ABSTRACT
This article presents an analysis of European smart city narratives and how they evolved under the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic. We start with Joss et al.'s observation that the smart-city discourse is presently in flux, engaged in intensive boundary-work and struggling to gain wider support. We approach this process from the critical perspective of surveillance capitalism, as proposed by Zuboff, to highlight the growing privacy concerns related to technological development. Our results are based on analysing 184 articles regarding smart-city solutions, published on social media by five European journals between 2017 and 2021. We adopted both human and machine coding processes for qualitative and quantitative analysis of our data. As a result, we identified the main actors and four dominant narratives: regulation of artificial intelligence and facial recognition, technological fight with the climate emergency, contact tracing apps and the potential of 5G technology to boost the digitalisation processes. Our analysis shows the growing number of positive narratives underlining the importance of technology in fighting the pandemic and mitigating the climate emergency, but the latter is often mentioned in a tokenistic fashion. Right to privacy considerations are central for two out of four discovered topics. We found that the main rationale for the development of surveillance technologies relates to the competitiveness of the EU in the global technological rivalry, while ambitions like increasing societal well-being or safeguarding the transparency of new policies are nearly non-existent.
ABSTRACT
Recent discourse on Information and Communication Technologies' (ICT) impact on societies has been dominated by negative side-effects of information exchange in huge online social systems. Yet, the size of ICT-based communities also provides an unprecedented opportunity for collective action, as exemplified through crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, or peer production. This paper aims to provide a framework for understanding what makes online collectives succeed or fail in achieving complex goals. The paper combines social and complexity sciences' insights on structures, mechanics, and emergent phenomena in social systems to define a Community Complexity Framework for evaluating three crucial components of complexity: multi-level structuration, procedural self-organization, and common identity. The potential value of such a framework would be to shift the focus of efforts aimed at curing the malfunctions of online social systems away from the design of algorithms that can automatically solve such problems, and toward the development of technologies which enable online social systems to self-organize in a more productive and sustainable way.
