is a 91̽»¨ professor of communication who also has appointments in the Information School and the Jackson School of International Studies. He is the author of “,” published this spring by Yale University Press.

His book discusses a next-generation Internet where electronic devices, from light bulbs and water meters to smart phones and Netflix, are all networked. These devices give us information to us, but also record information about us. Howard believes the Internet of Things could be a tool for consumer good or government/corporate manipulation, depending on the rules we put in place now to control surveillance, data access and communication. Howard answered a few questions about the book and his work.

What’s the concept behind this book, and why did you write it?

P.H. The concept is that all the excitement about how technology “disrupts” politics is misplaced. The disruption argument goes like this: New technologies upset old institutions, force people to do things in new ways and perpetually make us develop new rules for political life. I argue the opposite — that technology provides a surprising amount of structure for our lives. And the next Internet, the Internet of Things, is going to be the most powerful tool of political communication we’ve ever created.

You write that if we build the Internet of Things without seeking control over the data streams in early device networks, “we will have limited control over those streams as we add more ideas.” How close is this to already being the case, in your view? What are the dangers of failing to exert that control?

P.H. There are already some strong, coherent ecologies for the Internet of Things. Many of the companies that Apple, Google, and Microsoft acquire aren’t specifically building computers or mobile phones, they are building everyday objects with chips in them. These companies seek to ensure that as new devices come online, they use iTunes, Android or Windows are used as control platforms.

Not everyone will care enough to keep track of the data that is collected about them. But some will, and most people will find that some of their data, some of the time, is used without their consent and against their interests.

“The state, the political party, the civic group, the citizen: These are all old categories from a pre-digital world,” you write. What in your view will take the place of these social constructs? And how then will our own actions be affected?

P.H. In place of these social constructs will be a new kind of political unit, what I call the “digital clan.” By definition, clans are larger than families but still have tight bonds of trust and reciprocity. The Internet already allows us to manage our own extended networks in unprecedented ways. But the Internet of Things will force us to make some distinct choices about who we trust and who we share our encrypted data with. So digital clans will be the small communities we trust with our digital information.

You write, “The fiercest political competition in the years ahead will be over the standards-setting process for device networks” and say it has become the one policy domain that, over the long term, will affect all others. In a world brimming with political competition over scores of issues, why will this be the most serious?  

P.H. Increasingly, winning and losing on a political issue has been about marshalling and controlling information. I think this is true for domestic and international politics. And policy outcomes are usually better when stakeholders have access to the same high quality information.

Technology policy decisions affect what scientists can learn about the environment, what the World Health Organization can learn about disease vectors, what the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations can learn about caloric intake, and what security officials can learn about suspicious financial transfers.

So if the Internet of Things is generating almost perfect behavioral data about us, and detailed observations about the natural world, having access to that data becomes a source of real political power. And cutting out other political actors from the flow of data, unfortunately, becomes a powerful political strategy.

“The next Internet will certainly be used to express and challenge political power. Now is the time to encode the next Internet with democratic virtues,” you write. How do you suggest this be accomplished?

P.H. To code in democratic values, a basic step would be to require that any connected device be able to divulge a list of the “ultimate beneficiaries” who benefit from its sensor data. Terms of service always get modified, ownership structures change over time and the number of third parties paying for access to our data usually gets longer, not shorter, over time. But if the smart lightbulb you buy is able to relay some data up the network to other organizations, it should be able to pull down a list of the corporate, government and civic entities using your data.

After that, we need to make sure the Internet of Things has some branches designed for civic engagement, not simply government policymaking and industry marketing. These days, it’s normal for civil-society groups to have an Internet strategy or a social media strategy. It’s not too soon for them to consider their Internet of Things strategy.

Finally, you note that there are ways for us to survive in “this new empire of devices.” Would you offer some brief suggestions?

P.H. There are several things we can do now to build political participation into the Internet of Things, some I mentioned above. As individuals, we need to keep track of where our data ends up. Even now it would be tough to make a list of all the third-party vendors, market analysts and government agencies that have data we have generated.

Down the road, we may have little choice on where our data ends up. Standards to determine access to data are now being set behind closed doors, defined by industry engineers arguing for secrecy and proprietary systems.

If these arguments succeed, the next Internet will be even more personally intrusive, publicly unaccountable and susceptible to surveillance than the current one. Consumers are going to be excited by the new devices that can be connected to the Internet. But they should be smart shoppers, and buy the electronics gear that gives them control over the flow of data about their lives.

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For more information on “Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up,” contact Howard at 206-612-9911 or pnhoward@uw.edu. Chapter excerpts are available at .

Digital activism is usually nonviolent and tends to work best when social media tools are combined with street-level organization, according to new research from the 91̽»¨.

The findings come from a report released today (Nov. 20) by the run by , 91̽»¨professor of communication, information and international studies. Founded by Howard in 2012, the project applies rigorous empirical social science methods to the study of global digital activism.

“This is the largest investigation of digital activism ever undertaken,” Howard said. “We looked at just under 2,000 cases over a 20-year period, with a very focused look at the last two years.”

Howard and coauthors Frank Edwards and Mary Joyce, both 91̽»¨doctoral students, oversaw 40 student analysts who reviewed news stories by citizen and professional journalists describing digital activism campaigns worldwide. A year of research and refining brought the total down to between 400 and 500 well-verified cases representing about 150 countries. The research took a particularly focused look at the last two years.

Howard said one of their main findings is that digital activism tends to be nonviolent, despite what many may think.

“In the news we hear of online activism that involves anonymous or cyberterrorist hackers who cause trouble and break into systems,” Howard said. “But that was 2 or 3 percent of all the cases — far and away, most of the cases are average folks with a modest policy agenda” that doesn’t involve hacking or covert crime.

Other findings include:

• Digital activism campaigns tend to be more successful when waged against government rather than business authorities. There have been many activist campaigns against corporations, but they don’t seem to have succeeded as well as those that had governments for a target, Howard said.
• Effective digital activism employs a number of social media tools. Tweeting alone is less successful, Howard said, and no single tool in the study had a clear relationship with campaign success.
• Governments still tend to lag behind activist movements in the use and mastery of new social media tools. They sometimes use the same tools, Howard said, but it’s always months after others have tried them.

Howard said these factors, taken together, “are the magic ingredients, especially when the target is a government — a real recipe for success.”

Edwards is a doctoral student in sociology; Joyce is a doctoral student in communication.

Howard added that, in time, the data gathered for this work might yield more insight into the world of digital activism.

Unanswered questions include why there are regional disparities among digital tool use, why phones are prevalent but text messaging is rare in digital campaigns, and whether external political, social or cultural phenomena influence patterns and the effectiveness of digital activism.

Funding for the research came from the United States Institute of Peace, the National Science Foundation and the 91̽»¨Department of Communication.

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The report is available for download at . For more information contact Howard at 206-612-9911 or pnhoward@uw.edu, Edwards at 312-608-1716  or Fedwards@uw.edu and Joyce at 857-928-1297 or Mjoyce@uw.edu.

Q: What’s the central concept behind the book?

A: The central argument of this book is that to understand the Arab Spring you need to understand how media use has changed in recent years.

It has been 15 years since the last “wave” of democratization. Between 1989 and 1995, many remnants of the Soviet Union and failed authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world turned themselves into variously functional electoral democracies. But as a region, North Africa and the Middle East were noticeably devoid of popular democracy movements — until the early months of 2011.

Democratization movements had existed long before technologies such as mobile phones and the Internet came to these countries. But with these technologies, people sharing an interest in democracy built extensive networks, created social capital and organized political action.

Whether or not this Arab Spring leads to long-term entrenchment of democratic institutions and cultures in the Arab state-system is a question mark, but one which requires a critical examination of the tools and infrastructures being used to organize and mobilize political change in one of the world’s last remaining authoritarian strongholds.

Q: Did the availability of personal digital devices cause the Arab Spring?

A: Perhaps the best evidence that digital media were an important causal factor in the Arab Spring is that dictators treated them as such. The months during which the Arab Spring took place had the most national blackouts, network shutdowns and tool blockages to date.

Yet authoritarian regimes have come to value digital media, too. Security services in Bahrain, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria observed how democracy advocates were using social media in Egypt and Tunisia and developed counterinsurgency strategies that allowed for them to surveille, mislead and entrap protesters.

Over the last 15 years, states (both authoritarian and democratic) have become increasingly willing to interfere with the links between nodes of digital infrastructure. Our examination finds that the existence of long-term online civil society with connections to transnational observers — including international news media and transnational diaspora networks — helped outmaneuver many authoritarian regimes, this time. These days authoritarian regimes around the world take their Facebook and Twitter strategies seriously.

Q: Do you believe citizens’ access to global digital communications will outpace the power of repressive regimes to slow or stop those communications?

A: While activists in the Arab Spring were successful in exploiting new communication channels, repressive regimes have been active in learning from their successes and failures as well. Thus far, civil society actors have consistently been the more creative and successful innovators in using digital media to advance their goals.

On the other hand, regimes with economies benefiting from rich natural resources have had the ability to implement sophisticated censorship platforms. We expect digital media to continue playing an important role in more fragile regimes, but predicting the future of oil-wealthy monarchies and dictatorships is less easy.

Q: What role does information technology have in the modern recipe for democratization?

A: The modern recipe for democratization seems to have several consistent ingredients. Countries where mobile phone use is high seem to have more successful protests, where success means drawing out lots of people to protest and actually getting what you want out of the government.

Countries where Internet use is high seem to have more lively civil society groups and investigative journalism.  Both of these things are important for democracy because civic groups use the Internet to raise funds and engage with their supporters, and journalists use the Internet to publish the things they can’t publish or broadcast in state-owned media.

In every single case, the inciting incidents of the Arab Spring were digitally mediated in some way. Information infrastructure, in the form of mobile phones, personal computers and social media, were part of the causal story we must tell about the Arab Spring. People were inspired to protest for many different and always personal reasons. Information technologies mediated that inspiration, such that the revolutions followed each other by a few weeks and had notably similar patterns.