Inspired by Roland Barthes's practice of "semioclasm" in Mythologies, this book offers a "technoclasm"; a cultural critique of US narratives, discourses, images, and objects that have transformed the politics of automation into statements of fact about the "rise of the robots". Treating automation as an ensemble of technologies and science fictions, this book foregrounds automation's ideologies, exaggerations, failures, and mystifications of the social value of human labor in order to question accepted and prolific automation mythologies. Jesse Ramirez offers a study of automation that recognizes automation as a technosocial project, that uses the tools of cultural studies and history to investigate the narratives and ideologies that often implicitly frame the automation debate, and that concretely and soberly assesses the technologies that have made the headlines. The case studies featured include some of the most widely cited and celebrated automatic technologies, such as the Baxter industrial robot, the self-driving car, and the Watson AI system. An ideal resource for anyone interested in or studying emerging technology and society, automation, Marxist cultural theory, cultural studies, science fiction studies, and the cultural history of technology.

This book provides critical commentary on key issues around virtual reality, using media technology as a tool to challenge perspectives for learning and understanding cultural diversities. With a focus on empathy, embodiment and ethics, the book interrogates the use of immersive technologies for formal and informal educational contexts. Taking a critical approach to discourses around emerging technology and learning, the book presents the idea that a new literacy is emerging and an emphasis on media and technology is needed in the context of education to explore and experience cultural diversities. Employing a personal reflexive narrative, the chapters highlight key issues through research and interviews with leading practitioners in the field. Understanding Virtual Reality will be of great interest to academics and students interested in the effects of immersive realities on the education experience, and to anyone keen on exploring the paradigm shift from entertainment to education.

Digital media have become deeply immersed in our lives, heightening both hopes and fears of their affordances. While the internet, mobile phones, and social media offer their users many options, they also engender concerns about their manipulations and intrusions. Emotions Online explores the visions that shape responses to media and the emotional regimes that govern people's engagements with them. This book critically examines evidence on the role of digital media in emotional life. Offering a sociological perspective and using ideas from science and technology studies and media studies, it explores: * The dimensions and operations of the online emotional economy * Growing concerns about online harms and abuse, especially to children * 'Deepfakes' and other forms of image-based abuse * The role of hope in shaping online behaviours * 'Digital well-being' and its market * COVID-19's impacts on perceptions of digital media and Big Tech * Growing challenges to centralised control of the internet, and the implications for future emotional life The book breaks new ground in the sociological study of digital media and the emotions. It reveals the dynamics of online emotional regimes showing how deceptive designs and algorithm-driven technologies serve to attract and engage users. As it argues, digital media rely on the emotional labours of many people, including social media inf luencers and content moderators who make the internet seem smart. The book provides an invaluable overview of the evidence and debates on the role of digital media in emotional life and guidance for future research, policy, and action.

Videogames and Agency explores the trend in videogames and their marketing to offer a player higher volumes, or even more distinct kinds, of player freedom. The book offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn reflects in their design principles. What can we learn from existing theories around agency? How do paratextual materials reflect design intention with regards to what the player can and cannot do in a videogame? How does game design shape the possibility space for player action? Through these questions and selected case studies that include AAA and independent games alike, the book presents a unique approach to studying agency that combines game design, game studies, and game developer discourse. By doing so, the book examines what discourses around player action, as well as a game's design can reveal about the nature of agency and videogame aesthetics. This book will appeal to readers specifically interested in videogames, such as game studies scholars or game designers, but also to media studies students and media and screen studies scholars less familiar with digital games.

Have you ever considered how much effect information technology has on society throughout the world? Progress often places lower income and marginalized communities at a distinct disadvantage. Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems, however, offers a detailed look at numerous incidences around the world where communities have actually taken control of the technology and really used it to their advantage. This is presented in the form of case studies and models such as Philadelphia's neighborhoods, the Atlanta Project, and neighborhood revitalization in Minneapolis, reflect on public participation in GIS concepts, best practices, constraints and opportunities.

In this book, Steffen Lange and Tilman Santarius investigate how digitalization influences environmental and social sustainability. The information revolution is currently changing the daily lives of billions of people worldwide. At the same time, the current economic model and consumerist lifestyle needs to be radically transformed if society is to overcome the challenges humanity is facing on a finite planet. Can the much-discussed disruption potential of digitalization be harnessed for this purpose? Smart Green World? provides guiding principles for a sustainable digital society and develops numerous hands-on proposals for how digitalization can be shaped to become a driving force for social transformation. For instance, the authors explain why more digitalization is needed to realize the transition towards 100% renewable energy and show how this can be achieved without sacrificing privacy. They analyze how the information revolution can transform consumption patterns, mobility habits and industry structures - instead of fostering the consumption of unneeded stuff due to personalized commercials and the acceleration of life. The authors reveal how Artificial Intelligence and the Industrial Internet of Things pose novel environmental challenges and contribute to a polarization of income; but they also demonstrate how the internet can be restored to its status as a commons, with users taking priority and society at large reaping the benefits of technological change in a most democratic way. Providing a comprehensive and practical assessment of both social and environmental opportunities and challenges of digitalization, Smart Green World? Making Digitalization Work for Sustainability will be of great interest to all those studying the complex interrelationship of the twenty-first-century megatrends of digitalization and decarbonization.

The most exciting and productive areas of academic inquiry are often where the interests of two disciplines meet. This is certainly the case for the subject of this book, originally published in 1994, which explores the contribution that computer-based modelling and artificial intelligence can make to understanding fundamental issues in social science. Simulating Societies shows how computer simulations can help to clarify theoretical approaches, contribute to the evaluation of alternative theories, and illuminate one of the major issues of the social sciences: how social phenomena can "emerge" from individual action. The authors discuss how simulation models can be constructed using recently developed artificial intelligence techniques and they consider the methodological issues involved in using such models for theory development, testing and experiment. The introductory chapters situate the book within social science, and suggest why the time was ripe for significant progress, before defining basic terminology, showing how simulation has been used to theorize about organizations, and indicating through examples some of the fundamental issues involved in simulation. The main body of the text provides case studies drawn from economics, anthropology, archaeology, planning, social psychology and sociology. The appeal of this path-breaking book was twofold. It offered an essential introduction to simulation for social scientists and it provided case study applications for computer scientists interested in the latest advances in the burgeoning area of distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) at the time.

Aims to be broad in scope yet practical in approach, so that it can serve the needs of several different audiences, including researchers, teachers, developers, and theologians; Covers a wide variety of issues which have been neglected in other research texts; Studies the impact of creating a digital immortal on relatives and friends, the consequences of persistent digital legacies, and ways digital media are currently being used to expand the possibilities of commemorating the dead and managing the grief of those left behind; Analyzes the extent to which digital media are complementing or replacing the well-established formal structures and religious rituals; Explores the legal and ethical impact of creating a digital immortal.

Provides advanced system implementation for Smart Cities using Artificial Intelligence Addresses the complete functional framework workflow in Artificial Intelligence Explores basic and high-level concepts, thus servicing as a manual for those in the industry while also helping beginners Based on the latest technologies, and covering the major challenges, issues, and advances in Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity Discusses intelligent data management and automated systems through Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Security

Big Data, gathered together and re-analysed, can be used to form endless variations of our persons - so-called 'data doubles'. Whilst never a precise portrayal of who we are, they unarguably contain glimpses of details about us that, when deployed into various routines (such as management, policing and advertising) can affect us in many ways. How are we to deal with Big Data? When is it beneficial to us? When is it harmful? How might we regulate it? Offering careful and critical analyses, this timely volume aims to broaden well-informed, unprejudiced discourse, focusing on: the tenets of Big Data, the politics of governance and regulation; and Big Data practices, performance and resistance. An interdisciplinary volume, The Politics of Big Data will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral and senior researchers interested in fields such as Technology, Politics and Surveillance.

In this book, David Braund offers a significantly different perspective upon the history of Roman Britain. He concentrates upon the literary evidence, which has been studied to a lesser extent than archaeology in recent years. Close attention to the Greek and Roman sources enables the construction of a new approach to Roman Britain, its history and its archaeology. For the first time, monarchy is identified as a key issue in the history of Roman Britain.

Mobile devices' impact on daily life has raised relevant questions regarding public and private space and communication. Both the technological environment (operating systems, platforms, apps) and media ecosystems (interface design, participatory culture, social media) influence how users deal with the public and private, intimate and personal spheres. Leading researchers in communication, art, computer engineering, education, law, sociology, philosophy, and psychology here explore current methodologies for studying the dichotomy of the public and private in mobile communication, providing a foundation for further research.

This book brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to address critical perspectives on Chinese language social media, internationalizing the state of social media studies beyond the Anglophone paradigm. The collection focuses on the intersections between Chinese language social media and disability, celebrity, sexuality, interpersonal communication, charity, diaspora, public health, political activism and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The book is not only rich in its theoretical perspectives but also in its methodologies. Contributors use both qualitative and quantitative methods to study Chinese social media and its social-cultural-political implications, such as case studies, in-depth interviews, participatory observations, discourse analysis, content analysis and data mining.

Feminist War Games? explores the critical intersections and collisions between feminist values and perceptions of war, by asking whether feminist values can be asserted as interventional approaches to the design, play, and analysis of games that focus on armed conflict and economies of violence. Focusing on the ways that games, both digital and table-top, can function as narratives, arguments, methods, and instruments of research, the volume demonstrates the impact of computing technologies on our perceptions, ideologies, and actions. Exploring the compatibility between feminist values and systems of war through games is a unique way to pose destabilizing questions, solutions, and approaches; to prototype alternative narratives; and to challenge current idealizations and assumptions. Positing that feminist values can be asserted as a critical method of design, as an ideological design influence, and as a lens that determines how designers and players interact with and within arenas of war, the book addresses the persistence and brutality of war and issues surrounding violence in games, whilst also considering the place and purpose of video games in our cultural moment. Feminist War Games? is a timely volume that questions the often-toxic nature of online and gaming cultures. As such, the book will appeal to a broad variety of disciplinary interests, including sociology, education, psychology, literature, history, politics, game studies, digital humanities, media and cultural studies, and gender studies, as well as those interested in playing, or designing, socially engaged games.

Humans at Work in the Digital Age explores the roots of twenty-first-century cultures of digital textual labor, mapping the diverse physical and cognitive acts involved, and recovering the invisible workers and work that support digital technologies. Drawing on 14 case studies organized around four sites of work, this book shows how definitions of labor have been influenced by the digital technologies that employees use to produce, interpret, or process text. Incorporating methodology and theory from a range of disciplines and highlighting labor issues related to topics as diverse as census tabulation, market research, electronic games, digital archives, and 3D modeling, contributors uncover the roles played by race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics in determining how narratives of digital labor are constructed and erased. Because each chapter is centered on the human cost of digital technologies, however, it is individual people immersed in cultures of technology who are the focus of the volume, rather than the technologies themselves. Humans at Work in the Digital Age shows how humanistic inquiry can be a valuable tool in the emerging conversation surrounding digital textual labor. As such, this book will be essential reading for academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of digital humanities; human-computer interaction; digital culture and social justice; race, class, gender, and sexuality in digital realms; the economics of the internet; and technology in higher education.

Once hidden behind the veils of entrepreneurship, it is now clear that platforms are reshaping the world of work, and Amazon has been a forerunner in setting the trend. This book examines two key and contrasting Amazon platforms that differ in how they organize workers: its e-commerce platform and digital labor platform (Mechanical Turk). With access to the people who are working at the heart of these platforms, it explores how different working conditions alienate workers, and how, despite these conditions, workers organize within their political-economic contexts to express their agency in traditional and alternative ways. Written for social scientists studying and researching the platform economy, this is a timely and important analysis of work and workers on the (digital) shop floor.

- Written by world-leading subject specialist in both sport management and artificial intelligence - Includes interviews with elite sports managers and coaches - Examines the competitive advantages offered by AI to a wide-range of areas including Recruitment, Performance & Tactics, Health & Fitness, Pedagogy, Broadcasting, eSports, Gambling, and Stadium Design

Blockchain technologies Bitcoins Web 3.0

This volume brings together research on cyberbullying across contexts, age groups, and cultures to gain a fuller perspective of the prevalence and impact of electronic mistreatment on individual, group, and organizational outcomes. This is the first book to integrate research on cyberbullying across three contexts: schools, workplaces, and romantic relationships, providing a unique synthesis of lifespan contexts. For each context, the expert chapter authors bring together three different 'lenses': existing research on the predictors and outcomes of cyberbullying within that context; a cross-cultural review across national borders and cultural boundaries; and a developmental perspective that examines age-related differences in cyberbullying within that context. The book closes by drawing commonalities across these different contexts leading to a richer understanding of cyberbullying as a whole and some possible avenues for future research and practice. This is fascinating reading for researchers and upper-level students in social psychology, counseling, school psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, and developmental psychology, as well as educators and administrators.

This book provides a critical overview of the changing ways people mourn, commemorate and interact with the remains of the dead, including bodies, materials and digital artefacts. It focuses on how residues of death persist and circulate through different spaces, materials, data and mediated memories, refiguring how the disposal of the dead is understood, enacted and contested across the globe. The volume contains contributions by scholars from a number of disciplines and includes a diverse range of case studies drawn from Asia, Europe and North America. Together they reveal how rapidly changing practices, industries and experiences around death's remains involve the entwining of digital technologies with other material and ritualised forms of commemoration, as well as with shifting boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the institutional and the vernacular, the public and the private.

GitOps and Kubernetes introduces a radical idea-managing your infrastructure with the same Git pull requests you use to manage your codebase. In this in-depth tutorial, you'll learn to operate infrastructures based on powerful-but-complex technologies with the same Git version control tools most developers use daily. GitOps and Kubernetes is half reference, half practical tutorial for operating Kubernetes the GitOps way. Through fast-paced chapters, you'll unlock the benefits of GitOps for flexible configuration management, monitoring, robustness, multi-environment support, and discover tricks and tips for managing secrets in the unique GitOps fashion. Key Features * Multiple-environments management with branching, namespace, and configuration * Access Control with Git, Kubernetes, and Pipeline * Using Kubernetes with Argo CD, JenkinsX, and Flux * Multi-step deployment strategies like Blue-Green, Canary in a declarative GitOps model For developers familiar with Continuous Delivery principles and the basics of Git and Kubernetes. About the technology The tools to monitor and manage software delivery and deployment can be complex to set up and intimidating to learn. But with the "GitOps" method, you can manage your entire Kubernetes infrastructure with Git pull requests, giving you a single control interface and making it easy to assess and roll back changes! Billy Yuen, Alexander Matyushentsev, Todd Ekenstam, and Jesse Suen are principal engineers for the Intuit platform. They are widely recognized as industry leads in GitOps for Kubernetes, having presented numerous related talks at industry conferences.

It explore issues of diversity and inclusion in relation to artificial intelligence (AI). The author leads a research group on Digitalization and Robotization of Society at NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

With all our contemporary connectivity, are we really connected? What does the nature of connectivity tell us about interpersonal and community relationships? What ethical concerns are raised through an always-on culture? Communication in today's world is characterised by a condition of persistent, semi-permanent connectivity, which seems to bring us closer together, but which can also be profoundly alienating. The Death of Web 2.0 takes a retrospective look at a moment in recent media history that has had, and will continue to have, a lasting impact upon the predominant attitude towards cultures of connectivity. Greg Singh draws from a range of approaches, intellectual traditions and scholarly disciplines to engage key questions underpinning the contemporary communications media ecosystem. Bringing together influences from communitarian ethics, recognition theory and relational and depth psychology, Singh synthesises key approaches to produce a critical inquiry that projects the tensions at the heart of connectivity as a principle of Web 2.0. He argues that Web 2.0 is a cultural moment that is truly over, and that what is popularly described as 'Web 2.0' is an altogether different set of principles and practices. The Death of Web 2.0 recognises the consequences of our 'always-on' culture, where judgments are made quickly and where impacts can be far-reaching, affecting our relationships, wellbeing, mental health and the health of our communities, and it concludes by asking what an ethics of connectivity would look like. This unique interdisciplinary work will be essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, media and cultural studies and psychosocial studies as well as anyone interested in the social implications of new media.

With all our contemporary connectivity, are we really connected? What does the nature of connectivity tell us about interpersonal and community relationships? What ethical concerns are raised through an always-on culture? Communication in today's world is characterised by a condition of persistent, semi-permanent connectivity, which seems to bring us closer together, but which can also be profoundly alienating. The Death of Web 2.0 takes a retrospective look at a moment in recent media history that has had, and will continue to have, a lasting impact upon the predominant attitude towards cultures of connectivity. Greg Singh draws from a range of approaches, intellectual traditions and scholarly disciplines to engage key questions underpinning the contemporary communications media ecosystem. Bringing together influences from communitarian ethics, recognition theory and relational and depth psychology, Singh synthesises key approaches to produce a critical inquiry that projects the tensions at the heart of connectivity as a principle of Web 2.0. He argues that Web 2.0 is a cultural moment that is truly over, and that what is popularly described as 'Web 2.0' is an altogether different set of principles and practices. The Death of Web 2.0 recognises the consequences of our 'always-on' culture, where judgments are made quickly and where impacts can be far-reaching, affecting our relationships, wellbeing, mental health and the health of our communities, and it concludes by asking what an ethics of connectivity would look like. This unique interdisciplinary work will be essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, media and cultural studies and psychosocial studies as well as anyone interested in the social implications of new media.

Digital media have become deeply immersed in our lives, heightening both hopes and fears of their affordances. While the internet, mobile phones, and social media offer their users many options, they also engender concerns about their manipulations and intrusions. Emotions Online explores the visions that shape responses to media and the emotional regimes that govern people's engagements with them. This book critically examines evidence on the role of digital media in emotional life. Offering a sociological perspective and using ideas from science and technology studies and media studies, it explores: * The dimensions and operations of the online emotional economy * Growing concerns about online harms and abuse, especially to children * 'Deepfakes' and other forms of image-based abuse * The role of hope in shaping online behaviours * 'Digital well-being' and its market * COVID-19's impacts on perceptions of digital media and Big Tech * Growing challenges to centralised control of the internet, and the implications for future emotional life The book breaks new ground in the sociological study of digital media and the emotions. It reveals the dynamics of online emotional regimes showing how deceptive designs and algorithm-driven technologies serve to attract and engage users. As it argues, digital media rely on the emotional labours of many people, including social media inf luencers and content moderators who make the internet seem smart. The book provides an invaluable overview of the evidence and debates on the role of digital media in emotional life and guidance for future research, policy, and action.