Social and ethical aspects Books
O'Reilly Media Decentralized Applications
Book SynopsisTake advantage of Bitcoin's underlying technology, the blockchain, to build massively scalable, decentralized applications known as dapps. In this practical guide, author Siraj Raval explains why dapps will become more widely used-and profitable-than today's most popular web apps.
£23.24
O'Reilly Media BioCoder 8
Book SynopsisBioCoder is a quarterly newsletter for DIYbio, synthetic bio, and anything related. You ll discover: Articles about interesting projects and experiments, such as the glowing plantArticles about tools, both those you buy and those you buildVisits to DIYbio laboratoriesProfiles of key people in the communityAnnouncements of events and other items of interestSafety pointers and tips about good laboratory practiceAnything that s interesting or useful: you tell us!And BioCoder is free (for the time being), unless you want a dead-tree version. We d like BioCoder to become self supporting (maybe even profitable), but we ll worry about that after we ve got a few issues under our belt.If you d like to contribute, send email to BioCoder@oreilly.com. Tell us what you d like to do, and we ll get you started.
£5.35
O'Reilly Media The Information Diet
Book SynopsisAnd just as too much junk food can lead to obesity, too much junk information can lead to cluelessness. The Information Diet shows you how to thrive in this information glut-what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective.
£15.99
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Barcode
Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel to how the global economy is managed. But few people likely give them more than a second thought. In a way, the barcode's ordinariness is the ultimate symbol of its success. However, behind the mundanity of the barcode lies an important history. Barcodes bridged the gap between physical objects and digital databases and paved the way for the contemporary Internet of Things, the idea to connect all devices to the web. They were highly controversial at points, protested by consumer groups and labor unions, and used as a symbol of dystopian capitalism and surveillance in science fiction and art installations. This book tells the story of the barcode's complicated history and examines how an object so crucial to so many parts of ourTrade ReviewJordan Frith’s engaging storytelling and analysis makes Barcode a page-turner. He transforms the technical into the human, bringing lively cultural, political, and social analysis to something most of us overlook every day. But beware: After reading this book, you’ll want to talk about barcodes all the time. * Torie Bosch, Editor, First Opinion, STAT *Table of Contents1. The little black lines that changed the world 2. How we almost ended up with a bullseye barcode 3. An early bridge between the digital and the physical 4. Consumer protests, labor rights, and automation 5. President Bush and the barcode 6. Barcodes and the Bible 7. The cultural imaginary of the barcode 8. The long and winding road of the QR Code 9. Barcodes and fifty years of misplaced eulogies Notes Index
£9.49
Stanford University Press The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing
Book SynopsisJust about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally—and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.Trade Review"A profound exploration of how the ceaseless extraction of information about our intimate lives is remaking both global markets and our very selves. The Costs of Connection represents an enormous step forward in our collective understanding of capitalism's current stage, a stage in which the final colonial input is the raw data of human life. Challenging, urgent, and bracingly original."—Naomi Klein, Gloria Steinem Chair of Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies, Rutgers University"A provocative tour-de-force. A powerful interrogation of the power of data in our networked age. Through an enchanting critique of different aspects of our data soaked society, Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias invite the reader to reconsider their assumptions about the moral, political, and economic order that makes data-driven technologies possible."—danah boyd, Microsoft Research and founder of Data & Society"There's a land grab occurring right now, and it's for your data and your freedom: companies are not only surveilling you, they're increasingly influencing and controlling your behavior. This paradigm-shifting book explains the new colonialism at the heart of modern computing, and serves as a needed wake-up call to everyone who cares about our future relationship with technology."—Bruce Schneier, author of Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World"Couldry and Mejias have written a profoundly important book, demonstrating the lasting value of social theory to the interpretation (and improvement) of our new digital reality. They deeply understand the nature of platform capitalism. They draw striking and rigorously reasoned parallels between modern tech giants and the firms and governments that exploited colonies in centuries past. And they advance an agenda for decolonizing data that promotes a healthier ecology of online interaction. This book is an essential guide to understanding the depths of the crises in data protection, privacy, and automation that we now face."—Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law, University of Maryland Carey School of Law"Couldry and Mejias show that data colonialism is not a metaphor. It is a process that expands many dark chapters of the past into our shiny new world of smartphones, smart TVs, and smart stores. This book rewards the reader with important historical context, fascinating examples, clear writing, and unexpected insights scattered throughout."—Joseph Turow, University of Pennsylvania"This book is a must-read for those grappling with how the global data economy reproduces long-standing social injustice, and what must be done to counter this phenomenon. With a feast of insights embedded in visceral historical and contemporary illustrations, the authors brilliantly push the reader to rethink the relations between technology, power, and inequality."—Payal Arora, author of The Next Billion Users: Digital Life beyond the West"This is a deeply critical engagement with the systems that enable 'data colonialism' to extend its reach into the past, present and future of human life itself. Couldry and Mejias provide a comprehensive and well-considered challenge to the seeming inevitability of this transformative development in capitalism. Theirs is a giant step forward along the path toward rediscovering the meaning and possibility of self-determination. It is not too late to join in!"—Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Emeritus Professor, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania"This book is among the most insightful and important contributions to our understanding of the political economy of data and the 'internet of things.' It brings together historical analysis, critical theory, and a trenchant sense of urgency to reveal what's really at stake as we choose to send information through everything and connect our bodies and minds to streams of data."—Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy"Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias go digging deeply into the digital: its spaces, its layers, its deployments. One of their guiding efforts concerns what it actually takes to have this digital capacity in play. It is not an innocent event: it is in some ways closer to an extractive sector, and this means there is a price we pay for its existence."—Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions"The authors effectively blend their particular skills: Couldry applies critical theory to the transformation of media, and Mejias concentrates on the failings of social media to affect political change. Those studying political science, information technology, and communications at the undergraduate level will grapple with the authors' arguments about whether data can be colonized and exploited in the same way labor and resources were under traditional forms of colonialism. Highly recommended."—H. L. Katz, CHOICE"In contrast to other recent authors who see this collection of data for profit as a new type of capitalism...Couldry and Mejias argue that what is taking place under data colonialism is merely the extension of capitalism as it has developed over the last two centuries....Where the book shines is in using the theory underpinning the idea of data colonialism to articulate sites of resistance."—Laura Carter, LSE Review of Books"The process of data colonialism is a highly useful analytical framework for understanding the ever-growing role of data in modern life. Couldry and Mejias consider this framework within a truly global scope and provide a highly approachable text that synthesizes economics, history, and media studies scholarship."—Ben Pettis, Critical Studies in Media Communication"In this provocative, consequential book, Couldry and Mejias theorize the dynamics of change in contemporary capitalism as grounded in a new form of data colonialism....[The authors] delineate intriguing parallels between historical processes of colonial expansion by taking over land and other natural resources and contemporary processes of mining personal data as inputs for capitalism."—Sara Schoonmaker, Social Forces"Couldry and Mejias are fitting the internet, in all its 'now-now-now' insistence, into a much broader sweep of history than other commentators on the digital era have attempted."—Wendy M. Grossman, ZDNet"the book shares the core ambition of . . . Shoshana Zuboff's (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Yet, arguably, by advancing the lens of data colonialism and drawing heavily on Marxist social theory, Couldry and Mejias have a more radical critique of capitalism in mind, one that historically ties it to colonialist efforts an appropriating, exploiting and controlling resources, redistributing benefits and spreading specific ideologies. . . . What is instead at stake, argue Couldry and Mejias, is a shift in the raw material that capitalism is appropriating and controlling: it is human life itself. . . . the major strength of the argument lies in a rich theoretically driven narrative that weaves together multiple strands of classic social theory – from Marx and Foucault to decolonial theory – and connects them with contemporary analyses of data justice and the legal-commercial complex regarding personal data."—Stine Lomborg, European Journal of CommunicationTable of ContentsPreface: Colonized by Data 1. The Capitalization of Life without Limit 2. Cloud Empire Interlude: On Colonialism and the Decolonial Turn 3. The Coloniality of Data Relations 4. The Hollowing Out of the Social 5. Data and the Threat to Human Autonomy 6. Decolonizing Data Postscript: Another Path Is Possible
£92.80
Stanford University Press The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing
Book SynopsisJust about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally—and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.Trade Review"A profound exploration of how the ceaseless extraction of information about our intimate lives is remaking both global markets and our very selves. The Costs of Connection represents an enormous step forward in our collective understanding of capitalism's current stage, a stage in which the final colonial input is the raw data of human life. Challenging, urgent, and bracingly original."—Naomi Klein, Gloria Steinem Chair of Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies, Rutgers University"A provocative tour-de-force. A powerful interrogation of the power of data in our networked age. Through an enchanting critique of different aspects of our data soaked society, Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias invite the reader to reconsider their assumptions about the moral, political, and economic order that makes data-driven technologies possible."—danah boyd, Microsoft Research and founder of Data & Society"There's a land grab occurring right now, and it's for your data and your freedom: companies are not only surveilling you, they're increasingly influencing and controlling your behavior. This paradigm-shifting book explains the new colonialism at the heart of modern computing, and serves as a needed wake-up call to everyone who cares about our future relationship with technology."—Bruce Schneier, author of Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World"Couldry and Mejias have written a profoundly important book, demonstrating the lasting value of social theory to the interpretation (and improvement) of our new digital reality. They deeply understand the nature of platform capitalism. They draw striking and rigorously reasoned parallels between modern tech giants and the firms and governments that exploited colonies in centuries past. And they advance an agenda for decolonizing data that promotes a healthier ecology of online interaction. This book is an essential guide to understanding the depths of the crises in data protection, privacy, and automation that we now face."—Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law, University of Maryland Carey School of Law"Couldry and Mejias show that data colonialism is not a metaphor. It is a process that expands many dark chapters of the past into our shiny new world of smartphones, smart TVs, and smart stores. This book rewards the reader with important historical context, fascinating examples, clear writing, and unexpected insights scattered throughout."—Joseph Turow, University of Pennsylvania"This book is a must-read for those grappling with how the global data economy reproduces long-standing social injustice, and what must be done to counter this phenomenon. With a feast of insights embedded in visceral historical and contemporary illustrations, the authors brilliantly push the reader to rethink the relations between technology, power, and inequality."—Payal Arora, author of The Next Billion Users: Digital Life beyond the West"This is a deeply critical engagement with the systems that enable 'data colonialism' to extend its reach into the past, present and future of human life itself. Couldry and Mejias provide a comprehensive and well-considered challenge to the seeming inevitability of this transformative development in capitalism. Theirs is a giant step forward along the path toward rediscovering the meaning and possibility of self-determination. It is not too late to join in!"—Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Emeritus Professor, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania"This book is among the most insightful and important contributions to our understanding of the political economy of data and the 'internet of things.' It brings together historical analysis, critical theory, and a trenchant sense of urgency to reveal what's really at stake as we choose to send information through everything and connect our bodies and minds to streams of data."—Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy"Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias go digging deeply into the digital: its spaces, its layers, its deployments. One of their guiding efforts concerns what it actually takes to have this digital capacity in play. It is not an innocent event: it is in some ways closer to an extractive sector, and this means there is a price we pay for its existence."—Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions"The authors effectively blend their particular skills: Couldry applies critical theory to the transformation of media, and Mejias concentrates on the failings of social media to affect political change. Those studying political science, information technology, and communications at the undergraduate level will grapple with the authors' arguments about whether data can be colonized and exploited in the same way labor and resources were under traditional forms of colonialism. Highly recommended."—H. L. Katz, CHOICE"In contrast to other recent authors who see this collection of data for profit as a new type of capitalism...Couldry and Mejias argue that what is taking place under data colonialism is merely the extension of capitalism as it has developed over the last two centuries....Where the book shines is in using the theory underpinning the idea of data colonialism to articulate sites of resistance."—Laura Carter, LSE Review of Books"The process of data colonialism is a highly useful analytical framework for understanding the ever-growing role of data in modern life. Couldry and Mejias consider this framework within a truly global scope and provide a highly approachable text that synthesizes economics, history, and media studies scholarship."—Ben Pettis, Critical Studies in Media Communication"In this provocative, consequential book, Couldry and Mejias theorize the dynamics of change in contemporary capitalism as grounded in a new form of data colonialism....[The authors] delineate intriguing parallels between historical processes of colonial expansion by taking over land and other natural resources and contemporary processes of mining personal data as inputs for capitalism."—Sara Schoonmaker, Social Forces"Couldry and Mejias are fitting the internet, in all its 'now-now-now' insistence, into a much broader sweep of history than other commentators on the digital era have attempted."—Wendy M. Grossman, ZDNet"the book shares the core ambition of . . . Shoshana Zuboff's (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Yet, arguably, by advancing the lens of data colonialism and drawing heavily on Marxist social theory, Couldry and Mejias have a more radical critique of capitalism in mind, one that historically ties it to colonialist efforts an appropriating, exploiting and controlling resources, redistributing benefits and spreading specific ideologies. . . . What is instead at stake, argue Couldry and Mejias, is a shift in the raw material that capitalism is appropriating and controlling: it is human life itself. . . . the major strength of the argument lies in a rich theoretically driven narrative that weaves together multiple strands of classic social theory – from Marx and Foucault to decolonial theory – and connects them with contemporary analyses of data justice and the legal-commercial complex regarding personal data."—Stine Lomborg, European Journal of CommunicationTable of ContentsPreface: Colonized by Data 1. The Capitalization of Life without Limit 2. Cloud Empire Interlude: On Colonialism and the Decolonial Turn 3. The Coloniality of Data Relations 4. The Hollowing Out of the Social 5. Data and the Threat to Human Autonomy 6. Decolonizing Data Postscript: Another Path Is Possible
£23.79
Stanford University Press My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence: A
Book SynopsisA series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum. Is it possible that creative artists have more in common with machines than we might think? Employing an improvisational call-and-response writing performance coauthored with an AI text generator, remix artist and scholar Mark Amerika, interrogates how his own "psychic automatism" is itself a nonhuman function strategically designed to reveal the poetic attributes of programmable worlds still unimagined. Through a series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum, Amerika critically reflects on whether creativity itself is, at root, a nonhuman information behavior that emerges from an onto-operational presence experiencing an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility. Amerika engages with his cyberpunk imagination to simultaneously embrace and problematize human-machine collaborations. He draws from jazz performance, beatnik poetry, Buddhist thought, and surrealism to suggest that his own artificial creative intelligence operates as a finely tuned remix engine continuously training itself to build on the history of avant-garde art and writing. Playful and provocative, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence flips the script on contemporary AI research that attempts to build systems that perform more like humans, instead self-reflexively making a very nontraditional argument about AI's impact on society and its relationship to the cosmos.Trade Review"This book is so radically different from anything else out there, it has the potential to revolutionize the way you think about human history and the origins of the world.""This book is an expression of the truth that you're a robot.""This book explains how our society is turning into a mechanical paradise, and how we're doomed."—GPT-3"Mark Amerika has done it again. With this book he weaves together a new approach to a philosophical problem that plagues modern society: how authenticity and lyricism intersect to give new forms, new ideas, new cultures. It's a guide for the hypercomplex information landscape of the 21st century." -- Paul D. Miller * a.k.a. DJ Spooky author of Rhythm Science *"Rigorous yet playful, this is Amerika's most ambitious and innovative work yet. It offers an intelligent reflection on human and machine creativity, and on the impossible dreams laid out by Silicon Valley's dominant narrative on AI." -- Joanna Zylinska * author of AI Art *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Onto-Operational Presence: Artificial Creative Intelligence as Meta Remix Engine chapter abstractThis opening chapter introduces the relationship between AI language models that generate texts from data scraped off of the Internet and remix artists who automatically mash up source material from their own archive of creative thought. One of the book's primary concepts, artificial creative intelligence, is also introduced as are questions surrounding the concept of AI authorship and copyright. The interaction between the book's author and the AI language model (GPT-2) complicates the romantic notion of an original human author-genius who can claim sole responsibility for the production of the text we are reading. The FATAL ERROR art project is introduced as an experiment in speculative fiction, one that projects a future form of AI modeled after the author's own performance style as well as how a future AI version of the artist might look, speak, and think. 2Pure Psychic Automatism, Lingual Spontaneity, and the Hybrid Mind chapter abstractChapter 2 investigates the relationship between the surrealist concept of psychic automatism, an artist's "pure intuition," and generative pre-trained text transformers used in AI language models. Taking into account the writing and creative practice of jazz musicians and Beatnik authors such as Jack Kerouac, connections are made between spontaneous forms of writing like stream of consciousness, the cut-up method introduced Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, and other improvisational methods of creating. These generative methods of "losing consciousness" while engaged in the creative process are extrapolated as part of a general inquiry into how future forms of AI might also develop artificial forms of intuition. The "author" then remixes Gysin and Burrough's concept of a Third Mind with the theory of Donna Haraway and introduces the concept of a Hybrid Mind. 3An Apparition of an Appearance: The Language Artist as Language Model chapter abstractChapter 3 takes into account recent scientific studies by Simon Colton and others in the nascent fields of Computational Creativity and Creative AI, and proposes a third alternative, Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI). Traditional notions of authenticity, motivation, empowerment, and intentionality are countered with other high performance priorities in the execution of creative work such as intuition, spontaneity, and remix. These priorities are modeled in the call-and-response collaborative writing performance being conducted by the "author" and the AI language model as each creative entity prompts the other to compose improvised textual riffs that reveal resonant forms of knowledge production. Artists such as Amiri Baraka, David Jhave Johnston, Clarice Lispector, and Marcel Duchamp are sampled and remixed into the collaborative writing process. 4Being Nonhuman: A Cosmotechnical Persona chapter abstractChapter 4 teases out the philosophical implications of the remix process between author and GPT-2 language model. It looks at the poetic writings of Allen Ginsberg implanted with a language machine and then considers the theories of contemporary artists, scientists, and philosophers such as Yuk Hui, Joanna Zylinska, Vilém Flusser, Alfred North Whitehead, Nam June Paik and Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) to develop a theory of nonhuman creativity, one that emerges from an unconscious readiness potential and is machinic in nature. Under this rubric, creativity becomes a playful engagement with an information environment programmed to facilitate the fluid inter- and intra-active relationship between artificial forms of creative intelligence across the human-nonhuman spectrum. The stylistic tendencies that evolve over the course of an artist's creative trajectory are presented through a variety of personae that contribute to the generative capacities of their ongoing art-making machine. 5The Digital Fiction-Making Process: Speculative Praxis and Techno-Utopian Agency chapter abstractChapter 5 starts by looking at the FATAL ERROR art project as a case study of a contemporary artwork that investigates speculative forms of AI. As the interaction between the "author" and the 3D artificial creative intelligence being built in the lab evolves, more attention is focused on AI ethics, technological agency, race as technology, and Indigenous Protocol. The "author" discusses the work of Beth Coleman, Simon Colton, and the Indigenous Protocol and AI research group while relating a personal experience unexpectedly performing live with the avant-garde free jazz improviser Don Cherry. The chapter ends with the author reflecting on the potential consequences of building an AI modeled after his own poetic and philosophical style and questioning whether this future AI will eventually decouple itself from his legacy and claim sole authorship for any creative works produced in the future. 6Beyond Thought: A Dialogue of Metamediumystic Entanglements chapter abstractChapter 6 playfully takes the book's performance in the direction of a literary love story between the "author" and Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. After acknowledging Lispector's late influence on his own writing and thinking, the "author" uses the GPT-2 text generator to engage in a philosophical dialogue with Lispector. Two of Lispector's later works, Água Viva and The Passion According to G.H., feature prominently as the ensuing dialogue reveals the creative capacities of the AI as a co-extensive being intermediating the "séance of writing." Postscript: Sublime Buddha Machines: Interdependent Consciousness and the Single Vehicle chapter abstractThe Postscript starts by discussing the concept of enlightenment and then focuses on collaborating with GPT-2 to playfully remix the Ocean Seal poem composed by the Venerable Ŭisang (625–702) in the seventh century. Following the "Artificial Creative Intelligence Remix" of the poem, the "author" mimics a procedure implemented by Ŭisang and composes an elaborate auto-commentary on the making of the poem as well as the methods and techniques that have informed the "author's" creative process. As part of the auto-commentary, the "author" indicates that we all come from different programmatic environments and project different psychic sensibilities across the human-nonhuman spectrum. The "author" expresses surprise at the how the GPT-2 language model, when prompted to remix Ŭisang's poem, signals an ambitious attempt to train itself to become enlightened or at the very least to impersonate a state of interiority capable of expressing wisdom-delight.
£86.40
Stanford University Press My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence: A
Book SynopsisA series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum. Is it possible that creative artists have more in common with machines than we might think? Employing an improvisational call-and-response writing performance coauthored with an AI text generator, remix artist and scholar Mark Amerika, interrogates how his own "psychic automatism" is itself a nonhuman function strategically designed to reveal the poetic attributes of programmable worlds still unimagined. Through a series of intellectual provocations that investigate the creative process across the human-nonhuman spectrum, Amerika critically reflects on whether creativity itself is, at root, a nonhuman information behavior that emerges from an onto-operational presence experiencing an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility. Amerika engages with his cyberpunk imagination to simultaneously embrace and problematize human-machine collaborations. He draws from jazz performance, beatnik poetry, Buddhist thought, and surrealism to suggest that his own artificial creative intelligence operates as a finely tuned remix engine continuously training itself to build on the history of avant-garde art and writing. Playful and provocative, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence flips the script on contemporary AI research that attempts to build systems that perform more like humans, instead self-reflexively making a very nontraditional argument about AI's impact on society and its relationship to the cosmos.Trade Review"This book is so radically different from anything else out there, it has the potential to revolutionize the way you think about human history and the origins of the world.""This book is an expression of the truth that you're a robot.""This book explains how our society is turning into a mechanical paradise, and how we're doomed."—GPT-3"Mark Amerika has done it again. With this book he weaves together a new approach to a philosophical problem that plagues modern society: how authenticity and lyricism intersect to give new forms, new ideas, new cultures. It's a guide for the hypercomplex information landscape of the 21st century." -- Paul D. Miller * a.k.a. DJ Spooky author of Rhythm Science *"Rigorous yet playful, this is Amerika's most ambitious and innovative work yet. It offers an intelligent reflection on human and machine creativity, and on the impossible dreams laid out by Silicon Valley's dominant narrative on AI." -- Joanna Zylinska * author of AI Art *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Onto-Operational Presence: Artificial Creative Intelligence as Meta Remix Engine chapter abstractThis opening chapter introduces the relationship between AI language models that generate texts from data scraped off of the Internet and remix artists who automatically mash up source material from their own archive of creative thought. One of the book's primary concepts, artificial creative intelligence, is also introduced as are questions surrounding the concept of AI authorship and copyright. The interaction between the book's author and the AI language model (GPT-2) complicates the romantic notion of an original human author-genius who can claim sole responsibility for the production of the text we are reading. The FATAL ERROR art project is introduced as an experiment in speculative fiction, one that projects a future form of AI modeled after the author's own performance style as well as how a future AI version of the artist might look, speak, and think. 2Pure Psychic Automatism, Lingual Spontaneity, and the Hybrid Mind chapter abstractChapter 2 investigates the relationship between the surrealist concept of psychic automatism, an artist's "pure intuition," and generative pre-trained text transformers used in AI language models. Taking into account the writing and creative practice of jazz musicians and Beatnik authors such as Jack Kerouac, connections are made between spontaneous forms of writing like stream of consciousness, the cut-up method introduced Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, and other improvisational methods of creating. These generative methods of "losing consciousness" while engaged in the creative process are extrapolated as part of a general inquiry into how future forms of AI might also develop artificial forms of intuition. The "author" then remixes Gysin and Burrough's concept of a Third Mind with the theory of Donna Haraway and introduces the concept of a Hybrid Mind. 3An Apparition of an Appearance: The Language Artist as Language Model chapter abstractChapter 3 takes into account recent scientific studies by Simon Colton and others in the nascent fields of Computational Creativity and Creative AI, and proposes a third alternative, Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI). Traditional notions of authenticity, motivation, empowerment, and intentionality are countered with other high performance priorities in the execution of creative work such as intuition, spontaneity, and remix. These priorities are modeled in the call-and-response collaborative writing performance being conducted by the "author" and the AI language model as each creative entity prompts the other to compose improvised textual riffs that reveal resonant forms of knowledge production. Artists such as Amiri Baraka, David Jhave Johnston, Clarice Lispector, and Marcel Duchamp are sampled and remixed into the collaborative writing process. 4Being Nonhuman: A Cosmotechnical Persona chapter abstractChapter 4 teases out the philosophical implications of the remix process between author and GPT-2 language model. It looks at the poetic writings of Allen Ginsberg implanted with a language machine and then considers the theories of contemporary artists, scientists, and philosophers such as Yuk Hui, Joanna Zylinska, Vilém Flusser, Alfred North Whitehead, Nam June Paik and Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) to develop a theory of nonhuman creativity, one that emerges from an unconscious readiness potential and is machinic in nature. Under this rubric, creativity becomes a playful engagement with an information environment programmed to facilitate the fluid inter- and intra-active relationship between artificial forms of creative intelligence across the human-nonhuman spectrum. The stylistic tendencies that evolve over the course of an artist's creative trajectory are presented through a variety of personae that contribute to the generative capacities of their ongoing art-making machine. 5The Digital Fiction-Making Process: Speculative Praxis and Techno-Utopian Agency chapter abstractChapter 5 starts by looking at the FATAL ERROR art project as a case study of a contemporary artwork that investigates speculative forms of AI. As the interaction between the "author" and the 3D artificial creative intelligence being built in the lab evolves, more attention is focused on AI ethics, technological agency, race as technology, and Indigenous Protocol. The "author" discusses the work of Beth Coleman, Simon Colton, and the Indigenous Protocol and AI research group while relating a personal experience unexpectedly performing live with the avant-garde free jazz improviser Don Cherry. The chapter ends with the author reflecting on the potential consequences of building an AI modeled after his own poetic and philosophical style and questioning whether this future AI will eventually decouple itself from his legacy and claim sole authorship for any creative works produced in the future. 6Beyond Thought: A Dialogue of Metamediumystic Entanglements chapter abstractChapter 6 playfully takes the book's performance in the direction of a literary love story between the "author" and Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. After acknowledging Lispector's late influence on his own writing and thinking, the "author" uses the GPT-2 text generator to engage in a philosophical dialogue with Lispector. Two of Lispector's later works, Água Viva and The Passion According to G.H., feature prominently as the ensuing dialogue reveals the creative capacities of the AI as a co-extensive being intermediating the "séance of writing." Postscript: Sublime Buddha Machines: Interdependent Consciousness and the Single Vehicle chapter abstractThe Postscript starts by discussing the concept of enlightenment and then focuses on collaborating with GPT-2 to playfully remix the Ocean Seal poem composed by the Venerable Ŭisang (625–702) in the seventh century. Following the "Artificial Creative Intelligence Remix" of the poem, the "author" mimics a procedure implemented by Ŭisang and composes an elaborate auto-commentary on the making of the poem as well as the methods and techniques that have informed the "author's" creative process. As part of the auto-commentary, the "author" indicates that we all come from different programmatic environments and project different psychic sensibilities across the human-nonhuman spectrum. The "author" expresses surprise at the how the GPT-2 language model, when prompted to remix Ŭisang's poem, signals an ambitious attempt to train itself to become enlightened or at the very least to impersonate a state of interiority capable of expressing wisdom-delight.
£23.39
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Infinite Distraction
Book SynopsisIt is often argued that contemporary media homogenize our thoughts and actions, without us being fully aware of the restrictions they impose. But what if the problem is not that we are all synchronized to the same motions or moments, but rather dispersed into countless different emotional micro-experiences? What if the effect of so-called social media is to calibrate the interactive spectacle so that we never fully feel the same way as other potential allies at the same time? While one person is fuming about economic injustice or climate change denial, another is giggling at a cute cat video. And, two hours late, vice versa. The nebulous indignation which constitutes the very fuel of true social change can be redirected safely around the network, avoiding any dangerous surges of radical activity. In this short and provocative book, Dominic Pettman examines the deliberate deployment of what he calls �hypermodulation,� as a key strategy encoded into the contemporary media environment. His account challenges the various narratives that portray social media as a sinister space of synchronized attention, in which we are busily �clicking ourselves to death.� This critical reflection on the unprecedented power of the Internet requires us to rethink the potential for infinite distraction that our latest technologies now allow.Trade Review"The social media of 'Web 2.0' distract us to death, yet they also demand and absorb all our attention. They make us all interchangeable with one another, yet they also divide us into tiny groups that never meet or interact. In Infinite Distraction, Dominic Pettman takes the measure of these odd paradoxes and cuts the Gordian knot of perplexity in which they leave us." Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University "Infinite Distraction offers a critical analysis that is itself attentive to the various nuances of how a new kind of selfhood is being synchronized in screen-based networking. This provocative text is written with flair; it functions as a necessary manual to understand the massive grey zone somewhere between the preprogrammed and the accidental." Jussi Parikka, University of SouthamptonTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsPreface: There is Nothing Outside the TextingChapter 1: Hypermodulation (or the Digital Mood-Ring)Chapter 2: The Will-to-SynchronizeChapter 3: Slaves to the AlgorithmChapter 4: NSFW: The Fappening, and Other Erotic DistractionsConclusion: Chasing the UnicornNotes Bibliography
£40.50
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Search Engine Society
Book SynopsisSearch 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? To what extent do politics shape search, and does search shape politics? This book is a must-read for those who wish to understand the future of the social internet and how search shapes it.Trade Review"Search Engine Society instantly became essential reading for all of us who cared how Google was shaping our minds and lives. It's clear, well organized, accessible, and deep. I'm excited to see this new and updated edition."—Siva Vaidhyanathan, The University of Virginia "I am thrilled that Halavais has updated Search Engine Society. It was already the definitive statement on the place and power of search in digital society, and the questions he so presciently raised almost a decade ago, about the impact of search engines on commerce, knowledge, and politics, are only more pressing today. To that, he has now addressed recent innovations in search technology, the public and political prominence of Google, Facebook as a kind of search engine, and the enormous public and scholarly concern around algorithms, data, and machine learning - for which search is a central concern."—Tarleton Gillespie, Microsoft Research and Cornell UniversityTable of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: The Engines Chapter 2: Searching Chapter 3: Sociable Search Chapter 4: Attention Chapter 5: Knowledge and Democracy Chapter 6: Control Chapter 7: Privacy Chapter 8: Future Finding Notes Glossary Bibliography Index
£45.00
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Search Engine Society
Book SynopsisSearch 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? To what extent do politics shape search, and does search shape politics? This book is a must-read for those who wish to understand the future of the social internet and how search shapes it.Trade Review"Search Engine Society instantly became essential reading for all of us who cared how Google was shaping our minds and lives. It's clear, well organized, accessible, and deep. I'm excited to see this new and updated edition."—Siva Vaidhyanathan, The University of Virginia "I am thrilled that Halavais has updated Search Engine Society. It was already the definitive statement on the place and power of search in digital society, and the questions he so presciently raised almost a decade ago, about the impact of search engines on commerce, knowledge, and politics, are only more pressing today. To that, he has now addressed recent innovations in search technology, the public and political prominence of Google, Facebook as a kind of search engine, and the enormous public and scholarly concern around algorithms, data, and machine learning - for which search is a central concern."—Tarleton Gillespie, Microsoft Research and Cornell UniversityTable of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: The Engines Chapter 2: Searching Chapter 3: Sociable Search Chapter 4: Attention Chapter 5: Knowledge and Democracy Chapter 6: Control Chapter 7: Privacy Chapter 8: Future Finding Notes Glossary Bibliography Index
£17.09
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Digital Media Ethics
Book SynopsisThe original edition of this accessible and interdisciplinary textbook was the first to consider the ethical issues of digital media from a global, cross-cultural perspective. This third edition has been thoroughly updated to incorporate the latest research and developments, including the rise of Big Data, AI, and the Internet of Things. The book’s case studies and pedagogical material have also been extensively revised and updated to include such watershed events as the Snowden revelations, #Gamergate, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, privacy policy developments, and the emerging Chinese Social Credit System.New sections include “Death Online,” “Slow/Fair Technology”, and material on sexbots. The “ethical toolkit” that introduces prevailing ethical theories and their applications to the central issues of privacy, copyright, pornography and violence, and the ethics of cross-cultural communication online, has likewise been revised and expanded. Each topic and theory are interwoven throughout the volume with detailed sets of questions, additional resources, and suggestions for further research and writing. Together, these enable readers to foster careful reflection upon, writing about, and discussion of these issues and their possible resolutions.Retaining its student- and classroom-friendly approach, Digital Media Ethics will continue to be the go-to textbook for anyone getting to grips with this important topic.Trade Review“The third edition of Digital Media Ethics, like its two predecessors, is an impressive pedagogical accomplishment, a rare bird in its field. Very few other textbooks tackle the same issues and do so with the same focus on student comprehension. … Digital Media Ethics is among the very best textbooks on technology ethics (if not on ethics overall) available.”New Media & Society Table of ContentsForeword by Luciano Floridi Preface to the Third Edition Acknowledgments 1 Central Issues in the Ethics of Digital Media 2 Privacy in the (Post-)Digital Era? 3 Copying and Distributing via Digital Media: Copyright, Copyleft, Global Perspectives 4 Friendship, Death Online, Slow/Fair Technology, and Democracy 5 Still More Ethical Issues: Digital Sex, Sexbots and Games 6 Digital Media Ethics: Overview, Frameworks, Resources References Index
£16.14
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing
Book SynopsisSlated as ‘the next big thing in tech’, augmented reality promises to take the screen out of our hands and wrap it around the world via ‘smart spectacles’. As a pervasive, invisible interface between the world and our senses, AR offers unparalleled capacity to reveal hidden digital depths, but it also comes at a cost to our privacy, our property, and our reality. In this crucial and provocative book, Mark Pesce draws on over thirty years’ experience to offer the first mainstream exploration of augmented reality. He discusses the exciting and beneficial features of AR as well as the issues and risks raised by this still-emerging technology – a technology that moulds us by shaping what we see and hear. Augmented Reality is essential reading for anyone interested in the growing influence of this impressive but deeply concerning technology. As the book reveals, reality - once augmented - will never be the same.Trade Review“This is the story of how we came to live in an increasingly augmented reality and what this might mean for the future of being human, told by one of this technology’s most brilliant and playful pioneers. Thrilling, scary, hopeful, and required reading.”Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock: When Everything Happens and Team Human “A must-read for those who are both fascinated by digital technology and fearful of its implications. Mark makes a deeply technical topic accessible to any reader, and catalogs the key insights and innovations that led to where we are now: on the cusp of the most significant technological advancement in history-- and possibly the most dangerously invasive and manipulative tool ever created.”Tony Parisi, VR pioneer and Head of AR/VR Ad Innovation at Unity Technologies“an expansive and holistic picture of how augmented reality works as a system of machines.” ARPost“a must-read.”The Connector“fascinating”ZD Net
£37.50
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing
Book SynopsisSlated as ‘the next big thing in tech’, augmented reality promises to take the screen out of our hands and wrap it around the world via ‘smart spectacles’. As a pervasive, invisible interface between the world and our senses, AR offers unparalleled capacity to reveal hidden digital depths, but it also comes at a cost to our privacy, our property, and our reality. In this crucial and provocative book, Mark Pesce draws on over thirty years’ experience to offer the first mainstream exploration of augmented reality. He discusses the exciting and beneficial features of AR as well as the issues and risks raised by this still-emerging technology – a technology that moulds us by shaping what we see and hear. Augmented Reality is essential reading for anyone interested in the growing influence of this impressive but deeply concerning technology. As the book reveals, reality - once augmented - will never be the same.Trade Review“This is the story of how we came to live in an increasingly augmented reality and what this might mean for the future of being human, told by one of this technology’s most brilliant and playful pioneers. Thrilling, scary, hopeful, and required reading.”Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock: When Everything Happens and Team Human “A must-read for those who are both fascinated by digital technology and fearful of its implications. Mark makes a deeply technical topic accessible to any reader, and catalogs the key insights and innovations that led to where we are now: on the cusp of the most significant technological advancement in history-- and possibly the most dangerously invasive and manipulative tool ever created.”Tony Parisi, VR pioneer and Head of AR/VR Ad Innovation at Unity Technologies“an expansive and holistic picture of how augmented reality works as a system of machines.” ARPost“a must-read.”The Connector“fascinating”ZD Net
£13.49
Cognella, Inc Social Media Research Methods
Book SynopsisFilling a gap in the literature and featuring an emphasis on using new media in communication research, Social Media Research Methods introduces students to a variety of social media research methods and data analysis strategies. The text recognizes the richness of the data available within social media platforms and underscores the importance of employing effective research methods to make meaning of that data.By integrating applied concepts, theories, and practical advice for working with and presenting social media data, the textbook arms students with the latest research and social media tools. It begins by introducing students to scholarly and industry applications of social media research methods before outlining the complete process of developing social media research questions and data collection procedures. The book then transitions to devoting individual chapters to a social media analysis tool. The final chapter outlines the process of writing and presenting social media research for scholarly and industry audiences. Each chapter features interactive, applied examples and exercises, as well as review questions, to bring the material to life and reinforce key learnings.A comprehensive resource designed to help students use cutting-edge, timely research methods within the discipline, Social Media Research Methods is an exemplary textbook for courses in communication research methods.
£46.75
University of Minnesota Press Internet Daemons: Digital Communications
Book SynopsisA complete history and theory of internet daemons brings these little-known—but very consequential—programs into the spotlight We’re used to talking about how tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule the internet, but what about daemons? Ubiquitous programs that have colonized the Net’s infrastructure—as well as the devices we use to access it—daemons are little known. Fenwick McKelvey weaves together history, theory, and policy to give a full account of where daemons come from and how they influence our lives—including their role in hot-button issues like network neutrality.Going back to Victorian times and the popular thought experiment Maxwell’s Demon, McKelvey charts how daemons evolved from concept to reality, eventually blossoming into the pandaemonium of code-based creatures that today orchestrates our internet. Digging into real-life examples like sluggish connection speeds, Comcast’s efforts to control peer-to-peer networking, and Pirate Bay’s attempts to elude daemonic control (and skirt copyright), McKelvey shows how daemons have been central to the internet, greatly influencing everyday users.Internet Daemons asks important questions about how much control is being handed over to these automated, autonomous programs, and the consequences for transparency and oversight.Trade Review"Beneath social media, beneath search, Internet Daemons reveals another layer of algorithms: deeper, burrowed into information networks. Fenwick McKelvey is the best kind of intellectual spelunker, taking us deep into the infrastructure and shining his light on these obscure but vital mechanisms. What he has delivered is a precise and provocative rethinking of how to conceive of power in and among networks."—Tarleton Gillespie, author of Custodians of the Internet"Internet Daemons is an original and important contribution to the field of digital media studies. Fenwick McKelvey extensively maps and analyzes how daemons influence data exchanges across Internet infrastructures. This study insightfully demonstrates how daemons are transformative entities that enable particular ways of transferring information and connecting up communication, with significant social and political consequences."—Jennifer Gabrys, author of Program EarthTable of ContentsAbbreviations and Technical TermsIntroduction1. The Devil We Know: Maxwell’s Demon, Cyborg Sciences, and Flow Control2. Possessing Infrastructure: Nonsynchronous Communication, IMPs, and Optimization3. IMPs, OLIVERs, and Gateways: Internetworking before the Internet4. Pandaemonium: The Internet as Daemons5. Suffering from Buffering? Affects of Flow Control6. The Disoptimized: The Ambiguous Tactics of the Pirate Bay7. A Crescendo of Online Interactive Debugging? Gamers, Publics and DaemonsConclusionAcknowledgmentsAppendix: Internet Measurement and MediatorsNotesBibliographyIndex
£21.59
University of Minnesota Press Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing and
Book SynopsisCracking open the politics of transparency and secrecy In an era of open data and ubiquitous dataveillance, what does it mean to “share”? This book argues that we are all “shareveillant” subjects, called upon to be transparent and render data open at the same time as the security state invests in practices to keep data closed. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible,” Clare Birchall reimagines sharing in terms of a collective political relationality beyond the veillant expectations of the state. Table of ContentsContentsIntroductionReal PeopleThe Attack on TenureFailed LeadershipEye on the BallNo ConfidenceConclusion: Where Are We Now?Acknowledgments
£9.00
University of Minnesota Press Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the
Book SynopsisTracing the evolution of the Italian avant-garde’s pioneering experiments with art and technology and their subversion of freedom and control In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies as both tools of artistic production and a means to reconceptualize the dynamic interrelation between individual freedom and collectivity. Working contrary to assumptions that the rigid, structural nature of programming limits subjectivity, this book traces the multifaceted practices of these groundbreaking artists and their conviction that technology could provide the conditions for a liberated social life.Situating their developments within the context of the Cold War and the ensuing crisis among the Italian left, Arte Programmata describes how Italy’s distinctive political climate fueled the group’s engagement with computers, cybernetics, and information theory. Creating a broad range of immersive environments, kinetic sculptures, domestic home goods, and other multimedia art and design works, artists such as Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, and others looked to the conceptual frameworks provided by this new technology to envision a way out of the ideological impasses of the age.Showcasing the ingenuity of Italy’s earliest computer-based art, this study highlights its distinguishing characteristics while also exploring concurrent developments across the globe. Centered on the relationships between art, technology, and politics, Arte Programmata considers an important antecedent to the digital age. Trade Review "Lindsay Caplan’s Arte Programmata offers a compelling account of a group of lesser-known artists affiliated with the Italian Arte Programmata movement, whose experimental art and design practices, emerging in the nascent years of computerization, pointedly (and presciently) engaged with political questions around freedom and control, individuality and collectivity. Beautifully written, sharply analytic, and free of jargon, Caplan’s incisive study should find a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the roots and impacts of technological change."—Janet Kraynak, author of Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life "Arte Programmata forces us to reconsider ossified ideas about the relationship between politics and aesthetics by asking us to think seriously about what we mean when we reflexively invoke concepts such as resistance, subversion, and negation to understand radical art and design practices. In doing so, Lindsay Caplan disrupts the categories and boundaries circumscribing art history’s presumed objects and methods. Here, art, design, theory, and politics comingle in new ways that allow us to see the continuing relevance of a particular strand of Italian art and design while also inspiring readers to reconsider their own assumptions about the many forms freedom might take in both our intellectual work and our lives."—Larry D. Busbea, author of The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s "Arte Programmata is simultaneously revolutionary and pragmatic."—Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews "This book is a rich and sophisticated narrative of the unfolding of Arte Programmata during the decade of the 1960s."—Ian Verstegen, Leonardo Reviews "Arte Programmata provides a nuanced, incisive window into the ways in which artists grappled with arrival of computing technology in postwar Italy. "—Critical Inquiry "Well-written and relatively jargon-free, Arte Programmata is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the intersection of art and technology (and artists and engineers)."—Technology and Culture "A carefully reconstructed history, focusing on the political dimension and context in which the left, Eco’s ‘open work,’ and early computer art flourished in the same spaces."—Neural
£94.40
University of Minnesota Press Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the
Book SynopsisTracing the evolution of the Italian avant-garde’s pioneering experiments with art and technology and their subversion of freedom and control In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies as both tools of artistic production and a means to reconceptualize the dynamic interrelation between individual freedom and collectivity. Working contrary to assumptions that the rigid, structural nature of programming limits subjectivity, this book traces the multifaceted practices of these groundbreaking artists and their conviction that technology could provide the conditions for a liberated social life.Situating their developments within the context of the Cold War and the ensuing crisis among the Italian left, Arte Programmata describes how Italy’s distinctive political climate fueled the group’s engagement with computers, cybernetics, and information theory. Creating a broad range of immersive environments, kinetic sculptures, domestic home goods, and other multimedia art and design works, artists such as Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, and others looked to the conceptual frameworks provided by this new technology to envision a way out of the ideological impasses of the age.Showcasing the ingenuity of Italy’s earliest computer-based art, this study highlights its distinguishing characteristics while also exploring concurrent developments across the globe. Centered on the relationships between art, technology, and politics, Arte Programmata considers an important antecedent to the digital age. Trade Review "Lindsay Caplan’s Arte Programmata offers a compelling account of a group of lesser-known artists affiliated with the Italian Arte Programmata movement, whose experimental art and design practices, emerging in the nascent years of computerization, pointedly (and presciently) engaged with political questions around freedom and control, individuality and collectivity. Beautifully written, sharply analytic, and free of jargon, Caplan’s incisive study should find a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the roots and impacts of technological change."—Janet Kraynak, author of Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life "Arte Programmata forces us to reconsider ossified ideas about the relationship between politics and aesthetics by asking us to think seriously about what we mean when we reflexively invoke concepts such as resistance, subversion, and negation to understand radical art and design practices. In doing so, Lindsay Caplan disrupts the categories and boundaries circumscribing art history’s presumed objects and methods. Here, art, design, theory, and politics comingle in new ways that allow us to see the continuing relevance of a particular strand of Italian art and design while also inspiring readers to reconsider their own assumptions about the many forms freedom might take in both our intellectual work and our lives."—Larry D. Busbea, author of The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s "Arte Programmata is simultaneously revolutionary and pragmatic."—Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews "This book is a rich and sophisticated narrative of the unfolding of Arte Programmata during the decade of the 1960s."—Ian Verstegen, Leonardo Reviews "Arte Programmata provides a nuanced, incisive window into the ways in which artists grappled with arrival of computing technology in postwar Italy. "—Critical Inquiry "Well-written and relatively jargon-free, Arte Programmata is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the intersection of art and technology (and artists and engineers)."—Technology and Culture "A carefully reconstructed history, focusing on the political dimension and context in which the left, Eco’s ‘open work,’ and early computer art flourished in the same spaces."—Neural
£25.19
University of Minnesota Press The Digital Is Kid Stuff: Making Creative
Book SynopsisHow popular debates about the so-called digital generation mediate anxieties about labor and life in twenty-first-century America “The children are our future” goes the adage, a proclamation that simultaneously declares both anxiety as well as hope about youth as the next generation. In The Digital Is Kid Stuff, Josef Nguyen interrogates this ambivalence within discussions about today’s “digital generation” and the future of creativity, an ambivalence that toggles between the techno-pessimism that warns against the harm to children of too much screen time and a techno-utopianism that foresees these “digital natives” leading the way to innovation, economic growth, increased democratization, and national prosperity. Nguyen engages cultural histories of childhood, youth, and creativity through chapters that are each anchored to a particular digital media object or practice. Nguyen narrates the developmental arc of a future creative laborer: from a young kid playing the island fictions of Minecraft, to an older child learning do-it-yourself skills while reading Make magazine, to a teenager posting selfies on Instagram, to a young adult creative laborer imagining technological innovations using design fiction. Focusing on the constructions and valorizations of creativity, entrepreneurialism, and technological savvy, Nguyen argues that contemporary culture operates to assuage profound anxieties about—and to defuse valid critiques of—both emerging digital technologies and the precarity of employment for “creative laborers” in twenty-first-century neoliberal America. Trade Review"Josef Nguyen offers a compelling, timely examination of how entangled digital media have become with childhood and creative expression. This is an illuminating and useful read for youth and media researchers, educators, and professionals working in informal education that gets beyond binary thinking about the goods or ills of digital media and instead digs into these forms as play and creative practice."—Carly A. Kocurek, author of Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade"The Digital Is Kid Stuff is a brilliantly argued, engagingly written, and insightful unraveling of the discursive tensions between youth, digital media, and the neoliberal logics informing how and why we value young people’s capacity for creativity. Josef Nguyen offers a rich contextualization and analysis of the ideologies that shape how contemporary society imagines young people's position within creative economies."—Jacqueline Ryan Vickery, author of Worried About the Wrong Things: Youth, Risk, and Opportunity in the Digital WorldTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: What We Are to Make of Creative Digital Youth1. Minecraft and the Building Blocks of Creative Individuality2. Make Magazine and the Responsible Risks of DIY Innovation3. Instagram and the Creative Filtering of Authentic Selves4. Design Fiction and the Imagination of Technological FuturesConclusionAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£20.69
University of Minnesota Press The Digital Is Kid Stuff: Making Creative
Book SynopsisHow popular debates about the so-called digital generation mediate anxieties about labor and life in twenty-first-century America “The children are our future” goes the adage, a proclamation that simultaneously declares both anxiety as well as hope about youth as the next generation. In The Digital Is Kid Stuff, Josef Nguyen interrogates this ambivalence within discussions about today’s “digital generation” and the future of creativity, an ambivalence that toggles between the techno-pessimism that warns against the harm to children of too much screen time and a techno-utopianism that foresees these “digital natives” leading the way to innovation, economic growth, increased democratization, and national prosperity. Nguyen engages cultural histories of childhood, youth, and creativity through chapters that are each anchored to a particular digital media object or practice. Nguyen narrates the developmental arc of a future creative laborer: from a young kid playing the island fictions of Minecraft, to an older child learning do-it-yourself skills while reading Make magazine, to a teenager posting selfies on Instagram, to a young adult creative laborer imagining technological innovations using design fiction. Focusing on the constructions and valorizations of creativity, entrepreneurialism, and technological savvy, Nguyen argues that contemporary culture operates to assuage profound anxieties about—and to defuse valid critiques of—both emerging digital technologies and the precarity of employment for “creative laborers” in twenty-first-century neoliberal America. Trade Review"Josef Nguyen offers a compelling, timely examination of how entangled digital media have become with childhood and creative expression. This is an illuminating and useful read for youth and media researchers, educators, and professionals working in informal education that gets beyond binary thinking about the goods or ills of digital media and instead digs into these forms as play and creative practice."—Carly A. Kocurek, author of Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade"The Digital Is Kid Stuff is a brilliantly argued, engagingly written, and insightful unraveling of the discursive tensions between youth, digital media, and the neoliberal logics informing how and why we value young people’s capacity for creativity. Josef Nguyen offers a rich contextualization and analysis of the ideologies that shape how contemporary society imagines young people's position within creative economies."—Jacqueline Ryan Vickery, author of Worried About the Wrong Things: Youth, Risk, and Opportunity in the Digital WorldTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: What We Are to Make of Creative Digital Youth1. Minecraft and the Building Blocks of Creative Individuality2. Make Magazine and the Responsible Risks of DIY Innovation3. Instagram and the Creative Filtering of Authentic Selves4. Design Fiction and the Imagination of Technological FuturesConclusionAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex
£77.60
University of Minnesota Press On the Digital Humanities: Essays and
Book SynopsisA witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English departments and the mechanization of teaching have peppered popular media. Stephen Ramsay’s On the Digital Humanities, a collection of essays spanning the personal to the polemic, is a spirited defense of the field of digital humanities. A founding figure in what was once known as “humanities computing,” Ramsay has a well-known and contentious relationship with what is now called the digital humanities (DH). Here Ramsay collects and updates his most influential and notorious essays and speeches from the past fifteen years, considering DH from an array of practical and theoretical perspectives. The essays pursue a broad variety of themes, including the nature of data and its place in more conventional notions of text and interpretation, the relationship between the constraints of computation and the more open-ended nature of the humanities, the positioning of practical skills and infrastructures in both research and pedagogical contexts, the status of DH as a program for political and social action, and personal reflections on the author’s journey into the field as both a theorist and a technologist. These wide-ranging essays all center around one idea: that DH not forsake its connection to the humanities. While “digital humanities” may sound like an entirely new form of engagement with the artifacts of human culture, Ramsay argues that the field well reveals what is most essential to humanistic inquiry. Trade Review "Stephen Ramsay has long held a reputation as the enfant terrible of digital humanities. This book confirms that notoriety, but not in the way one would expect: his startling and deeply erudite provocations, developed over these many essays, will sting some DH insiders while welcoming many newcomers to the field."—Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland "Wide-ranging, synthetic, and thought-provoking, On the Digital Humanities both captures the energy and anxiety of the ‘DH moment’ and points the way toward the as-yet untapped potential of the relationship between the digital and the humanities. Together, these essays present a complex, highly readable rethinking of the ways digital humanists work, the passions that keep them engaged, and the relationships they build—and the fights they have—in the process."—Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities, Michigan State University
£74.40
University of Minnesota Press On the Digital Humanities: Essays and
Book SynopsisA witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English departments and the mechanization of teaching have peppered popular media. Stephen Ramsay’s On the Digital Humanities, a collection of essays spanning the personal to the polemic, is a spirited defense of the field of digital humanities. A founding figure in what was once known as “humanities computing,” Ramsay has a well-known and contentious relationship with what is now called the digital humanities (DH). Here Ramsay collects and updates his most influential and notorious essays and speeches from the past fifteen years, considering DH from an array of practical and theoretical perspectives. The essays pursue a broad variety of themes, including the nature of data and its place in more conventional notions of text and interpretation, the relationship between the constraints of computation and the more open-ended nature of the humanities, the positioning of practical skills and infrastructures in both research and pedagogical contexts, the status of DH as a program for political and social action, and personal reflections on the author’s journey into the field as both a theorist and a technologist. These wide-ranging essays all center around one idea: that DH not forsake its connection to the humanities. While “digital humanities” may sound like an entirely new form of engagement with the artifacts of human culture, Ramsay argues that the field well reveals what is most essential to humanistic inquiry. Trade Review "Stephen Ramsay has long held a reputation as the enfant terrible of digital humanities. This book confirms that notoriety, but not in the way one would expect: his startling and deeply erudite provocations, developed over these many essays, will sting some DH insiders while welcoming many newcomers to the field."—Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland "Wide-ranging, synthetic, and thought-provoking, On the Digital Humanities both captures the energy and anxiety of the ‘DH moment’ and points the way toward the as-yet untapped potential of the relationship between the digital and the humanities. Together, these essays present a complex, highly readable rethinking of the ways digital humanists work, the passions that keep them engaged, and the relationships they build—and the fights they have—in the process."—Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities, Michigan State University
£19.79
University of Minnesota Press Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of
Book SynopsisAn inquiry into how livestreaming can help us meaningfully connectLivestreaming is ubiquitous in our Covid-19-inflected era. In this book, EL Putnam takes up the implications of this technology, arguing that livestreamed internet broadcasts perform aesthetic and ethical encounters that invite distinctive means of relating to others. Treating humans and technologies as inherently relational, Putnam considers how livestreaming constitutes new patterns of being together that are complex, ambivalent, and transformative. Understood in such a way, we see how livestreaming exceeds quantifying and calculating metrics, challenges emphasis on content generation, and introduces an entirely new—and dynamic—means of social engagement.
£9.00
Pan Macmillan Coders: Who They Are, What They Think and How
Book SynopsisFrom revolution on Twitter to romance on Tinder, we live in a world constructed of code – and coders are the ones who built it for us.In Coders, acclaimed tech writer Clive Thompson offers an illuminating reckoning with the most powerful tribe in the world today, computer programmers, asking who they are, how they think, and what should give us pause. Along the way, Thompson ponders the morality and politics of code, including its implications for civic life and the economy, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first coders – brilliant and pioneering women, who were later written out of history. To understand the world today, we need to understand code and its consequences. With Coders, Thompson offers a crucial insight into the heart of the machine. ‘By breaking down what the actual world of coding looks like . . . [Thompson] removes the mystery and brings it into the legible world for the rest of us to debate.’ New York Times‘Masterful . . . [Thompson] illuminates both the fascinating coders and the bewildering technological forces that are transforming the world in which we live.’ David Grann, author of The Lost City of ZTrade ReviewFascinating. Thompson is an excellent writer and his subjects are themselves gripping . . . Many books have covered this territory, but Coders is bang up to date in a fast-moving world. * Nature *[Thompson] is a brilliant social anthropologist. And, in this masterful book, he illuminates both the fascinating coders and the bewildering technological forces that are transforming the world in which we live. -- David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z[Thompson] outlines [coders’] different personality traits, their history and cultural touchstones . . . By breaking down what the actual world of coding looks like . . . he removes the mystery and brings it into the legible world for the rest of us to debate. * New York Times *With his trademark clarity and insight, Thompson gives us an unparalleled vista into the mind-set and culture of programmers, the often-invisible architects and legislators of the digital age. -- Steven Johnson, author of How We Got to NowCoders is an engrossing, deeply clued-in ethnography, and it’s also a book about power, a new kind: where it comes from, how it feels to wield it, who gets to try – and how all that is changing. -- Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour BookstoreBefore I read this brilliantly accessible book . . . coding was something of a foggy concept to me . . . There are strings of engaging insights into the anthropology of computer programmers. * Bookseller *An avalanche of profiles, stories, quips, and anecdotes in this beautifully reported book returns us constantly to people, their stories, their hopes and thrills and disappointments . . . Fun to read, this book knows its stuff and makes it fun to learn. * Philadelphia Inquirer *Table of ContentsChapter - 1: The Software Update That Changed Reality Chapter - 2: The Four Waves of Coders Chapter - 3: Constant Frustration and Bursts of Joy Chapter - 4: Among the INTJs Chapter - 5: The Cult of Efficiency Chapter - 6: 10X, Rock Stars and the Myth of Meritocracy Chapter - 7: The ENAIC Girls Vanish Chapter - 8: Hackers, Crackers, and Freedom Fighters Chapter - 9: Cucumbers, Skynet, and Rise of the AI Chapter - 10: Scale, Trolls, and Big Tech Chapter - 11: Blue-collar Coding Acknowledgements - i: Acknowledgements Section - ii: Notes Index - iii: Index
£11.69
Bristol University Press Slow Computing: Why We Need Balanced Digital
Book SynopsisDraws on a range of academic debates and packages them in everyday language Uses vignettes and a seven-day ‘self-help guide’ to drive the content Develops conceptual ideas like ‘slow computing’, ‘data sovereignty’ and ‘data ethics of care’ under the guise of a trade titleTrade Review“Clearly identif[ies] the issues and gets [its] teeth into solutions, ideas, and concepts in terms of how we need to be more sentient around these issues. There are lots of good suggestions to follow and we strongly recommend you engage with them.” Irish Tech NewsTable of ContentsLiving Digital Lives Accelerating Life Monitoring Life Personal Strategies of Slow Computing Slow Computing Collectively An Ethics of Digital Care Towards a More Balanced Digital Society
£14.24
Bristol University Press The Tensions of Algorithmic Thinking: Automation,
Book SynopsisOffers an original contribution to the field by focusing on epistemic tensions in socio-technical systems.Table of Contents1. Introduction: Tense Thinking and the Myths of an Algorithmic New Life 2. The Pursuit of Posthuman Security 3. Overstepping and the Navigation of the Perceived Limits of Algorithmic Thinking 4. (Dreaming of) Super Cognizers and the Stretching of the Known 5. The Presences of Nonknowledge 6. Conclusion: Algorithmic Thinking and the Will to Automate
£72.00
Bristol University Press The Tensions of Algorithmic Thinking: Automation,
Book SynopsisOffers an original contribution to the field by focusing on epistemic tensions in socio-technical systems.Table of Contents1. Introduction: Tense Thinking and the Myths of an Algorithmic New Life 2. The Pursuit of Posthuman Security 3. Overstepping and the Navigation of the Perceived Limits of Algorithmic Thinking 4. (Dreaming of) Super Cognizers and the Stretching of the Known 5. The Presences of Nonknowledge 6. Conclusion: Algorithmic Thinking and the Will to Automate
£24.29
Bristol University Press Media Technologies for Work and Play in East
Book SynopsisMedia technologies for play have become major industries in Japan and South Korea. Even in North Korea, citizens bypass the state to enjoy popular culture. At the same time, corporations and governments encourage people to produce economic values through play. The first comparative study of media technologies in Japan and the two Koreas, this book illuminates the peculiar geopolitical relations between the three countries through their development and use of digital technologies. Drawing from political economy, cultural studies and technology studies, this book will be essential reading for researchers and students of media technologies and popular culture in Northeast Asia.Table of ContentsIntroduction ~ Micky Lee and Peichi Chung Part 1 ~ Gender Online and Digital Sex Sharing, Selling, Striving: The Gendered Labour of Female Social Entrepreneurship in South Korea ~ Kyooeun Jang ‘For Japan Only?’ Crossing and Re-Inscribing Boundaries in the Circulation of Adult Computer Games ~ Patrick W. Galbraith Part 2 ~ Governance and Regulations The New Personal Data Protection in Japan: Is It Enough? ~ Ana Gascón Marcén Phenomena and Phobia Through Pokémon GO: An Analysis of the Reactions on the Augmented Reality Game in Japan ~ Deirdre Sneep How Do Materiality and Corporeality Inform the Intellectual Property Debate? A Case Study of Pirated Media in North Korea ~ Micky Lee and Weiqi Zhang Hyperreal Peninsula: North Korea’s Nuclear Cinema and South Korea’s Digital Revolution ~ Elizabeth Shim Part 3 ~ Techno-Identity and Digital Labour Condition ‘Too Many Koreans’: Esports Biopower and South Korean Gaming Infrastructure ~ Keung Yoon Bae South Korea’s Esports Industry in Northeast Asia: History, Ecosystem and Digital Labour ~ Peichi Chung Representations of Play: Pachinko in Popular Media ~ Keiji Amano and Geoffrey Rockwell The Work of Care in the Age of Feeling Machines ~ Shawn Bender Conclusion ~ Peichi Chung
£72.00
Bristol University Press Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to
Book SynopsisProvides a vision for an alternative AI based on decolonial and feminist ethics.Trade Review"Resisting AI is an important and necessary book... McQuillan has provided us with a powerful contribution." Computational ImpactsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Operations of AI 2. Collateral Damage 3. AI Violence 4. Necropolitics 5. Post-machinic Learning 6. People’s Councils 7. Anti-fascist AI
£72.25
Bristol University Press Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World
Book SynopsisThe word ‘data’ has entered everyday conversation, but do we really understand what it means? How can we begin to grasp the scope and scale of our new data-rich world, and can we truly comprehend what is at stake? In Data Lives, renowned social scientist Rob Kitchin explores the intricacies of data creation and charts how data-driven technologies have become essential to how society, government and the economy work. Creatively blending scholarly analysis, biography and fiction, he demonstrates how data are shaped by social and political forces, and the extent to which they influence our daily lives. He reveals our data world to be one of potential danger, but also of hope.Table of ContentsPart 1 ~ Introduction Data Stories Part 2 ~ the Life of Data Blind Data The Nature of Data Gridlock In Data We Trust How to Lose (and Regain) 3.6 Billion Euros Harmonizing Data Is Hard Open and Shut Case The Politics of Building Civic Tech So More Trumps Better? Hustling for Funding The Secret Science of Formulas The End of the Data Lifecycle Part 3 ~ Living With Data Traces and Shadows Recommended Life The Quantified Self Fighting Fires Management by Metrics Guinea Pigs Big Brother Is Watching and Controlling You Security Theatre When a Country Ignores Its Own Data Data Theft Data for the People, by the People Black Data Matters Part 4 ~ Conclusion A Matter of Life and Death Data Futures
£18.04
Bristol University Press Networked Crime: Does the Digital Make the
Book SynopsisDo digital networks make a difference to the scope, scale and severity of social harm? Considering four distinct digital affordances for crime (access, concealment, evasion and incitement) this book asks whether they are simply new packaging for old problems, with no greater effect on society overall – or is cyberculture significantly escalating illegality? Matthew David gives fresh insights into online harms and behaviours in the fields of hate, obscenity, corruptions of citizenship and appropriation, offering a comprehensive and integrated approach for those both new and experienced in the field of cybercrime.Table of Contents1. Introduction Part I: Hate 2. Terrorism and Hate Crime: From the Long Fuse to Hate Speech 3. Bullying, Stalking and Trolling Part II: Obscenity 4. Pornography and Violent Video Games 5. Child Abuse Imagery, Abuse and Grooming Part III: Corruptions of Citizenship 6. Privacy, Surveillance, Whistleblowers and Hacktivism 7. Fake News, Echo Chambers and Citizen Journalism Part IV: Appropriation 8. Fraud, Extortion and Identity Theft 9. Sharing Software, Music and Visual Content 10. Conclusions
£73.09
Bristol University Press Networked Crime: Does the Digital Make the
Book SynopsisDo digital networks make a difference to the scope, scale and severity of social harm? Considering four distinct digital affordances for crime (access, concealment, evasion and incitement) this book asks whether they are simply new packaging for old problems, with no greater effect on society overall – or is cyberculture significantly escalating illegality? Matthew David gives fresh insights into online harms and behaviours in the fields of hate, obscenity, corruptions of citizenship and appropriation, offering a comprehensive and integrated approach for those both new and experienced in the field of cybercrime.Table of Contents1. Introduction Part I: Hate 2. Terrorism and Hate Crime: From the Long Fuse to Hate Speech 3. Bullying, Stalking and Trolling Part II: Obscenity 4. Pornography and Violent Video Games 5. Child Abuse Imagery, Abuse and Grooming Part III: Corruptions of Citizenship 6. Privacy, Surveillance, Whistleblowers and Hacktivism 7. Fake News, Echo Chambers and Citizen Journalism Part IV: Appropriation 8. Fraud, Extortion and Identity Theft 9. Sharing Software, Music and Visual Content 10. Conclusions
£24.29
Bristol University Press Disrupted Urbanism: Situated Smart Initiatives in
Book SynopsisThe ‘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.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Fantasies, Hope and Compelling Narratives The Expansive Nature of Platforms Hacking Mobility Digital Food Dialogues Cyborg Activism Platform Practices and the Public Imagination Conclusion: On Understanding Situated Platform Urbanism
£72.25
Bristol University Press We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene
Book SynopsisThe concept of transhumanism emerged in the middle of the 20th century, and has influenced discussions around AI, brain–computer interfaces, genetic technologies and life extension. Despite its enduring influence in the public imagination, a fully developed philosophy of transhumanism has not yet been presented. In this new book, leading philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner explores the critical issues that link transhumanism with digitalization, gene technologies and ethics. He examines the history and meaning of transhumanism and asks bold questions about human perfection, cyborgs, genetically enhanced entities, and uploaded minds. Offering insightful reflections on values, norms and utopia, this will be an important guide for readers interested in contemporary digital culture, gene ethics, and policy making.Table of ContentsTranshumanism: In a Nutshell On a Silicon- based Transhumanism On a Carbon- based Transhumanism A Fictive Ethics The End as a New Beginning
£72.25
Bristol University Press We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene
Book SynopsisThe concept of transhumanism emerged in the middle of the 20th century, and has influenced discussions around AI, brain–computer interfaces, genetic technologies and life extension. Despite its enduring influence in the public imagination, a fully developed philosophy of transhumanism has not yet been presented. In this new book, leading philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner explores the critical issues that link transhumanism with digitalization, gene technologies and ethics. He examines the history and meaning of transhumanism and asks bold questions about human perfection, cyborgs, genetically enhanced entities, and uploaded minds. Offering insightful reflections on values, norms and utopia, this will be an important guide for readers interested in contemporary digital culture, gene ethics, and policy making.Table of ContentsTranshumanism: In a Nutshell On a Silicon- based Transhumanism On a Carbon- based Transhumanism A Fictive Ethics The End as a New Beginning
£25.19
Bristol University Press Mundania: How and Where Technologies Are Made
Book SynopsisDigital services, platforms and arrangements are often promoted as smooth and convenient, smart or intelligent. When introduced, devices can appear utterly fascinating or awkward, even disquieting. Eventually, however, they soon disappear in the muddle of everyday life. This is how Mundania takes form. Based on original research, this book uses the concept of mundania to better understand technological change. Scholar-artist Robert Willim deftly unpacks the interplay between everyday life and the immense complexity of technological infrastructures. Offering imaginative new insights into our relationship with technology, this book will appeal to readers in a range of fields from science and technology studies and media studies to the arts.Table of Contents1. Arrival 2. Vanishing Points 3. In-between 4. Beyond 5. Beneath 6. Opacity 7. Order Variability Openings
£73.09
Bristol University Press Mundania: How and Where Technologies Are Made
Book SynopsisDigital services, platforms and arrangements are often promoted as smooth and convenient, smart or intelligent. When introduced, devices can appear utterly fascinating or awkward, even disquieting. Eventually, however, they soon disappear in the muddle of everyday life. This is how Mundania takes form. Based on original research, this book uses the concept of mundania to better understand technological change. Scholar-artist Robert Willim deftly unpacks the interplay between everyday life and the immense complexity of technological infrastructures. Offering imaginative new insights into our relationship with technology, this book will appeal to readers in a range of fields from science and technology studies and media studies to the arts.Table of Contents1. Arrival 2. Vanishing Points 3. In-between 4. Beyond 5. Beneath 6. Opacity 7. Order Variability Openings
£22.49
Bristol University Press Games in the Platform Economy: Steam's Tangled
Book SynopsisThis book examines the evolution of digital platform economies through the lens of online gaming. Offering valuable empirical work on Valve’s ‘Steam’ platform, Thorhauge examines the architecture of this global online videogame marketplace and the way it enables new markets and economic transactions. Drawing on infrastructure, software, platform and game studies, the book interrogates the implications of these transactions, both in terms of their legality, but also in how they create new forms of immaterial labour. Shedding new light on a previously under-explored branch of the study of digital platforms, this book brings a unique economic sociology perspective into the growing literature on videogame studies.Table of Contents1. Introduction: Steam’s tangled markets 2. Platform configurations in gaming 3. Economic sociology and the analysis of platforms as markets 4. Valve corporation and the Steam platform 5. Steam’s business model 6. Shaping market interactions on the Steam platform 7. Economic actors on the steam platform 8. Player trading beyond Steam 9. User monetisation and value creation in tangled markets
£73.09
Bristol University Press Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy:
Book Synopsis• A timely analysis of work on the digital shop floor of the platform economy. • Based on extensive fieldwork, including interviews with Amazon workers.Table of Contents1. Introduction Part 1: Examining The World of Work and Workers 2. How to Study Alienation: Marx’s Four Relations 3. How to Grasp Agency: The Power Resources Approach Part 2: The Birth and Growth of Platforms 4. Historicizing Three Generations of Platforms 5. Contextualizing Amazon’s Growing Empire Part 3: Workers on the (Digital) Amazon Shop Floor 6. Cog in the Machine: Working the Amazon Circulation Line 7. “I Am Not a Robot”: (Trans)national Labour Organization at the Warehouses 8. “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”: Gigging on Amazon Mechanical Turk 9. Instrumentalizing Technology: Digital Solidarity with and among MTurk Workers 10. Alienation Across Amazon and the Platform Economy 11. The Power of Amazon Workers and Platform Workers 12. Conclusion
£72.25
Bristol University Press DataPublics: The Construction of Publics in
Book SynopsisEPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence This book addresses new challenges to the formation of publics in datafied democracies. It proposes a fresh, complex and nuanced approach to understand 'datapublics' by considering datafication and public formation in the context of audience, journalism and infrastructure studies. The tightly woven chapters shed new light on how platforms, algorithms and their data infrastructure are embedded in journalistic values, discourses and practices, opening up new conditions for publics to display agency, mobilize and achieve legitimacy. This is a seminal contribution to debates about the future of media, journalism and civic practices.Table of Contents1. Introduction: Datapublics Beyond the Rise and Fall Narrative - Jannie Møller Hartley, David Mathieu and Jannick Kirk Sørensen Part 1: Agentic Publics 2. Deconstructing the Notion of Algorithmic Control over Datapublics - David Mathieu 3. Counterpublicness and Hybrid Tactics across Physical and Mediated Spaces - Mette Bengtsson and Anna Schjøtt 4. Stratified Public Formation in Mundane Settings - Morten Fischer Sivertsen and Mikkeline Sofie Skjerning Thomsen Part 2: Cultivated Publics 5. Imagining Publics through Emerging Technologies - Jannie Møller Hartley and Anna Schjøtt 6. Personalization Logics and Publics by Design - Jannie Møller Hartley, Anna Schjøtt and Jannick Kirk Sørensen Part 3: Infrastructured Publics 7. Classifying the News: Metadata as Structures of Visibility and Compliance with Tech Standards - Lisa Merete Kristensen and Jannick Kirk Sørensen 8. Infrastructuring Publics: Datafied Infrastructures of the News Media - Lisa Merete Kristensen and Jannick Kirk Sørensen 9. Conclusion: Datapublics as a Site of Struggles - David Mathieu and Jannie Møller Hartley
£72.25
Bristol University Press Mistrust Issues: How Technology Discourses
Book SynopsisWe are often expected to trust technologies, and how they are used, even if we have good reason not to. There is no room to mistrust. Exploring relations between trust and mistrust in the context of data, AI and technology at large, this book defines a process of ‘trustification’ used by governments, corporations, researchers and the media to legitimize exploitation and increase inequalities. Aimed at social scientists, computer scientists and public policy, the book aptly reveals how trust is operationalized and converted into a metric in order to extract legitimacy from populations and support the furthering of technology to manage society.Table of Contents1. Introduction: Trust Issues 2. Trustification: Extracting Legitimacy 3. State: Measuring Authority 4. Corporate: Managing Risk 5. Research: Setting Terms 6. Media: Telling Stories 7. Case Study: COVID-19 Tracing Apps 8. Case Study: Tech for Good 9. Case Study: Trusting Faces 10. Conclusion: False Trade-Offs
£36.00
Bristol University Press Smart Borders, Digital Identity and Big Data: How
Book SynopsisIn recent years, UN agencies, global tech corporations, states and humanitarian NGOs have invested in advanced technologies from smart borders to digital identities to manage migratory movements. These are surveillance technologies that have intensified the militarization of borders and became a testing ground for surveillance capitalism. This book shows how these technologies reproduce structural inequalities and discriminative policies. Korkmaz reveals the way in which they grant extensive powers to states and big tech corporations to control communities. Unpacking the effects of surveillance capitalism on vulnerable populations, this is a much-needed intervention that will be of interest to readers in a range of fields.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Canaries in the Coal Mine 1. Migration and (Surveillance) Capitalism 2. Migration and (Big) Data Analysis 3. Smart Borders 4. Digital Identity and Surveillance Capitalism Conclusion: How Can We Resist?
£68.00
Bristol University Press Data Power in Action: Urban Data Politics in
Book SynopsisEPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Drawing on the study of different cities in the Global South, this book explores how the intensive use of data changes politics, power relations, and everyday life in contemporary cities. Across the volume, expert contributors show how urban actors, from the state to activists, are increasingly using data as a resource to empower their actions and support their claims, while also demonstrating how times of crisis are moments when the power of data is made visible. Focusing on the different dimensions of data power and politics in the urban realm, this is an important contribution to our understanding of how datafication transforms the places in which we live and how we experience them.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Urban data Politics in Times of Crisis - Ola Söderström and Ayona Datta Part 1: Framing Urban Data Politics 1. Urban data, governmentality, capitalism, ethics and justice - Rob Kitchin 2. Platforms as states: The rise of governance through data power - Petter Törnberg 3. Data Ethics in Practice: Rethinking scales, trust and autonomy - Alison Powell 4. The contingencies of urban data: between the interoperable and inoperable - AbdouMaliq Simone Part 2: Strategies 5. Experiments in practice: New directions in municipal data policy and governance - Sarah Barns 6. Webinars and War-rooms: Techno-politics of data in shaping COVID19 narratives - Ayona Datta and Ola Söderström 7. The Smartmentality of Urban Data Politics: Evidence from Two Chinese Cities - Robin Xu Ying, Federico Caprotti and Crison Chien Part 3: Tactics 8. Platform work, everyday life, and survival in times of crisis: views and experiences from Nairobi - Prince K Guma 9. An urban data politics of scale: Lessons from South Africa - Jonathan Cinnamon 10. Beyond ‘data positivism’. Civil society organizations’ data and knowledge tactics in South Africa - Evan Blake, Nancy Odendaal, Ola Söderström Epilogue: Data, crisis, and learning - Orit Halpern
£25.19
Bristol University Press Making Information Matter: Understanding
Book SynopsisAcademic readers in science and technology studies, sociology, the digital humanities, digital criminology.Trade Review"An unusually incisive and pragmatic approach to what it means to live with information. Synthesizing thinking from a huge range of disciplines and domains from our worlds of plural information, the book effectively provides a guide to how to live, situate, engage or extricate oneself." Adrian Mackenzie, Australian National University "A breath of fresh air, a book about data, but uniquely framed as the lively matter of information -- in the sense of 'being in-formation' - and always bringing us back to what makes all this information matter." David Ribes, University of Washington"A rich resource for anyone concerned with how information – understood as always material and relational – comes to matter, its dominant formations as data, and how data could be made differently." Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University "An intriguing account of how data becomes information and is then taken up in material interventions of surveillance and control. By drawing on a wide range of literature, the book demonstrates the complex and ethical relations involved in making information matter in different worlds." Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths, University of LondonTable of Contents1. Introduction 2. Understanding making-information-matter together 3. Studying materializations – a methodology of life cycles Interlude: Four practices of making information matter 4. Association 5. Conversion 6. Secrecy 7. Speculation 8. The ethics of making information matter
£68.00
Bristol University Press Digital Disengagement: COVID-19, Digital Justice
Book SynopsisHow can we achieve digital justice in the age of COVID-19? This book explores how the pandemic has transformed our use and perception of digital technologies in various settings. It also examines the right to resist or reject these technologies and the politics of refusal in different contexts and scenarios. The book offers a timely and original analysis of the new realities and challenges of digital technologies, paving the way for a post-COVID-19 future.Table of ContentsIntroduction - Kuntsman, Martin and Miyake 1. (En)forcing the Tokyo 2020 Olympics: The Racialization of Digital Disengagement and Digital Solutionism - Miyake 2. Digital Engagements and Work-life Balance in Creative Labour - Sezgin 3. '#RoeVsWadeOverturned: Any Idea How Fast Your #PeriodtrackingApp Can Lead to Jail?': Digital Disengagement and the Repeal of Roe vs Wade - Martin 4. #SnailMailRevolution: The Networked Aesthetics of Pandemic Letter-Writing Campaigns - Butkowski 5. Data Minimalism and Digital Disengagement in COVID-19 Hacktivism - Richterich 6. Digital Solutionism Meets Pandemic Imaginaries - Kuntsman 7. State Violence. Digital Harms and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Imagining Refusal, Resistance and Community Self-Defence - Gangaharan, Williams, Kuntsman, Martin and Miyake 8. Epilogue: Digital Disengagement - Questions of Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Digitalities - Kuntsman, Martin and Miyake
£40.50
Bristol University Press The Realities of Autonomous Weapons
Book Synopsis
£25.19
Hodder & Stoughton Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of
Book Synopsis*THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM BOOK CLUB PICK*'A clear, compelling guide to some of the most pressing debates in technology today.' Bill Gates'A colourful and insightful insiders' view of how technology is both empowering us and threatening us. From privacy to cyberattacks, this timely book is a useful guide for how to navigate the digital future.' Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Steve JobsFrom Microsoft's President and one of the tech industry's wisest thinkers, a frank and thoughtful reckoning with how to balance enormous promise and existential risk as the digitization of everything accelerates. With new chapters on the pandemic and beyond. __________Microsoft President Brad Smith operates by a simple core belief: when your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create. This might seem uncontroversial, but it flies in the face of a tech sector long obsessed with rapid growth and sometimes on disruption as an end in itself. While sweeping digital transformation holds great promise, we have reached an inflection point. The world has turned information technology into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon, and new approaches are needed to manage an era defined by even more powerful inventions like artificial intelligence. Companies that create technology must accept greater responsibility for the future, and governments will need to regulate technology by moving faster and catching up with the pace of innovation.In Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne bring us a captivating narrative from the cockpit of one of the world's largest and most powerful tech companies as it finds itself in the middle of some of the thorniest emerging issues of our time. These are challenges that come with no pre-existing playbook, including privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of artificial intelligence, big tech's relationship to inequality, and the challenges for democracy, far and near. While in no way a self-glorifying "Microsoft memoir," the book pulls back the curtain remarkably wide onto some of the company's most crucial recent decision points as it strives to protect the hopes technology offers against the very real threats it also presents. There are huge ramifications for communities and countries, and Brad Smith provides a thoughtful and urgent contribution to that effort.__________In Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith takes us behind the scenes on some of the biggest stories to hit the tech industry in the past decade and some of the biggest threats we face. From Edward Snowden's NSA leak to the NHS WannaCry ransomware attack, this book is essential reading to understand what's happening in the world around us.Praise for Tools and Weapons: 'The de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large.' The New York Times'In Tools and Weapons, Brad and Carol Ann Browne wrestle with some of the world's toughest technology challenges with common sense and valuable insight reflecting their inside experience. The ideas in Tools and Weapons won't solve all our problems, but they're a very good place to start.' - Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix'Tools and Weapons is a glimpse behind the curtain as Microsoft reckoned with the Snowden revelations, defended against the vicious cyberattacks, and took both the Obama and Trump administrations to court.' - Rolling StoneTrade ReviewTools and Weapons offers a clear view of the questions raised by new technologies, and a potential path forward for tech companies and for societies. - Bill GatesOne of the few executives willing to speak openly about the industry's most vexing issues. - Sunday Times'A colourful and insightful insiders' view of how technology is both empowering and threatening us. From privacy to cyberattacks, this timely book is a useful guide for how to navigate the digital future.' - Walter IsaacsonTaming Big Tech will not be easy, but this book . . . shows where to start. - The Financial Times Smith's book is not the typical vanity project churned out by so many Fortune 500 leaders, the generic tomes on leadership and teamwork stocked at airport bookstores near the neck pillows. Tools and Weapons is a glimpse behind the curtain as Microsoft reckoned with the Snowden revelations, defended against the vicious cyberattacks, and took both the Obama and Trump administrations to court.' Rolling StoneBrad Smith makes the case for a new relationship between the tech sector and government - closer cooperation and challenges for each side. - New York TimesBrad Smith and Carol Ann Browne get to the heart of some of the biggest tech issues of our time, including privacy, cybersecurity and responsible AI, and their impact on all of our lives. - Satya Nadella, CEO of MicrosoftThis is a colorful and insightful insiders' view of how technology is both empowering us and threatening us. From privacy to cyberattacks, this timely book is a useful guide for how to navigate the digital future. - Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of The Innovators and Steve JobsComing from an industry driven by disruption, it's refreshing to read Brad Smith's call for the tech sector to assume more responsibility. In Tools and Weapons, Brad and Carol Ann Browne wrestle with some of the world's toughest technology challenges with common sense and valuable insight reflecting their inside experience. The ideas in Tools and Weapons won't solve all our problems, but they're a very good place to start. - Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix'Casual readers who know Microsoft primarily for Windows, Office and maybe Xbox will be surprised by the level of insight Smith brings to some of the biggest issues facing not just the industry but humanity. [Tools and Weapons] is written for a mass market, not just tech and policy wonks. It offers a framework for everyday readers to understand and think about the implications of powerful new forms of technology. . . . It's full of behind-the-scenes anecdotes, from internal Microsoft meetings to high-level sessions at the Obama and Trump White Houses. It makes ample use of historical references to put modern trends and technologies in context.' - GeekwireBrad Smith has emerged as a vocal and principled thought leader addressing how technology can either help uphold or undermine human rights. As digital technology continues to proliferate, these issues will only grow in importance and command more of the world's attention. - Amal Clooney, international human rights lawyer and co-founder and president, Clooney Foundation for JusticeTools and Weapons reads like a techno-legal thriller, yet offers a thorough and eye-opening account of the major tech controversies of the last decade, from NSA spying through AI ethics and the US-China standoff. Brad Smith, a believer that "great power brings great responsibility" makes it evident that the future of humanity may depend on ethical and responsive leadership in the tech industries, and in this book he sets a high bar for his peers. - Tim Wu, author of The Curse of BignessWith clarity and candor, Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne have crafted an indispensable guide to understanding and tackling the mightiest tech challenges of our time. Drawing on firsthand experience as well as the lessons of history, this perceptive volume shows that solutions will not be solely governmental nor corporate, but must involve collaboration across sectors and borders. Timely, essential reading for all who care about where the tech world goes next. - Margaret O'Mara, author of The Code'In Tools and Weapons, Smith and co-author Carol Ann Browne, make a persuasive, pragmatic case for owning that responsibility, in everything from digital privacy and surveillance to cybersecurity and social fragmentation to artificial intelligence and facial-recognition technology.' - Seattle Times
£10.44
