First thoughts on web science

The Web is an amazing piece of technology that has changed the way that we exchange information, buy groceries, chat to friends, keep up to date with news and watch films. As my colleague Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt says “It’s changed the way we make love and war – and it ain’t finished yet”. So it’s no surprise that scientists want to study it and its impact on society, to see if we can understand it better, to see if we can learn to avoid the problems that it opens up (e.g. copyright, privacy and cybercrime) and take better advantage of the opportunities that it gives us for a digital economy and a cyber-society.

But the Web we enjoy, problematic and promising, is just the latest attempt at a globally connected information system that scientists have been trying to create for over a hundred years. There have been no computers for most of that time, so inventors have tried to adapt whatever technology they had to hand. In the 1850s, the original Reuters company exchanged messages between the Paris and London stock exchanges using a fleet of 200 carrier pigeons, before successfully adopting the newfangled telegraph. In the 1920s, a Belgian scientist invented a search engine that allowed people to query a huge index of information from library books – by using the newly invented telephone.

In the courses I teach I explore more of these attempts to design a world-wide web of knowledge – the mystery for Web Science is why did this attempt work so well? Our Web was designed in an underground nuclear research bunker by a group of physicists who just wanted to share information among themselves; how come it succeeded as a global venture where the previous attempts influenced by the military or Hollywood or TV broadcasters or media publishers didn’t.

In my research about information-sharing, I try to understand how to make the technology better by building new capabilities into the Web. But just because you release a new piece of software with exciting new features, it doesn’t guarantee that it will actually be used or that it will improve peoples’ lives. So I also try to understand how to make the Web work better for people, so that social networks don’t destroy people’s privacy, e-commerce doesn’t destroy the highstreet and information sharing doesn’t destroy the media industries.

Julian Ellis says:

November 6, 2013 at 3:03 am

I am interested in the course because it has become such a widely used tool in a relatively short time. As social worker I work with families who are often excluded from so many areas of society for a number of complex but inter related issues. For me there are some themes in our interaction with the web: access: the issue for me is: the cost to the user, the cost to the person putting the information on the net, the cost of infer structure and who pays and how, the need to upgrade equipment both for the providers and the users.

And, as you discussed the interaction between the net and other systems such as SMS and how that could address some of the access issues raised.

How do we use the information to crate change at a macro and micro level and how does the greater access to information actually improve or change people’s lives.