The last two decades have seen tremendous changes in society, driven by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). From email and the web, to Facebook and Twitter, the process of building and strengthening social relationships have been transformed through the use of ICT and new ICT-based groups and communities have emerged as a result.
However, there are some challenges associated with such rapid change. There is an acute lack of understanding of the driving forces and mechanisms behind this new and complex system of interactions. In addition, there is currently no general understanding of how these new forms of social interactions and patterns of influence work across individuals and societies.
To address this, the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) and the CABDyN Complexity Centre at the University of Oxford are participating in the launch of a new project entitled, “ICTeCollective – Harnessing ICT-enabled Collective Social Behaviour.” Led by Professor Kimmo Kaski of Helsinki University of Technology, the project also involves colleagues in Poland, Italy and Hungary. This €2.5 million effort aims to develop a systematic means of exploring, modelling and understanding systems where ICT is entangled with social structures.
For example, the project will look at questions such as how face-to-face encounters have become less critical than they were in the past, how new ICT-mediated groups & communities have emerged by overcoming usual limitations such as distance or lack of a common platform, and how this has led to the appearance of entirely new forms of collective human behaviour.
“There is a critical gap in understanding how different levels of social behaviour are related to each other,” says Dr Felix Reed-Tsochas, Director of Complex Systems at InSIS and Director of Oxford’s CABDyN Complexity Centre. “Moreover, the existing knowledge in this area is highly fragmented between different scientific disciplines such as social psychology, computer science and complexity science. A major goal of the ICTeCollective is to bridge this gap.”
To address this, the project will take a multi-level and multi-scale approach to understanding social dynamics, from individuals to groups to large-scale social systems. By analysing large datasets and electronic records, (from Facebook, Wikipedia and mobile telephones) the team will construct and investigate models to better understand activity patterns, group dynamics and the process of social influence. The overall aim is to develop a more integrated picture of ICT-mediated social systems and a more rigorous theoretical framework.
According to Dr. Reed-Tsochas, “This interdisciplinary approach will produce new insight concerning the social impact of ICT. By integrating knowledge from several scientific disciplines, the project will enable this information to be used in policy-making decisions and for the benefit of the industry.”
The project is funded under the European Commission’s Framework 7, Future and Emerging Technologies Open Scheme, and will run from 1 October 2009-2012.