Philip N. Howard

Days and Nights on the Internet : The Impact of a Diffusing Technology

For a growing cohort of Americans, Internet tools have become a significant conduit of social life and work life. The surveys of the Pew Internet & American Life Project in 2000 show that more than 52 million Americans went online each day, and there are significant differences in use between men and women, young and old, those of different races and ethnic groups, and those of different socioeconomic status. A user typology can be built around two variables: the length of time a person has used the Internet and the frequency with which he or she logs on from home. The authors contend that use of e-mail helps people build their social networks by extending and maintaining friend and family relationships.

Velocity measurements by vibrational tagging and fluorescent probing of oxygen

We report the development of a new method of instantaneously measuring three-dimensional velocity profiles and structure in air and oxygen. No seeding of particles, molecules, or atomic species is required. The method combines Raman excitation and laser-induced electronic fluorescence to generate a time-gated image of the moving oxygen molecules.

Research methodology: method and representation in Internet-based survey tools—mobility, community, and cultural identity in Survey2000

The Survey2000 Project is the largest and most comprehensive Internet-based social science survey to date. Along with generating interesting data about geographic mobility, feelings of community, and culinary, literary, and musical tastes, the experience of operating a survey with Internet tools has set into sharp relief important methodological issues of sample size, representation, and generalization. The authors argue that Internet-based survey research can yield meaningfully comparable data about both Internet users and larger populations.

Deep Democracy, Thin Citizenship: The Impact of Digital Media in Political Campaign Strategy

Digital media strategies are a crucial component of contemporary political campaigns. Established political elites use database and Internet technologies to raise money, organize volunteers, gather intelligence on voters, and do opposition research. However, they use data-mining techniques that outrage privacy advocates and surreptitious technologies that few Internet users understand. Grassroots political actors and average votersbuild their own digital campaigns, researching public policy options, candidate histories, lobbyist maneuvering, and the finances of big campaigns. I examine the role of digital technologies in the production of contemporary political culture with ethnographic and survey evidence from four election seasons between 1996 and 2002. Democracy is deeper in terms of the diffusion of rich data about political actors, policy options, and the diversity of actors and opinion in the public sphere. Citizenship is thinner in terms of the ease in which people can become politically expressive without being substantively engaged.

When Do States Disconnect Their Digital Networks? Regime Responses to The Political Uses of Social Media

Although there have been many studies of the different ways regimes censor the use of social media by their citizens, shutting off social media altogether is something that rarely happens. However, it happens at the most politically sensitive times and has widespread—if not global—consequences for political, economic and cultural life. When do states disconnect their digital networks, and why? To answer this question, the authors build an event history database of incidents in which a regime went beyond mere censorship of particular websites or users. The authors draw from multiple sources, including major news media, specialized news services, and international experts, to construct an event log database of 566 incidents. This rich, original dataset allows for a nuanced analysis of the conditions for state action, and the authors offer some assessment of the effect of such desperate action. Comparative analysis indicates that both democratic and authoritarian regimes disable social media networks for citing concerns about national security, protecting authority figures, and preserving cultural and religious morals. Whereas democracies disable social media with the goal of protecting children, authoritarian regimes also attempt to eliminate what they perceive as propaganda on social media. The authors cover the period 1995–2011 and build a grounded typology on the basis of regime type, what states actually did to interfere with digital networks, why they did it, and who was affected.

Instantaneous supersonic velocity profiles in an underexpanded sonic air jet by oxygen flow tagging

The statistics and structure of velocity profiles across the free shear layer of a sonic free jet are examined using oxygen tagging by Raman excitation plus laser‐induced electronic fluorescence. The flow is observed both before and after the Mach disk at centerline Mach numbers of 3.6 and 0.4, respectively. Instantaneous images of the displaced line of tagged molecules show a clear picture of the turbulent structure including large‐scale coherent features.

TESTING THE LEAP-FROG HYPOTHESIS: The impact of existing infrastructure and telecommunications policy on the global digital divide

This paper tests the ‘leap-frog’ hypothesis by modeling the impact of existing telecommunications infrastructure, controlling for economic, political and demographic factors, on changes in information communication technology (ICT) access for over 200 countries between 1995 and 2005. This study has significantly greater coverage than previous research, in terms of both time frame and country cases. First, the analysis demonstrates that in the first decade of the information society successful leap-frog countries are few and far between. Second, the relative distribution of personal computers, internet hosts and secure servers among the nations of the world has barely improved over the last decade. Third, contrary to received wisdom, most of the countries that might qualify as successful leap-frog countries are actually among the wealthiest in the world. Finally, while policy reform in the telecommunications sector can sometimes speed the diffusion of digital communication tools, the record of market reforms is mixed, and the overall effect of economic wealth is still paramount. In sum, a few poor countries have leapt ahead in the development of a few aspects of ICT infrastructure and use, but these relatively rare successes are more likely to be due to economic productivity than to privatization, regulatory separation and depoliticization, or market liberalization in the telecommunications sector.

Digitizing the Social Contract: Producing American Political Culture in the Age of New Media

Campaigns are complex exercises in the creation, transmission, and mutation of significant political symbols. However, there are important differences between political communication through new media and political communication through traditional media. I argue that the most interesting change in patterns of political communication is in the way political culture is produced, not in the way it is consumed. These changes are presented through the findings from systematic ethnographies of two organizations devoted to digitizing the social contract. DataBank.com is a private data mining company that used to offer its services to wealthier campaigns, but can now sell data to the smallest nascent grassroots movements and individuals. Astroturf-Lobby.org is a political action committee that helps lobbyists seek legislative relief to grievances by helping these groups find and mobilize their sympathetic publics. I analyze the range of new media tools for producing political culture, and with this ethnographic evidence build two theories about the role of new media in advanced democracies-a theory of thin citizenship and a theory about data shadows as a means of political representation.

Sizing Up Information Societies: Toward a Better Metric for the Cultures of ICT Adoption

When researchers study technology diffusion in a global and comparative manner, they often find that economic productivity explains differences in the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs). But when researchers study technology diffusion in a regional, national, or subnational context, they often find that politics and culture explains different diffusion rates. How do we make use of different kinds of conclusions drawn from different levels of analysis? Just knowing the ways in which wealth explains technology diffusion can obscure the ways in which politics and culture also explain patterns in technology diffusion. In this article, we offer a new perspective on weighting technology diffusion data by economic wealth to set into sharp relief the ways in which other factors—such as politics and culture—influence how well a country metabolizes new technologies. A simple but useful computation is offered, examples are assessed, and implications for public policy, industry, and research are discussed.

Learning to Search and Searching to Learn: Income, Education, and Experience Online

Using data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project surveys, this article explores changing trends in reported sophistication and satisfaction with search skills and with search engines. We find that the proportion of Internet users searching online for answers to specific questions—as opposed to casual browsing—has grown significantly. Moreover, as users get more experience online, they increasingly become dependent on search engines, confident in their findings, and savvy about how search engines structure information, privilege paid results, and track users. When other factors are controlled, years of online experience is a strong predictor of the likelihood of a person doing specific searches on a daily basis, and experience can have an even stronger positive effect than education and income. We also find that years of online experience, frequency of use, and sophistication with multiple search engines can overcome socio-economic status in predicting how active a person is in searching across different topics.