Will future gadgets be the “face of big brother”? Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Oxford Internet institute, published a book entitled The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop it. The online version of the book is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license and can be downloaded here.

In this book, Zittrain worries about whether the Internet can survive the freedom that produced it. Its openness is a reason why it spreads beyond nerds and their friends, in order to let other people exploit the space later on. In the beginning, there was a general purpose machine (PC), which was only restricted by its hardware limitations and did not have locks to limit its usage to what is accepted by the manufacturer.

Nowadays, there are high-tech gadgets which usually have a better usability and are more seamless. But, on the other hand, they are also controlled by their manufacturer, which are free to introduce locks. This fact is illustrated in the introduction by taking the iPhone as an example of a gorgeous but restricted high-tech gadget. In order to design the phone as a more user friendly device, Apple is controlling everything running on it, in order to prevent people from uploading crap that will stop the phone from operating properly. The first version was not open to run any third-party software at all, which was relaxed later on. However, there is still the enforced limitation that third-party software cannot be exchanged directly between users. When Bob wrote a great software for security enabled Instant Messaging, he cannot give it directly to Alice but needs to share it on the iTunes Application store, run by Apple. Even though this is less restrictive than disallowing third-party software at all, Apple can still control what is run on the iPhone and kill every software that is not wanted and also government can enforce that. This is a difference to the general purpose machine we know as personal computer.

The Internet follows an innovation model that he calls the “two people in a room” model, which is different to the ones preferred in most enterprises. Metaphorically speaking, the two people in that imaginary room are hacking without following exact plans and even having a business plan or pre-defined milestones. This is different to the way CEO’s asked by Zittrain deal with innovation. In their models, people need to ensure that everything is planed ahead of time and well justified. But most of the interesting innovations in the last decades came from people who were not planing very far ahead.
Some people were working on KaZaA and wounded the music industry in more than a week. When they were done, they were about to take on the telecommunication industry and came up with Skype. This is the disruptive and unpredictable nature of the Internet as we know it. The question discussed in the book is how this might change in the future Internet.

Therefore, Zittrain gives a number of scenarios for the Internet of the future, where a plausible one is the “not with a bang, but with a whimper” scenario. In this scenario, we might end up in an ecosystem, where innovation takes place in the way known in many other industries; there is competition among a bunch of firms and, occasionally, they come up with something good. As Zittrain said in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), he worries that, metaphorically, we end up with a technical elite class that swap files with each other and the mainstream will still have a narrow connection to that. The mainstream is using platforms where innovation is taking place very slowly and with the capacity to monitor and control very much.

Zittrain writes on page 5:

A lockdown on PCs and a corresponding rise of tethered appliances will eliminate what today we take for granted: a world where mainstream technology can be influenced, even revolutionized, out of left field. Stopping this future depends on some wisely developed and implemented locks, along with new technologies and a community ethos that secures the keys to those locks among groups with shared norms and a sense of public purpose, rather than in the hands of a single gatekeeping entity, whether public or private.

Although I did not finish reading the book yet, it appears to be well-written and worth reading for people interested in discussions on the future Internet.

Just a quick side note: The recently elected spokesman of GI/ITG’s MMB section, Prof. Markus Siegle, suit the action to the word. Papers that were published in the 13th (2006) and 14th (2008) GI/ITG Conference on Measurement, Modelling and Evaluation of Computer and Communication Systems (MMB) have been added to the DBLP academic libary, run by Michael Ley at the University of Trier. Thus, these publications can now be included in typical author performance and reputation measures more easily.

Why do people vote? “When one person votes, everyone with the same preferences benefits from the increased likelihood that their preferred outcome will result. Yet those who do vote must bear the coast of time and effort required to learn about election alternatives and go to the polls. In large populations, the probability that a single vote will change the outcome of an election is minuscule (..), meaning that even very small costs to the individual typically outweight the expected benefits he or she would receive from voting. As a result, classic game theoretic models that assume individuals are self-interested and fully optimizing in their behavior show that the equilibrium amount of voter turnout approaches zero as the population becomes large (..). Yet in spite of this theoretical result, millions of people do vote, suggesting behavior drives their decision (..). In addition, the fact that millions of people abstain suggest that there may be inherent variation in the human tendency to participate in politics.” [1]

I read some papers this evening that were published very recently in 2008 (Although the results are older, as e.g. indicated by an elder abstract published here by Adam Kolber in 2007). These papers claim to have found evidence of heritability of voting. A paper entitled Genetic Variation in Political Participation [1] by Fowler, Baker and Daws, who are with the University of California in San Diego, published in the May 2008 issue of The American Politicial Science Review, showed in two independent studies of twins that voter turnout has very high heritability. Their findings are conducted from evaluating data about 168 monozygotic who were conceived from a single fertilized egg and share 100 % of their genes, and 102 dizygotic twins who were conceived from two separate eggs and share only 50 % of their genes on average. The data has been gathered from twin registry and voter registration records in Los Angeles county. Moreover, data of a national representative sample was used for an independent replication of the results. Their findings can be summarised as follows [2]:

While the choice of a particular candidate or party does not appear to be heritable, a significant proportion of the variation in the decision to participate in politics can be attributed to genetic factors. Fowler, Baker, and Dawes (2008) recently studied the voting behavior of two populations of twins and showed that heritability accounted for 53% of the variation in validated turnout of those living in Los Angeles county and 72% of the self-reported turnout in a nationally representative sample of young adults. They also showed that heritability accounted for 60% of the variation in a general index of political participation, including contributing to campaigns, running for office, volunteering for political organizations, and attending protests. These results were the first to suggest that humans exhibit inherent variability in their willingness to participate in politics.

As discussed in the paper, these findings would help to explain why models based primarily on environmental variables fit poorly to observed behavior and it would conform to two well known features of voting: i) parental turnout behavior has been shown to be one of the strongest predictors of turnout behavior in young adults  and ii) turnout behavior has been shown to be habitual—the majority of people either always vote or always abstain (cf. [1]).

However, this paper does not address specific mechanism that links genes to participation. Thus, it merits further investigation to find out why genes matter so much.

The first paper beg the question which genes matter, which is addressed in a follow-up work by Fowler et al. entitled Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout, published in The Journal of Politics in July 2008. In this paper, the authors hypothesize “that people with more transcriptionally efficient alleles of the MAOA and 5HTT genes are more likely to vote” [2].

In summary: Fowler et al. [1, 2] claim to found evidence that genes do contribute to variation in turnout. Their results suggest that both genes and environmental influences matter, without specifying to which degree both factors affect turnout. They do not claim that genetic effects are more important than environmental effects.

What these paper are not about: These paper do not claim that the choice of an particular candidate is influenced by genetics. Moreover, these paper do not state that genetics are the only effect that influences turnout—genetics is one effect among others that influences turnout.

German speakers might find this post by Marc interesting.

References:
[1] James H. Fowler, Laura A. Baker, Christopher T. Dawes: “Genetic Variation in Political Participation“. In: The American Political Science Review, May 2008: Volume 102, No. 2
[2] James H. Fowler, Christopher T. Dawes: “Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout“. In: The Journal of Politics, Vol. 70, No. 3, July 2008, Pp. 579–594

Inspired by some work presented at IWQoS dealing with social networks and small world characteristics, I zoned out and was wondering whether someone did some analysis of Facebook and e.g. proofed the six degrees of separation assumption stated by Milgram. In 2006, an analysis of one million profiles of the German Facebook clone StudiVZ were presented in [0]. The findings provide interesting insights into StudiVZ, but the presented evaluation does not consider an extensive social network analysis. As the amount of users on Facebook is much higher than on StudiVZ and — from an international perspective — Facebook is more widely known, I would expect more work dealing with Facebook that gives more interesting insights into today’s social networks.

A student work presented at the University of Oslo by Sasan Zarghooni [1] focuses on self-presentation management on Facebook. Self-presentation management is understood as the management of the impression a person makes on other people. An introduction of the classical theory proposed by Goffman [2] is followed by a discussion aiming to show whether this theory can explain the self-representational behaviour observed on Facebook.

Goffman introduced a dramaturgical approach in [2], where he compared self-presentation to stage acting. An actor plays a role for a specific audience in a front stage area and retreats to a backstage, where he will change his behaviour. This concept can be clarified by the example of a teacher acting in an authoritarian manner in an unruly class (front stage), but shows a different behaviour at a family reunion. The concept of front- and backstages helps to understand why people behave differently in different places.

Some findings presented in [1]:

• “The e-mail like messaging system on Facebook allows for backstage interaction, and this way two friends may discuss the darkest secrets of their lives on Facebook without any other friends knowing.”
• A study by Ellison [3] “found that Facebook led to a substantial increase in subjective well-being and self-esteem for shy people (…) because Facebook provides users with better control over how they self-present”
• “It could suggest [A study by Walther [4]] that people consider their pictures to be the most important way of self-presenting: those who perceive themselves photogeneous do not engage heavily in other forms of self-presentation because they have already done a successfull self-presentation, whereas those who consider themselves less attractive wish to compensate”.

The work in [1] clearly states that “the more contacts or friends we have, the stronger is the need to segregate those who receive a particular self-presentation from those who receive another one”. This is the main reason why I believe that the discussion should be detached from a particular medium (e.g. Facebook) to a more macroscopic view. Different social networks provide different stages for different types of roles; business networks such as Xing or LinkedIn are used to manage a business role, whereas Facebook and StudiVZ appear to be more used for managing a role revealed to (closer) friends.

All in all, [1] is a well written student paper which is easy to read and gives a good introduction into Goffman’s theory of self-presentation.

[0] StudiVZ analysis

[1] Sasan Zarghooni, “A Study of Self-Presentation in Light of Facebook“, University of Oslo, 2007

[2] Goffman, E: “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”, 1982