Digital Crowd Research Articles

Социальные последствия цифровизации для развития человеческой индивидуальности

The article characterizes the types of communication, highlights the theories of interaction in the virtual envi-ronment, digitalization, presents the term “digital crowd”, studies the new phenomenon of “digital sublimation of individuality”, gives recommendations on overcoming loneliness in the modern digital world and decision-making in all spheres of society by the individual himself. In this study, the method of qualitative analysis is used. The aim of the work is to identify the social implications of digitalization and ways of addressing social problems. Human individuality in the digital society forms the subject of the study. Conclusion dwells upon the fact that the problem of loneliness, self-loss in the digital crowd and the phenomenon of individuality digital sublimation are complex and are caused by a variety of reasons, ranging from the imposition of certain stand-ards and values in the virtual world to the psychological characteristics of a particular individual.

Crowd Pleaser: The Remaking of Property Rights in Digital Spaces

Abstract This article explores the remaking of classical liberal rights in digital spaces, with a focus on property rights in artificial intelligence (AI) crowds. The rise of crowds in digital and technological spaces has created new opportunities for users, but their accumulated contributions create added value for the platforms and manufacturers that manage the crowd, leading to a curtailment of individual autonomy. The article identifies two parallel processes that characterize individuals’ involvement in digital crowds: manufacturers construct the property rights of individual users as crowd-based rights, while also working to de-crowd users in other contexts. The article compares crowd-based rights to potential group rights and individual rights in non-digital spheres, exposing the weakness of manufacturer-constituted crowd-based rights. The article concludes by discussing possible legal conceptions of the crowd and its governance.

Цифровая девиация как феномен современного мира

This research is devoted to the current issue of the formation of deviations on the Internet, in connection with the global digitalization taking place in the modern world. The peculiarity of this process is the fact that in virtual reality, unlike everyday reality, there are no clear laws and rules defining the norms of digital behavior, there are no criteria for deviant behavior. The process of deviant forms of behavior on the Internet, such as trolling, astroturfing, sexting, scamming, fishing, has become possible due to the anonymity on the Internet. The virtual space has thus created fertile ground for the emergence of deviant activity without fear of being held accountable. We consider the controversial issue of the impact of digitalization on personality and human behavior, provide an interpretation overview for term “deviation” from the point of view of biology, sociology, deviantology. The digital network causes the changes in humans at several levels: emotional, intellectual, physical, value, etc. These changes, in turn, generate new psychological personality traits. Behavioral changes are put forward in a special class, namely: the formation of deviant behavior in the digital network. As literature analysis on the studied issue shows, the characteristics of digital deviations are the latent nature of the manifestation, the absence of sanctions for the manifestation of deviations, the complex nature of the manifestation, etc. In addition, we provide a conditional typology of types of digital deviations by levels of human impact with such forms as “alienated in a digital crowd”, “digital dementia”, “I know everything and nothing”, etc.

Bumbometer digital crowd game: collaboration through competition in entertainment events

The use of mobile devices, especially smartphones, is widespread across all social strata and age groups, helping to ensure faster access from anywhere, data collection, and more regular and frequent control to aid urban, environmental, and social management. In this scenario, the entertainment industry has benefited from this powerful individual technological resource in cultural and sporting events. In this way, this work presents a proposal for interaction and engagement in entertainment events in a more prosperous and more technological way, through the development of a collaborative and competitive mobile-­web crowd game, intended for enhancing interaction between the crowd and as a unified group, whether physically co-­located or online. The application, called Bumbometer, uses motion sensors during an interactive dynamic with the crowd applying concepts from Mobile Crowd Sensing and User eXperience. We conducted two experimental studies to evaluate the proposed technology, the first in a real scenario of a folk cultural festival and the second in a controlled environment, simulating an event considering a scenario in which users were geographically distant. The results indicate that people feel immersed and engaged during the interaction through the proposed game, which reinforces the statement that the game meets an increasingly growing need to use technologies to ensure more significant interaction and audience immersion at crowd entertainment events, a creative and far­-reaching form.

The Digital Crowd

Although digital technologies are implicated in intrusive surveillance and social fragmentation, their widespread uses in recent political protests demonstrate their potentials to support intense forms of collective life. Building on Mark Hansen’s new-media philosophy, this paper explores digital crowds as an intensified form of a contemporary phenomenon: the intertwinement of digital media with social life. Enveloped in technospheres of data-rich devices, the digital crowd forms hybrids with its environment of distributed digital intelligence, what Hansen conceptualizes as System-Environment Hybrids. Sampling the visible trace of such SEHs on Instagram, the article posits that their impacts on crowd formations signal a distinct form of collective life. It argues that the hybrid intensifies the affect and de-individuation processes of conventional pre-digital crowds, and extends such effects well beyond crowd events into persistent online environments of insatiable exchange. The paper speculates that intensified and persistent affect transform the emotional geography of the city.

Networked Wisdom of the Digital Crowd: From Individualization to Socialization through Algorithms-the Paradigm Shift

Social networking today has radically changed our way of life form, communication style, daily working, our relationships with other people, etc. This paradigm shift has not landed overnight but over the last one and half decades gradually. Even if we stare back at the boundary of the present Millennium, just 20 years back, one will certainly be overwhelmed after doing a simple comparative study between pre-2K and post- 2K lives. Now, whether social networking transformed our life for better or worse, that is a debatable issue. Still, quite a substantial number of people think that social networking has sound effects in our society, though many think social networking has only bad effects. It is thus logical to accept that, like almost everything in life, social networking has its own pros and cons. Read more...

Chinese Experience of Advancing Financial Inclusion in Light of Foster’s Three Limiting Conditions in Institutional Change

:China has been developing “financial inclusion” since the 1990s so as to deal with financial exclusion, a problem that faces rural residents and small and micro enterprises as well as the poor. Analysis is conducted in light of John Foster’s theory of institutional change, especially the three limiting conditions, which are, the availability of knowledge, people’s capacity for understanding and adaptation, and the principle of minimal dislocation. Digital finance, introduced into China in the early 2000s, is thought to be the innovative and sustainable means of financial inclusion and was boldly encouraged with very loose regulation, especially before 2015. Many of the nontraditional providers of internet financial services, including nonbank digital payment, internet-based lending, crowd funding, and virtual coins, etc. had boomed like mushroom since 2013. While social permission has been granted to such well-intentioned but poorly understood social experiments, unprecedent internet financial chaos have emerged and spread raising serious social concern. Since 2015, new policy bundles have been developed in China, and the concept and practice of financial inclusion has been transformed greatly. As China is still facing challenges marching toward financial inclusion, the three limiting conditions must be carefully considered in formulating policies.

Initial development of the digital crowd mapping for landslide monitoring and early warning system

Landslide disaster risk reduction emphasizing community participation and technical instruments for monitoring and early warning has been introduced in Indonesia for more than a decade. Notable recognition from the international scientific community indicated that this approach is reliable and effective for landslide vulnerable area where a dense population exists. This paper presents our progress of the initial development framework of interdisciplinary product through digital crowd mapping for landslide and early warning in mobile apps. The crowd information from local people or community in the real-time as a ‘human sensor’ is the necessary and main point in developing this crowd mapping because not all of the landslide vulnerable area in Indonesia is covered by the monitoring and early warning technical instruments. Rainfall condition, threshold condition based on the geological structure, data monitoring from field early warning instruments, and verified crowd information from local people, are occupied as the ‘requirement definition’ for ‘system and software design’ that will be structured and provided in the apps. Central Java Province is selected as a pilot area in developing this digital crowd mapping.

This other atmosphere: against human resources, emoji and devices

Frequently humans are invited to engage with modern visual forms: emoji, emoticons, pictograms. Some of these forms are finding their way into the workplace, understood as augmentations to workplace atmospheres. What has been called the ‘quantified workplace’ requires its workers to log their rates of stress, wellbeing and subjective sense of productivity on a scale of 1–5 or by emoji, in a context in which Human Resources (HR) professionals develop a vocabulary of Workforce Analytics, People Analytics, Human Capital Analytics or Talent Analytics, and all this in the context of managing the work environment or its atmosphere. Atmosphere is mood, a compote of emotions. Emotions are a part of a human package characterized as ‘the quantified self’, a self intertwined with – subject to but also compliant with – tracking and archiving. The logical step for managing atmospheres is to track emotions at a granular and large-scale level. Through the concept of the digital crowd, rated and self-rating, as well as emotion-tracking strategies, the human resource (as worker and consumer) engages in a new politics of the crowd, organized around what political philosopher Jodi Dean calls, affirmatively, ‘secondary visuality’, high-circulation communication fusing speech, writing and image as a new form. This is the visuality of communicative, or social media, capitalism. But to the extent that it is captured by HR, is it an exposure less to crowd-sourced democracy, and more a stage in turning the employee into an on-the-shelf item in a digital economy warehouse, assessed by Likert scales? While HR works on new atmospheres of work, what other atmospheres pervade the context of labour, and can these be deployed in the generation of other types of affect, ones that work towards the free association of labour and life?

Social capital and the digital crowd: Involving backers to promote new product innovativeness

Involving customers is often considered a method to develop products in line with market needs. However, we still need to obtain more insights into the respective drivers and outcomes in the context of (a) the involvement of customers by entrepreneurial ventures and (b) business-to-consumer (B2C) relationships. This study suggests that reward-based crowdfunding can provide a digital opportunity for both areas. We explore how community-derived social capital influences ventures’ approach to engaging backers in new product development and how this, in turn, advances product innovativeness. Using structural equation modeling, we test a unique dataset that combines primary survey and secondary platform data from 710 crowdfunding ventures. Our results provide a nuanced picture of how social capital dimensions are associated with backers as an information source and as co-developers and, indirectly, with new product innovativeness. This study underscores that crowdfunding serves as a digital platform for market-oriented innovation. It contributes empirical insights into how nascent teams can engage the digital crowd in product development via crowdfunding. We also add to social capital literature by illuminating web-mediated mechanisms that transform knowledge into tangible innovation outcomes.

From madness to wisdom: intelligence and the digital crowd

ABSTRACTThis article sheds light on the complexity and sensitivity of crowd-based intelligence in security governance. The 'crowd’ as special manifestation of ‘the public’ is both challenging and enabling new forms of intelligence practices. As a spontaneous eruption of collective activity, the crowd is a notion of great versatility. Sometimes considered mad/dangerous, sometimes wise/useful, the crowd’s drivers are a context-dependent collage of (affective) group engagement, projection from the outside and the workings of digital technologies. The article traces how the existence of crowds in its variations is connected to how they are approached by security agents and their intelligence practices.

The Phenomena of Social Media Interaction on Global Muslim Identity Construction

The growth interaction of social media has become a global phenomenon. Recently, internet usage throughout the world has led to the popularity of social network sites. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are the common websites shaped cooperative structures wherein the human digital crowd is encouraged proactively. The increasing interest in this means of communication technology has significant impacts on the social landscapes of global affairs and physical social life. Both of these factors make people play certain characters in the social arena. The Social Network is gaining more and more importance today and has a deeper impact on society than the traditional media. Social media enables identity expression, exploration, and experimentation; something natural for the human experience. It is the agencies in real life, which provide a source of names for different sectors, that inspire the internet communities and the interactions they make within themselves. It is essential to comprehend the motives of agencies to have an understanding of the group interactions on social platforms. However, (Especially,) the perception of global Muslim worldviews are being challenged by these means of the information revolution. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine practical aspects of social media interaction on the global Muslim identity construction. Global Muslims is viewed on the existing relationship and critics of their civilization are also made in this work. The qualitative method is applied in conducting the work which enables authors to arrive at indisputable logical facts.

Cyfrowy tłum – charakterystyka zjawiska

The purpose of this article is to describe the phenomenon of the digital crowd, which is a phenomenon specific to the functioning of political debate on the Internet (with particular emphasis on social media). Referring to the concept of Le Bon and Girard, it presents the behavior of the digital crowd and its importance for the development of public debate in the area of mass communication such as the Internet.

Body Music by David Homel

she seeds the narrative with deep and abiding interest. Manhattan Beach is a novel to savor. Rita D. Jacobs New York Julie Maroh. Body Music. Trans. David Homel. Vancouver. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2017. 300 pages. With an orchestra of players on the stage of the streets of Montreal, Julie Maroh conducts a symphony of the human condition in Body Music. Through twenty-one graphic-narrative vignettes, Maroh guides us through a stunning array of emotions as she chronicles the lives and relationships of people across the city. With few exceptions, each vignette is unique in the players it presents , giving a specific movement of discrete instruments, like a separate movement for each flavor of love. As such, each treats its subject matter the way we experience love for the first time. Some notes are strange, some sweet, comforting, others dark, discordant , and also propulsive. Maroh runs us through all different kinds of love: puppy love, lust for sex, the feeling of losing your most cherished companion to debilitating disease, to missed love and ships passing in the night. No form is off the score. So too are the players diverse. Maroh’s artwork is also harmonious. Beautiful, fluid, and impressionistic at times, the art brings the song of the work to life, depicting all the glory of love. At times it changes slightly to fit the differing themes of the vignette. In one vignette, her art takes on a darker, more abstract appearance in a story dealing with love as interpreted through First Nations’ folk culture . In another, the art bears a more realistic , harder edge during one of the silent sequences, telling the story fully through the art. The art also represents a hidden love, Montreal itself. D. Emerson Eddy Hamilton, Ontario Roland Buti. Year of the Drought. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. London. Old Street. 2017. 160 pages. Thirteen-year-old Auguste (Gus) Sutter vividly remembers the summer of 1976, not just for the preternaturally harsh drought but also for the incidents leading up to the disintegration of his family. Gus, his mother and father, his older sister, Lea, and a mentally challenged worker named Rudy live on the family’s farm on the Swiss plateau. Buti’s take on a coming-of-age story is captivating because of the impending sense of doom and ruin that he weaves throughout Gus’s narrative. All of nature around them foreshadows the sad fate of this family: the crops are burning in the sun, Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 73 Lawrence Joseph So Where Are We? Farrar, Straus and Giroux A New York–based writer and law professor of Syrian and Lebanese descent, Lawrence Joseph writes the noise and smoke and digital crowds of a world perplexed and then pierces that world with beams of lucid affect. Grappling with events of great scope, the poems in So Where Are We? are deeply affected by the events since 9/11, which they explore with an unflinching gaze and critical intelligence. Michael Köhlmeier Yiza Trans. Ruth Martin Haus Publishing Originally written in German by an Austrian author, Yiza is a story about a young girl of the same name who is abandoned in Germany, where she meets two young boys in a shelter for migrant children. One day, they decide to run away. Köhlmeier writes in a simple language and structure that suits the subjects and contrasts well with the gravity of the reality around them. ...

The reader-oriented scholarly edition

Recent attempts to computer-model the scholarly edition so as to permit the crowd-sourcing of its production have misunderstood its nature. Scholarly editions are, in their methodology and form, not unchanging, nor are their underlying conceptions simple. This essay is, in response, a reflection on the opportunities that the digital form potentially offers editors about how they may gain traction by taking advantage of the capacities and logic of the new medium. The main proposal stems from leaving the representational question on hold (how the edition represents the work and the methodologies used to achieve that) and instead considering the edition primarily as a transaction with its readers—those print-counterparts of the digital crowd. The history of post-war scholarly editions is reviewed for its evolving understandings of the reader-user. Then a conceptual separation between the archive and the edition is proposed so that a new, more reader-oriented definition of editorial responsibilities can be envisaged for digital scholarly editions—something that the logic of the print medium forbade.

The VideoMob Interactive Art Installation Connecting Strangers through Inclusive Digital Crowds

VideoMob is an interactive video platform and an artwork that enables strangers visiting different installation locations to interact across time and space through a computer interface that detects their presence, video-records their actions while automatically removing the video background through computer vision, and co-situates visitors as part of the same digital environment. Through the combination of individual user videos to form a digital crowd, strangers are connected through the graphic display. Our work is inspired by the way distant people can interact with each other through technology and influenced by artists working in the realm of interactive art. We deployed VideoMob in a variety of settings, locations, and contexts to observe hundreds of visitors’ reactions. By analyzing behavioral data collected through depth cameras from our 1,068 recordings across eight venues, we studied how participants behave when given the opportunity to record their own video portrait into the artwork. We report the specific activity performed in front of the camera and the influences that existing crowds impose on new participants. Our analysis informs the integration of a series of possible novel interaction paradigms based on real-time analysis of the visitors’ behavior through specific computer vision and machine learning techniques that have the potential to increase the engagement of the artwork's visitors and to impact user experience.

Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Databases and Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing, which employs human workers to perform tasks on the Internet, has garnered a lot of attention. This is because crowdsourcing helps solving many problems that are considered difficult for computers, including entity resolution, question answering, image tagging, and content rating. The goal of this Special Issue is to study the issues of harnessing the power of crowdsourcing. To achieve this goal, several technical challenges need to be encountered. First, how should crowdsourcing tasks be designed? Second, in some crowdsourcing systems (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk), rewards, or incentives, can be given to workers when their tasks have been completed successfully. How should these incentives be allocated to tasks? Third, are existing crowdsourcing user interface designed well (e.g., on mobile platforms)? Fourth, althoughmany crowdsourcing workers are available, their performance varies, and some of themmay not be very reliable. Is it possible to understand their behaviour in a more systematic manner, so that the best workers can be chosen for a given task? In this Special Issue, we have selected five high-quality papers that address some of the above challenges in crowdsourcing. They are summarised below. • An Abstract Formal Basis for Digital Crowds by Marija Slavkovic, Louise A. Dennis, andMichael Fisher, explores the issue of applying formal methods, which

An abstract formal basis for digital crowds

Crowdsourcing, together with its related approaches, has become very popular in recent years. All crowdsourcing processes involve the participation of a digital crowd, a large number of people that access a single Internet platform or shared service. In this paper we explore the possibility of applying formal methods, typically used for the verification of software and hardware systems, in analysing the behaviour of a digital crowd. More precisely, we provide a formal description language for specifying digital crowds. We represent digital crowds in which the agents do not directly communicate with each other. We further show how this specification can provide the basis for sophisticated formal methods, in particular formal verification.

Hierarchical textures

Rich, interesting patterns create an oasis of aesthetic pleasure between the arid lands of complete randomness and complete order. In addition to their inherent beauty, patterns prove useful in graphics when we use them as textures. Textures were originally used to add color detail to shapes. Today, textures control everything from shape details to the placement of extras in digital crowd scenes. Though not appropriate for everything, such patterns can be used for applications from ornamentation to creating complex 3D structures and motion. One easy and powerful way to create rich textures is to start with something simple, and then use that seed along with some rules to grow something more complicated. Lots of growing schemes produce both repeating and non-repeating patterns. One of the simplest techniques is called tiling, where you place down multiple copies of a single starting shape, or tile, according to some (usually simple) rules. You can create rich tilings in surprisingly many ways. I look at a tiling technique based on using a set of simple symmetry operations.

The Digital Crowd: Some Questions on Globalization and Agency

Introduction The Internet appears to offer renewed participation in the public sphere. Such positive claims for the Internet might derive from the conservative political context of the previous decade, with its general disillusionment with the democratic processes available. This appears to be the result of a search for a new sense of community and collectivism. Since democracy is about the exchange of information rather than information itself, the Internet and World Wide Web appear to offer itself as a perfect model of interconnectedness. But what are the conditions under which this information exchange takes place, and what purpose does it serve? Surely, access alone does not ensure good participation. This essay offers the metaphor of the crowd as one way of describing the agents (those that have the power to act for effect) in this Internet space, and to reveal some insights into the possibility for collective action. By the use of this collective noun, the I am not merely describing any type of collective (of a generic community, or the public), but what historian George Rude has called a direct-contact or face-to-face group.' Rude's scope is the period immediately leading to the Industrial Revolution that he identifies as 1848. For the purposes of this argument, I will first concentrate on the defining characteristics of the preindustrial and industrial crowd, and then proceed to digitize them. This essay seeks to make a comparison with the present condition of what might be called the postindustrial or information society that makes contact on a global scale. There is a surplus of fashionable terms here, not least of which is that this crowd now operates under the forces of globalization. According to Doreen Massey, one of the problems is the way we talk about terms such as globalization without adjectives.2 Without further qualification, it appears as an inevitable force rather than a project with specific agencies and interest groups. The crowd also appears as a unifying force acting like a single body or machine, and this also needs qualification. While crowds behave differently in different contexts, they have common elements such as those of direct action and a fundamental belief in their collective aims. So what happens when these social relationships are indirect and stretched across global space? An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium Vision Plus 4: The Republic of Information, Carnegie Mellon University, March 1998.