Bill Dutton's presentation to the 2022, 7th international SEARCH conference, at Taylor's University, Malaysia, focusing on his concept of a Fifth Estate.

1. The Fifth Estate
Power Shift
William H. Dutton
Emeritus Professor, University of Southern
California
Senior Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford
University
Oxford Martin Fellow, Global Cyber Security
Capacity Centre, Computer Science, Oxford
University
Visiting Professor, Media and Communication,
University of Leeds
• 1 November 2022
7th International SEARCH Conference, Oct 31- Nov 2, 2022

2. The Fifth Estate
 Press since the 18th Century –
enabling a ‘Fourth Estate’
 Internet in the 21st - enabling a
‘Fifth Estate’
The Fifth Estate is a collectivity of networked individuals who
use the Internet and related social media in ways that
enhance their communicative power vis-à-vis governments,
business & industry and other actors and institutions.

3. Greta Thunberg
2003: Born in Sweden to Swedish parents
2018: Began skipping school days as a fifteen-year-
old to protest outside the Swedish Parliament for
action on climate change. Her sign read: Skolstrejk
för klimatet (School strike for climate)
2018: Spoke to UN Climate Change Conference
2019: Toured North America for interviews and
speaking engagements with her father, then sailed
across the Atlantic to speak at the UN Climate
Action Summit
2019-21: Three consecutive nominations for the
Nobel Peace Prize

4. Young women hold their
mobilephones as they
take refuge in a metro
station in Kyiv, Ukraine,
24 Feb 2022
Photo: Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty

5. Social media post
of Chinese Consul
General Zheng
Xiyan pulling a
Hong Kong
protester by his
hair into the
Chinese consulate
in Manchester,
England
16 Oct 2022

6. Informational or
Communicative
Power
If digital technologies can redistribute
information or reconfigure networks of
communication, they can threaten existing
distributions of power in society
Informational or communicative power is
relative overtime or across actors
Power Shifts: reinforcement, technocratic,
top management, democratic, autocratic,
totalitarian?

7. The Fourth Estate:
enabled by an independent press
• Thomas Carlyle (1831), Heroes and Hero-
Worship, at www.gutenberg.org.etext/1091
• “[Edmund] Burke said there were Three
Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’
Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate
more prominent far than they all. It is not a
figure of speech, or witty saying; it is a literal
fact – very momentous to us in these times.”
• Paraphrasing the historian Thomas Macaulay
in 1828

8. Pre-Industrial
Estates to the
21st Century
Pre-Industrial
Estates
Post-Industrial Roles of
Clergy Experts, such as Public
Intellectuals
Nobility Business, Industry and
Economic Elites, Internet
Industrial Elites
Commons Government, Politicians &
Regulators
Press (4th Estate) Journalists and the Mass
Media
Mob Civil Society, Networked
Individuals, Mobs

9. Montesquieu’s
Tripartite
System into the
21st USA
Tripartite Modern US Separation of Powers
Courts Judiciary
Monarch Executive
Parliament Legislative
Press as 4th Journalists and the Mass Media
Mob Civil Society, Networked
Individuals, Mobs

10. Internet &
Social Media
Reconfigure
Access to:
• How you get information
• What you know
Information
• How you communicate
• Who you know
People
• How you obtain services
• From whom, from where
Services
• How you do what you do
• What know-how you require
Technology

11. Early but
Overly
Narrow
Conceptions
of the Fifth
Estate
•Extension of the 4th Estate
Bloggers
•Holding the 4th Estate
Accountable
Watchdogs

12. Power Shifts
of the
Internet:
The
Potential of
a Fifth
Estate
• Relative Informational and
Communication Power of
Networked Individuals
Individuals
• Relative Power of Institutions
• 4B Watch QE II Funeral Worldwide
Institutions

13. Quello Search Study
• Funding from Google, Inc.
• 14,000 respondents, 2,000 in seven nations
• 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2019
• Cross-sectional Surveys versus Panels
• Multi-Stage Probability Sample
• England, Scotland & Wales
• Respondents: 14 years and older
• Face-to-face Interviews, High Response Rates [Online in 2019]
• Sponsorship for 2013 from the Nominet Trust, Ofcom, UK
Research Councils, dot.rural
• Component of World Internet Project (WIP)
Oxford Internet Surveys
Quello Search Study, 2017

14. Inductivist:
Concept &
Dynamics
of the Fifth
Estate
Surveys
Cases
Targeted Studies

15. Emergence Online of a New Organizational Form:
Networked Individuals
Source
Information
Join & Create
Networks
Enhance
Communicative
Power

16. First Port of Call
Search v Sites
Social Cues & Collaboration
Centrality Significance
Trust
Key
Foundations
of a Fifth
Estate,
enabled by
the Internet

17. Fifth Estate defined by being
networked (beyond the
home), producing content
(writing blogs, posting text
and photos), sourcing
(following search),
collaborating (following
cues), trusting (content,
providers), centrality
(viewing net as essential for
information).
0 10 20 30 40 50
Spectators
Attentives
Fifth Estate
Percentage of Users, 2013
Percentage of Users

18. Demo
• Young
• Urban
• Minorities
SES
• Educated
• Middle &
Upper Middle
• Higher Income
Work
• Managerial-
Professional
• Student
• Employed
Perspective
• Political Efficacy
• Political
Empowerment

19. Arenas: Networked Institutions Networked Individuals
News Online journalism, BBC Online, Live
Micro-Blogging
Citizen Journalists, Bloggers,
Whistleblowers, Leakers
Government Digital Democracy, E-Consultation, e-
Voting, Surveillance
Social media campaigns, Arab Spring,
Anti-Bribery Websites
Education Online Learning, Multimedia
Classrooms, MOOCs, Zoom Classes
Backchannels, Informal Learning, Rate
My Teacher, YouTube, Khan Academy,
Zoom Meetings
Health and Medical e-mailing safety alerts, COVID-19 Apps Going to the Internet for health
information, networks of physicians

20. Fifth Estate
Strategies
Searching
Originating, Creating Content
Networking
Collaborating
Leaking

21. • Martha Payne, 9 yr. old girl in Scotland, writes a blog for
school project: ‘NeverSeconds’
• Produced content: photos & reviews school lunch in
2012
• Posted on her blog: neverseconds.blogspot.com/
• Censored by her institution (her primary school’s
council)
• Over 10 million page views
• Fostered debate over the quality of school lunches
nationwide and worldwide

22. Not a Social Movement, But a Collectivity of
Individuals Holding Powerful Actors Accountable?

24. See: https://billdutton.me/tag/social-intelligence/
Social Listening and Intelligence
Angus Cheong and Bill Dutton in Oxford
September 2022
The tools and processes: uMax Data Technology
Limited, uMax Data: xMiner, a platform for big data
analysis; LawMiner, a plaform for legal market
insights; HK Plulse, a platform for social listening &
analytics. See: uMaxData
at https://www.umaxdata.com/ and DiVoMiner
at https://www.divominer.com/en/
Angus Cheong moved from surveys
to add content analysis of social
media comments aggregated across
multiple social media for clients in
Macau and Hong Kong. Comments
mean more!

25. Eliot Higgins, We Are
Bellingcat: An Intelligence
Agency for the People,
London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2021
Eliot Higgins
Internet Sleuth, open-source intelligence
Tracking Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine from his home in Leicester, UK,
gathering evidence of war crimes, such as use of cluster munitions in
2022
Identified agents who poisoned Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, UK in
2018
Identified Russian vehicle that shot the missile downing Malaysian
airliner over Ukraine in 2014
See: Matthew Campbell, ‘Keeping Tabs on War Crimes from a Cul-
de-sac in Leicester’, The Guardian, 6 March, 2022, p. 23.

26. Attacks on
the Fifth
Estate
Experts
Business &
Industrial
Elites
Government
and
Regulatory
Agencies
Press
The ‘Mob’

27. Search
• Filter Bubble or
bias of
algorithms
• Privacy and
surveillance
Social Cues and
Collaboration
• Echo chamber
• Mobs
Trust of the
Internet &
Social Media
• Fake News,
Conspiracies,
Disinformation
• Information
warfare, e.g.,
Ukraine
1st Port of Call
• Entertainment: TikTok &
immersive video
• Closing of your world on
mobile apps
Threats

28. The Future
of the Fifth
Estate
Challenge dystopian narratives leading
to inappropriate regulation
Raising Awareness: talks, articles,
books, and education
Bringing cybersecurity into a new
paradigm for media regulation
Future Scenarios: Lost Horizon? On the
Horizon?
William H. Dutton, The Fifth Estate: The Power Shift of the
Digital Age (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)