Cyberscience 2.0 (eBook)

PD Dr. Michael Nentwich ist Direktor des Instituts für Technikfolgen-Abschätzung (ITA) der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. René König, Dipl.- Soz., arbeitete dort im Projekt "Interactive Science".

Contents 6
Preface 10
1 Introduction 12
1.1 Cyberscience 1.0 Revisited 13
1.2 Web 2.0 and Cyberscience 16
1.2.1 The Internet is becoming a social space 16
1.2.2 Social media, digital social networks and digital social culture 18
1.2.3 On the path to cyberscience 2.0? 20
1.3 Conceptual Framework and Methods 22
1.3.1 Modeling scholarly activities and ICT impact on academia 22
1.3.2 Methods applied 26
2 Case Studies 28
2.1 Social Network Sites 30
2.1.1 Main functions 37
2.1.2 Potential for science and research 44
2.1.3 Usage practices and impact 46
2.1.4 Interim conclusions 59
2.2 Microblogging 61
2.2.1 Main functions 62
2.2.2 Potentials for academia 65
2.2.3 Usage practices and impact 68
2.2.4 Interim conclusions 81
2.3 Collaborative Knowledge Production—The Case of Wikimedia 83
2.3.1 Main functions and core principles 85
2.3.2 Potentials for academia 93
2.3.3 Usage practices and impact 96
2.3.4 Interim conclusions 108
2.4 Virtual Worlds—The Case of Second Life 111
2.4.1 Main functions 112
2.4.2 Potentials for science and research 114
2.4.3 Usage practices and impact 115
2.4.4 Interim conclusions 123
2.5 Search Engines—The Case of Google 124
2.5.1 Main functions 127
2.5.2 Potential for academia 136
2.5.3 User practices and impact 138
2.5.4 Interim conclusions 150
3 Cross-Cutting Analysis 154
3.1 Interactivity as a Crucial Category 154
3.1.1 Utopian and dystopian perspectives 154
3.1.2 Insiders and outsiders: methodological issues 157
3.1.3 Overcoming the barriers between utopians and dystopians 160
3.2 New Windows in the Ivory Tower 162
3.2.1 Bringing together the academic and the public sphere 163
3.2.2 Blurring media formats 166
3.2.3 Blurring roles 169
3.2.4 Bridging the boundaries? 172
3.3 Academic Quality and Digital Social Networks 174
3.3.1 Recent developments in academic quality control 174
3.3.2 Ex ante quality control for or through digital social networks? 176
3.3.3 Ex post quality control in digital social networks 179
3.3.4 Crediting and incentives 182
3.4 Information Overload or Information Paradise? 183
3.4.1 The evolution and diversification of communication channels in academia 184
3.4.2 Quantitative impacts of multi-channel communication 187
3.4.3 Qualitative impacts? 189
3.5 Between Transparency and Privacy 192
3.5.1 Privacy versus transparency in the Web 2.0 193
3.5.2 Privacy impact assessment of academic use of social media 194
3.5.3 Paths towards transparent and privacy-friendly academic Web 2.0? 196
3.6 Towards Democratization of Science? 199
3.6.1 What does democratization mean? 199
3.6.2 Internal democratization? 201
3.6.3 External democratization? 205
3.6.4 Obstacles for assessing democratization processes 208
4 Overall Conclusions and Outlook 210
4.1 Maturing Cyberscience 210
4.2 The Cyberscience 2.0 Prospects 212
4.3 An Ambivalent Overall Assessment 216
Abbreviations 218
List of Tables 220
List of Figures 221
Bibliography 222
Index 244

1 Introduction

In the early part of the 21st century one of us coined the term 'cyberscience' (Nentwich 2003) to describe the trend of applying information and communication technologies (ICT) to scientific research. Scholars tended increasingly to use the Internet not only to exchange e-mails, but also to participate in online debates, cooperate at distance, use remote databases, simulate and model reality on their computers, and teaching their students with the web. These developments have not come to a halt since the early days but have accelerated and diversified ever since. As will be discussed in section 1.1, the Internet has today become an essential tool for everyday scholarly communication; academic work without the use of the Internet is now as unthinkable as writing an academic paper on a typewriter, especially for young researchers. The emergence of Web 2.0 opened up new opportunities, seized not only by the general Internet community worldwide, but increasingly also by researchers and academic teachers. During the same period powerful commercial actors continued the development of the Internet and made it a different place compared to its early days.

This book focuses on these latest trends and addresses two interrelated research questions: What role does the digital social culture triggered by Web 2.0 play in the academic world at present and what are the potentials of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia? What impact will the emerging socio-technical practices have?

We approach an answer to these questions in three steps. First, we will review the status quo of how cyberscience developed (1.1) and which new tools and platforms evolved over the last decade with the potential to serve the academic communities (1.2); as a basis for our empirical research and subsequent analysis, we will present our conceptual framework (1.3). Second, we will present five empirical case studies, discussing promising fields of the developments in recent years when it comes to analyze the potential impact on academia: social network sites such as Facebook and similar sites specifically dedicated to research communities (2.1); microblogging with a focus on Twitter (2.2); collaborative knowledge resources, exemplified by various projects of the Wikimedia foundation, namely Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and Wikiversity (2.3); virtual worlds, in particular the rise and fall of Second Life (2.4); finally the most prominent and ubiquitously used universal search engine Google Web Search as well as Google Scholar and Google Books, which are of special interest for academia (2.5). In a third step, we will analyze the empirical material of chapter 2 in the light of our conceptual framework identifying the following key issues: the crucial role of interactivity (3.1); the blurring boundary between academia and the public (3.2); academic quality in the age of Web 2.0 (3.3); the problem of multiple channels and information overload (3.4); transparency and privacy (3.5); and finally potentially democratizing effects emerging from the participatory possibilities of the new platforms (3.6). The book closes with an outlook and overall conclusions, in which we put the analyzed developments into perspective (4.)