Martin Hilbert

University of California, Davis | UCD

Bots have become increasingly prevalent in the digital sphere and have taken up a proactive role in shaping democratic processes. While previous studies have focused on their influence at the individual level, their potential macro-level impact on communication dynamics is still little understood. This study adopts an information theoretic approach...

Institutions and cultures usually evolve in response to environmental incentives. However, sometimes institutional change occurs due to stochastic drivers beyond current fitness, including drift, path dependency, blind imitation, and complementary cooperation in fluctuating environments. Disentangling the selective and stochastic components of soci...

Institutions and cultures sometimes change adaptively in response to changes in the environment. But sometimes institutional change is due to stochastic drives including drift, path dependency, and blind imitation. Disentangling the selective and stochastic components of social system change enables us to identify the key features to organizational...

Theorists since Marx, Bourdieu, and DiMaggio have asked how individual choices on cultural preference interact with collective social network structure. The rise of social media in today’s communication landscape motivates us to take a closer look at the involved dynamics. We designed an agent-based model to explore how different behavioral princip...

Agent-based computational models create virtual laboratories in which to formalize and simulate dynamic, multi-level theories of communication. They allow the systematic development of thought experiments, and they improve our understanding of the generative mechanisms that underlie patterns observed in empirical data. Simulation models help explor...

Ever since its earliest years, information theory has enjoyed both a promising and complicated relationship with the social sciences [...]

Automated communication bots follow deterministic local rules that either respond to programmed instructions or learned patterns. On the microlevel, their automated and reactive behavior makes certain parts of the communication dynamic more predictable. Studying communicative turns in the editing history of Wikipedia, we find that on the macrolevel...

Digital technology, including its omnipresent connectedness and its powerful artificial intelligence, is the most recent long wave of humanity's socioeconomic evolution. The first technological revolutions go all the way back to the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, when the transformation of material was the driving force in the Schumpeterian process...

This study examines algorithm effects on user opinion, utilizing a real-world recommender algorithm of a highly popular video-sharing platform, YouTube. We experimentally manipulate user search/watch history by our custom programming. A controlled laboratory experiment is then conducted to examine whether exposure to algorithmically recommended con...

The machine-learning paradigm promises traders to reduce uncertainty through better predictions done by ever more complex algorithms. We ask about detectable results of both uncertainty and complexity at the aggregated market level. We analyzed almost one billion trades of eight currency pairs (2007-2017) and show that increased algorithmic trading...

This article reviews the opportunities and challenges for computational research methods in the field of communication. Among the social sciences, communication stands out as a discipline with a relatively low-profile institutionalized focus on the in-house development of methods. Computational tools are changing this, and they are catalyzing a new...

While traditional computer-mediated communication happened through transparent, passive, and neutral channels, today’s communication channels are obscure, proactive, and distorted. Social algorithms, guided by a socio-technological codependency, often bias communication, usually in pursuit of some third-party goal of commercial or political nature....

Communicative exchanges consist of both static and dynamic structures that can be used for prediction. Temporal dynamics are often neglected in communication studies. We used Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication to examine 1,594,690 contributions from 206,184 contributors to 38 open online collaborations. We found that about three-fourths...

While the mobile phone is the world’s most popular media device, it is actually not one single medium, but is effectively used as a different medium by different user groups. The article characterizes polymodal differences in mobile apps usage among different user groups, including gender, education, occupation, screen size, and price. We monitored...

Online algorithms have received much blame for polarizing emotions during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We use transfer entropy to measure directed information flows from human emotions to YouTube’s video recommendation engine, and back, from recommended videos to users’ emotions. We find that algorithmic recommendations communicate a statis...

While the mobile phone is the world’s most popular media device, it is actually not one single medium, but is effectively used as a different medium by different user groups. The article characterizes polymodal differences in mobile apps usage among different user groups, including gender, education, occupation, screen size, and price. We monitored...

This study introduces and evaluates the robustness of different volumetric, sentiment, and social network approaches to predict the elections in three Asian countries – Malaysia, India, and Pakistan from Twitter posts. We find that predictive power of social media performs well for India and Pakistan but is not effective for Malaysia. Overall, we f...

Evolving biological and socioeconomic populations can sometimes increase their growth rate by cooperatively redistributing resources among their members. In unchanging environments, this simply comes down to reallocating resources to fitter types. In uncertain and fluctuating environments, cooperation cannot always outperform blind competitive sele...

In our information age, information alone has become a driver of social growth. Information is the fuel of “big data” companies, and the decision-making compass of policy makers. Can we quantify how much information leads to how much social growth potential? Information theory is used to show that information (in bits) is effectively a quantifiable...

Information and communication technologies affect global trade patterns through transaction costs on the supply and demand sides. The relevant transaction costs are affected by both the number of telecommunication subscriptions and the speed of the available bandwidth. We test for the differential effects of telecommunication quantity (data subscri...

Structures of evolving populations are traditionally derived from traits of its members. An alternative approach uses network metrics to define groups that evolve jointly. This supposes that selection acts not only on who members are (i.e., traits) but also on to whom they are connected (i.e., interdependent relationships). This paper presents a me...

The claim that big data can revolutionize strategy and governance in the context of international relations is increasingly hard to ignore. Scholars of international political sociology have mainly discussed this development through the themes of security and surveillance. The aim of this paper is to outline a research agenda that can be used to ra...

The article analyzes the nature of communication flows during social conflicts via the digital platform Twitter. We gathered over 150,000 tweets from citizen protests for nine environmental social movements in Chile and used a mixed methods approach to show that long-standing paradigms for social mobilization and participation are neither replicate...

The article provides a way to quantify the role of information and knowledge in growth through structural adjustments. The more is known about environmental patterns, the more growth can be obtained by redistributing resources accordingly among the evolving sectors (e.g. bet-hedging). Formal equations show that the amount of information about the e...

In contrary to the common argument that the digital access divide is quickly closing and that the focus should shift to skills and usage, this article shows that access to digital communication is a moving target unlikely to ever be solved. While the number of subscriptions reaches population saturation levels, the bandwidth divide continuous to be...

Evolution has transformed life through key innovations in information storage and replication, including RNA, DNA, multicellularity, and culture and language. We argue that the carbon-based biosphere has generated a cognitive system (humans) capable of creating technology that will result in a comparable evolutionary transition. Digital information...

The article uses a conceptual framework to review empirical evidence and some 180 articles related to the opportunities and threats of Big Data Analytics for international development. The advent of Big Data delivers a cost-effective prospect for improved decision-making in critical development areas such as healthcare, economic productivity and se...

While the mobile phone is the world’s most popular media device, it is actually not one single medium, but provides an entire media ecology. As a result, it is effectively used as a different medium by different user groups. The article deepens our understanding of this polymediality by characterizing differences in mobile apps usage among differen...

Introduction. Pressed by the increasing social importance of digital information, including the current attention given to the ‘big data paradigm’, several research projects have taken up the challenge to quantify the amount of technologically mediated information. Method. This meta-study reviews the eight most important inventories in a descriptiv...

Coastal tourism can be a critical driver of ecological impacts and social tensions. Unplanned tourism might reduce the provision of environmental services and threat local people´s livelihoods. In Mexico civic engagement in decision making processes of new developments is constrained by bureaucratic instruments, however social networks can shift th...

While the ICT for Development (ICTD) community is well aware about the far-reaching changes introduced by the digital age, it is remarkably slowly getting used to the idea that digital tools also revolutionize its very own core business: research. Information and communication technology (ICT) is currently transforming the way knowledge is created...

A comprehensive theory of knowledge societies and knowledge economics is still missing. This article shows that the analytical tools from computer science, information systems and information theory provide an adequate language to work toward such theory. The presented formalization follows an evolutionary and multilevel approach, and embraces both...

The digital divide refers to an inequality in the access to, use, and impact of digital information and communication technology (ICT) among social agents. Research on this social inequality has evolved around the questions of who, with which attributes, connects how to what kind of ICT. Different foci on these questions lead to different answers a...

This article provides first-time empirical evidence that the digital age has first increased and then (only very recently) decreased global, international, and national inequalities of information and communication capacities among and within societies. Previous studies on the digital divide were unable to capture the detected trends appropriately,...

Technological change in the digital age is a combination of both more and better technology. This work quantifies how much of the technologically-mediated information and communication explosion during the period of digitization (1986–2007) was driven by the deployment of additional technological devices, and how much by technological progress in h...

This article asks whether the global process of digitization has led to noteworthy changes in the shares of the amount of text, images, audio, and video in worldwide technologically stored and communicated information content. We empirically quantify the amount of information that is globally broadcast, telecommunicated, and stored (1986–2007) and...

While scale-free power-laws are frequently found in social and technological systems, their authenticity, origin, and gained insights are often questioned, and rightfully so. The article presents a newly found rank-frequency power-law that aligns the top-500 supercomputers according to their performance. Pursuing a cautious approach in a systematic...

The article reformulates evolutionary fitness as information processes. This changes our understanding of evolutionary change, as it allows its formal expression as a communication process between the evolving system and its environment. Similar to how a communication process reveals a communicated message among possible messages, evolution reveals...

The article uses an established three-dimensional conceptual framework to systematically review literature and empirical evidence related to the prerequisites, opportunities, and threats of Big Data Analysis for international development. On the one hand, the advent of Big Data delivers the cost-effective prospect to improve decision-making in crit...

This article illustrates a formal link between economic growth and longstanding quantitative measures of information and knowledge. The link is found by relating two concepts from evolutionary theory, namely the Price equation and bet-hedging (stochastic switching). The first part of the article uses a Price-equation like evolutionary multilevel de...

We know our brave new world is being transformed by data. But how much more of it is there than before?Martin Hilbert finds huge untapped capacity to process information.

FULL TEXT: http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/view/967 The ICT for development community has long searched for comprehensive and adequate conceptual frameworks. In 2003, the United Nations Regional Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN-ECLAC) proposed a three-dimensional conceptual framework that models the transition toward informat...

FULL TEXT: http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1318/746 The question of “how much information” there is in the world goes back at least to the time when Aristotle’s student Demetrius (367 BC–ca. 283 BC) was asked to organize the Library of Alexandria in order to quantify “how many thousand books are there” (Aristeas, ca. 200 BC, in Cha...

FULL TEXT: http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1562/742 This is Part I of a two-part article that reviews methodological and statistical challenges involved in the estimation of humanity’s technological capacity to communicate, store, and compute information. It is written from the perspective of the results of our recent inventory of...

FULL TEXT: http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1563/741 This is Part II of a two-part article that reviews methodological and statistical challenges involved in the quantification of humanity’s technological capacity to communicate, store, and compute information. In this Part II, we focus on the adequate unit of measurement for quanti...

FULL TEXT: http://www.martinhilbert.net/HilbertPsychBull.pdf A single coherent framework is proposed to synthesize long-standing research on 8 seemingly unrelated cognitive decision-making biases. During the past 6 decades, hundreds of empirical studies have resulted in a variety of rules of thumb that specify how humans systematically deviate fro...

The discussion about women’s access to and use of digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in developing countries has been inconclusive so far. Some claim that women are rather technophobic and that men are much better users of digital tools, while others argue that women enthusiastically embrace digital communication. This article...

Based on the theory of the diffusion of innovations through social networks, the article discusses the main approaches researchers have taken to conceptualize the digital divide. The result is a common framework that addresses the questions of who (e.g. divide between individuals, countries, etc.), with which kinds of characteristics (e.g. income,...

We estimated the world’s technological capacity to store, communicate, and compute information, tracking 60 analog and digital technologies during the period from 1986 to 2007. In 2007, humankind was able to store 2.9 × 1020 optimally compressed bytes, communicate almost 2 × 1021 bytes, and carry out 6.4 × 1018 instructions per second on general-pu...

This article analyzes the nature and characteristics of the world’s technological capacity to communicate information in bits per second during the two decades that were characterized by the digitization of global information flows (1986 to 2007/2010). We distinguish between 12 broadcasting and 31 telecommunication technologies. Television still ac...

This book analyses the development of information societies in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, and provides input for public policy on information and communications technologies (ICT) issues.

Based on the theory of the diffusion of innovations through social networks, the article discuses the main approaches researchers have taken to conceptualize the digital divide. The result is a common framework, which points to different approaches regarding the selected types of technologies (e.g. phones, Internet, digital-TV); the level of analys...

Summary The article presents a model that shows how income structures create diffusion patterns of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The model allows the creation of scenarios for potential cuts in access prices and/or required subsidies for household spending in Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil, and Costa Rica. One analyzed scenario would...

The digital divide is conventionally measured in terms of information and communication technology (ICT) equipment diffusion, which comes down to counting the number of computers or phones, among other devices. This article fine-tunes these approximations by estimating the amount of digital information that is stored, communicated, and computed by...

The paper shows how international foresight exercises, through online and offline tools, can make policy-making in developing countries more participatory, fostering transparency and accountability of public decision-making. A five-round Delphi exercise (with 1454 contributions), based on the priorities of the 2005-2007 Latin American and Caribbean...

Early literature on e-democracy was dominated by euphoric claims about the benefits of e-voting (digital direct democracy) or continuous online citizen consultations (digital representative democracy). High expectations have gradually been replaced with more genuine approaches that aim to break with the dichotomy of traditional notions of direct an...

¿Quo vadis, tecnología de la información y de las comunicaciones? es un libro que presenta los conceptos y las teorías que sustentan los aspectos técnicos y explican qué son, de dónde provienen y hacia dónde evolucionan las tecnologías de la información y de las comunicaciones (TIC). Las TIC son transversales y progresivamente presentes en todo el...

The digital paradigm began some decades ago with the introduction of the microprocessor and the manipulation of information. The progresses of science and technology have been fantastic since those years, and due to these tremendous advances, the digital paradigm is in transitions today. Whereas the omnipresent importance of information for physica...

The functionality and the modus operandi of democracy was repeatedly reinvented and further developed by numerous societies during the 2,500 years of its history. The given historic setting and the evolution of available technological opportunities contribute significantly to the fact that the concept of equally entitled political co-determination...

New technological options that permit the use of digital systems to create and disseminate information around the world are paving the way for new means of organizing society and economic production and are gradually giving rise to a meta-paradigm that has come to be referred to as the “Information Society”. Viewed from the perspective of developin...

The concept of an “information society” refers to a paradigm which is profoundly changing the world in which we live at the beginning of this new millennium. This transformation is being driven primarily by new ways of creating and disseminating information using digital technologies. Information flows, communications and coordination mechanisms ar...

En la ponencia presentada por los autores al III Encuentro AHCIET de Ciudades Digitales, cuya transcripción publicamos, se toma como punto de partida el Informe sobre Ciudades Digitales de la Generalitat de Valencia para, a continuación hacer una breve descripción del incierto escenario que genera la evolución de las TIC's en nuestra sociedad. Tras...

The preparation of this document was coordinated by Valeria Jordán and Wilson Peres, of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and Hernán Galperin, from the Regional Dialogue on the Information Society (REDIS), in the framework of the project "Inclusive political dialogue and exchange of experiences", under the Allianc...