Op-Ed

[Commentary] Scientists need to go even further, venturing into unfamiliar local venues where science may not be mentioned but where communities gather to discuss their problems. Scientists need to be present at these tables, and practice those deep listening skills. At a minimum you will meet new people and gain new insights. But you may also make valuable new connections, find new collaborators, and most important of all, forge stronger bonds with your community. Don’t underestimate the power of the data you collect and create to impact community decision making.

[Commentary] A recent wave of cyberattacks—from WannaCry and Equifax to the alleged Russian influence on the US election—has demonstrated how hackers can wreak havoc on our largest institutions. But by focusing only on hackers’ efforts to extort money or mess with our political process, we may have been missing what is potentially an even scarier possibility: data manipulation. Imagine that a major Big Food company gets hacked.

[Commentary] How do you use the World Wide Web? People use it for all kinds of different things: to read email, post an update on social media, check in to a work meeting, navigate to a destination, enjoy a favorite song or album. It’s your choice. When I invented the World Wide Web as an information sharing system in 1989, I aimed to create a neutral space where everyone could create, share, debate, innovate, learn and dream. That’s why I gave my invention away for free, so that anyone, anywhere could access and build on it without permission.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is setting a record pace for deregulating the communications industries. Believe it or not, things are about to get worse in Nov. Starting with the FCC’s open meeting on Nov 16, the agency is poised to approve or propose no fewer than four decisions that will deregulate consolidated industries, remove consumer protections, and widen the digital divide:

My country, Serbia, has become an unwilling laboratory for Facebook’s experiments on user behavior — and the independent, nonprofit investigative journalism organization where I am the editor in chief is one of the unfortunate lab rats. Facebook allowed us to bypass mainstream channels and bring our stories to hundreds of thousands of readers. But now, even as the social network claims to be cracking down on “fake news,” it is on the verge of ruining us. That’s why Mark Zuckerberg’s arbitrary experiments are so dangerous.

[Commentatry] We exist in a time when technological capabilities and economic incentives have combined to attack truth and weaken trust. It is not an act of pre-planned perdition. Unchecked, however, it will have the same effect. The broader question is how to deal with the exploitation of the Web as a vehicle for de-democratizing communities fueled by fact-free untruth? I would argue that it was software algorithms that put us in this situation, and it is software algorithms that can get us out of it.

[Commentary] Few stories in tech have been more breathlessly hyped on the way up and gleefully eulogized on the way down than Google Fiber. Since Google announced last fall that it was pausing Google Fiber’s expansion into new markets, Access, the Google subsidiary that houses Google Fiber, has laid off more than 20% of its workforce, faced continued delays in Fiber’s existing markets and gone through three chief executives (or four, depending on how you’re counting). By any traditional yardstick of success, Google Fiber has been a failure.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission et al have created a series of interconnected proposed rules, regulations and actions. Unfortunately, we, the public, are now facing at least 10-20+ different cuts into the public interest, (depending on how you count). Killing off net neutrality is just one of the many planned harms. While none of this is new, it is now a sped up, concealed, heavily funded and very well coordinated plan, aided by the ability of the companies to control the FCC’s votes.

[Commentary] Much has been written about the challenges facing the news business in the Internet and social media age. But recent research helps explain why local news outlets have struggled so mightily — and what that means for citizen engagement in local politics and elections. 1) Local news isn’t popular; 2) Audiences have shifted to national sources; 3) Local newsrooms are shrinking their staffs and their coverage; and 4) As local news declines, Americans stay away from local elections — even for members of Congress.

[Commentary] The power of Facebook, Twitter, Google and others, and the democratic threat that they represent, comes not from the content they show but how they show it. The closed algorithms that drive their feeds and streams also shape and bound our associational spaces. These systems know who we meet with, they determine who we hear from and they decide which voices we cannot escape. As a result, these digital companies have become arbiters, managers and record keepers of our associational lives.