Monday 10th December 2012
The non-neutrality of digital ecosystems
A panel discussion
2:30-4:30PM, Vera Anstey Room (VAR - Old Building, LSE)
Prof. Robin Mansell
Department of Media and Communications, LSE
Prof. Jannis Kallinikos
Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, LSE
Dr. Martha Poon
Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation, Department of Accounting, LSE
A student-led interdisciplinary panel series coordinated by Niccolo Tempini, Silvia Masiero and Florian Allwein
Panel abstract
The current digital ecosystem supports, at various scales, all kinds of social behaviours and operations. Yet communication systems have become so interconnected, global and complex, that it is difficult to formulate adequate concepts for exhaustively writing about them. At the same time, the complex phenomena the digital ecosystem brings forward compel scholars to engage in understanding and explaining how they are reshaping different facets of social life.
Researching complex arrangements of systems is a difficult and laborious process. And yet, people cannot operate within digital environments acritically, without concern for the character of the social habitat these spaces may favour or support. Digital ecosystems may be no simple or docile grassland for social life. Instead, they may encode values and premises that could be associated with social consequences.
Scholarly voices are warning that digital environments are not neutral. They argue that the digital ecosystem impacts the world in ways that can be both unpredictable and partial. These effects are difficult to trace, especially when technologies co-exist in complex arrangements, but there is still hope that research can contribute powerful explanations for how social life is being refactored by the complex technological arrangements that increasingly underlie it.
Niccolo Tempini
In ‘Imagining the Internet: Paradoxical Systems and What to Do About Them’, Robin Mansell outlines two of the central paradoxes of emerging networked environments, offering a framework for thinking differently about them and discussing how this might inform policy and practice in several key areas.
Have a look at Robin Mansell's presentation slides
Jannis Kallinikos will explain how the current digital ecosystem/internet features the growing independence of digital content from the underlying technological arrangements (software, devices, infrastructures) by which content is generated and made available. This development (clearly indicated by the buzz of ‘big data’ ) seems to signal a distinct step in the evolution of the digital ecosystem/internet and its socio-economic involvement. It is marked by several contradictions and paradoxes and has profound and ramifying implications.
During the Great American Housing Bubble, Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae, the US government sponsored enterprises which had traditionally helped to securitize prime mortgages, were overtaken by private label players securitizing subprime loans. How did this happen? In the mid-1990s, the mortgage industry adopted an information product called a FICO® credit score for demarcating credit quality in its newly automated underwriting systems. Martha Poon will explain how the specific organization of privately-managed information infrastructure contributed to the emergence of a market for subprime loans
For event info: n.tempini@lse.ac.uk