the “last mile” of the telecommunications infrastructure? Does the Telecommunications Act of 1996 need to be scrapped, or is it a reasonable basis for our telecommunications policy?
  • Will increased consolidation in the telecommunications industry and the lack of “open access” requirements on cable companies lead to a decrease in user-driven innovation on the Internet?
  • Will network effects, switching costs, and economies of scale generated more “winner-take-all” markets? What is the appropriate competition policy response?
  • How can governments allocate the rights to use spectrum? Should we have more unlicensed spectrum, with rules that discourage interference? Or should we have more of a “property right” regime?
  • Will the combination of new laws (the Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and new technologies (Digital Rights Management) undermine important legal concepts such as “fair use” and the “first sale” doctrine?
  • Why do programmers donate their time and talent to “open source” development projects for free? What are some other examples of thriving “gift economies” on the Internet – and how can this concept be leveraged further?
  • Are our current economic statistics accurately capturing the impact that IT is having on the U.S. and other economies? If not, what can be done about it? Is IT really increasing productivity economy-wide, or has the recent increase in productivity been primarily limited to the computer sector?
  • What new forms of “computer-mediated contracts” have the potential to increase customer choice, productivity, and efficiency?
  • What are the “great works” of the 21st century that could have the impact of Carnegie’s decision to fund public libraries? Should the government or foundations support the creation of an “information commons”?

Next steps

Below are some proposed next steps:

  1. The current level of awareness of CITRIS outside of Engineering is low. We should brief interested members of other departments and schools, such as SIMS, Public Policy, Law, Economics, Political Science, Sociology, etc.
  1. We should plan some seminars that would allow engineers and social scientists on campus to identify research topics of common interest.
  1. We need to develop some concrete ways in which social scientists can participate. I think that creating a mechanism to support social science graduate students that are interested in writing a Ph.D. or master’s thesis on a CITRIS-related topic is one such mechanism. But we should be open to other suggestions as well.
  1. We should talk to people who have been involved in previous collaborations between engineers and social scientists to determine how they have dealt with some of the obvious barriers to successful two-way collaboration, such as a lack of familiarity with each others’ specialized vocabulary, research methodology, and academic culture.

Sources

Kalil, Thomas. “The Case for Putting Internet Applications on the Policy Agenda.” Presentation made to the Global Internet Project, April 1999. At

National Academy of Science. Fostering Research on the Economic and Social Impacts of Information Technology. National Academy Press, 1998.

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