Thematic Analysis of Words that Invoke Values in the Net Neutrality Debate

This paper describes an initial analysis of the association of specific vocabulary choices with the invocation of human values in testimonies prepared for public hearings about Net neutrality in the United States. Motivation for this work comes from an interest in understanding what people value and how they express those values in writing. Related work includes research on human values from fields ranging from social psychology to advertising to human-computer interaction. First, human annotators used closed coding to identify human values in testimonies based on a prior meta-analysis of human values. Next, a “values dictionary” was automatically learned that identifies words that are strongly associated with sentences that human annotators coded as being related to specific values. Finally, an open-ended thematic analysis was conducted. The contribution of the paper is to enhance our understanding of how human values are expressed, as well as to introduce and evaluate a new automated tool for facilitating social science research.ye

Value-sensitive design practices for frugal innovations

This chapter focuses on technological innovation and how insights from technological design can be used to address the challenges associated with the setting in which frugal innovation operates. The resource-constrained setting of frugal innovation puts high demands the design requirements of frugal innovation technologies and the possible conflicts between these requirements. Within the ethics of technology, there is a growing literature that explicitly focuses on how to make technological design more sensitive to important moral values, commonly referred to as value-sensitive design or design for values. However, despite strong commonalities, frugal innovation does not feature as a strong application domain in the literature on value-sensitive design practices. Since frugal innovation takes place in and/or for a resource-constrained context, focusing on just one value could easily lead to other relevant values not being appropriately embedded in the design. For value-sensitive design practices to contribute to frugal innovation, it seems better to think in terms of ‘design for context X’ rather than ‘design for value X’, as the latter may be too narrowly focused on one specific value. Systematic research on design practices is necessary to gain more insight in which values are particularly relevant, both in terms of internal values and in terms of external values, but also in the relevant operationalisations, which may differ substantially in different contexts and which may make value conflicts both more complicated but also more easily solvable

SAT: a methodology to assess the social acceptance of innovative AI-based technologies

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present the conceptual model of an innovative methodology (SAT) to assess the social acceptance of technology, especially focusing on artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology. Design/methodology/approach After a review of the literature, this paper presents the main lines by which SAT stands out from current methods, namely, a four-bubble approach and a mix of qualitative and quantitative techniques that offer assessments that look at technology as a socio-technical system. Each bubble determines the social variability of a cluster of values: User-Experience Acceptance, Social Disruptiveness, Value Impact and Trust. Findings The methodology is still in development, requiring further developments, specifications and validation. Accordingly, the findings of this paper refer to the realm of the research discussion, that is, highlighting the importance of preventively assessing and forecasting the acceptance of technology and building the best design strategies to boost sustainable and ethical technology adoption. Social implications Once SAT method will be validated, it could constitute a useful tool, with societal implications, for helping users, markets and institutions to appraise and determine the co-implications of technology and socio-cultural contexts. Originality/value New AI applications flood today’s users and markets, often without a clear understanding of risks and impacts. In the European context, regulations (EU AI Act) and rules (EU Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy) try to fill this normative gap. The SAT method seeks to integrate the risk-based assessment of AI with an assessment of the perceptive-psychological and socio-behavioural aspects of its social acceptability

"Like a Real Friendship": Translation, Coherence, and Convergence of Information Values in LibraryThing and Goodreads

This paper presents findings on the roles that two digital libraries and virtual book club communities, LibraryThing and Goodreads, play in the existing and emergent communities of their users. Informed by social informatics and sociotechnical theory and research, it improves our understanding of the phenomenon of information value and how shared information values are translated, cohered, and converged as users interact. LibraryThing and Goodreads play significant roles, but perfect coherence and convergence is not necessary in most cases; understanding differences and being willing to negotiate and translate around them allowed for continued use of the sites and for continued community existence and emergence. Translation was a significant factor in allowing common ground and social ties to be established, leading to greater information and knowledge sharing. Similar to maintaining “a real friendship,” these processes are often invisible work, but serve as significant factors in the sociotechnical infrastructure of LibraryThing and Goodreads.ye

How does the use of mobile phones by 16-24 year old socially excluded women affect their capabilities?

This research looks at the impact of mobile phone use on the lives and opportunities of 16-24 year-old socially excluded women, using a novel, cross-disciplinary framework of the capability approach and affordances. Fieldwork took the form of semi-structured interviews in 2013-14 with 30 women between the ages of 16-24, and four youth workers. The instrumental affordances of mobile phones are examined to understand whether they provide a means to address issues relating to work, health, education and housing. The impact of the maintenance and communicative affordances of mobile phones on women’s lives and relationships is also critically examined. The fieldwork showed that respondents were making limited use of instrumental affordances to address issues of social exclusion. Poverty impacted on women’s mobile phone use: they lacked funds to repair their phones and experienced intermittent connectivity. Respondents were often paying a high proportion of their income for their mobile phones, going over call limits and breaking contracts. Mobile phones were contributing to a ‘digitally gendered’ identity, including technology-facilitated sexual harassment and gendered communicative practices. Economic and social circumstances meant that half of respondents were reliant on these devices for their Internet connection, and thus for a wide range of instrumental purposes. This demonstrates the value of research on women’s use of mobile phones that is alive not just to gendered technology use, but also to structural issues of class and poverty. This study shows the strength of cross-disciplinary approaches to studies on the social effects of inequalities of access to digital tools, particularly in the use of theories from the field of human computer interaction to ‘materialise’ understanding of the relationship between social and digital exclusion. It also makes a significant contribution to knowledge on the use of mobile phones by socially excluded young women in the UK

Values and Self-Presentation in Online Communication by Stakeholders Related to Homelessness

Values are guiding principles of what we consider important in our lives. They shape, and are shaped by, our information behaviors and interactions with technology. Design approaches that explicitly consider values can change the affordances of resulting technologies. This dissertation extends research related to values and information technology use and design within the social context of homelessness, a value-laden social issue in the United States. This study used both quantitative and qualitative content analysis to examine the values expressed in online communication (specifically, the 140-character posts on Twitter known as "tweets") by individuals who identified as homeless in their Twitter profiles. They were compared to the values expressed in the tweets of other stakeholders related to the issue of homelessness, including support organizations and homeless advocates, as well as a comparison group of individuals who did not identify with homelessness in their Twitter profiles. A key contribution of this study is an empirically tested coding manual for identifying salient values of Twitter users through their tweets. The application of this coding manual to Twitter users' timelines of tweets helped to characterize the ways in which values emerge from online communication, highlighting differences between the values expressed by individuals and organizations on Twitter. The study also showed how Twitter users' self-presentation of their online profiles relates to their expressions of values. These findings show how the role of values in one's self-presentation online leads to important implications for the design of sociotechnical systems and for raising awareness about the intersection of technology use and homelessness in the 21st century. These insights are necessary for understanding information technology use by individuals who are relevant but often absent from the development of new information technologies

Smart Energy Management for Smart Grids

This book is a contribution from the authors, to share solutions for a better and sustainable power grid. Renewable energy, smart grid security and smart energy management are the main topics discussed in this book