Christian Sandvig

The network in the garden: designing social media for rural life.

History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet little is known about how rural communities use modern technologies, which therefore results in a collective lack knowledge about how to design for rural life. To address this gap, the present empirical article investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. With a data set collected from a broadly popular social network site, the current work analyzes users’ profiles, 340,000 online friendships, and 200,000 interpersonal messages. Based on social capital theory, differences are predicted between rural and urban users, and strong evidence supports the present hypotheses—namely, rural people articulate far fewer friends online, and those friends live much closer to home. Results indicate that the groups have substantially different gender distributions and use privacy features differently. The article concludes with a discussion of the design implications drawn from these findings; most important, designers should reconsider the binary friend-or-not model to allow for incremental trust building.

Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook

Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined framework for future case studies.

Network neutrality is the new common carriage

Purpose – This article considers internet system development with reference to what is currently termed the “network neutrality” debate; its aim is to develop improved ways of reasoning about the role of the public interest in networked communications infrastructures.Design/methodology/approach – To assess the degree to which a general non‐discrimination rule would be possible or useful, this article this article reviews documented examples of differential service by internet service providers that already occur. It then compares these practices to older debates about common carriage.Findings – Most of the debate about network neutrality focuses on a few kinds of content discrimination, while there are many more varieties at work. While the focus of the debate has been legal, the problem is often technological. Many kinds of discrimination are now at work, often secretly.Practical implications – Rather than one grand, neutral rule for a neutral internet, there is a need for a normative framework that can ...

US communication policy after convergence

The laws and policies that govern communication in the US have evolved over time to treat different media with distinct doctrines. The press, the post, broadcasting and the telephone each abide by different rules, defining who can build and operate the underlying communication systems, who can use them, along what patterns, to convey what information. As these regimes evolved, they adjusted to reflect social, political, economic and technological change. Occasionally over the past century, the advent of a major new communication technology – radio, television, cable, microwave – changed the system of incentives and thus the equilibrium of the policy environment. This prompted more than a marginal adjustment to the rules, resulting in new rules within existing categories, or the creation of new categories to encompass the new technology.

The Internet at Play: Child Users of Public Internet Connections

This article reports an ethnographic study of a subsidized computer center for children in an inner-city library. Unsurprisingly, young children play with the Internet. Surprisingly, this creates conflict with the justifications given for such centers by adults and public policy, leading to an atmosphere of tension between differing understandings of the Internet’s purpose: as a place for ritual and play vs. as a place for the transmission of information and for work (Carey, 1989). Theories of play based on Huizinga (1950) and Gadamer (1989) are used to explain Internet play. The study finds that the narrowly instrumental rationales of public policy about the digital divide are rehearsed and repeated in everyday conversation at the center, even to the extent that child’s play is denaturalized and seen as a problem that must be corrected.

Software defaults as de facto regulation: The case of the wireless internet

Todays internet presumes that individuals are capable of configuring software to address issues such as spam, security, indecent content, and privacy. This assumption is worrying – common sense and empirical evidence state that not everyone is so interested or so skilled. When regulatory decisions are left to individuals, for the unskilled the default settings are the law. This article relies on evidence from the deployment of wireless routers and finds that defaults act as de facto regulation for the poor and poorly educated. This paper presents a large sample behavioral study of how people modify their 802.11 (‘Wi-Fi’) wireless access points from two distinct sources. The first is a secondary analysis of WifiMaps.com, one of the largest online databases of wireless router information. The second is an original wireless survey of portions of three census tracts in Chicago, selected as a diversity sample for contrast in education and income. By constructing lists of known default settings for specific brands and models, we were then able to identify how people changed their default settings. Our results show that the default settings for wireless access points are powerful. Media reports and instruction manuals have increasingly urged users to change defaults – especially passwords, network names, and encryption settings. Despite this, only half of all users change any defaults at all on the most popular brand of router. Moreover, we find that when a manufacturer sets a default 96–99 percent of users follow the suggested behavior, while only 28–57 percent of users acted to change these same default settings when exhorted to do so by expert sources. Finally, there is also a suggestion that those living in areas with lower incomes and levels of education are less likely to change defaults, although these data are not conclusive. These results show how the authority of software trumps that of advice. Consequently, policy-makers must acknowledge and address the power of software to act as de facto regulation.

MapWatch: Detecting and Monitoring International Border Personalization on Online Maps

Maps have long played a crucial role in enabling people to conceptualize and navigate the world around them. However, maps also encode the world-views of their creators. Disputed international borders are one example of this: governments may mandate that cartographers produce maps that conform to their view of a territorial dispute. Today, online maps maintained by private corporations have become the norm. However, these new maps are still subject to old debates. Companies like Google and Bing resolve these disputes by localizing their maps to meet government requirements and user preferences, i.e., users in different locations are shown maps with different international boundaries. We argue that this non-transparent personalization of maps may exacerbate nationalistic disputes by promoting divergent views of geopolitical realities. To address this problem, we present MapWatch, our system for detecting and cataloging personalization of international borders in online maps. Our system continuously crawls all map tiles from Google and Bing maps, and leverages crowdworkers to identify border personalization. In this paper, we present the architecture of MapWatch, and analyze the instances of border personalization on Google and Bing, including one border change that MapWatch identified live, as Google was rolling out the update.

Disorderly infrastructure and the role of government

The articles in this volume portray government investment in wireless as a creature of recent events. A case can be made for government, municipal, and community wireless today because digital convergence has combined with improvements in wireless technology, changes in federal spectrum regulation, slow private wireline broadband deployment, and the recent collapse of the capital markets. This is certainly accurate, but it overstates the degree to which the current historical moment is special. This comment steps back to ask: How do infrastructures usually come to exist? In addition, what role would we expect governments to play in infrastructure development? To choose one telling comparison, at the beginning of the 20th century, the exciting technology was the plain, old telephone system. Recalling the development of this infrastructure cements the importance of government efforts in wireless today. For the last hundred years, it has been a truism in telecommunications circles that a telephone network (or any wired infrastructure) is more expensive in rural areas than urban areas. In the United States, a provider might cross miles of dusty prairie with only the occasional farmer for a customer. If a telephone company did not particularly want to offer service to an isolated homestead a century ago, we cannot blame them. We do not blame them today, as rural telephone service is subsidized in many countries.

Connection at Ewiiaapaayp Mountain Indigenous Internet Infrastructure

Wendy Chun, Tara McPherson, Rayvon Fouche, Curtis Marez, Alexander Galloway, Oscar Gandy, Anna Everett, Christian Sandvig, danah boyd, Ernie Wilson, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Eszter Hargittai, Alondra Nelson, Peter Chow-White, Troy Duster

The Social Industry

Historical mass media and contemporary social media are typically seen as opposites. “The culture industry” was the term used by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s to explain the emerging commercial mass media. The culture industry was portrayed as a semi-fascist apparatus of indoctrination. It selected cultural products and made them popular based on obscure determinations of economic value. In contrast, the common view of contemporary social media is that it is more democratic. Using voting algorithms and human voting, social media can finally realize widespread participation that was denied to the passive audiences of the mass media system. Social media appear to remove the bottleneck of the mass media system, allowing everyone to aspire to celebrity, or at least popularity. However, despite these appearances, social media have also now evolved into an elaborate system that selects social products and makes them popular based on obscure determinations of economic value. Social media platforms filter, censor, control, and train—and they may do so without the user’s awareness. Advances in computation now make a social media industry possible that is based on individual difference and action rather than sameness and passivity. But in other respects, the social industry resembles the culture industry: the co-option of culture has been superseded by the co-option of sociality. The word “social” may then be the biggest challenge facing those who study social media. Our task is to rescue genuine sociality from the emerging social industry.