CITS is dedicated to research and education about the cultural transitions and social innovations associated with technology. The Center comprises a diverse team of more than a dozen scholars in the social sciences, engineering, and the humanities. We conduct research, organize public forums, provide multi-disciplinary doctoral education on technology and society, and facilitate partnerships with industry and the public sector. Our research examines many aspects of the social and cultural transitions under way at present around the globe, but we have a particular focus on technological change and three topics: • Social Collaboration and Dynamic Communities• Global Cultures in Transition• Technology in EducationCITS was founded at UC Santa Barbara in 1999, on the thirtieth anniversary of the birth of the Internet. UC Santa Barbara is nationally acclaimed for its success at multi-disciplinary research, and provides a perfect home CITS’s wide scope of inquiry and education. The Center is housed in the campus Office of Research, as a unit of the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research. CITS is funded by the university and private gifts, along with research grants.
The Life in the Age of Drones symposium brings together a philosopher, activists, and artists to speak about the growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones” in the world over the past decade. Panelists will present an array of research, art, and activist projects exploring how life has changed in age of drone warfare. Topics to be addressed include: the US drone war in Pakistan and practices of targeted killing; anti-drone protest movements; artistic interventions using drones; filmmak...
Scholars in various fields have theorized connections between communication, consumption, and civil society. Whether Bourdieu's attention to the social positioning of taste or Schor's concerns about commercialization, overconsumption and disengagement, the media are often implicated in consumer culture dynamics. Countering claims that product-saturated mass media simply diminish civic-mindedness, this research explores the ways in which mass communication practices shape and structure the cons...
Extending a digital divide framework, this study analyzes the influences on and relations among awareness, adoption, and (frequent) use of the Internet in three former Soviet republics -- Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Nationally representative survey samples in each country in 2011 fit a combined model predicting that age, economic wellbeing, education, urbanness, and English language proficiency all generally influence each of the three Internet stages. Age, education, and urbanness are t...
Social media played an integral role in the months leading to Egypt's January 25 Revolution, as well as during the events of the 18 days which toppled Hosni Mubarak, its dictator of 30 years. In the aftermath of that revolution, what role can social media play now? This lecture gives a glimpse of the dynamics of social media in Egypt before, during, and after the revolution, and leads a discussion into how social media can push forward a cause during Egypt's sensitive transition to democracy.
This lecture summarizes lessons learned by an engineer whom lives with his family in rural sub-Saharan Africa, for more then 11 years. The journey includes observations in engineering and appropriate technologies, touches upon orality and relatio-economics, and discusses the use of ICT in rural Zambia. Switching perspectives between engineering and critical ethnography, the lecture highlights the dilemmas between stakeholders of ICTs in rural Africa and discusses possible ways of reconciling t...
The so-called Fourth Paradigm describes a novel, data-intensive approach to scientific discovery. It is often characterized as the scientific perspective on Big Data. The underlying assumption is that the availability of data at a higher spatial, temporal, and thematic resolution will enable us to answer complex scientific and social questions that cannot be answered from within one domain but span across multiple disciplines. It will also result in a more holistic understanding of phenomena t...
Accurate or not, claims about the future, about the new and the different, have functions in the present. The outpouring of media attention and hagiography about Steve Jobs in the fall of 2011 confirmed my argument in The Net Effect that there has emerged, within the legitimatory apparatus of capitalism, a romantic individualist alternative to the original utilitarian construction of the idealized capitalist individual. Technological romanticism encourages us to narrate stories of technologica...
As the epistemology of evidence gathers strength, it drives the inexorable pursuit of personal information, everywhere, and all the time. In limited domains, data obfuscation promises relief against powerful machinations of aggregation, mining, and profiling but whether it can withstand countervailing data analytics remains an open question of great practical concern. Equally important, however, is whether it can withstand moral challenge from those who laud “big data” and suggest that data ob...
Professor Williams will share his experiences running a large team of interdisciplinary researchers working with data from several online games and virtual worlds. In the Virtual World Exploratorium group, 20 students and faculty from communication and computer science data mine, analyze and survey thousands of players across three online worlds. In a new project, a student-based team combines survey and server-side log files to explore the player population of the popular online game League o...
We have developed methods which can deal with the user's interaction without conventional conscious searching. When a user generally performs map operations with certain information retrieval intentions (less-conscious), a system using this method can detect the specific operation sequences. For example, if the user performs zooming-in and centering operations, the user is narrowing down the search area to a certain location. We define such operation sequences as chunks. The system detects the...
