Page - 58 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

Risk and Value: Design of a Framework to Resolve the Social Dilemmas of the World Wide Web KAPUR, Rajesh Thakur Institute of Management Studies Career Development and Research, India Abstract The rapid proliferation of the World Wide Web (WWW) has had a significant effect on society. There is considerable debate about the modalities to deal with sociological dilemmas that have emerged as a consequence of this proliferation. This study proposes the design of a framework that resolves sociological dilemmas through a sequence of activities that involve 1) identification of value; 2) risk analysis; 3) deployment of controls and 4) periodic monitoring and review on whether value is being accrued. This sequence and the various activities are elucidated. A method for validation of the framework is also suggested. The study concludes with recommendations on how to develop and deploy the design into a working model that will lead to a society more at peace with its virtual presence. Introduction The concept of risk has been well theorized in the context of reflexive modernization1. Althaus posited risk to be an “ordered application of knowledge into the unknown”. Its epistemological roots may be traced to an inter-disciplinary core; wherein lies uncertainty and ordered randomness. Uncertainty of consequences characterizes most human endeavors in the current milieu. Risk impacts studies in numerous domains; salient amongst these being engineering, economics, finance, psychology, anthropology and sociology. DiMaggio et al reviewed the social implications of the internet on the issues of 1) inequality; 2) social capital formation; 3) political impact; 4) organizational transformation; and 5) cultural impact. One of their findings was that even though the internet presented a moving target, the study of the internet by sociologists was critical. They felt a requirement to “synthesize research findings on individual user behavior with macroscopic analyses of institutional and political-economic factors that constrain that behavior.” In the seventeen years that have elapsed since their work, the study of identity and privacy as a ‘right’ in society have developed as realms of sociological focus vis-à- vis the internet. I posit that an iterative risk analysis based on analytics offers an effective tool to resolve the sociological dilemmas arising from the World Wide Web (WWW); and propose to design a framework to do so. 1 the term is attributed to Ulrich Beck in Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, 1992; refers to the way in which advanced modernity ‘becomes its own theme’, in the sense that ‘questions of the development and employment of technologies (in the realms of nature, society and the personality) are being eclipsed by questions of the political and economic “management” of the risks of actually or potentially utilized technologies – discovering, administering, acknowledging, avoiding or concealing such hazards with respect to specially defined horizons of relevance. 58