"I am no number": Humanizing Digital Identities

Growing interest in decentralized web has brought into focus the need to furnish decentralized digital identities that could uproot the dominant centralized solutions, such as single logins provided by social media platforms. However, these multiple efforts to put the end user in the center of identity management rarely relate to individuals’ psychological needs related to identity enactment and construction, diminishing their chances for widespread adoption. This paper proposes a network formalization of identity theories that incorporates the specifics of identity processes online. From this model, two general, architectural principles for decentralized digital identities are drawn that might guide future work in this area

Polarization on Social Media: When Group Dynamics Leads to Societal Divides

Polarization of group opinions - a natural mechanism that enables groups to stay intrinsically cohesive - explains why after multiple interactions individual and group opinions shift towards the extremes. Recently, significant polarization of opinions can be witnessed in the public discourse of many Western societies in a range of topics. We argue here that the prevalence of social media together with its specific design may amplify natural group dynamics and strengthen the divisions. We present an agent based model wherein implementation of polarization mechanisms together with social media properties leads to increased segregation and radicalization of opinions. We propose certain design choices for social media platforms that could help ameliorate the problem

Quality in peer production systems – impact of assortativity of communication networks on group efficacy

Many online peer production systems (e.g. Wikipedia or Open Source Software communities) strive to deliver high quality intellectual goods that could compare with commercial products. While quality is key to the communities’ success – widespread adoption of their products – it is not clear what makes some succeed, while others provide subpar outcomes or fail entirely. Quality of Wikipedia articles has been previously related to the number of editors writing them or to the diversity of editors’ competences. Here we tested the hypothesis that cohesiveness of private communication networks within collaborating groups increases the quality of their products. We analyzed communication within a sample of Wikiprojects on the English Wikipedia – groups of editors that coordinate their activities to improve articles related to a specific topic. We found that most Wikiprojects communicate in a highly hierarchical, disassortative way, but the successful ones break this trend and their communication networks are structured in a more egalitarian way

Right to Privacy in the Context of the Privacy Paradox and Data Collection Patterns: Exploratory Study of Polish Facebook Users

Dark patterns in online data gathering infringe on citizens' right to privacy and create a profound imbalance of power between citizens of digitalizing societies and institutional actors. In effect, even when users declare their concern about privacy, this attitude is often not reflected in actions. In the study reported here we found that Facebook users indeed perceive an imbalance of control over privacy: they feel it is their responsibility to protect it but at the same time they feel that they are less capable to fulfil this task than institutional actors. We also found that privacy concerns were a good predictor of actual effects of privacy protective behaviors, while at the same time they did not correlate with declarations about privacy protection, which suggest a need for careful measurement of such constructs. Our results are a first step towards a comprehensive research agenda on individuals’ attitudes towards institutional privacy

Data management for platform-mediated public services: Challenges and best practices

Data harvesting and profiling have become a de facto business model for many businesses in the digital economy. The surveillance of individual persons through their use of private sector platforms has a well-understood effect on personal autonomy and democratic institutions. In this article, we explore the consequences of implementing data-rich services in the public sector and specifically the dangers inherent to undermining the universality of the reach of public services, the implicit endorsement of the platform operators by government, and the inability of members of the public to avoid using the platforms in practice. We propose a set of good practices in the form of design principles that infrastructure services can adopt to mitigate the risks, and we specify a set of design primitives that can be used to support the development of infrastructure that follows the principles. We argue that providers of public infrastructure should adopt a practice of critical assessment of the consequences of their technology choices.Comment: 19 page

Functional Synchronization: The Emergence of Coordinated Activity in Human Systems

The topical landscape of psychology is highly compartmentalized, with distinct phenomena explained and investigated with recourse to theories and methods that have little in common. Our aim in this article is to identify a basic set of principles that underlie otherwise diverse aspects of human experience at all levels of psychological reality, from neural processes to group dynamics. The core idea is that neural, behavioral, mental, and social structures emerge through the synchronization of lower-level elements (e.g., neurons, muscle movements, thoughts and feelings, individuals) into a functional unit—a coherent structure that functions to accomplish tasks. The coherence provided by the formation of functional units may be transient, persisting only as long as necessary to perform the task at hand. This creates the potential for the repeated assembly and disassembly of functional units in accordance with changing task demands. This perspective is rooted in principles of complexity science and non-linear dynamical systems and is supported by recent discoveries in neuroscience and recent models in cognitive and social psychology. We offer guidelines for investigating the emergence of functional units in different domains, thereby honoring the topical differentiation of psychology while providing an integrative foundation for the field