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This paper explores the concept of digital modernity, the extension of narratives of modernity with the special affordances of digital networked technology. Digital modernity produces a new narrative which can be taken in many ways: to be descriptive of reality; a teleological account of an inexorable process; or a normative account of an ideal sociotechnical state. However, it is understood that narratives of digital modernity help shape reality via commercial and political decision-makers, and examples are given from the politics and society of the United Kingdom. The paper argues that digital modernity has two dimensions, of progression through time and progression through space, and these two dimensions can be in contradiction. Contradictions can also be found between ideas of digital modernity and modernity itself, and also between digital modernity and some of the basic pre-modern concepts that underlie the whole technology industry. Therefore, digital modernity may not be a sustainable goal for technology development.

A series of recent papers has discussed whether conservatism has a distinct set of values (substantive), or whether it consists in an attitude to shared values (adjectival). This paper argues that adjectival conservatism is a genuine type of conservatism, consistent with the Burkean tradition, in accordance with the idea that conservatism is concerned with change, and arguable using public reason. A version of adjectival conservatism derived from epistemological scepticism, consisting of a knowledge principle and a change principle, is presented. It is shown to (a) be resistant to arguments that adjectival conservatism is not a genuine type of conservatism, and (b) contain a distinct ideological programme, and not be restricted to a mere commentary on the activities of other ideologues.

This paper discusses issues that will affect the future development of the Web, either increasing its power and utility, or alternatively suppressing its development. It argues for the importance of the continued development of the Linked Data Web, and describes the use of linked open data as an important component of that. Second, the paper defends the Web as a read-write medium, and goes on to consider how the read-write Linked Data Web could be achieved.

Assumptions are made by government and technology providers about the power relationships that shape the use of technological security controls and the norms under which technology usage occurs. We present a case study carried out in the North East of England that examined how a community might work together using a digital information sharing platform to respond to the pressures of welfare policy change. We describe an inductive consideration of this highly local case study before reviewing it in the light of broader security theory. By taking this approach we problematise the tendency of the state to focus on the security of technology at the expense of the security of the citizen. From insights gained from the case study and the subsequent literature review, we conclude that there are three main absences not addressed by the current designs of cybersecurity architectures. These are absences of: consensus as to whose security is being addressed, evidence of equivalence between the mechanisms that control behaviour, and two-way legibility. We argue that by addressing these absences the foundations of trust and collaboration can be built which are necessary for effective cybersecurity. Our consideration of the case study within the context of sovereignty indicates that the design of the cybersecurity architecture and its concomitant service design has a significant bearing on the social contract between citizen and state. By taking this novel perspective new directions emerge for the understanding of the effectiveness of cybersecurity technologies.

The real meaning of ‘conservative’ – today denoting groups as diverse and incompatible as the religious right, libertarian free-marketeers and free-spending neo-conservatives – has been lost to politics. Yet the original conservative ideology, first developed in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke, was concerned with managing change. Kieron O’Hara argues that genuine conservatism has its own relevance in a complex and dynamic world where change is rapid, pervasive and dislocating. Conservatism transcends traditional politics, and has surprising applications – not least as the most appropriate and practical response to climate change. Kieron O’Hara’s Conservatism is a revision for the modern age of the traditional conservative philosophy. It shows what a properly conservative ideology looks like and demonstrates that many self-styled ‘conservatives’ actually promote destructive change in their own and others’ societies. Drawing on great conservative thinkers such as Burke and Adam Smith, philosophers ancient and modern from Plato to Wittgenstein, and contemporary social commentators including Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ulrich Beck and Jared Diamond, this new and strikingly original theory of conservative philosophy lays bare our lack of understanding of our own societies, and shows how risk pervades society and how it should be managed. It also proves that conservatism is distinct from neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism and the extreme positions of today’s ‘culture warriors’. O'Hara shows how conservatism is an ideology sensitive to cultural differences between the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and elsewhere, while highlighting the issues of technology, trust and privacy. Conservatism will appeal to anyone interested in the history – and future – of political philosophy and social thought.

There are increasing efforts directed at providing formal frameworks to consolidate the widening net of terms and relations used in medical practice. While there are many reasons for this, the need for standardisation of protocol and terminology is critical, not only for the provision of uniform levels of health care, but also to facilitate medical science research. In the domain of breast cancer pathology, a summary of current practice by the World Health Organisation states that the variability of the evidence archive (inconsistencies in describing microscopic appearances of phenomena, different diagnostic thresholds for working pathologists) is chief among the barriers to the medical understanding of the symptoms and development of early cancers. Such variability is acknowledged across specialist fields of medicine, motivating standardisation of terminologies for reporting medical practice. The desideratum of making these standards machine-readable has led to their formalisation as ontologies. Ontologies are computational artefacts designed to provide representations of a domain of interest. Thus, the representation must be a formal description so that it can be encoded, and reused, allowing navigation of the key concepts recorded and retrieval of information indexed against it. This brings the required standardisation by offering a set of labelling options to record observations and events encountered by medical professionals. Given the twin goals of ontologies -- representation and standardisation -- this paper will consider the key question of their design in the context of the use by experts, of information handling applications built around them. We build on our experience in developing ontologies for decision support software in the area of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. We will also examine, from this perspective, the suggestion offered in the literature that a set of metaphysically motivated questions should form the basis of ontology building as guarantors of fidelity to reality. We find that ontologies intended to support medical practice can only be understood within the context of their intended use. The declarative framework within which they are encoded generates the hope that their meaning transcends the specific application context. We show, however, that these declarative statements are to be understood as end products of chains of procedural engagements between humans, materials and communitarian norms. It is only when this scaffolding that brings this representation into existence becomes routine and consensual (within the community that exchanges information indexed against it) that the concepts stand in for physiological states with independent dynamics. However, as the state of biomedical knowledge is always in a state of flux, and different institutions and practitioners may be out of sync with respect to such modifications, the concepts embedded in the ontologies are constantly subject to reinterpretation within the context of specific institutional practices. Given the fragmentation of the patient’s body when viewed through various specialised lenses, ontologies can provide placeholders for co-ordinating disparate viewpoints to provide suitable medical interventions. The extent to which such interventions reflect any underlying reality, as manifest in measures of their efficacy, is closely wrapped up in the regulatory apparatus of protocol-guided consensus making. The value of ontologies lies in their reflection of, and support for, the sense-making activities that constitute expertise, not in their transparent access to a metaphysical reality.

Motivated by the increasing amount of voices who ask for careful consideration of what context-rich data analysis methods can tell us about the activities of human collectives, we contribute an argumentation that employs a dialectic of literature on the philosophy of truth and science as well as analytical methods for the study of information diffusion, Web graphs and social networks in order to make a case for changing the current view to the actions of human collectives in the digital. We strengthen our meta argument by a case study about one particular method that breaks with the causality assumption that is inherent in many of today’s methods and allows to capture novel dimensions of complexity of information sharing from a macroscopic cross-system perspective. We discuss whether this kind of analysis may generically suit to underpin the field of socio-technical systems with a novel information-centric theory.