To mark the ‘silver jubilee’ of the web, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has drawn attention to the huge contribution the Internet has made to society while at the same time calling for a global debate about how we develop the web and improve digital skills to make sure it continues to create opportunities and enhance people’s lives over the next 25 years.
The IET's Dr Mike Short CBE points to a recent US survey, which revealed that 76 percent of people believed the web has been a positive force for society. "This is encouraging and, given that we have really only scratched the surface with what the web can do, the potential for it to further improve our daily lives is still considerable," he says.
“But we now need an agreed vision for the web for the next decade – and on how we will address critical challenges such as security, capacity and capability. We must also do more to create the necessary digital skills to enable the Web to achieve its full potential. Currently, the UK is facing a well-documented shortage of these technological skills.”
The IET's wish-list for the Internet over the next few years includes:
- A wider range of content in a greater number of languages
- Trusted e-learning resources
- Greater inclusion of, and accessibility for, groups currently not engaged with the Internet such as large parts of the developing world, the older generation and those with visual and audio impairments
- Further innovation in web technologies, for example language and format conversion
- New thinking about how we operate commercially in a digital world, with a broader choice of ecommerce and payment options
- Global governance and standards for data privacy and security, including techniques such as human factors and user-based design to improve user confidence and adoption.
The Internet has revolutionised business practices and created all sorts of new opportunities for communication and interaction – first with email and more recently with social media.
The IET says we can expect to see social media transcending individual platforms such as Facebook or Twitter to bring together contacts across all platforms in the ongoing bid to create web technologies that allow people to communicate more widely, more easily and more often.
It won’t only be people who benefit from searching the web for information. Computers will be able to analyse the web to find data from a range of sources, linking data and identifying patterns. So in the future a faulty product or health scare could be addressed by machines scanning the web to find all available data to better prevent and prepare for future incidents.
Improved usability depends on a web infrastructure that allows us to connect to the web on demand - any time, any place – without having to worry about how the connection is made. To overhaul the existing infrastructure to provide universal high-speed broadband coverage is prohibitively expensive.
Instead, availability could be achieved by bringing together technical standards, embedding greater intelligence in the network architecture and introducing more proactive and innovative regulation to allow individual devices or appliances to find connectivity on demand.
Twitter shapes public opinion: fact!
How exactly does Twitter, with its 241 million users tweeting out 500 million messages daily, shape public opinion? That question has been tackled by a group of researchers in China who investigated how opinions evolve on Twitter by gathering about 6 million 140-character-or-less messages that were tweeted out over a six month period in the first half of 2011.
Fei Xiong, a lecturer at Beijing Jiaotong University who gathered the data using Twitter's open API and analysed it with Professor Yun Liu, ran these messages through computer algorithms that sorted them by topic and then analysed the underlying sentiments of the authors as they evolved over time.
Described in the journal Chaos, the work reveals several surprises about how Twitter shapes public opinion, and its findings might well influence the way political candidates run their social media campaigns or the way companies market their goods and services.
Xiong and Liu discovered that public opinion on Twitter often evolves rapidly and levels off quickly into an ordered state in which one opinion remains dominant. In true social media form, this consensus is often driven by the endorsements of larger and larger groups, which tend to have the most influence.
The work also revealed that when dominant opinions emerge, however, they tend not to achieve complete consensus. In fact, when Twitter users who hold minority views are faced with overwhelming opposition, they are still not likely to change their opinions.
Since public opinion levels off and evolves into an ordered state within a short time, small advantages of one opinion in the early stages can turn into a bigger advantage during the evolution of public opinion, according to Xiong. "Once public opinion stabilises, it's difficult to change," he adds.
The work also revealed that Twitter users overall are more likely to work to change the opinions of others than to admit to changes of their own.
While this particular study was done more than two years ago, and there are more Twitter users now, the researchers believe that the results would still be similar if done on a new dataset today, though Xiong and Liu say the analysis might be improved by integrating new algorithms that analyse the sentiment of the messages.
Les Hunt
Editor