Web and Philosophy: A Decade Retrospective

2010

The vigorous impact of the Web in time and space arises from the fact that it motivates massive creation, editing and distribution of information by Users with little knowledge. This unprecedented continuum provides novel opportunities for innovation but also puts under jeopardy its survival as a stable construct that nurtures a complex system of connections. We examine the Web as an ethics determined space by demonstrating Hayek's theory of freedom in a three-leveled Web: technological, contextualized and economic. Our approach accounts for the co-dependence of code and values, and assumes that the Web is a self-contained system that exists in and by itself. This view of internal Web ethics directly connects the concept of freedom with issues like centralization of traffic and data control, rights on visiting log file, custom User profiles and the interplay among function, structure and morality of the Web. It is also demonstrated, in the case of Net Neutrality, that generic freedom-coercion trade-offs are incomplete in treating specific cases at work.

New Media & Society, 2004

The ongoing evolution of the Web poses challenges for scholars as they seek to develop methodological approaches permitting robust examination of Web phenomena. Some of these challenges stem from the nature of the Web, which is a unique mixture of the ephemeral and the permanent. Increasingly complex Web applications that are altering traditional relationships between media form and content challenge the adaptation of traditional approaches to social research on the Web. Web-based media require new methods of analyzing form and content, along with processes and patterns of production, distribution, usage and interpretation. We identify three sets of approaches that have been employed in Web-related research over the last decade. Distinguishing between these approaches helps establish the trajectory of Web studies; highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each focuses attention on the methodological challenges associated with the field of Web studies.

Toward a Philosophy of the Web, 2013

We present some initial forays into the questions that underlie the philosophy of the Web around the notions of representation, enactive search, the extended mind, and collective intelligence.

Dagstuhl Reports, 2018

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 18262 "10 years Web Science: Closing the Loop" that took place in Schloss Dagstuhl from 25-29 June 2018. In total, an interdisciplinary team of 22 researchers from computer science, sociology, philosophy and law gathered and discussed on the past, present and future of Web Science and what sort of actions the community should take to stay faithful to its initial mission for societal good. The role of Web Science is more critical than ever given the ever growing impact of the Web in our society.

The fast lane toward the development of Web is coined to be as an outright phenomenon in the today's society with incorporated use of modern innovative technology and redefining the way of organizing, communicating and collaborating with individual which in terms lead us to mixture of spectacular successes and failures. The purpose of this paper is to understand and conceptualize the evolution of Web from the scratch to the upcoming trends in the field of Web Technology.

web-and-philosophy.org

The Web emerged as an antidote to the rapidly increasing quantity of accumulated knowledge and become successful because it facilitates massive participation and communication with minimum costs. Despite the fact that the enormous impact, scale and dynamism of the Web in time and space make very difficult to anticipate the effects in human society, we demand it to be fast, secure, reliable, all-inclusive and trustworthy. It becomes the time for science to pay back the debt to the Web and provide an epistemological "antidote" to these issues. On this campaign, Philosophy should be in the front line by forming the main questions and setting the research framework. The scope of our research is to initiate the dialogue for a theory about existence and the basic functions in the Web that will serve as a bridge between philosophical thinking/engineering and applied science (e.g. economics, computer science).

Журнал Белорусского государственного университета. Философия. Психология / Journal of the Belarusian State University. Philosophy and Psychology, 2021

The paper argues for the necessity of building up a philosophy of the Internet and proposes a version of it, an «Aristotelian» philosophy of the Internet. First, an overview of the recent trends in the Internet research is presented. This train of thoughts leads to a proposal of understanding the nature of the Internet in the spirit of the Aristotelian philosophy i. e., to conceive the Internet as the Internet, as a totality of its all aspects, as a whole entity. For this purpose, the Internet is explained in four (easily distinguishable, but obviously connected) contexts: we regard it as a system of technology, as an element of communication, as a cultural medium and as an independent organism. Based on these investigations we conclude that the Internet is the medium of a new mode of human existence created by late modern man; a mode that is built on earlier (i. e., natural, and social) spheres of existence and yet it is markedly different from them. We call this newly formed existence web-life. Finally using two enlightening cultural-historical analogies (the reformation of knowledge and the formation of web-life) several fundamental characteristics of the web-life is presented

Communications of the ACM, 2019

Today, November 11, 2018, as we write this contribution and consider current and future directions for computing in Europe and across the globe, we remember the end of the 1st World War exactly 100 years ago: the end to a war of atrocities at a scale previously unseen and the culmination of a series of events that European nations had allowed themselves to 'sleepwalk' into, with little thought for the consequences (Clark, 2013). When we see this article printed in early 2019, we will remember the first proposal for a new global information sharing system written by Tim Berners-Lee 30 years ago at CERN (Berners-Lee, 1989), the European organization for nuclear research. This proposal marked the beginning of the World Wide Web, which now pervades every facet of modern life for over 4bn users. However, the Web 30 years on, is not the land of free information and discussion, or an egalitarian space that supports the interests of all, as originally imagined (Berners-Lee 1999). Rather, egotisms, nationalisms and fundamentalisms freewheel on a landscape that is increasingly dominated by powerful corporate actors, often silencing other voices including democratically elected representatives. For seven decades Europe has been a political and social project, seeking to integrate what has divided us historically and to make our citizens more equal. Whilst the proponents of the Web were driven by similar values, there is now increasing concern in Europe (and beyond!) that the Web has become a vehicle of disintegration, polarization and exploitation. What is more, since the Web operates at a global scale, beyond nation states and with little formal regulation we lack both the understanding and the means to avoid sleepwalking into another catastrophe. Web Science seeks to investigate, analyse and intervene in the Web from a sociotechnical perspective, integrating our understanding of the mathematical properties, engineering principles and the social processes that shape its past, present and future (Berners-Lee et al., 2006). Over the past 10 years, Web Science has made remarkable progress, providing the building blocks to face the challenges described above. And yet there is more do to. In what follows, we offer a more detailed definition of Web Science and outline its achievements to date (Section 2). We then consider how Web Science frames and addresses key sociotechnical challenges facing the Web now and for the near future (Section 3) emphasising the importance of this as new Artificial Intelligences start to shape the Web (and Web Science) in significant new directions (Section 4). Arising from this, we outline some of the practical strategies that Web Science is developing to integrate knowledge across disciplinary boundaries and build collaboration with Web stakeholders. Web Science equips us to understand the past, and present of the Web and the skills and tools to shape a positive future.

Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science, 2019

The Web was initially perceived and used as a globally distributed hypertext space for humans. But from its inception, the Web has always been more: its hypermedia architecture is in fact linking programs worldwide through remote procedure calls [12]. In parallel to the social expansion of the Web we witnessed in the 90s, a more hidden but as important extension started very early to make it more and more machine friendly [4] supporting the publication and consumption by software agents of worldwide linked data published on a semantic Web [13]. The Web managed to become at the same time the largest social application on earth and the default and most adopted architecture and framework for internet applications. It is now a space where more than three billion users interact with billions of pages and numerous software. These evolution trends of the Web were joined by many others (mobile Web, Web of things, etc.) 1 and as a result the Web became a collaborative space for natural and artificial intelligence distributed and situated everywhere. Nowadays when a link is followed-when a call is made on the Web-the answer can come from an arbitrary source of knowledge or form of intelligence, be it natural or artificial. The Web we weaved effectively is a universal social and programming space linking data, programs, users,... everything in a unified and standardized architecture, for better and for worse, so Web science needs to speak now. This Web we mix should pursue a synergistic connection of intelligent forms for the good of the Web and society. If "The Web We Want [is] a public good[,] a basic right, and (...) a catalyst for social justice and human rights. " 2 ensuring, freedom of expression, access, neutrality and privacy to everyone, diversity, decentralization and openness, then we need AI on the Web to be aiming for that by design. In this keynote I will mention a number of works from the research team Wimmics 3 (pronounced "we mix") that has been studying the challenges in bridging social semantics and formal semantics on the Web [15]. These contributions address some of the challenges in connecting AIs to the Web. The Web is already populated by many bots and a number of classical tasks we perform on the Web can benefit from AI e.g. to ease search [7], support exploration [21, 24] and browsing, optimize