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Online tracking in its various forms is a backbone of digitalization that has sparked hopes and fears alike: It opens up new opportunities for users and businesses as it enables individually targeted content. At the same time, the encompassing tracking of often unaware and ill-informed users and the opaque practices of data procession has alarmed critics from multiple sides. How can we better understand but also proactively and constructively shape the emerging Tracked Society? Our special issues seek to shed light on these questions from various perspectives and disciplines. In this introduction, we give a brief overview of the topic in general and our special issue in particular.

As big data shapes more and more aspects of our lives, a wide-spread concern is that the affected people’s interests are not sufficiently taken into account. The field of participatory technology assessment (pTA) has attempted to make such processes more democratic by involving laypeople as an additional voice to the often rather expert-driven development. This text presents the lessons learned from such an endeavor, namely three citizen conferences on big data held in Germany. The empirical results are presented and critically contextualized in the larger discourse on pTA and big data. Therefore, the article sheds light on lay perspectives on big data while also providing insights into the strengths and weaknesses of participatory methods such as citizen conferences.

The decentralized participatory architecture of the Internet challenges traditional knowledge authorities and hierarchies. Questions arise about whether lay inclusion helps to ‘democratize’ knowledge formation or if existing hierarchies are re-enacted online. This article focuses on Wikipedia, a much-celebrated example which gives an in-depth picture of the process of knowledge production in an open environment. Drawing on insights from the sociology of knowledge, Wikipedia's talk pages are conceptualized as an arena where reality is socially constructed. Using grounded theory, this article examines the entry for the September 11 attacks and its related talk pages in the German Wikipedia. Numerous alternative interpretations (labeled as ‘conspiracy theories’) that fundamentally contradict the account of established knowledge authorities regarding this event have emerged. On the talk pages, these views collide, thereby serving as a useful case study to examine the role of experts and lay participants in th...

Deliverable No. 1 of the STOA Project "Potential and Impacts of Cloud Computing Services and Social Network Sites" This document is the result of the consultation phase of the STOA-project “Potential and Impacts of Cloud Computing Services and Social Network Sites”. It addresses in the first place cloud computing and furthermore social network sites. While Cloud computing (CC) has broad implications for all areas of society and business applications are perhaps crucial for its sustained breakthrough, social network sites (SNS) have their main impact on relationships between private citizens or private citizens and businesses. Beside the impact on the IT industry itself, the development of both is also seen as pivotal for the overall competitiveness of the European economy and society. However, both also pose a number of challenges for enterprises as well as for private citizens. There could be increasing virtualisation of the processing of personal and other sensitive data that is transmitted and stored by commercial providers on servers situated in a location unknown to the costumer. Given these challenges, it is not clear whether both and in particular cloud computing will meet its potential and the high expectations connected to it. Therefore the goal of the project is to analyse this blurry situation and to assess potentials as well as positive and negative impacts for citizens, business and public authorities from a European perspective. This interim report summarises the results of the first project phase, which lasted from April 15th to June 15th 2012. The main objective of this first project phase was the development of a detailed plan for the next four phases of the project. A preparatory meeting, held in May 2012, and several telephone conferences during the consultation phase with the project partners were very instrumental in discussing and prioritising research themes and issues. The report itself consists of two parts. The main part presents an introductory overview of the debates on Cloud Computing Services and Social Network Sites and their potentials and impacts for the European society as a whole. Against this background, the main research perspectives of the project are discussed in detail. Finally, the project’s research questions are presented. The annex describes the project plan, gives an overview of the project schedule and the deliverables. An important element of the whole project is the involvement of those MEPs who are particularly interested in the issue of Cloud Computing and Social Network Sites. We are convinced that taking the perspective of these representatives into account will help to generate recommendations that are considered useful by European decision-makers and practitioners.

Social network sites (SNS) have not only become a fundamental part of the Web, but also increasingly offer novel communicative and networking possibilities for academia. Following a short presentation of the typical functions of (science-specific) SNS, we firstly present the state of knowledge regarding academic usage practices, both in general purpose SNS and in science-specific SNS. Secondly, we assess potential impacts by addressing identified key issues such as privacy, the role of pseudonymity, and the specific form of informal communication in question. In particular, we focus on the issue of network effects and the challenge of multiple channels, which presents itself as a major hurdle for an effective implementation of SNS in academia. Despite these difficulties, we come to the conclusion that SNS are, in principle, functional for scholarly communication and that they have serious potential within academia.