Aleks Krotoski: I think that is the thing that has surprised me the most about where the web is now. The requirement the necessity for people to present as their offline selves, whether that’s for commercial purposes, or for social and psychological purposes. The great playground that we had of identity, the idea of being shielded from, full identity revelation that that we experienced, even as late as 2009. You know, we don’t have that as much anymore. We aren’t able to play with our identities as much as we were anymore. And I think that that has very interesting consequences for not just how we study web science, but also for the actual experience of the people who are living in this digital world.

Noshir Contractor: Today, our guest is Dr. Aleks Krotoski. Earlier, you heard her talk about the web’s impact on people’s offline and online identities. She’s an award-winning international broadcaster, author and academic, and she studies and writes about technology and interactivity. In 2009, she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Surrey, with her thesis focusing on information flow and the spread of ideas across digital spaces. Her book, “Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You,” based on her hit columns in the Guardian and Observer, was published in 2012. Since then, she’s continued to break ground in academia and journalism, and she’s currently a Visiting Fellow in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. Welcome, Aleks.

Aleks Krotoski: Hi, thank you Nosh, it’s wonderful to see you.

Noshir Contractor: It’s really good to see you and hear from you as well today. It’s been a long time since we spoke, and when I first met with you, you were working on your dissertation research, which I believe was one of the first efforts at doing a social science research project, which then we came to know as web science research. Tell us about your dissertation and your research and what got you interested in it.

Aleks Krotoski: You’re sending me down memory lane. Let me go back to what got me interested in it. So way back in the day, I mean, this is 150 years ago, I was presenting a television program in the UK about computer games. And I, over time, I became one of the assistant producers and became sort of instrumental in identifying the things that we should look at and the topics that we should cover and who went into these spaces. One of my co-presenters, I assigned her to review the game Asheron’s Call this is this is the era that we’re talking about. And I thought she was gonna come back and tell me about all of these things, these guys who sit around in their dark parents basements, and being really geeky, but she came back talking to me about the most extraordinary social phenomena I had come across to date. 

As a social psychologist, I had been interested in looking at how society interactions, group dynamics were functioning. But when I sent her into the space, I didn’t realize that I was going to hear back from her about justice systems, I didn’t realize I was gonna hear back from her about identity and identity play and identity development, I didn’t realize that all of these dynamics were not only present in these spaces, but also, they were effectively recreating the systems that we already had offline, that blew my mind. 

These were spaces, which in my mind, were completely separate from the physical environment in which we lived a place where we would be able to reinvent ourselves entirely, completely come up with new systems. And yet, here was evidence again and again — I started to recognize that we weren’t reinventing anything, we weren’t coming up with brand new systems, we were simply bringing our existing ideas about who we are, who society is, into the online space, and I really wanted to understand and explore that. So when I was looking initially at the work that I wanted to do, coming from a social psychology background, I was interested in patterns of communication. 

Now at that time, network science was particularly really coming to its own and there were two distinct, I would argue sort of brands of network science, there was the more mathematical science. Then you had the more sociological elements. And I was like, Well, here we have a technology that actually describes those connections. And then you can ask the people about those connections. And you can track and trace and follow networks of information to see to what degree the online world and those systems and those processes that we already knew offline, reflected, or were different from the offline processes. So that was kind of that was the nugget it all it all came back from Asheron’s Call and me sending somebody into the virtual world.

Noshir Contractor: There was a definite assumption that the offline and the online were very separate worlds. And that what we might find in the online world would be very different, perhaps, than what happens in the offline world. And you were looking in particular at a particular phenomena in these online games, do you want to tell us a little bit more?

Aleks Krotoski: I was looking at influence. And I was looking at the adoption of an innovation I was using the virtual world Second Life as my territory. And I remember, every time I logged in, I would write down the number of people who had accounts and the number of people who were active. The numbers that I was writing down were like 2500 people have accounts, which eventually turned into something like 15,16 million accounts. Like I watched the explosion of this virtual world, just a phenomenal network, a profoundly enormous network.

And at that time, Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) was a system that was being introduced into Second Life. The developers themselves thought that this would be a very natural technology that people would adopt, because it would allow for business transactions, it would allow for interpersonal transactions, whatever transactions went on. But what they found is that people were not adopting it. And I was curious as to why. I wanted to know why this was stalling. And what I found by mapping a subset of 47,000 accounts and got the reciprocal relationships, and then really dug into what those meant to the people who were within that network. What we found is that online, there was a difference in the adoption of innovations. 

It came back to a very, very interesting, but a very well known phenomenon offline, which is about who you believe as credible, who you believe is trustworthy, who you believe is like yourself, and who you believe is a very prototypical member of your interpersonal network. Now, the difference between online and off is that usually those networks in face-to-face experiences, they’re quite rich. 

As we know, through web science, we know that the nature of interpersonal interaction offline and online is different because of the richness, of the leanness of the medium, just the amount of stuff that we can read, without having to literally read the information. What I found in this research was that you had the initial adopters. And then it reached a point at which people were either gender playing, or they were aged playing, or they were playing identities that were not identical, or overlapped with their offline selves. So if somebody was presenting as female, they didn’t necessarily want to do VOIP because people didn’t realize that, in fact, offline, they were male, their voice would give them away.

Noshir Contractor: And so what your research points out is that sometimes there is value and merit in not having all dimensions of our appearance and of ourselves be presented in a web environment, and that sometimes there is freedom in being able to conceal certain facets of your character in the online space.

Aleks Krotoski: 100%. That research came out, that was 2009, and then subsequently, in the decades since, I wrote the book that was sort of, in part based upon that research, and then also on other research that I’ve done, journalistically since,  I think that is the thing that has surprised me the most about where the web is now. And the requirement, the necessity for people to present as their offline selves, whether that’s for commercial purposes, or for social and psychological purposes, the great playground that we had of identity, the idea of being shielded from full identity revelation that that we experienced, even as late as 2009. We don’t have that as much anymore, we aren’t able to play with our identities as much as we were anymore. And I think that that has very interesting consequences for not just how we study web science, but also for the actual experience of the people who are living in this digital world.

Noshir Contractor: I think you’re right, there has been so much more emphasis on making sure that we authenticate people in various contexts on the web, that predilection for authenticating people has come up the price of not enabling and empowering people to have alternate presences on the web, as they did back in 2009.

Aleks Krotoski: And indeed, it’s not just the presences on the web. This is something I find very important that I do feel that we’ve lost because we do live so much of our lives online. The internet, particularly over the last year has finally in many ways become mundane, for many people. 

Our existences are fixed, right, it’s as if we are living our entire lives right in the past to the present in the now. But the context of that information feels like it has been lost. 

I remember Eric Schmidt many years ago, when he was the CEO of Google, said that he wanted to create a search that sort of that stuff from the past would just disappear. And the reason for that is because you know, I am very different from who I was when I was a teenager. Right? And I’m even different from who I was 10 years ago when I was being when I was writing about this. But you pull me up right online, and probably one of the first things that still comes up is a TV show that I presented, right, the thing that I was talking about earlier, the TV show that I presented between 1999 and 2002. Sort of having to explain to random people that I am not that person that I was 20 plus years ago, is exhausting. And it also means that the idea of people coming up in this space, are not able to naturally reinvent themselves or have spaces in which you can discard that old self and move into another space. And everybody mutually accepts that this idea of being unable to psychosocially develop, and to discard the self and sort of to always have to have the consequence. It’s ironic, in web science, we used to talk all the time about how the online space had no consequence. And now, the consequence is forever there.

Noshir Contractor: One of the things that Europe is perhaps been a little more advanced than the US is in efforts to have the right to forget, that has been brought up in the EU. And it I think it speaks to some of the concerns that you’re just expressing there.

Aleks Krotoski: Often the right to be forgotten is, you know, it’s granted not on the basis of some kind of embarrassment happened a few years previously, but usually to do with some kind of, you know, a bankruptcy or some kind of thing that you have served your time for, 

I mean, I’m talking about like, you know that embarrassing thing that you did in front of your Aunt Martha back when you were four and every time you see Aunt Martha she reminds you of it, you know? Like, well, now I’m 44, can you please stop talking about this? Like, the internet is your Aunt Martha. And you’re not sort of allowed to move forward. I’m curious whether to what degree this has, has an impact on people’s development of self and their feeling of freedom to reinvent? I don’t know if anybody’s been doing research on this. it has been some time since I’ve thought about that.

Noshir Contractor: Yeah, well, speaking of research, you are, Aleks, one of the best examples in of somebody who has straddled the academic and the sort public space within web science. And you’ve had fellowships at the University of Oxford and at the London School of Economics. And at the same time, you made reference to those columns that you wrote in The Guardian, which aptly was titled, Untangling the Web, the very namesake of this podcast series. And then the book that came out in 2013, with the same title. 

And in that book, you unpack a few dimensions of untangling, you talk about untangling me, untangling us, untangling society. And then finally untangling the future. Tell us a little bit about why you called the book and column Untangling theWweb. And which of these untangles have surprised you the most? Now, all these years, almost 10 years since the book first came out?

Alex Krotoski: Well the reason I wanted to call it untangling the web was somebody suggested, and I was like, that’s really clever. It’s a great description, because we are, of course, all wrapped up in this space, again, even more so now, over the last year. As those of us who have been studying web science for a long time and have been living it, it’s sort of like, oh, welcome, everybody, we’ve been waiting for you to come to the party. That in and of itself has been so interesting to witness the degree to which all of our research, all of our findings, were actually relevant and valid in a space in which the entire world if they have been lucky enough to have digital technology, you know, has sort of graduated to the space. But I have always been of the opinion that we are always entangled in whatever technologies are within our lives, whether it’s television, whether it’s the pen, even electronic light.  And it’s exciting. All of these innovations and inventions have had an enormous impact on our lives. And we have developed alongside them. So there was that kind of seeking to untangle ourselves from these spaces. 

But another thing that I really wanted to get across, my sort of main aim from this book was, I wanted to untangle what people’s expectations were of this technology, as something that was other. This is the thing that I think drives me more crazy than anything else, is the magical thinking around technology, because it devolves our responsibility as human beings for the decisions that we make, for the outcomes that happen away from us to the technology. T his book sought to look at the psychological research of each of these categories and the subcategories within them. Look at the psychological research the findings, before the web, right? Things that we expected about how we thought about celebrity, how we thought about love how we thought about death, how we performed these things, right, looked at that, and then looked at the meaning of those things after the web, to the degree that we had done any research in that space as sort of before and after. And to this day, I’m pretty adamant about this, what I found is that almost nothing is different. Right? The idea, the meaning of privacy is exactly the same before. And after we still want privacy. It’s just we’re performing it in a different way. 

But going back to your question about, what is the thing that I think, you know, in some ways as has changed, or has surprised me, in that time, I think part of it is the identity piece, is the fact that we are not as free to reinvent ourselves, or to develop our identities in this space.

Noshir Contractor: One of the things that you have lamented in your writings is that a lot of the research that you just described, and that you’ve been translating in this book, a lot of it is hidden behind the walls of the ivory tower. Why do you think that is Aleks? And do you think it has gotten better or worse in the past decade?

Aleks Krotoski: It’s a wonderful question. I just simply think it’s just the nature of of the ivory tower. I think in the last decade, it has become profoundly better. And that is because of initiatives like web science. That’s because of initiatives like open data. That’s because of initiatives of people who like Sci-Hub, getting that information out to the public so that the public can read it and can be informed, right? I remember there was sort of movements of people to release their content online ahead of time, as it was being developed, but I don’t think we really started to see that truly like a sort of show your work kind of thing, until the mid-2010s. I’m grateful for that. Why should the academy have the stranglehold on this information? Because these are things that absolutely profoundly affect people’s lives, everyday lives.It just requires critical thinking skills, and an ability to be a critical consumer of content.

Noshir Contractor: One of the things that you wrote about in the columns, and in the book was the evolution of the web itself, the growing pains that it went through, the life stages of the web that you describe.  If you could summarize some of those ideas, but also then project out in terms of, what do you see as sort of the next steps in the evolution of the web?

Aleks Krotoski: Great question. And I’m going to answer it, not with reference to the book, but more with reference to what I have seen and some of the things that I have seen over the last year, now that we are kind of feeling the weight of the of the world, in the web. One of the greatest and most profound moments of the web’s history, social history was the eternal September in September 1993, when AOL opened. And it was the first time that people who were new or newbies arrived and outnumbered the number of people who had already populated the web, thus irrevocably shifting the culture, because suddenly, the majority was not interested in what the old guard had to say. The majority was simply forging ahead and doing its own thing and creating its own norms. 

Well, I think we are about to witness a really interesting moment where people like us who’ve been studying and diligent and living it, and all that kind of thing, the web science community is either going to be embraced by or embrace. And I think that’s going to be kind of an interesting tactical way to do it. I don’t know how that’s going to happen. You know, the hundreds of millions of people who thought that the web was an interesting place to visit, but didn’t really ever imagine living there. Now that this enormous population has opinions, because they’ve lived it for a year, I think that’s when we’re going to start to see some really interesting innovations that are not going to come out of the small pockets around the world that have historically been the places where innovations and technology come from, but more people are going to become empowered, because they see the ways that technology does not fit them. And they are able to define how it can fit them. So I think that’s what we’re going to see in terms of the future.

Noshir Contractor:  Listening to you, I’m reminded of the notion that there was some people who were there initially, who might have been the so called digital natives, and that the majority of people were tourists who would visit from time to time and be charmed. But many of those tourists are now digital immigrants that have come to set foot for a long time here. And that’s the big change that you see and your sense is that they are going to change the web as much as the web might change what they’re doing, or perhaps change the web even more.

Aleks Krotoski: I think they’re gonna change the web even more. Because when you have a mob who comes on and has opinions, right, I watched it, it was so interesting, people kind of walked blindly into this space where they were like, I know the room, but I’m not really sure where to sit.

We have evolved norms that are perhaps different from the norms that existed before, perhaps completely uninformed by the norms that were before because that information wasn’t widely available, or even of interest to the masses, who suddenly had to go online and suddenly had to perform and be and do what it is that we have been doing as web scientists for decades and decades. 

So I think that, there is going to be an enormous reinvention. I profoundly hope that one of the outcomes is that people will stop seeing the web as something that is magical, and something that is other, and something that does stuff to me or you or your dad or your mom or your kid or your dog whomever, and actually is a tool and a technology that we operate in as much as the electrical system, you know, the the water system and all of those other things that that we operate within a society and that we use for our own purposes. 

Noshir Contractor: That’s a fascinating vision. Aleks, thank you, again, so much for joining us today on this podcast. As I’ve said, You are one of the best exponents and champions of web science, both as a research scholar, as well as a public intellectual in the space. And we thank you for all your contributions. And we wish you the best and look forward to seeing your continuing insights evolve in the area of untangling the web. Thank you.

Aleks Krotoski: Thank you Nosh, I feel that your listeners are now witnessing my blush. They’re feeling it through their ears. Thank you so much. What a treat.