Online Actions Research Articles

The many shades of digital vigilantism. A typology of online self-justice

ABSTRACT Digital vigilantism involves direct online actions of targeted surveillance, dissuasion or punishment, which tend to rely on public denunciation or on an excess of unsolicited attention, and are carried out in the name of justice, order or safety. Drawing on a diversity of case studies, this article seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of its manifestations, addressing both the social practices and digital media dynamics involved. It presents a typology which distinguishes between four ideal types of digital vigilantism: flagging, investigating, hounding and organised leaking.

Pattern-Driven Resource Allocation in Optical Networks

The efficient allocation of network resources is key to the overall performance and the quality of services provided. Thanks to their high data rates, optical networks are the cornerstone of present and future core, metro, access, and datacenter networking. Many works in the field, formulate resource allocation operations as offline combinatorial problems, assuming a known static traffic matrix, and use integer linear programming (ILP) as well as heuristics. In contrast, other works assume randomly generated traffic and propose online schemes that serve connection requests one by one. In practice, traffic in optical networks is neither static nor completely random, but is usually semi-periodic, following some (e.g., daily or weekly) pattern. We present a traffic-pattern-driven approach for elastic optical networks for serving immediate and in advance network requests, where the decisions of an offline process, optimizing resource allocation for the traffic pattern expected during an epoch (day, week, etc.), are analyzed and then drive the operation of an online process that serves requests one by one, as they arrive. In this way, the online mechanism’s decisions come close to the optimal ones, if the traffic pattern indeed repeats itself to some extent, while its execution time remains small. We present two alternatives of this approach, the exact and the relative, based on the way the offline mechanism’s decisions are analyzed and translated to online actions. Our simulation results exhibit the performance benefits of the pattern-driven approach under various traffic conditions.

Searching for New Directions for Energy Policy: Testing the Cross-Effect of Risk Perception and Cyberspace Factors on Online/Offline Opposition to Nuclear Energy in South Korea

In the internet age, a considerable amount of information about risk events and objects is shared in cyberspace. Since online and offline spaces are not discrete, there is a cross-effect in which perceptual or attitudinal factors in cyberspace influence offline actions, while offline attitudes affect online actions. However, few studies have examined this cross-effect. In the present study, the intention to engage in online or offline behaviors opposing nuclear energy was the dependent variable. The independent variables included risk perception factors (i.e., perceived risk, perceived benefit, trust, knowledge, and stigma) in the risk perception paradigm, and cyber factors (i.e., self-efficacy in cyberspace, involvement on the internet, trust in cyberspace, conformity to online opinion, and belief in online rumors) in the cyberpsychology paradigm. Our findings offer evidence for the cross-effect of online or offline predictors on online/offline behaviors opposing nuclear energy. All the variables in the cyberspace paradigm influenced offline opposition, while those in the risk perception paradigm affected online opposition. Moreover, the five online-related risk perception variables played a significant role in moderating the relationships of predictors in the risk perception paradigm with offline opposition.

The Cyber Awareness of Online Video Game Players

The cyber awareness of online video game players (n = 183) was investigated by examining their online safety practices and the degree to which they were exposed to threats. With findings revealing that gamers engaged in poor online practices, despite expressing concern for their safety, this investigation supports the view that gamers are unaware of the possible consequences of their online actions, and/or continue to show resistance to cybersecurity practices perceived to hinder gameplay. While the findings should be regarded as preliminary, game developers and publishers, policymakers, and researchers may find them valuable in obtaining a clearer understanding of gamers' cyber awareness and online practices. Coupled with ongoing research, these findings may also prove valuable for the identification of strategies that may be used to curb risky online behavior.

“It’s Like Learning a Whole Other Language": The Role of Algorithmic Skills in the Curation of Creative Goods

There is increasing concern and scholarship about how algorithms influence users’ online experiences. Yet, little of the work is empirical in nature, leaving many questions about whether users recognize how algorithms affect their online actions and whether they can address the influence of algorithms skillfully. To address this gap, we draw on interviews with creative entrepreneurs from across the United States to examine the extent to which they understand how algorithms may impact their sales success. Participants reveal varying levels of algorithmic skills, or know-how, when it comes to understanding how algorithms influence their content’s visibility. Although many recognize that algorithms affect who sees their wares online, only some know how to set things up so as to improve their chances of reaching potential customers.

Attitudes and practices of Canadian academic librarians regarding library and online privacy: A national study

Libraries have always been places where individuals feel free to explore new ideas and seek out information in the pursuit of creative and intellectual growth. Fear of exposure or surveillance could threaten an individual's inclination to search for and access information. Understandably then, privacy is understood to be a core professional responsibility of librarians. This study builds on a national report and a qualitative study, completed in the United States, which explored librarians' attitudes on privacy. Adding a Canadian voice to the literature, this study examines survey results from academic librarians in Canada on their perceptions and attitudes related to library practices and online privacy behaviors. Overall, Canadian academic librarians believe that protecting patron privacy and educating patrons about issues related to online privacy is important. However, many Canadian academic librarians doubt that libraries are doing all they can to protect patron privacy. Academic librarians stand to gain knowledge and understanding of peer attitudes toward online privacy, as well as how patron privacy is being advocated for and protected on university campuses across Canada. The results will guide future library policies and programming aimed at creating an environment where privacy rights are protected and patrons can make informed choices about their online actions.

Take Action Now: Motivational Framing and Action Requests in Climate Advocacy

ABSTRACTThis article explores similarities and differences between Internet-mediated climate change advocacy organizations and their legacy counterparts. It relies on a content analysis of advocacy emails produced by Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Greenpeace USA, League of Conservation Voters, Climate Reality Project, 1Sky, and 350.org. The study finds differences and similarities in strategic Internet use, including greater emphasis by climate groups on high threshold, offline actions; greater emphasis by legacy groups on low threshold, online actions; and high reliance by both framings that demand accountability from political elites. Implications for Internet-mediated and climate advocacy are discussed.

Website Blocking Injunctions to Prevent Copyright Infringements Proportionality and Effectiveness

The liability of internet intermediaries, particularly Internet Service Providers ('ISPs'), for the unlawful online actions of third party users is a persistent theme and problem of cyberlaw. The creation of an intermediary liability regime involves balancing the benefits intermediaries provide in facilitating access to internet content on the one hand, with the advantages of leveraging intermediary control over access on the other. Intermediaries are targets for attempts to control unlawful end-user activities as bringing actions against individual users is expensive, while regulating access via intermediaries is more cost-effective. Imposing liability on intermediaries can, however, have significant unwelcome effects, or 'collateral damage', especially on the rights to freedom of expression and privacy of end-users.

Online Antagonism of the Alt-Right in the 2016 Election

Buoyed by the populist campaign of Donald Trump, the “alt-right,” a loose political movement based around right-wing ideologies, emerged as an unexpected and highly contentious actor during the election cycle. The alt-right promoted controversy through provocative online actions that drew a considerable amount of media attention. This article focuses on the role of the “alt-right” in the 2016 election by examining its visual and rhetorical efforts to engage the political mainstream in relation to the campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In particular, the alt-right’s unique style and internal jargon created notable confusion and also attracted interest by the media, while its promotional tactics included the use of social media and Internet memes, through which the movement came to epitomize online antagonism in the 2016 election.

The promise and challenge of online action research: Notes from a study of self-motivated online music learners

As a developer of online open education resources that provide basic information about Western music theory, notation, and acoustics, I undertook an action research project with the long-term goal of creating resources that were more accessible, particularly to independent learners pursuing their own music-making goals. In order to better understand the situations and perspectives of real-world learner stakeholders, I sought participants among the self-motivated users of my open education resources, offering active help in designing and carrying out inquiries based on their goals. Eleven long-term participants provided insights that have subsequently affected my efforts to design more accessible open education resources, but the course of the study also revealed tensions and challenges related to the online action research methodology. I have reported elsewhere the study results as they relate to online music education. This paper focuses on action research issues raised in the course of the study, including open versus closed online actions, reaching disadvantaged communities and learners, and consciousness-raising at a distance.

Civic activism online: Making young people dormant or more active in real life?

Citizens can be active in their community through a diverse set of actions in real life or on online platforms. Since the emergence of the Internet, there has been continual debate about the impact of online activism on real-life activism: whilst some claim that “clictivism” creates the false sense of making a difference, and undermines real life activities, others say it actually fosters it. We therefore explored the relationship between online and offline activism, covering a range of engagement levels in eight different domains. Every offline activity had its online counterpart. The results draw from a probability sample of 1023 participants from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo aged between 13 and 18 years. A unidimensional model fit the data better than a two dimensional model, suggesting that one factor underlies both online and offline forms of civic action. Our data demonstrate that online and offline activisms are not independent constructs, and that offline activism does not constrain online activism and vice versa. The two combine in a new, so called “hybrid activism”, comprised of very different forms of offline and online actions.

Visual Analytics for Non-Expert Users in Cyber Situation Awareness

Situation awareness is often described as the perception and comprehension of the current situation, and the projection of future status. Whilst this may be well understood in an organisational cybersecurity context, there is a strong case to be made for effective cybersecurity situation awareness that is tailored to the needs of the Non-Expert User (NEU). Our online usage habits are rapidly evolving with smartphones and tablets being widely used to access resources online. In order for NEUs to remain safe online, there is a need to enhance awareness and understanding of cybersecurity concerns, such as how devices may be acting online, and what data is being shared between devices. In this paper, we extend our proposal of the Enhanced Personal Situation Awareness (ePSA) framework to consider the key details of cyber situation awareness that would be of concern to NEUs, and we consider how such information can be effectively conveyed using a visual analytic approach. We present the design of our visual analytics approach to show how this can represent the key details of cyber situation awareness whilst maintaining a simple and clean design scheme so as to not result in information-overload for the user. The guidance developed through the course of this work can help practitioners develop tools that could help NEUs better understand their online actions, with the aim of giving users greater control and safer experiences when their personal devices are acting online.

Dynamic delay risk assessing in supply chains

To be competitive, supply chains must be able to analyse and to evaluate, in real-time, critical differences between the short-term planned actions and the actual performed actions generating states of undesirable or unacceptable risk. The authors propose in this study, a method for monitoring the dynamic evolution of risk associated to delays affecting the transportation operations. They use the failure mode and effects analysis around failure scenarios and they evaluate risk using probability and cost. A failure scenario probability is estimated dynamically in discrete points based on event occurrences during the process execution. Delay risk is then assessed on-line and preventive actions can be undertaken before execution ended. The implementation of this method is performed by monitoring a delivery process facing risks associated to delays in the transport stream.

DNA-Inspired Online Behavioral Modeling and Its Application to Spambot Detection

We propose a strikingly novel, simple, and effective approach to model online user behavior: we extract and analyze digital DNA sequences from user online actions and we use Twitter as a benchmark to test our proposal. We obtain an incisive and compact DNA-inspired characterization of user actions. Then, we apply standard DNA analysis techniques to discriminate between genuine and spambot accounts on Twitter. An experimental campaign supports our proposal, showing its effectiveness and viability. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first ones to identify and adapt DNA-inspired techniques to online user behavioral modeling. While Twitter spambot detection is a specific use case on a specific social media, our proposed methodology is platform and technology agnostic, hence paving the way for diverse behavioral characterization tasks.

Communication, Sportsmanship, and Negotiating Ethical Conduct on the Digital Playing Field

This study examines sportsmanship and ethics on the digital playing field of Strava—a mobile fitness application (app) that records bicycle rides and uploads the data to an online network of other users. Specifically, the study utilizes a social shaping and construction of technology theoretical framework to investigate and discuss how users of Strava communicatively negotiate what it means to be an ethical user of the technology. Drawing on interviews and participant observations of 47 users of the cycling-focused fitness app, the study presents how users perceive and understand online and off-line actions in terms of ethical conduct. Findings indicate that users view actions as indeterminate or disreputable. While disreputable actions are considered outright cheating, indeterminate actions remain in a gray area that is ethically questionable. The study details how the communicative features of Strava allow users to enact sportsmanship through kudos (e.g., congratulatory comments) and refereeing (e.g., flagging user data). This article concludes by offering examples of how relevant social groups are beginning to shape the sports technology.

Classifying and coding online actions

Research on how the Internet is diffusing across the population has broadened from questions about who uses the medium to what people do during their time online. With this change in focus comes a need for more detailed data on people's online actions. The author provides a method for coding and classifying users' online information-seeking behavior. The author presents an exhaustive list of ways in which a user may arrive at a web page. The proposed methodology includes enough nuanced information to distinguish among different search actions and links. In its entirety, the coding scheme makes it possible to understand many details about the users' sequence of actions simply by looking at the spreadsheet containing the information proposed in this article. The author also demonstrates the utility of this scheme with findings from a study on the information-seeking behavior of 100 randomly selected Internet users to exemplify the utility of this coding and classification scheme.

Virtuous reality: moral theory and research into cyber-bullying

This article draws on a study investigating how 11---14 year olds growing up in England understand cyber-bullying as a moral concern. Three prominent moral theories: deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics, informed the development of a semi-structured interview schedule which enabled young people, in their own words, to describe their experiences of online and offline bullying. Sixty 11---14 year olds from six schools across England were involved with the research. Themes emerging from the interviews included anonymity; the absence of rules, monitoring and guidance and, the challenges associated with determining the consequences of online actions. The findings demonstrate the advantages of adopting a character-based moral theory to compliment rules and/or consequence based moral theories as the basis for future research into cyber-bullying. The findings evoke some wider implications for future research into cyber-bullying that might equally be applied to investigations into other Internet related moral concerns.

Teaching Students How to Self-Regulate Their Online Vocabulary Learning By Using a Structured Think-To-Yourself Procedure

Using the Internet for vocabulary development is a powerful way for students to rapidly expand their vocabularies. The Internet affords students opportunities to interact both instantaneously and multimodaly with words in different contexts. By using search engines and hyperlinks, students can immediately access textual, visual, and auditory information about a word and can also experience the word in a variety of contexts. But, to fully reap the benefits of using the Internet for vocabulary learning, students need to be able to self-regulate their online actions and avoid the Internet’s multitudinous distractions. In this article, we describe our development and research on the benefits of teaching students structured thinking procedures to remain metacognitively engaged when learning vocabulary online.

Curating the Soul: Foucault's concept of hupomnemata and the digital technology of self-care

ABSTRACTThis paper explores how online actions such as the practice of digital self-writing shape our offline identity. We start with an examination of the concept of hupomnemata – a practice of self-writing in which notes are kept as a ‘material record of things read, heard, or thought’ in the intent of shaping the self [Foucault (1997). Self writing. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics, subjectivity and truth. The essential works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Volume 1 (pp. 207–222). New York, NY: The New Press p. 209] – before arguing that the practice of digital content curation can be understood as a modern-day variant of the Greco-Roman hupomnemata. Although the work of the digital curator is conducted online, this paper positions contemporary curatorial practices as acts of self-exploration, self-cultivation, and self-care, which nourish offline identity and which ultimately work to shape the offline, corporeal self.

Application of Assistive Computer Vision Methods to Oyama Karate Techniques Recognition

In this paper we propose a novel algorithm that enables online actions segmentation and classification. The algorithm enables segmentation from an incoming motion capture (MoCap) data stream, sport (or karate) movement sequences that are later processed by classification algorithm. The segmentation is based on Gesture Description Language classifier that is trained with an unsupervised learning algorithm. The classification is performed by continuous density forward-only hidden Markov models (HMM) classifier. Our methodology was evaluated on a unique dataset consisting of MoCap recordings of six Oyama karate martial artists including multiple champion of Kumite Knockdown Oyama karate. The dataset consists of 10 classes of actions and included dynamic actions of stands, kicks and blocking techniques. Total number of samples was 1236. We have examined several HMM classifiers with various number of hidden states and also Gaussian mixture model (GMM) classifier to empirically find the best setup of the proposed method in our dataset. We have used leave-one-out cross validation. The recognition rate of our methodology differs between karate techniques and is in the range of 81% ± 15% even to 100%. Our method is not limited for this class of actions but can be easily adapted to any other MoCap-based actions. The description of our approach and its evaluation are the main contributions of this paper. The results presented in this paper are effects of pioneering research on online karate action classification.