The new Internet bar phenomenon in China reveals a contradictory time and a vital tug of war between the state and civil society. Small, private net bar operators are caught in the double roles of regulator and the regulated, struggling to survive; many Internet cafe visitors largely enjoy emailing and online entertainment, showing little interest in political or policy issues. And both bar operators and visitors skillfully play a cat-mouse game with the state. Internet Policy in China: A Field Study of Internet Cafes reports the results of a multi-layered study of this phenomenon. Helen Sun investigates how the Internet has been used by the state and individuals, as well as the implications of Chinese Internet policies and regulations. She conceptualizes media technology as a "dependent variable" that can be affected by other factors such as its availability, the user's uses and expectations, media policy, the market, and the nations-state. Internet Policy in China focuses on the Chinese telecommunications policy-making system, regulatory activities, and the governmental means of control over Internet access and use at both the macro and micro levels. Sun also discusses users' perceptions and uses of the Internet in net cafes, the dual role cafe owners play in the frantic digital arena, the mismatch between Internet regulations and net cafe owners and goers, their interaction with governmental policy and regulation, and the social implications of their interactions during China's transitional time.

What effect have innovations in digital technology had on the way we communicate and work, and what can we expect from the future? Following on from the hugely successful "e-Shock," Michael de Kare Silver analyses the developments in digital technology over the past decade, and how they have changed our lives both at home and in the workplace.

In the future, everyday life in traffic will be intricately meshed with city life. Today motorways, cities and streets are places where we spend a considerable amount of time, and where a large number of everyday encounters between people occur. Any road user's journey coincides with hundreds or even thousands of others. This book unpacks the details of the practical achievements involved in socially engaging with people at high speed. Although, generally speaking, these encounters are brief and interaction is slight, the recent emergence of mobile technologies offers opportunities to support drivers and passengers beyond just helping them to reach their destination. New social media could enhance interaction in traffic making life on the road more interesting and meaningful. Such innovative applications could include car stereos that share music amongst drivers; digital games that interact with the landscape passing outside the car windows, or with passengers in surrounding cars; message systems that allow drivers to help each other; and web applications that allow motorcyclists to socialize on the road. Social Media on the Road - The Future of Car Based Computing provides a bridge between research in transport planning and traffic technology, and new media areas such as Computer Human Interaction and Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Those studying and researching in the areas of human computer interaction in mobile use contexts, and those interested in developing new forms of mobile applications and services will find this book an excellent resource. Oskar Juhlin is Associate Professor and Director of the Mobile Life VinnExcellence Centre at Stockholm University and Interactive Institute. 'This book represents a pioneering and key research work that examines the future of transportation being merged with communication and interactive media. It also provides a glimpse of the future potential of mixed reality entertainment for children and family on the move. It is essential for scientists, designers, and engineers working on mobile social media, as well as for business people looking for new potential urban transport media services.' Professor Adrian D. Cheok, Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University.

Technology currently encourages the capture and storage of vast quantities of data and information and so thinkers, reasoners, and decision-makers have available large resources to support their tasks. At the same time, there is a need to engage with an enormous range of complex issues that require reasoning and decisions that are actionable to address them. Approaches for Community Decision Making and Collective Reasoning: Knowledge Technology Support acts to provide knowledge for each individual in a group with the broad structural wealth of reasoning. It also acts as an explicit structure that technological devices for supporting reasoning within a group can hook onto. If you are interested in how groups can structure their activities towards making better decisions or in developing technologies for the support of decision-making in groups, then this book is an excellent way to understand the state of the art and possible ways forward.

Welcome to the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems! It is quite an achievement to reach the five-year mark - that's the sign of a successful enterprise. This annual conference is now being recognized as the primary event for the open source research community, attracting not only high-quality papers, but also building a community around a technical program, a collection of workshops, and (starting this year) a Doctoral Consortium. Reaching this milestone reflects the efforts of many people, including the conference founders, as well as the organizers and participants in the previous conferences. My task has been easy, and has been greatly aided by the hard work of Kevin Crowston and Cornelia Boldyreff, the Program Committee, as well as the Organizing Team led by Bjoern Lundell. All of us are also grateful to our attendees, especially in the difficult economic climate of 2009. We hope the participants found the conference valuable both for its technical content and for its personal networking opportunities. To me, it is interesting to look back over the past five years, not just at this conference, but at the development and acceptance of open source software. Since 2004, the business and commercial side of open source has grown enormously. At that time, there were only a handful of open source businesses, led by RedHat and its Linux distribution. Companies such as MySQL and JBoss were still quite small.

China's economic and social progress toward modernization is one of the defining features of the last quarter of the 20th century. The emergence of China coincides with another development of equally important international implications--the revolution in information and telecommunication technology. But how compatible are the new China and the information age? The Chinese government intends to embrace market-oriented economic development while maintaining centralized control over politics, culture, and public discourse. The contradictions and tensions of this goal are especially acute in telecommunication and information technology markets, where the rest of the world is moving rapidly toward liberalization and globalization. Will China's economic reforms allow it to join the information revolution, or will its unique political structure keep it insulated from the main currents of global economic development? This volume is the first detailed examination of how China's reform process is playing out in the realm of information and telecommunications.

From Google search to self-driving cars to human longevity, is Alphabet creating a neoteric Garden of Eden or Bentham's Panopticon? Will King Solomon's challenge supersede the Turing test for artificial intelligence? Can transhumanism mitigate existential threats to humankind? These are some of the overarching questions in this book, which explores the impact of information awareness on humanity starting from the Book of Genesis to the Royal Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC to the modern day of Google Search, IBM Watson, and Wolfram|Alpha. The book also covers Search Engine Optimization, Google AdWords, Google Maps, Google Local Search, and what every business leader must know about digital transformation. "Search is curiosity, and that will never be done," said Google's first female engineer and Yahoo's sixth CEO Marissa Mayer. The truth is out there; we just need to know how to Google it!

As the twenty-first century unfolds, computers challenge the way in which we think about culture, society and what it is to be human: areas traditionally explored by the humanities. In a world of automation, Big Data, algorithms, Google searches, digital archives, real-time streams and social networks, our use of culture has been changing dramatically. The digital humanities give us powerful theories, methods and tools for exploring new ways of being in a digital age. Berry and Fagerjord provide a compelling guide, exploring the history, intellectual work, key arguments and ideas of this emerging discipline. They also offer an important critique, suggesting ways in which the humanities can be enriched through computing, but also how cultural critique can transform the digital humanities. Digital Humanities will be an essential book for students and researchers in this new field but also related areas, such as media and communications, digital media, sociology, informatics, and the humanities more broadly.

This volume provides the basis for contemporary privacy and social media research and informs global as well as local initiatives to address issues related to social media privacy through research, policymaking, and education. Renowned scholars in the fields of communication, psychology, philosophy, informatics, and law look back on the last decade of privacy research and project how the topic will develop in the next decade. The text begins with an overview of key scholarship in online privacy, expands to focus on influential factors shaping privacy perceptions and behaviors-such as culture, gender, and trust-and continues with specific examinations of concerns around vulnerable populations such as children and older adults. It then looks at how privacy is managed and the implications of interacting with artificial intelligence, concluding by discussing feasible solutions to some of the more pressing questions surrounding online privacy. This handbook will be a valuable resource for advanced students, scholars, and policymakers in the fields of communication studies, digital media studies, psychology, and computer science.

This book is concerned with the associated issues between the differing paradigms of academic and organizational computing infrastructures. Driven by the increasing impact Information Communication Technology (ICT) has on our working and social lives, researchers within the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) field try and find ways to situate new hardware and software in rapidly changing socio-digital ecologies. Adopting a design-orientated research perspective, researchers from the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET) elaborate on the challenges and opportunities we face through the increasing permeation of society by ICT from commercial, academic, design and organizational perspectives. Designing Socially Embedded Technologies in the Real-World is directed at researchers, industry practitioners and will be of great interest to any other societal actors who are involved with the design of IT systems.

This book is for people who work in the tech industry-computer and data scientists, software developers and engineers, designers, and people in business, marketing or management roles. It is also for people who are involved in the procurement and deployment of advanced applications, algorithms, and AI systems, and in policy making. Together, they create the digital products, services, and systems that shape our societies and daily lives. The book's aim is to empower people to take responsibility, to 'upgrade' their skills for ethical reflection, inquiry, and deliberation. It introduces ethics in an accessible manner with practical examples, outlines of different ethical traditions, and practice-oriented methods. Additional online resources are available at: ethicsforpeoplewhoworkintech.com.

Social networks provide a powerful abstraction of the structure and dynamics of diverse kinds of people or people-to-technology interaction. Web 2.0 has enabled a new generation of web-based communities, social networks, and folksonomies to facilitate collaboration among different communities.

This unique text/reference compares and contrasts the ethological approach to social behavior in animals with web-based evidence of social interaction, perceptual learning, information granulation, the behavior of humans and affinities between web-based social networks. An international team of leading experts present the latest advances of various topics in intelligent-social-networks and illustrates how organizations can gain competitive advantages by applying the different emergent techniques in real-world scenarios. The work incorporates experience reports, survey articles, and intelligence techniques and theories with specific network technology problems.

Topics and Features: Provides an overview social network tools, and explores methods for discovering key players in social networks, designing self-organizing search systems, and clustering blog sites, surveys techniques for exploratory analysis and text mining of social networks, approaches to tracking online community interaction, and examines how the topological features of a system affects the flow of information, reviews the models of network evolution, covering scientific co-citation networks, nature-inspired frameworks, latent social networks in e-Learning systems, and compound communities, examines the relationship between the intent of web pages, their architecture and the communities who take part in their usage and creation, discusses team selection based on members' social context, presents social network applications, including music recommendation and face recognition in photographs, explores the use of social networks in web services that focus on the discovery stage in the life cycle of these web services.

This useful and comprehensive volume will be indispensible to senior undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in Social Intelligence, as well as to researchers, developers, and postgraduates interested in intelligent-social-networks research and related areas.

This multi-disciplinary book provides insight in how to establish consumer trust in electronic commerce. It first goes into detail on a broad variety of consumer trust criteria with regard to the security and reliability of electronic consumer transactions, what information must be provided to consumers, how to create a legally binding contract online, confidence in electronic payments, the resolution of disputes, what law applies to the electronic consumer contract, which body is entitled to settle the dispute and personal data protection. By means of these criteria it is assessed into what extent consumer trust is ensured by the application of a public-key infrastructure, which supports cryptographic services such as electronic signatures and encryption. An assessment is also made on the European Union cryptography policy and the European Union policy on consumer protection in electronic commerce. In addition, a wide range of co-regulation and self-regulation initiatives within the European Union and Northern America are assessed. Finally, this book provides a consumer trust framework which learns that various ingredients at different levels are required to build consumer trust in electronic commerce. As such, it clarifies the roles and responsibilities of government, industry and consumer organisations, businesses, as well as consumers themselves.

E-government has emerged not merely as a specialization in public administration but as a transformative force affecting all leaves and functions in government. Digital Government: Principles and Best Practices, written by a collection of practitioners and researchers, provides an overview of the management challenges and issues involved in seeking a new form of governance - digital government.

This edited book is the first of its kind to systematically address the intersection of e-democracy and European politics. It contributes to an improved understanding of the role that new media technologies play in European politics and the potential impact that Internet-based political participation processes may have on modern-day representative democracy in Europe. A unique, holistic approach is taken to examine e-democracy's current state and prospects in Europe from three, partially overlapping and interlocking perspectives: e-public, e-participation and e-voting. The authors provide both theory-inspired reflections on e-democracy's contribution to the formation of the European public sphere, as well as rich empirical analyses of contemporary e-participation phenomena such as the European Citizens' Initiative or e-voting practices in Estonia. Based on the presented findings, the concluding chapter combines a prospective outlook with recommendations for future paths towards meaningful integration of e-democracy in European politics and governance.

ED-L2L, Learning to Live in the Knowledge Society, is one of the co-located conferences of the 20th World Computer Congress (WCC2008). The event is organized under the auspices of IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) and is to be held in Milan from 7th to 10th September 2008. ED-L2L is devoted to themes related to ICT for education in the knowledge society. It provides an international forum for professionals from all continents to discuss research and practice in ICT and education. The event brings together educators, researchers, policy makers, curriculum designers, teacher educators, members of academia, teachers and content producers. ED-L2L is organised by the IFIP Technical Committee 3, Education, with the support of the Institute for Educational Technology, part of the National Research Council of Italy. The Institute is devoted to the study of educational innovation brought about through the use of ICT. Submissions to ED-L2L are published in this conference book. The published papers are devoted to the published conference themes: Developing digital literacy for the knowledge society: information problem solving, creating, capturing and transferring knowledge, commitment to lifelong learning Teaching and learning in the knowledge society, playful and fun learning at home and in the school New models, processes and systems for formal and informal learning environments and organisations Developing a collective intelligence, learning together and sharing knowledge ICT issues in education - ethics, equality, inclusion and parental role Educating ICT professionals for the global knowledge society Managing the transition to the knowledge society

Information technology is continuing to transform global communications and the world economy with innovative products and services. In this dynamic environment, events tend to be market-driven and it may be difficult for the regulators to keep up. At the same time, there is a need for public authorities to promote effective competition within a clear, coherent, and predictable framework. This reference work summarizes the major rules and policies for information technology at European level. It describes the institutional framework and general policies for the "information society", examines the detailed rules for external trade, competition and intellectual property, and discusses the Internet and electronic commerce. It provides an excellent overview of the subject as well as a good starting point for additional research on particular issues. This work should be of interest to practising lawyers, corporate counsel, business executives, consultants, academics, and government or trade association officials.

As the majority of the world continues to move into an internet-based society we have seen significant social, cultural, economic and technological changes. Most developing countries have embraced Web 2.0 and have moved onto the next generation of the World Wide Web, however, some developing countries still struggle to bridge the digital divide. Cases on Web 2.0 in Developing Countries: Studies on Implementation, Application, and Use investigates the perception of the value of Web 2.0, the adoption and application of its technologies, as well as the different approaches and innovations necessary for the implementation of Web applications in developing countries.

This book surveys a 'cluster' of works that seek to explore the cultures of cyberspace, the Internet and the information society. It introduces key ideas, and includes detailed discussion of the work of two key thinkers in this area, Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway, as well as outlining the development of cyberculture studies as a field. To do this, the book also explores selected 'moments' in this development, from the early 1990s, when cyberspace and cyberculture were only just beginning to come together as ideas, up to the present day, when the field of cyberculture studies has grown and bloomed, producing innovative theoretical and empirical work from a diversity of standpoints. Key topics include: life on the screen network society space of flows cyborg methods. Cyberculture Theorists is the ideal starting point for anyone wanting to understand how to theorise cyberculture in all its myriad forms.

People are increasingly engaged in profession-related learning via social networks supported by Web 2.0 tools. Some of these informal online learners are already actively engaged in a profession, whereas others are preparing to enter a profession. Their online interactions enhance their formal education and face-to-face professional experiences Virtual Professional Development and Informal Learning via Social Networks will examine how individuals and organizations are using Web 2.0 tools to create informal learning and professional development opportunities. Informal learning is learning which occurs outside of a formal educational context, typically driven by a personal question or an immediate need. In other instances, informal learning may occur as a by-product of other social interactions. In this context, we focus on informal learning that occurs through online social networks on a voluntary basis. Professional development, then, is defined as learning that will enhance one's job-related knowledge or career growth. This book is perfectly suited for academics and practitioners as it is written in a manner that is clearly accessible and includes implications for practice.

This volume explores the nature of the Internet's impact on civil society, addressing the following central questions: is the Internet qualitatively different from the more traditional forms of the media? has the Internet demonstrated real potential to improve civil society through a wider provision of information, an enhancement of communication between government and citizen, or via better state transparency? does the Internet pose a threat to the coherence of civil society as people are encouraged to abandon shared media experiences and pursue narrow interests? in authoritarian states, does the Internet function as a beacon for free speech or as another tool for propaganda?

This book is one of the first books that deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 pandemic has affected countries all over the world and has made a significant impact on daily life and healthcare facilities and treatment systems. The book covers the main recent emerging technologies that are related to the COVID-19 crisis. The technologies that are included in this book play a significant role in tackling COVID-19 in the future. The scope of this book is to cover all advanced emerging technologies and artificial intelligence techniques to fight against COVID-19 pandemic.

Changes in the media landscape present new challenges for scholars interested in the relationship between the mass media and civil society. Notably, the explosion of the Internet in advanced industrial democracies and its more limited introduction in other types of regimes has provided new pathways for communication. This volume explores the nature of the Internet's impact on civil society, addressing the following central questions: * Is the Internet qualitativey different from the more traditional forms of the media? * Has the Internet demonstrated real potential to improve civil society through a wider provision of information, an enhancement of communication between government and citizen or via better state transparency? * Alternatively, does the Internet pose a threat to the coherence of civil society as people are encouraged to abandon shared media experiences and pursue narrow interests? * In authoritarian states, does the Internet function as a beacon for free speech or another tool for propaganda? This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the Internet and civil society. Jensen, University of Aarhus Weiner Lusoli, University of Salford Stephen Ward, University of Salford Scott Wr