Slides for my talk at Trinity College, Dublin, on what Web Science means to me. ABSTRACT It is common to view any artificially created entity as an extension of our human faculties. So it was with our early understanding of the World Wide Web. In the initial years, the Web was viewed variously as a very large database, a digital library or even as an extension of our thoughts. In this talk, I will argue that, far from the Web being an extension of ourselves, *we* are individual appendages to a large emergent characteristic space created by the Web. This is called the "Socio-Cognitive Space". Much like the "economy" -- an entity created by us, which in turn affects our financial well being, the socio-cognitive space that is created by us in turn influences what we think and even how we feel. The socio-cognitive space can satiate our scientific curiosity or strengthen our cognitive biases, stroke our inner-most desires or make us deeply outraged, create wise crowds or unruly mobs, and create a livelihood or drive people to suicide. The socio-cognitive space is immersive and specific in its influence. Two people from the same family could be affected very differently by the Web, depending on their own innate characteristics. We are only beginning to understand the impact of this very powerful space, which is only going to increase in the coming years. I will also argue that arguments that view the Web as a whole as a great opportunity or a great threat, are both inherently missing the essence of the socio-cognitive space. Instead, I will draw concepts from Eastern philosophy to view the space as a collective "state of being" characterized by different levels of harmony or disharmony.

1. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Towards a “Mindful” Web
Srinath Srinivasa
Web Sciences Lab
http://cds.iiitb.ac.in/wsl/
Center for Data Sciences
http://cds.iiitb.ac.in/
IIIT Bangalore – India
http://www.iiitb.ac.in/

2. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Recent additions to our vocabulary
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Social media
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Tweeting
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#hashtags
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SEO
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Wikipedia
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Netbanking
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MOOC
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Crowdsourcing
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Big Data
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Phishing
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Trolling
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SEO
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Cyberstalking
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Cyber squatting
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Identity theft
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Online privacy
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Big Data

3. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
The World Wide Web
What started as a means for managing
documents, is now an integral part of the
lives of more than 360 million users
worldwide
Models of the Web
Very large database
Digital library
A cognitive extension of ourselves
Socio­cognitive space
Image source:
http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html

4. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Web as a Database
Early approaches (mid '90s) to
model the Web
Focused on the “semi­structured”
nature of the Web and as a
special case of managing
structured (RDBMS) databases
Research objectives: structured
and rich query semantics
Examples include: [AMM 97],
[Eng 98], WebQL
An example WebQL query
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebQL

5. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Web as a Digital Library
Shift from:
Strict notions of “query” Looser notions of “retrieval”
and “relevance”
Strict notions of “schema” Looser notions of “ontology”
Emphasis still on retrieving information
Web still seen as a passive repository of information
Examples: [GR+ 97], [HMA 03]

6. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Web as a Cognitive Extension of Ourselves
Rooted in Vannevar Bush's interpretation
of hypertext reflecting the way
information is organized in human brains
Focus on interpreting hyperlinks, rather
than (just) data on web pages
Hyperlink as a(n):
– Relevance indicator
– Endorsement
– Attention pathway
Examples: PageRank [BP 98],
HITS [GKR 98]
Memex

7. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Web as a Socio­cognitive Space
Characteristic paradigm of Web 2.0 approaches
Web as an active, participatory, social space
Shift of emphasis from retrieving information from the Web to engaging users
with the Web
Characteristic elements of the socio­cognitive space paradigm:
Crowdsourcing
Participatory authoring (Ex: Wikis)
Social bookmarking
Recommendations
Push­based notifications
Social media and information diffusion modeling
Personalized search

8. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
The Socio­cognitive Space
From web users to web participants
Active “behavior molding” from other participants
and web elements (User feedback, likes, +1, ­1;
algorithmic ranking and recommendations)
“Ask not what the Web can do for you, ask what you
can do for the Web”
“If any online social space provides services for free,
then you are not the customer, you are the product!”

9. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
The Socio­cognitive Space
Immersive and individualized
experience
“Karmic” gratification
Social nature of mass media
Individualized nature of “social” media

10. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Survival in the “Space”
Three things to know:
Actor, agent and identity
Spread of ideas versus spread of emotions
Crowds, herds and mobs

11. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Actor and Agent
Two forms of identity:
Actor: Our externally projected set of characteristics
Agent: Our set of innate characteristics
Actor: Who we are in a social setting
Agent: Who we are when we are alone
“Moral” Actor and “Selfish” Agent [FSO 14]
Agnostic to cultural variations

12. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Actor and Agent Collectives
Predominantly­actor societies
Society made of people contributing
their “actor” selves to the collective
Values collective good over
individual freedom
Values manners and political
correctness over direct honesty
Low collective dissonance, but high
individual dissonance
Predominantly­agent societies
Society made of people contributing
their “agent” selves to the collective
Passionate and enthusiastic
Values honesty and transparency
over political correctness
Lesser individual dissonance, but
may witness more conflicts compared
to predominantly­actor collectives

13. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Actor and Agent
The web is likely to be a predominantly­agent space
Even more so, when participation is anonymous!
Anonymity, invisibility and lack of eye contact brings out the “agent”
and obviates need for the “actor” [NB 12]
Possible explanation for the “online disinhibition effect” [Suler 04]
Online social life likely to be more passionate and more conflict­
prone than offline social lives.

14. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Ideas and Emotions
Spread of ideas
Spreads by dynamics of (bounded)
rationality
Facilitated by connectivity
Hampered by “too much” connectivity
(conformance psychology)
Needs critical connectivity and
rational motivation
Spread of emotions
Spreads by emotional contagion
Facilitated by connectivity
Unhampered by too much connectivity
No rational basis for spread
Triggered by any form of dissonance

15. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Entrenchment and the Diffusion of
Ideas
Information diffusion is faster in sparsely connected parts of a network,
rather than densely connected (entrenched) parts due to conformance effects.
Node d in the above figure does not switch to the new idea because of
conformance pressures from nodes e, f and g
Image Source: [Sri 06]

16. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Mental Models, Weak Ties and the
Emotional Contagion

17. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Mental Models, Weak Ties and the
Emotional Contagion

18. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Mental Models, Weak Ties and the
Emotional Contagion

19. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Mental Models, Weak Ties and the
Emotional Contagion

20. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Mental Models, Weak Ties and the
Emotional Contagion

21. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Mental Models, Weak Ties and the
Emotional Contagion

22. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
The Web
and the
Emotional Contagion
Spread of ideas hampered by entrenchment effects and conformance
pressures
Spread of emotions facilitated in entrenched and tightly­knit
networks
Interactions over the Web typically span across mental models
Interaction across mental­models increases dissonance and
emotionally charged conversations
Emotions spread faster on the Web than ideas!

23. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
The Wisdom of Crowds..

24. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Crowdsourcing is all fine, but..
Not all groups of people form
“wise” crowds!

25. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Crowds, Herds and Mobs
Crowds
– A shared­attention group debating about a topic
– Rich in diversity of viewpoints and argumentation
– Wisdom of the Crowd
Herds
– A shared mental­model group, all possessing the same or similar beliefs
– Potent in strength of conviction of beliefs
– Unwise as a collective and potentially manipulable
– Herd Mentality
Mobs
– A shared emotional­state group, all possessing the same emotional state, but no shared
mental model or attention
– Extremely unpredictable, unwise and potent as a collective
– Mob fury

26. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Crowds, Herds and Mobs
Crowds:
Members act as individuals
High cognitive load
Unstable
Herds:
Members comply to collective
Low cognitive load
Stable
Mobs:
Deindividualized members
No self-awareness as individuals
Expansive
degeneration

27. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Perspectives towards the Web
The Web is an
Opportunity
The Web is a Threat
The Web is.

28. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
The “Mindful” Web
From:
Web as an object of interest
Problem­solving
Objectification (de­personalization)
Transactional and specific
interventions
Imperative control actions (Do this,
Do that..)
To:
Web as a collective state of being
Harmonizing
Self­awareness
Ongoing relationship with generic
interventions
Declarative control actions (This needs to
be achieved..)

29. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
The “Mindful” Web
WWW
Web-state
modeling
center(s)
Web observatory
Participatory
web site

30. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Engineering a “Mindful” Web
One or more “State of the Web” model­building centers
Powered by inputs from a distributed array of “Web Observatories”
Providing strategic, declarative, aggregate­level inputs to
participatory websites like social media sites
Managed in an open and transparent fashion by public
endowments

31. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Towards a “Mindful” Web
Rich area of inter­disciplinary research
Several open problems – including legal and ethical
dilemmas
Ex: Is it advisable to dampen the spread of some news
simply because it can induce an intense negative
emotional reaction?
Web Science : Humanities :: Cognition : Being Human

32. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
Thank You!
All images used in this presentation have a CC public license or their licensing terms were unspecified.
Copyright rests with the creators.
Icons source: http://findicons.com/ http://velyrhorde.livejournal.com/73019.html

33. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
References
[AMM 97] G.O. Arocena, A.O. Meldelzon and G.A. Mihaila, Applications of a Web query language, in: Proc. of the 6th
International World Wide Web Conference, April 7–11, 1997, Santa Clara, California, USA,
http://www6.nttlabs.com/HyperNews/get/PAPER267.html
[GR+ 97] Gudivada, V.N.; Raghavan, V.V.; Grosky, William I; Kasanagottu, R., "Information retrieval on the World
Wide Web," Internet Computing, IEEE , vol.1, no.5, pp.58,68, Sep/Oct 1997
[BP 98] Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. 1998. The anatomy of a large­scale hypertextual Web search engine. In
Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web 7 (WWW7), Philip H. Enslow, Jr. and Allen
Ellis (Eds.). Elsevier Science Publishers B. V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, The Netherlands, 107­117.
[Eng 98] Carlos F. Enguix. 1998. Database querying on the World Wide Web: UniGuide, an object­relational search
engine for Australian universities. Comput. Netw. ISDN Syst. 30, 1­7 (April 1998), 567­572. DOI=10.1016/S0169­
7552(98)00080­4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0169­7552(98)00080­4
[GKR 98] David Gibson, Jon Kleinberg, and Prabhakar Raghavan. 1998. Inferring Web communities from link topology.
In Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia : links, objects, time and space­­­structure in
hypermedia systems: links, objects, time and space­­­structure in hypermedia systems (HYPERTEXT '98). ACM, New
York, NY, USA, 225­234.
[HMA 03] Ian Horrocks, Deborah L. McGuinness, and Christopher A. Welty. 2003. Digital libraries and web­based
information systems. In The description logic handbook, Franz Baader, Diego Calvanese, Deborah L. McGuinness,
Daniele Nardi, and Peter F. Patel­Schneider (Eds.). Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA 427­449.

34. Talk at Trinity College, Dublin, July 2014
References
[Suler 04] Suler, John. "The online disinhibition effect." Cyberpsychology & behavior 7.3 (2004): 321­326.
[NB 12] Lapidot­Lefler, Noam, and Azy Barak. "Effects of anonymity, invisibility, and lack of eye­contact
on toxic online disinhibition." Computers in Human Behavior 28.2 (2012): 434­443.
[FSO 14] Frimer, J. A., N. K. Schaefer, and H. Oakes. "Moral actor, selfish agent." Journal of personality
and social psychology 106.5 (2014): 790­802.
Google IR Research http://research.google.com/pubs/InformationRetrievalandtheWeb.html
When crowdsourcing goes wrong: Reddit, Boston and missing student Sunil Tripathi
http://www.newstatesman.com/world­affairs/2013/04/when­crowdsourcing­goes­wrong­reddit­boston­and­m
issing­student­sunil­tripathi
The 5 Most Entertaining Crowdsourcing Disasters
http://www.businessinsider.com/the­5­most­entertaining­crowdsourcing­disasters­2009­9/ifail­20­1?IR=T#
ifail­20­1
The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the­story­behind­the­worst­movie­on­imdb/
Web Observatory http://wstweb1.ecs.soton.ac.uk/web­observatory/