Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1. 1 Research Objective 1 The modern State is unlikely to be the end configuration of organized political life. Throughout history, both the nature and manifestation of political organization have continuously adapted to the specific needs of the age. Despite the natural tendency of organizations to retain a certain status quo, there is no reason to suggest that the dominant form of political organization, the State, has lost the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Today's needs are shaped by a process of glob- ization increasing the level of transnational interdependence between actors in terms of social, economic and political activity. As such, this process is likely to inform the next transformation of organized political life. This inquiry sets out to shed some light on the consequences of this transformation for the modern State in the view of its constitutional commitments and responsibilities using the Internet's - terdependency-imposing nature as foundation for the inquiry. In investigating the way in which traditional public commitments and responsibilities take shape on the Internet, this inquiry aims to further our understanding of how globalization inf- ences decision making in the public interest. The vast amount of literature on the effects of globalization on the State roughly divides into three categories. The first strand of literature stresses the economic dimension of globalization.

Is any image in modern times more evocative of social change than the computer? Popular mythology ascribes extraordinary powers to computers in the ordering of human affairs. Computers are seen as instruments of social transformation and economic change. Indeed, it is hard not to find computers in the modern workplace, let alone in the home. They are ubiquitous in government offices, businesses large and small alike, the school, and not-for-profit organizations. In this meticulously researched study of computers and computing, authors James B. Rule, Debra Gimlin, and Sylvia Sievers present a fascinating, entertaining, and thought-provoking survey of the use of what may be the most powerful tool in today's workplace. In the chapter entitled "The New York Study: Design and Execution," the authors describe their inspiration for the undertaking of their study, how they designed their research methods, and how they obtained funding for the project. In the chapter "What Computers Do; How Computing Changes," case studies involving businesses that adopted greater computer usage are described, and the authors explain how the new technology was employed for their benefit. In "Employment and Efficiency" time saving and cost-effectiveness qualities of computer technology are explored. And in "Management and Structure," the authors posit the role of the computer in organizational transformation. Computing in Organizations is a timely and relevant work, and will prove of great benefit to strategic consultants, business management personnel, sociologists, and students of information technology. James B. Rule is professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and is a member of the editorial board of Dissent magazine. Debra Gimlin holds a doctorate in sociology, and is vice president of V2, Inc., a strategic consulting and marketing research firm for the pharmaceutical industry. She is the author of Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture. Sylvia Sievers is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is an experienced researcher in computing use and has had several articles published in scholarly journals.

Digital Playgrounds explores the key developments, trends, debates, and controversies that have shaped children's commercial digital play spaces over the past two decades. It argues that children's online playgrounds, virtual worlds, and connected games are much more than mere sources of fun and diversion - they serve as the sites of complex negotiations of power between children, parents, developers, politicians, and other actors with a stake in determining what, how, and where children's play unfolds. Through an innovative, transdisciplinary framework combining science and technology studies, critical communication studies, and children's cultural studies, Digital Playgrounds focuses on the contents and contexts of actual technological artefacts as a necessary entry point for understanding the meanings and politics of children's digital play. The discussion draws on several research studies on a wide range of digital playgrounds designed and marketed to children aged six to twelve years, revealing how various problematic tendencies prevent most digital play spaces from effectively supporting children's culture, rights, and - ironically - play. Digital Playgrounds lays the groundwork for a critical reconsideration of how existing approaches might be used in the development of new regulation, as well as best practices for the industries involved in making children's digital play spaces. In so doing, it argues that children's online play spaces be reimagined as a crucial new form of public sphere in which children's rights and digital citizenship must be prioritized.

Mokyr provides a long term perspective on the economic impact of technological change, surveying developments in production technologies between 500 BC and 1914.

'The Singularity' is what Silicon Valley calls the idea that, eventually, we will be overrun by machines that are able to take decisions and act for themselves. What no one says is that it happened before.

A few hundred years ago, humans started building the robots that now rule our world. They are called states and corporations: immensely powerful artificial entities, with capacities that go far beyond what any individual can do, and which, unlike us, need never die.

They have made us richer, safer and healthier than would have seemed possible even a few generations ago - and they may yet destroy us. The Handover distils over three hundred years of thinking about how to live with artificial agency.

First Published in 2001. In this collection of essays and interviews, Mark Poster examines theoretical approaches and develops his own position on our information based society. He contends that new communications media disrupt and transfigure the way identities are constituted in cultural exchanges. He looks in detail at several aspects of what might be called "internet culture", including virtuality and democracy. Poster advocates an awareness of the Internet and other new forms of communication, calling for a mobilization to ensure accessibility to all and to configure technology into vehicles of open cultural creation. For example, nothing is pure about the Internet politically, he points out, and it remains an open question as to who will transform the potentiality of new communications media into determinate cultural configurations. This book explores the rupture and potentiality between the electronic self and the face-to-face self inherent in new forms of technology and media.

Not long ago we were spectators, passive consumers of mass media. Now, on YouTube and blogs and Facebook and Twitter, we are media. No longer content in our traditional role as couch potatoes, we approach television shows, movies, even advertising as invitations to participate as experiences to immerse ourselves in at will. Frank Rose introduces us to the people who are reshaping media for a two-way world, changing how we play, how we communicate, and how we think."

If the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates came to life again today, he would wonder how airplanes fly and light bulbs glow, but not wonder much about the world's political and social changes that took place since his time. The author puts himself in the position of explaining to Socrates the technological fundamentals behind all our modern conveniences . Since he takes Socrates seriously, the author accepts the challenge of introducing the relevant mathematical and technical concepts, and he does so in a remarkably easy-tounderstand and accurate way. The result is a comprehensive overview of the elements of our technical civilization, an overview properly based upon elementary but solid mathematical and scientific principles. Everyone with an inclination toward science and technology can take advantage of the clear structure, the comprehensive presentation and the many wonderfully-illustrated examples of the book.

Digital Democracy examines the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their consequences for political institutions and assesses critically the concept of an emergent electronic democracy.
The first Section discusses the concepts and issues of `Electronic Democracy' with chapters on democracy and cyberspace, local democracy, global control and interactive ICTs. In the second section, entitled ICTs and the State, the chapters examine the impacts and implications of televising the British House of Commons, the effects of ICTs on Political Parties, and closed circuit television. The final section discusses ICTs and the citizen with chapters covering democracies online, strengthening communities in the Information Age and the community network.
Digital Democracy will provide invaluable reading for those studying social policy, politics and sociology as well as for policy analysts, social scientists and computer scientists.

Democracy in the Digital Age is a fascinating philosophical exploration of how the emerging information and communication technologies are impacting political participation in the United States. Rather than being the antidote to democratic ills, the political conversations occurring online are neither inclusive nor deliberative, suggesting that new technologies, as currently designed and used, are as much threats to progress as they are vehicles of progress. Wilhelm discussses four features of digitally-mediated political likfe (resources, inclusiveness, deliberation and design) and puts forward public policy solutions to bridge the digital divide.

Democracy in the Digital Age is a fascinating philosophical exploration of how the emerging information and communication technologies are impacting political participation in the United States. Rather than being the antidote to democratic ills, the political conversations occurring online are neither inclusive nor deliberative, suggesting that new technologies, as currently designed and used, are as much threats to progress as they are vehicles of progress.

This book addresses the measurement of the effect of information technology (IT) investments on a firm's productivity. Determining a quantifiable impact of a firm's IT has plagued senior executives, researchers, and policy-makers for several years, as evidenced by articles in trade magazines such as Fortune and Businessweek and in academic journals such as Management Science. Simple statistical techniques for measuring IT impact in a firm are fraught with methodological problems, as these techniques do not account for either the causal direction in managerial decision making or the behavioral assumptions about firms. Therefore, such studies have led to results and inferences that are not generalizable. While studies that measure the satisfaction of people who use IT are important, management typically would like to know whether IT has reduced operation costs by streamlining processes or increased revenues by increasing the demand-meeting capability of the firm. This book attempts to determine cost-reduction or output-enhancement that may be linked to IT investments through methodological sophistication.
The healthcare industry presents an important and interesting context in which to study IT impacts for several reasons. First, since the implementation of the Prospective Payment System (PPS) by Medicaid, most hospitals adopted cost containment measures, and hence capital investments in hospitals have come under greater scrutiny than ever before. Second, hospitals have been more thorough in reporting capital and labor expenses and revenues (due to state regulation) at a level of detail that makes it possible to aggregate IT and other capital investments without serious measurementerror. Most non-healthcare firms do not collect or report such data in their financial statements. Finally, though hospitals were slow in IT adoption, most hospitals have been acquiring sophisticated hardware and software over the past few years.
Results of the analysis bear evidence of the positive impact of IT on production of healthcare services. It also shows how methodological differences can lead to conflicting results. The effect of PPS determined in a comparative way shows that the economic behavior in the post-PPS differs from that in the pre-PPS years.

Information Technology and Organizational Transformation is arguably the key challenge facing corporate executives and business school academics alike as we approach the millennium. Much that is superficial has been written on the topic in recent years. The siren call of the more popular literature in this area — seductive in the simplicity of the message of radically improved business performance brought about by IT and process re-engineering — has led to the unwary foundering on the rocks of the realpolitik associated with organizational change. But organizational innovation is possible — as the case studies included in this book amply demonstrate. While ‘best practice’ solutions may be illusory, the examples given herein, taken together with the fruits of research undertaken by leading academics from Continental Europe, Scandinavia, North America and the UK, provide key lessons that one ignores at one’s peril. This is a highly important contribution to knowledge. Bringing together such key themes as organizational learning, knowledge management, IT and business strategy alignment, the management of change, inter-organizational communications, corporate innovation and business process change, this book provides significant learning for those willing to challenge much of the received wisdom on this fascinating topic.

A great technological and scientific innovation of the last half of the twentieth century, the computer has revolutionized how we organize information, how we communicate with each other, and even the way we think about the human mind. Computers have eased the drudgery of such tasks as calculating sums and clerical work, making them both more bearable and more efficient, whatever the occasional frustration they carry with them. The computer has become a standard fixture in our culture, a necessity for many aspects of business, recreation, and everyday life. In this book, Eric G. Swedin and David L. Ferro offer an accessible short history of this dynamic technology, covering its central themes from ancient times to the present day.

We can't imagine our lives without the Internet. It is the tool of our existence; without it we couldn't work, plan our social and leisure activities, and interact with friends. The Internet’s influence on contemporary society extends across every aspect of our personal and professional lives, but how has this altered us in psychological terms? How are we to understand how the Internet can promote enormous amounts of caring and kindness to strangers and yet be the source of unremitting acts of terror?

This book, grounded in the latest cutting-edge research, enhances our understanding of how we, and our children, behave online. It explores questions such as:

Why does our self-control abandon us sometimes on the Internet?

Why does the Internet create a separate realm of social and personal relationships?

How does all that change us as people?

Are youngsters really as exposed and threatened on the web as people think?

Internet Psychology: The Basics is a vital and fascinating guide to the online world, drawing on classic theories of human behaviour to shed fresh light on this central facet of modern life. It argues that, even in an age of constant technological advancement, our understanding of the human psyche remains rooted in these well-established theories. Embracing both positive and negative aspects of Internet use, this easy introduction to the subject will appeal to students and general readers alike.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Personality and Internet Use Chapter 2: Who gets Richer on the Net?Chapter 3 - Is there real love online?Chapter 4: Aggression and the Internet: why is it so easy to be aggressive on the net?Chapter 5: What did you learn on the Internet today: how will we protect our children online?Chapter 6: The Elderly and Wellness: How can the elderly population utilize the Internet to improve their wellbeing? Chapter 7: The power of belonging: Online groups and their impactChapter 8: Leadership: leading people to the targetChapter 9: Is there good in the online world? Helping others through the Internet. Chapter 10: Will the Internet bring peace? Using the net to solve global intergroup conflicts.Chapter 11 Whither the Internet?

The major shift going on today in the technologies of reading and writing raises important questions about conventional conceptions of literacy and its role in education, society, and culture. What are the important characteristics of electronic forms of reading and writing distinguishing them from printed forms? To what extent and in what ways is literacy being transformed by new technologies? This central question is addressed in this volume from diverse, multidisciplinary perspectives. The contributing authors focus on a guiding question in one of the following areas, which correspond to the major sections of the book:
*Transforming Texts. What are the new differences between printed and electronic texts, and what are the implications of new textual forms for defining literacy, especially in regard to teaching and learning in schools?
*Transforming Readers and Writers. How do electronic reading and writing change conceptualizations of literacy development from childhood through adulthood?
*Transforming Classrooms and Schools. What are the effects of introducing new reading and writing technologies into schools and classrooms?
*Transforming Instruction. How can instruction be adapted in response to the changing literacy landscape, and how can teachers and students exploit forms of reading and writing to enhance teaching and learning?
*Transforming Society. What are the broad societal implications of the increasing prevalence of electronic forms of reading and writing?
*Transforming Literacy Research. What are the questions that must be addressed as digital reading and writing become more common, and what approaches to research will be most useful in addressing those questions?
This volume is the result of an interactive process. The contributors met as a group to discuss drafts of their chapters at a one-day meeting convened and sponsored by the National Reading Research Center, and had read each others' chapters prior to this gathering. That meeting was followed by a two-day conference attended by approximately 180 researchers, educators, and policymakers who responded to an open invitation to present papers and to attend sessions focusing on the six major themes of the book. Contributors then revised their chapters based on interactions with fellow contributors, conference participants, and volume editors. Thus, this work is more than just a compilation of the individual authors' views. Rather, it represents a synthesis of a broad range of current thinking about how literacy is being and may be transformed by technology.

The dramatic advances in computer and telecommunications technologies such as the Internet, virtual reality,smart cards or multimedia applications are increasingly regarded as ushering in a new form of society: the Information Society. Politicians, policy makers and business gurus are all encouraging us to join the information superhighway at the nearest junction or risk being excluded from the social and economic benefits of the information revolution. Cyberspace Divide critically considers the complex relationship between technological change, its effect upon social divisions, its consequences for social action and the emerging strategies for social inclusion in the Information Age.
This book analyses issues of agency, autonomy and equality as they are affected by global communications networks and information technologies. The contributors discuss such themes as human interaction, ethical behaviour, power relationships and gender divisions as well as the growing disparity between the information rich and the information poor. Also contrasted are the policy formulations by nation-states and trading areas such as the EU and China. Cyberspace Divide will be invaluable reading for those studying social policy, sociology, computing and communication studies.

The two volumes IFIP AICT 551 and 552 constitute the refereed proceedings of the 15th IFIP WG 9.4 International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, ICT4D 2019, held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in May 2019. The 97 revised full papers and 2 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 185 submissions. The papers present a wide range of perspectives and disciplines including (but not limited to) public administration, entrepreneurship, business administration, information technology for development, information management systems, organization studies, philosophy, and management. They are organized in the following topical sections: communities, ICT-enabled networks, and development; digital platforms for development; ICT for displaced population and refugees. How it helps? How it hurts?; ICT4D for the indigenous, by the indigenous and of the indigenous; local technical papers; pushing the boundaries - new research methods, theory and philosophy in ICT4D; southern-driven human-computer interaction; sustainable ICT, informatics, education and learning in a turbulent world - "doing the safari way".

Open innovation increases the profit of companies and organizations via the input and the adoption of new ideas that are transformed into new processes, products, and services. Yet, how do we ensure that adopters of such innovations focus on relevant problems and use appropriate methods? How should we manage open innovation technologies? How can we exploit distributed knowledge and inventions? And how can we promote them successfully on the market?

With valuable lessons to be learned from academic research and industrial experiences of e.g. Intel, Nokia, Philips Healthcare, small municipalities, e-learning platforms and user communities, this book focuses on some of the key dimensions of open innovation and open innovation technologies. It is divided into three themes: theme 1 deals with open innovation as it is in use today, including theoretical underpinnings and lessons from related research fields. Theme 2 analyzes the use of open innovation in organizations today in order to extract best practices. Theme 3 presents forward-looking theoretical research as well as practical future uses of open innovation. Each chapter addresses the particular topics by presenting experiences and results gained in real life projects and/or by empirical research, and clearly states its purpose and how readers are supposed to benefit from it. Overall, the objectives of this book are to advance and disseminate research on systematic open innovation, and to make its results available to practitioners. Thus, the intended target audience includes the international academic community, industrial enterprises, and public authorities."

A New York Times bestselling author and tech columnist's counter-intuitive guide to staying relevant - and employable - in the machine age by becoming irreplaceably human. It's not a future scenario any more. We've been taught that to compete with automation and AI, we'll have to become more like the machines themselves, building up technical skills like coding. But, there's simply no way to keep up. What if all the advice is wrong? And what do we need to do instead to become futureproof? We tend to think of automation as a blue-collar phenomenon that will affect truck drivers, factory workers, and other people with repetitive manual jobs. But it's much, much broader than that. Lawyers are being automated out of existence. Last year, JPMorgan Chase built a piece of software called COIN, which uses machine learning to review complicated contracts and documents. It used to take the firm's lawyers more than 300,000 hours every year to review all of those documents. Now, it takes a few seconds, and requires just one human to run the program. Doctors are being automated out of existence, too. Last summer, a Chinese tech company built a deep learning algorithm that diagnosed brain cancer and other diseases faster and more accurately than a team of 15 top Chinese doctors. Kevin Roose has spent the past few years studying the question of how people, communities, and organisations adapt to periods of change, from the Industrial Revolution to the present. And the insight that is sweeping through Silicon Valley as we speak -- that in an age dominated by machines, it's human skills that really matter - is one of the more profound and counter-intuitive ideas he's discovered. It's the antidote to the doom-and-gloom worries many people feel when they think about AI and automation. And it's something everyone needs to hear. In nine accessible, prescriptive chapters, Roose distills what he has learned about how we will survive the future, that the way to become futureproof is to become incredibly, irreplaceably human.

The ebook version of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and is freely available to read online. This book presents how young children's current practices when playing with tablets inform digital experiences in Denmark and Japan. Through an interdisciplinary lens and a grounded theory approach, Froes identifies and maps these practices, which compose the taxonomy of tablet play and proposes a series of theoretical concepts that complement recent theories related to play and digital literacy studies. Tablet devices bring with them not only a multitude of options, but they also help create notions of digital space and environments defining emerging territories in young children's play experiences. Young children play with these devices and have fun indulging in digital worlds, while discovering and problem-solving with a variety of narratives and interfaces encountered on these digital playgrounds. A set of tablet play characteristics, such as multimodal applications (apps) combined with tablets' physical and digital affordances shape children's digital play. The data collected through observations informed some noteworthy aspects, including how children's hands gain and perform an embodied knowledge of digital spaces. This embodied knowledge develops through digital play interactions, defining what is proposed as digital penmanship. Complementary to the penmanship, several symbols and a range of modes of use shape a rich multimodal semiotic vocabulary in children's digital play experiences. These early digital experiences set the rules for the playgrounds and assert digital tablets as twenty-first-century toys, shaping young children's playful literacy.

Sponsored by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS), this volume celebrates the section's thirtieth anniversary. Lead editor Barry Wellman joins forces with former and current CITAMS chairs Wenhong Chen, Shelia Cotten, and Laura Robinson, as well as Casey Brienza, founder of the Media Sociology Preconference, to look back at the history of the section, review some of its most important themes, and set the agenda for future discussion. Alongside its sister volume, The "M" in CITAMS@30: Media Sociology, this valuable book shows the impact CITAMS has had, and continues to have, on academic and public discourse. Featuring leading scholars in the fields of sociology of communication, information technologies and media, it reveals how the section had transcended disciplinary boundaries, and demonstrates how it holds the skills to address some of the biggest challenges of our digital age. It is essential reading for all those interested in both the story of CITAMS to date, and the role it will play in the future.

There is a growing body of literature that focuses on the similarities and differences between how people behave in the offline world vs. how they behave in these virtual environments. Data mining has aided in discovering interesting insights with respect to how people behave in these virtual environments. The book addresses prediction, mining and analysis of offline characteristics and behaviors from online data and vice versa. Each chapter will focus on a different aspect of virtual worlds to real world prediction e.g., demographics, personality, location, etc.

Today's complex, information-intensive problems often require people to work together. Mostly these tasks go far beyond simply searching together; they include information lookup, sharing, synthesis, and decision-making. In addition, they all have an end-goal that is mutually beneficial to all parties involved. Such "collaborative information seeking" (CIS) projects typically last several sessions and the participants all share an intention to contribute and benefit. Not surprisingly, these processes are highly interactive. Shah focuses on two individually well-understood notions: collaboration and information seeking, with the goal of bringing them together to show how it is a natural tendency for humans to work together on complex tasks. The first part of his book introduces the general notions of collaboration and information seeking, as well as related concepts, terminology, and frameworks; and thus provides the reader with a comprehensive treatment of the concepts underlying CIS. The second part of the book details CIS as a standalone domain. A series of frameworks, theories, and models are introduced to provide a conceptual basis for CIS. The final part describes several systems and applications of CIS, along with their broader implications on other fields such as computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human-computer interaction (HCI). With this first comprehensive overview of an exciting new research field, Shah delivers to graduate students and researchers in academia and industry an encompassing description of the technologies involved, state-of-the-art results, and open challenges as well as research opportunities.