Internet Studies, Online Behavior and Information Culture
What is a cognitive psychologist doing among admins, web developers, internet governance people and wikipedians? Here’s the story.
The figure presents power-law distributions characteristic of some new media and the power-law describing the relationship between the number of sold copies of best selling books in the history of publishing and its rank. Taken from: Online Contributions to the Global Community: The Power Laws for New Media.
First of all, it didn’t start with Internet at all. Back in the eighties, I was a geekish kid with his mind in Sci-Fi and fingers all over a Commodore 64 keyboard (yes, rock’n’roll came later into my life :-). I was a bit crazy - if programming in Pascal when you’re fifteen counts as a diagnosis… Somewhere in the early 90s I’ve became interested in formal logic and artificial intelligence. I’ve spent one year studying math, mostly because I could not imagine doing anything else except math in my life. Then I’ve switched to psychology - because I liked the writings of C.G. Jung and wanted to study the inner depths of our psyches - just to realize psychophysics and cognitive science are much more interesting. From 1993. until 2000. I have spend my studies of psychology almost living in the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology at the Faculty of Philosophy. No one was able to convince me that there’s more fun in anything but running experiments to figure out how our semantic representations work. Ok, nightclubbing with friends, from time to time (almost every night, to be honest…).
In 2000. I have become interested to study the social consequences of the development of Internet. Everything in the field was just at its beginning and the times for research were exciting… no Web 2.0, no social media, and (can you believe it!) - no Facebook.
The same year, with a lot of help from my dear friends and associates from the Belgrade Open School (Belgrade based NGO), and Mr. Lazar Šestović and Mr. Marinko Buca Vučinić in the first place, I have managed to found the Center for Research on Information Technologies (CePIT). In 2002, we have published the results of the first study of online behavior in the Republic of Serbia, based on a survey research from a sample of Internet users in Belgrade. The book “Internet Survey: Belgrade 2002” followed our efforts in 2002. What followed is a research study that I personally count as the best of what our small research team produced in four or five years for how long we’ve worked together, a national level study on a sample from the Republic of Serbia, “Global Citizens”. Thanks to the efforts of team members I managed to find the time to write an introductory theoretical paper for the book; unfortunately and to my greatest disappointment, since 2003. it remains the only attempt to write an integral theoretical paper on the position of social sciences in internet research in Serbian. “Perspectives on Networking: Internet in 8 Cities of SE Europe” was our first study based on an international sample of participants from eight capitals of SEE. Finally, in 2005. we have published another comprehensive research study on a national sample from the Republic of Serbia, this time focused on comparisons of social attitudes of Internet users and non-users.
Milina, Nataša, Tanja, Ivan, Neša, Milan, Srđan and Buca: thank you guys for those wonderful years in CePIT.
In 2002, I started my cooperation with DiploFoundation and took part in the World Summit on Information Society, Geneva, 2003, with two small research projects that Dr. Jovan Kurbalija, the Director of DiploFoundation, and I have conceptualized. From time to time I still cooperate with DiploFoundation which is now among the most important international actors in the Internet Governance arena.
Recently I have developed interest in Wikipedia related research projects. I am almost philosophically inclined to think in open-source terms and I do believe that projects like those supported by the Wikimedia Foundation are really working for the best benefit of human kind and more progressive and tolerant future for all of us. It is very likely that I will dedicate some future time volunteering to help Wikimedia’s efforts to further advance some its projects. Not to mention that Wikipedia in itself presents a first-class interesting social phenomenon to study. (Note: as of June 2011, I serve as a member of The Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee).
At the moment, the study of the developing information age, conceptualized as a research program linking the individual, cognitive and social changes induced by the recent explosion of human communication with the macro-level, global, cultural and political developments, is the most exciting thing to do I can imagine. We are witnessing such changes in the cognitive, symbolic evolution of human beings, the changes of such magnitude and such impact that nothing precedent in our history could be possibly compared to them.
As of programming - I quitted, sincerely. The only two languages I use are R and Matlab for math models and stats, and it’s not impossible that I’ll learn some Python in the near future, but just for the sake of numpy and scipy libraries use, of course. (Note: no one escapes the hand of destiny: as of june 2011, my Linux Ubuntu desktop is filled with Octave, SciLab and a lot of coding is waiting just around the corner for me; namely, I have to program my thesis experiments…).