Gina Neff: We see a moment that we’re in right now of being somewhat trapped, I think, between the necessity of contributing to a public good, but also needing to understand where we fit personally in these. So I’ve spoken out quite publicly about back-to-work solutions that don’t protect workers’ privacy, right? What we know about organizations and workplaces, is that we absolutely have an imbalance of power between employees who need work and employers who might have other interests or demands in the workplace. 

Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling The Web, a podcast of the web science trust. I am Noshir Contractor and I will be your host today. On this podcast we bring thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society and how society in turn is shaping the web.

That was Gina Neff earlier, talking about how the Web and the workplace are influencing one another. Gina is a professor of Technology & Society at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. She’s a sociologist who studies how web-based technologies are shaping the future of work, and has published three well-acclaimed books and over four dozen research articles on innovation and the impact of digital transformation. Her writing for the general public has also appeared in Wired, Slate and The Atlantic, among other outlets. Given her thought leadership in this space, Gina was invited to deliver a Keynote at the 2020 ACM Web Science Conference. Welcome, Gina. 

Gina Neff: It’s really good to be here.

Noshir Contractor: Well, I thank you very much for taking time to talk with us today. And I’m very excited to hear your opinions and your insights about this very important new discipline that has been emerging over the last decade, called web science  So first I want to talk about what does that term web science mean to you?

Gina Neff: As a social scientist who studies work and technology, I really can’t do what I do without thinking about web science, so when I first think of the term, I think of mapping the web.  What I do in my work is to really dive deep into those ties and think about what people are doing in those connections. How are they linking at work, what fo those links mean for them, and how are those collaborations playing out — both at workplaces where people are trying to work on tasks together, but also in terms of making social structure, in terms of making the new rules of society that come out of the links that they’ve built. 

Noshir Contractor: And I wonder if you can give us some key insights and contributions that have been made by web science to better understand not just the way we do work now, but the changing nature of work and what some would argue is the future of work?

Gina Neff: Without understanding how our networks and relationships are changing with technology, we simply can’t understand how people accomplish the tasks and goals they have in the workplace. So this is going to seem like a tangent, but bear with me.

I’ve been studying large scale construction projects, skyscrapers and, you know, on the one hand, it’s one of the last industries that we would think of is high tech, and yet, a decade ago they were trying to figure out how to do remote work meaningfully.

The first web meetings — WebEx meetings I was ever in — were on construction sites. Why Because people who come together working on a construction site often have to travel from a two hour radius to get to the construction site. If you bring all of those different companies, people from all of those different jobs to the job site. It’s costly. It takes time. And much of the work that they were trying to do is coordinating in a digital space. And so they tried. They’re like, okay, let’s just have video calls. And yet, even though we have a very tight closed project group, everybody understands their roles and tasks, really highly structured, they struggled with figuring out how to come up with collaborative decision-making in these online virtual meetings. 

That’s a neat problem, right, and it’s a problem that we’re all facing right now. So I think when I think about web science, I think about the ways in which we’re mapping new kinds of communication ties that end up structuring our everyday life. Whether that’s from social media, whether that’s from our news environment, whether that’s from our workplace. And so when we look at how this becomes part of our daily way of working — part of our daily rules and ways of being — what I think as a social scientist, what we start to see is some really exciting things about how the fundamental rules of social life are formed. That’s what I think web science can do.

Noshir Contractor: That is that is incredibly important and significant and I was wondering also, how this would tie into some of the earlier work that you did, the book that you wrote titled “Venture Labor Work and the Burden of Risk and Innovative Industries.” Acting with technology, you were one of the early scholars looking at this issue clearly from a web science point of view.

Gina Neff: Yeah, so that project really asked the question, why on earth would an internet industry form in New York City. If we have the capacity with the new commercial worldwide web, to have these links that allow us to work remotely, why would a thriving industry form in some of the most expensive real estate in North America, right in the center of Manhattan?

And the answer is kind of twofold. One is there was a supply of creative individuals who worked in adjacent industries, in advertising and in film and writing and in magazines and that they could come together and basically create new kinds of content to fuel the first wave of commercial web activity.

Now, that’s part of the story. But the other is that we know that innovative industries really thrive and prosper on these close links that people have and that that big that kind of information becomes both the way that industries can understand the event horizon that they face, right? They have all of these people fairly closely together who share information, share new technologies, share ways of doing things, they share new kinds of companies, you know, this is the hope that everyone has of the new Silicon Valley, right, what, what makes it an innovative industry.

And so you put these two pieces together, you have a bunch of creative people and they’re all trying to figure out how to make a new industry.

It — I argued in the book — becomes a way that new kinds of risk gets shared and dispersed and spread across a new industry. And that I think is really interesting for us to think about in this particular moment because people learn to adapt and people learn to take on that risk in these new kinds of environments and they, and they welcomed it in the first wave of the web.

Noshir Contractor: That’s a good point that in terms of the first wave and the second wave. I think initially, a lot of people in the first wave we’re focused on broadening our networks to the point where, we could be anywhere in the world and have virtual organizations and virtual teams, But what you’re pointing out is that the web has at least an equally important role in helping people who may be co-located also augmenting their interactions and communication and collaboration by leveraging other aspects of the web that we might not have looked at initially.

Gina Neff: And I think that, you know, in this moment right now we’re having this conversation. You’re sitting in Evanston, I’m sitting in Oxford. Most of England and much of the United States are sitting at home because we’re fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

So what we don’t know yet is how these initial stores of our social networks, our social capital get translated in this incredibly highly stressed moment, so that  people can can become useful and and do their jobs and make the connections in a moment when we can’t travel. When we can’t see each other face to face, right? This is — it is incredible to me. Can you imagine doing this 15 years ago, right? If I go back 20 years ago, if I go back to this moment in Silicon Alley, in New York City, where content creators were so excited about the possibility of what the web could be. They were doing serial small video segments, you know, there was a company pseudo.com that had the, the hubris to turn to 60 minutes and said, I will put you out of business. No one’s heard of pseudo, right? Pseudo is gone, it’s long gone. But the idea that a web company doing streaming video was so laughable in the year 2000, right, it was so inconceivable that we could have the bandwidth to do this thing that we’re doing right now. The high quality video, high quality streaming, high quality interaction. And so, we’re still in many ways in the early days of figuring out how these kinds of links and ties are going to be intensified in our face-to-face interaction, and then nourished through the other kind of digital-mediated ways that we interact.

Noshir Contractor: And this is a question and a challenge that web scientists like yourself have taken on. I was also struck about how with all the technology that we now have around us, they have the ability to be instruments tracking us digitally. And you talked about that in the book that you co-authored with Dawn Nafus, titled  “Self-Tracking.” And while that book was focusing more on the quantified self and instrumenting yourself in personal contexts, I would love to get your take on what might happen as technologies in the workplace are being instrumented to capture our actions, interactions and transactions. Where do you think self-tracking is headed in the workplace ? And what do you see as the promises and perils of that?

Gina Neff: One of the things that I really learned in the self-tracking project is that for many people, their personal data is something they’re very willing to share in an altruistic way. There are all these wonderful communities that I studied and the self-tracking in the self tracking project of patient community is where people share really intimate data, genetic data medical histories, things that you and I might see as much too risky to our own sense of personal privacy and protection and yet, these incredible people were driven to do this because they, they saw that in their data held the possibility for the cures to their illnesses. And in their data held the possibility of these incredible connections and ties to other people who were going through the same thing they did.

We see a moment that we’re in right now have been somewhat trapped, I think, between the necessity of contributing to a public good, but also so needing to understand where we fit personally in these. So I’ve spoken out quite publicly about back-to-work solutions that don’t protect workers’ privacy, right? What we know about organizations and workplaces, is that we absolutely have an imbalance of power between employees who need work and employers who might have other interests or demands in the workplace in terms of HR, management or legal exposure.

And so any kind of app that gets us safely back to work absolutely has to take these two kind of tensions in mind, right, have to be designed from the ground up first to tap into people’s altruism. People want to solve problems and they certainly want to solve the global pandemic that we’re in right now. But they don’t want to do it at the risk of their own livelihood, or their own their own ability to continue working, or their own,  so so you’ve got to, got to think about that kind of data as control, and data as power. You know, we kind of went off from your basic question. Now, suddenly everything we do at work is somehow also traceable and trackable. It’s a huge opportunity for those of us who study workplaces to think about how those networks at work might be changing, how might the networks for people, who are say, women at work, are we seeing how remote working changes women’s ability to navigate networks. That’s an open question and one that we’re going to have trace data to study. But at the same time, we absolutely need to be thinking about how do we create safe workplaces and how do we create better and more stable workplaces, given the fact that now everyone’s exposed in these new ways with their data.

Noshir Contractor: You hit the nail on the head. It’s really a dilemma in some ways, but also an opportunity to be able to understand how networks are changing today when they go virtual. It’s one thing when we are connecting with people that we already knew and we may be in a position where we are deepening those ties, but it’s an open question how this environment will work when we have to deal with people we had not met previously. How will the web environment accommodate the levels of social presence that we are used to in which we have a prior face-to-face interaction?

Now, you already made reference to the pandemic, but I wanted to just give you another opportunity and invite you to talk about what you think are the one or two most significant things that have been different for us as we navigate the pandemic and global cultural reckonings without the web.

Gina Neff: Can you imagine doing this without the web. Seriously. Can you, im- I mean, evidently there have been global pandemics before the web, but I can’t, I can’t think of them between how we have organized our shopping, how we have organized our home life, how we have organized our schooling, how quickly, within just a matter of weeks we transitioned from face-to-face to be at home around the world. I find it literally inconceivable. And I can remember a world before the commercial internet. So what does that mean? 

I think that one of the challenges that we need to remember about the web is that beautiful wonderful decentralized structure that is stable enough to permit this thing, to keep on going and perpetuating without centers of control, is the exact same protocol that allows us individually to navigate in very different ways. And so while my ability to reach out and regenerate my networks may not be damaged as much I as a manager, I as a supervisor as a, as a leader, I really need to remember that others I work with might not be able to do that as well. And so I think that that’s the, that’s the kind of catch-22, right? There was a wonderful example — a terrible example really here in the UK when shops opened up and there were very long lines at one of the discount retail stores, and they’re in the chattering classes in the media, talking about, you know, how dare these people wait in line going to these discount shops in order to buy clothes, that seems so risky, why are they doing that and forgetting the number of people who don’t navigate the world through Amazon, who don’t have credit cards at their disposal. Who, you know, navigate the web from their smartphone and therefore have a very different kind of experience through how you might buy and shop and deal. And by the way, this retailer has no online presence, right. So the retailer that allows the best discount on clothing in the entire country is not one selling online. And yet, this very large disconnect. So I think that one of the things that has been made visible is the way in which we navigate communities through the web are quite distinctive and we need to remember that others are doing their own distinctive path as well.

Noshir Contractor: I think these are really, really important points because you mentioned that you have memories going back before the commercial internet and so do I. And I don’t remember an overwhelming amount of discussion about designing the web to help deal with a pandemic. And yet, for some reason, it seems that many aspects of the web were designed perfectly to deal with it. On the other hand, as you have also been mentioning, there has been the downside of the web in terms of the ways in which at this particular point in time, it might be influencing certain communities. And I’ve heard you talk about the term infodemic and I wonder if you want to talk a little bit more and share your thoughts about that in the present situation.

Gina Neff: So when the head of the World Health Organization says very early on in the COVID-19 crisis that we have an infodemic, right. That is as they say, on, on, on Twitter, you know, not swimming in the lane, right? Come, come, swim in our lane, right, the lane of people who understand online communication. And I want to use the term meaningfully because you know, I, many of the ills that we talked about in terms of disinformation, misinformation.

The infodemic — there are reflections of a moment where there is ending, decreasing distrust of our social institutions. This is not coming from the web and the way in which people connect, this is really about how people feel a part of society. And that’s the challenge we’re having right now. We’re having an enormous challenge in Western democracies, of this relationship between individuals and the state and individuals to their communities and something will shift and change, we just don’t quite yet I think know what. When we bring that back to infodemic, right, when we bring that back to this idea that high-quality good scientific information is hard to come by. I’m sure you’ve seen in your social media feeds and in mine, I’ve had to deal over this crisis with people who don’t believe in science. They don’t believe in vaccines. They don’t believe the same thing I do, and I can take the approach that says — if I only convince them that, you know, if I only argue hard enough — or I can begin to say, part of what we need to do is not simply about the kinds of information, getting better information and better quality information we need to do that. But we need to get out the kinds of stories that we know have always connected us, and make us feel a part of something bigger than what we are individually. And so that’s what I think, you know, we see in this moment right it’s just a simple amplification of a social trend, a very large social trend that’s predated the web, it’s predated COVID-19 and this is coming together at this particular moment. It’s interesting times.

Noshir Contractor: Well, thank you again, Gina, for taking time to join us today to share your insights with us, and more importantly for your thought leadership in web science. Thank you.

Gina Neff: Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure.