IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 31

leadership" that is implied by the
demands of these "brave conversations" about the Web and society.
Some of that leadership can come
from those with positions of existing or emerging power and influence, some of which they might
choose to invest in creating spaces
and momentum for these kinds of
continuing conversations. But in
an important way, the leadership
for these conversations to happen
at all needs to be distributed and
dispersed. In that sense, we will all
need to be leaders in this endeavor,
willing to spend some of our personal capital and time diving into
the discussions, helping to shape
them and constantly learning as
we contribute.
One way to think about this is
to link the three stages of effective conversations - actually having them in the first place, being
clear about the influence they are
intended to have, and linking them
to a sense of agency and action. In
each stage, the same basic questions need to be asked. Who needs
to be involved or targeted, what
will be discussed or done, will it be
clear why the conversations are taking place, and how will they be convened and conducted.

Conversations
Who, What, Why, and How
Web Science
A new conversation about the
interdependence of and the
interaction between technology,
society, people, and nature
Actions
Who, What, Why, and How

A "brave conversations" process at
the individual organizational or
system level

FIGURE 1. Context for Brave Conversations.

What that simple three-stage
model implies is a method for holding and sustaining collaborative
conversations that combines convening, collaborating, and sustaining. It's a model that works at the
individual, organizational, community, or even system level. The same
basic steps apply.

What's it All About ... and
What Can You Do?
In the end, the Web Science conversation, as it confronts a period
of technology, political, cultural,
institutional, and social change, is

... we can say with confidence that the web is not outside of society, but co-constituted
with it in heterogeneous networks that are both challenging and reproducing older
forms of inequality and producing their own varieties of inequality. Whilst some actors
are excluded - the illiterate, the poorest, and so on - others acquire new forms of
power - global media corporations, and "geeks bearing gifts" or those with particular
technical competencies.
At a finer level of granularity, amongst those who are connected, some can make expert
use and derive enormous benefits, whilst others cannot (Hargittai, in Social Stratification,
Westview, 2008), producing new forms of power and inequality inside the web. From
this perspective, we cannot see the web as, somehow, outside of power relations or as a
simple solution to inequality.
There may be enormous benefits from enabling access to the web, via hardware
and education, but we should not assume that this is a simple answer to inequality or
will produce predictable outcomes."
http://journal.webscience.org/297/2/manifestoACM.pdf

SEPTEMBER 2017

Influence
Who, What, Why, and How

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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

fundamentally about four things
(Figure 2):
■ Sorting out the contest between
technology and society is fundamentally an exercise in selfgovernment. We are not going
to be saved by some "deus ex
machina" intervention to decree
what is right and what is wrong.
We have to work that out for ourselves. "There is no justice," said
writer Terry Pratchett. "There is
just us."
■ At the heart of the Web Science
debate is a debate about identity or, even more basically, about
what it means to be human. As
machines and people merge and
learn new ways to augment each
other's essential qualities, we
need to define what we think
being human means and needs.
■ Inescapable, risk, and how we
choose to deal with it, is at
the heart of the big discussions
about technology and society.
And if there is risk there is also
opportunity, of course. But at
least one big part of the brave
conversations we need to have
will grapple with new sources
of, and responses to, the political, cultural, technical, environmental, and social risks that a

http://journal.webscience.org/297/2/manifestoACM.pdf

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017