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Books > Computing & IT > Social & legal aspects of computing > Impact of computing & IT on society
Computers have changed the landscape of both gathering and
disseminating information throughout the world. As journalists
quickly move toward the 21st century and perhaps, a new era of
electronic journalism, resources are needed to understand the
newest and most successful computer-based news reporting
strategies. Written to serve that purpose, this book is designed to
show both professional journalists and students which of the newest
personal computing tools are being used by the nation's leading
news organizations and top individual journalists. It further
describes how these resources are being used on a daily basis and
for special projects.
As the "information superhighway" moves into the home through
interactive media, enhanced telecom services, and hybrid
appliances, interest continually grows in how consumers adopt and
use Information Technology (IT), the strategies IT marketers use to
reach consumers, and the public policies that help and protect
consumers. USE COPY FROM THIS POINT ON FOR GENERAL CATALOGS... This
book presents a unique collection of papers dealing with the demand
side issues of new information technologies in the home. The
contributors are from business, academia, and the public policy
sector and represent many disciplines including communication,
marketing, economics, psychology, engineering, and information
systems.
We are constantly being told that we are living through an image revolution. In this sceptical exploration of the politics of visual culture, Kevin Robins assesses the nature of our emotional and imaginary investment in the visual media from photography to virtual reality. He looks at how modern image technologies allow us to monitor and survey the "real" world while maintaining a distance which somehow denies its reality. He asks what pressures lie behind the utopian fantasies of cyberspace with its alternative realities and virtual communities. Rather than accepting the fashionable idea that the new visual technologies are displacing the real, "Into the Image" examines them sociologically, as shaped by forces and events in the real world, and demonstrates that what continues to matter is the relation of image and screen culture to the way we interact with that world.
Search engines have become a key part of our everyday lives. Yet there is growing concern with how algorithms, which run just beneath the surface of our interactions online, are affecting society. This timely new edition of Search Engine Society enlightens readers on the forms of bias that algorithms introduce into our knowledge and social spaces, drawing on recent changes to technology, industries, policies, and research. It provides an introduction to the social place of the search engine and addresses crucial questions such as: *How have search engines changed the way we organize our thoughts about the world, and how we work? *In what ways are big data and advances in artificial intelligence already influencing what we know of the world and each other? *To what extent do politics shape search, and does search shape politics? *What does the future of search portend for education, knowledge, work, privacy, and social power? While the search engine is starting to disappear from view, it is, at the same time, having an ever greater effect on how we learn about the world and how it learns about us. This book is a must-read for those who wish to understand the future of the social internet and how search shapes it.
"A Journey Through Cultures" addresses one of the hottest topics in contemporary HCI: cultural diversity amongst users. For a number of years the HCI community has been investigating alternatives to enhance the design of cross-cultural systems. Most contributions to date have followed either a 'design for each' or a 'design for all' strategy. "A Journey Through Cultures "takes a very different approach. Proponents of CVM - the Cultural Viewpoint Metaphors perspective - the authors invite HCI practitioners to think of how to expose and communicate the idea of cultural diversity. A detailed case study is included which assesses the metaphors' potential in cross-cultural design and evaluation. The results show that cultural viewpoint metaphors have strong epistemic power, leveraged by a combination of theoretic foundations coming from Anthropology, Semiotics and the authors' own work in HCI and Semiotic Engineering. Luciana Salgado, Carla Leitao and Clarisse de Souza are members of SERG, the Semiotic Engineering Research Group at the Departamento de Informatica of Rio de Janeiro's Pontifical Catholic University (PUC-Rio)."
Technoculture is culture--such is the proposition posited in Technoscience and Cyberculture, arguing that technology's permeation of the cultural landscape has so irrevocably reconstituted this terrain that technology emerges as the dominant discourse in politics, medicine and everyday life. The problems addressed in Technoscience and Cyberculture concern the ways in which technology and science relate to one another and organize, orient and effect the landscape and inhabitants of contemporary culture.
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.
The internet is changing the rules of the game of love. In a world where anything is possible, a potential date - whether it be a one-night stand or the start of a more lasting relationship - can be just a click away. Anyone looking for love online can throw off their inhibitions and can say what they have never dared to before. The internet revolution has ensured that online dating has now become both widespread and commonplace. Online users can buy into the consumerist illusion that they can choose a man or woman in the same way that they would shop for groceries - this is the new hypermarket of desire. Women in particular can enjoy a new sexual assertiveness. Where once they might have looked for an emotional attachment, they are now demanding simply the right to have a good time. However, love cannot be reduced to such simple terms. The apparently risk-free world of online dating is at odds with love in real life, which has its own demands and expectations. You cannot introduce another person into your life and expect everything to remain the same. Human beings have a way of turning your life upside down. In this compelling book, Jean-Claude Kaufmann navigates this new emotional world and explores the tensions between sex and love, instant gratification and enduring commitment.
Here is an outstanding critical analysis of the impact groundbreaking technologies, both new and established, have had on resource sharing in the information industry. It offers a unique opportunity to explore the possibilities of resource sharing in the electronic information age, beyond the narrow scope of interlibrary loan. This highly selective book not only assesses the technologies that have had a profound impact on resource sharing, it also considers the political, philosophical, social, financial, legal, managerial, and attitudinal issues they have affected. Technologies that hold great promise for revolutionizing interlibrary cooperation on various levels have been included in this important analysis. Impact of Technology on Resource Sharing fosters an in-depth understanding of these technologies by including chapters that range from descriptive analyses of particular projects to philosophical discussions of the challenges of change. It questions traditional assumptions while providing an opportunity to examine the practical technological options available to libraries today and in the near future.This thought-provoking book introduces beginning level library professionals to the changes technological innovations have caused in resource sharing. For more advanced professionals, it is a valuable review of several areas of technology and resource sharing including: CD-ROM union catalogscollection analysis using the OCLC/AMIGOS CDlocal integrated systemsnational bibliographic databases/utilitieslarge-scale system interconnectionZ39.50Internet/NRENnetworking high schoolspolitical/social impediments to resource sharingfinancial issues of resource sharinghistory of library networkingPublic service, technical service, and systems librarians will gain a better understanding of technical issues in language that is easy to understand. Library administrators will benefit from the review of issues important to the management and decision making process for the future of interlibrary cooperation and sharing.
"Consuming Tecnologies" opens for analysis some crucial but rarely examined areas of social, cultural and economic life. At its core is a concern with the complex set of relationships that mark and define the place of the domestic in the modern world, and an explanation of the relationship between the domestic and public spheres as they are mediated by consumption and technology. Debate over the commodification and privatization of everyday life has been preoccupied with the impact of technological change on established social structures and cultural values. Yet much of the discussion has lacked any substantive empirical work on the understanding of modern industrial society: on the nature of consumption, and the contradictory significance of the domestic sphere. The contributors address these questions with a series of essays suggesting that in essence, information and communication technologies require us to see them as social and symbolic as well as material objects, crucially embedded in the structures and dynamics of our consumer culture.
Written by leading international experts in field of cybercrimnology Provides a global socio-legal perspective Written in non-technical style without jargon Suitable for use as a textbook in cyber victimology courses Presents practical solutions for the problem
Online grooming is a topic of increased importance in global debates. This pioneering text offers a comprehensive overview of the established themes and emergent debates relating to the online abuse and victimisation of children.With important new findings from a European study of online grooming, the first and largest study of its kind, this volume provides a unique insight into the behaviour of offenders and those who are 'groomed', aiming to understand the 'place' of the child in relation to the characteristics of online groomer behaviour. The collection explores how information communication technology facilitates online grooming, as well as the role and impact of social media. Outlining the latest research on the online behaviour of young people, the volume sets the findings against the rapidly changing legislative and policy context at EU and international level, and also develops guidelines for prevention initiatives. This timely collection will be a valuable resource to scholars in Criminology, Psychology and Sociology, and practitioners and policy-makers engaged in child protection.
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.
Imagining, forecasting and predicting the future is an inextricable and increasingly important part of the present. States, organizations and individuals almost continuously have to make decisions about future actions, financial investments or technological innovation, without much knowledge of what will exactly happen in the future. Science and technology play a crucial role in this collective attempt to make sense of the future. Technological developments such as nanotechnology, robotics or solar energy largely shape how we dream and think about the future, while economic forecasts, gene tests or climate change projections help us to make images of what may possibly occur in the future. This book provides one of the first interdisciplinary assessments of how scientific and technological imaginations matter in the formation of human, ecological and societal futures. Rooted in different disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, and science and technology studies, it explores how various actors such as scientists, companies or states imagine the future to be and act upon that imagination. Bringing together case studies from different regions around the globe, including the electrification of German car infrastructure, or genetically modified crops in India, Imagined Futures in Science, Technology and Society shows how science and technology create novel forms of imagination, thereby opening horizons toward alternative futures. By developing central aspects of the current debate on how scientific imagination and future-making interact, this timely volume provides a fresh look at the complex interrelationships between science, technology and society. This book will be of interest to postgraduate students interested in Science and Technology Studies, History and Philosophy of Science, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Political Sciences, Future Studies and Literary Sciences.
This book represents an attempt to fully review the phenomenon of the blogosphere. The intention is to provide a reliable guide to understanding and analyzing the world of the unimaginable number of diverse blogs, each consisting of innumerable posts, which in their entirety form the blogosphere. We go on to answer the questions of how to grasp the complexity of the blogosphere and extract useful knowledge from it. In setting out to write this book, our central aim was to increase the reader's awareness and understanding of the blogosphere phenomenon, including its structure and characteristics. This can be achieved through a better understanding of individual blogs and their particular technical characteristics, as well as a deeper knowledge of how a single blog is embedded and interconnected within the entire blogosphere. The shape and form of the blogosphere can be described using the analogy of different continents. In our description the defining features and characteristics of the continents are illustrated by paradigmatic example blogs. Following on from the structural analysis we provide details of the available methods and describe the complex challenge of automatically retrieving information from the abundance of data contained in the blogosphere. Finally, we present our blog search platform, called BLOGINTELLIGENCE and describe all the tools and features we have developed during the last couple of years to explore the blogosphere.
This open access book begins with an algorithm-a set of IF...THEN rules used in the development of a new, ethical, video surveillance architecture for transport hubs. Readers are invited to follow the algorithm over three years, charting its everyday life. Questions of ethics, transparency, accountability and market value must be grasped by the algorithm in a series of ever more demanding forms of experimentation. Here the algorithm must prove its ability to get a grip on everyday life if it is to become an ordinary feature of the settings where it is being put to work. Through investigating the everyday life of the algorithm, the book opens a conversation with existing social science research that tends to focus on the power and opacity of algorithms. In this book we have unique access to the algorithm's design, development and testing, but can also bear witness to its fragility and dependency on others.
Manuel Castells - one of the world's pre-eminent social scientists - has drawn together a stellar group of contributors to explore the patterns and dynamics of the network society in its cultural and institutional diversity. The book analyzes the technological, cultural and institutional transformation of societies around the world in terms of the critical role of electronic communication networks in business, everyday life, public services, social interaction and politics. The contributors demonstrate that the network society is the new form of social organization in the Information age, replacing the Industrial society. The book analyzes processes of technological transformation in interaction with social culture in different cultural and institutional contexts: the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Finland, Russia, China, India, Canada, and Catalonia. The topics examined include business productivity, global financial markets, cultural identity, the uses of the Internet in education and health, the anti-globalization movement, political processes, media and identity, and public policies to guide technological development. Taken together these studies show that the network society adopts very different forms, depending on the cultural and institutional environments in which it evolves. The Network Society is an outstanding and original volume of direct interest in academia - particularly in the fields of social sciences, communication studies, and business schools - as well as for policymakers engaged in technological policy and economic development. Business and management experts will also discover much of value to them within this book.
This volume contains perspectives from a collection of cognitive scientists on the psychological, philosophical, and educational issues surrounding the meanings of words and how these meanings are learned and accessed. It features chapters covering the nature and structure of word meaning, how new word meanings are acquired in childhood and later on in life, and how research in word processing may tell us something about the way in which word meanings are represented and how they relate to the language processor.
Focuses on how the computer has transformed the economy into an information processing and intelligence system. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
This absorbing anthology uses in-depth interdisciplinary case studies from across the globe to examine the practice and concept of microcelebrity. Expanding on the existing theoretical framing of the online celebrity experience, the editors re-theorize microcelebrity to accommodate developments in global internet governance, the evolution of platform politics, the emergence of hybrid forms of celebrity, and the collapsing networks between old and new media. Chapters analyse experiences across Asia, Europe, Latin America and Australia, and consider microcelebrities at all stages of their careers, from everyday users and beginners to veteran influencers. Arguing for new perspectives and theories of microcelebrity that take into account colonial geographies, cross-media networks between influencers and legacy media, and gendered aggression and political discourses in a social media-saturated age, this volume will be of huge value to students and scholars of microcelebrity, social media, digital labour, creative industries and internet culture.
Suzanne Keene's pioneering book shows how museums and other cultural organizations fit into the new world of information and electronic communications and, most importantly, how they can take advantage of what it has to offer. By using new technology museums can build knowledge bases around information about collections. A collection object can be the central link for information about past and present, places, people and concepts, technologies, ways of working and evidence of the natural world. 'Digital Collections' explains how this vision can be realized. Sound, video and animations can be digitized and developed as a central resource that can be drawn on for many varied access routes: via the World Wide Web; CD ROMs; through on-gallery screens, and other future products still in development. These technological capabilities raise many compelling issues that need to be understood in order to successfully develop information collections. In this book Suzanne Keene reviews these issues clearly and comprehensively. Suzanne Keene is a senior manager of museum collections and information at the Science Museum, London. She led the UK LASSI project to select a collections information system for UK museums. This, with her experience in directing information technology and multimedia projects, means that she is accustomed to translating the highly technical concepts of information technology into high level issues for senior and strategic management.
How is social media changing contemporary understandings of crime and injustice, and what contribution can it make to justice-seeking? Abuse on social media often involves betrayals of trust and invasions of privacy that range from the public circulation of intimate photographs to mass campaigns of public abuse and harassment using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, 8chan and Reddit - forms of abuse that disproportionately target women and children. Crime, Justice and Social Media argues that online abuse is not discontinuous with established patterns of inequality but rather intersects with and amplifies them. Embedded within social media platforms are inducements to abuse and harass other users who are rarely provided with the tools to protect themselves or interrupt the abuse of others. There is a relationship between the values that shape the technological design and administration of social media, and those that inform the use of abuse and harassment to exclude and marginalise diverse participants in public life. Drawing on original qualitative research, this book is essential reading for students and scholars in the fields of cyber-crime, media and crime, cultural criminology, and gender and crime.
The 'smart city' is often promoted as a technology-driven solution to complex urban issues. While commentators are increasingly critical of techno-optimistic narratives, the political imagination is dominated by claims that technical solutions can be uniformly applied to intractable problems. This book provides a much-needed alternative view, exploring how 'home-grown' digital disruption, driven and initiated by local actors, upends the mainstream corporate narrative. Drawing on original research conducted in a range of urban African settings, Odendaal shows how these initiatives can lead to meaningful change. This is a valuable resource for scholars working in the intersection of science and technology studies, urban and economic geography and sociology. |
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