Digital Dead End

Digital Dead End
Author: Virginia Eubanks
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-09-21
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0262294699

The realities of the high-tech global economy for women and families in the United States. The idea that technology will pave the road to prosperity has been promoted through both boom and bust. Today we are told that universal broadband access, high-tech jobs, and cutting-edge science will pull us out of our current economic downturn and move us toward social and economic equality. In Digital Dead End, Virginia Eubanks argues that to believe this is to engage in a kind of magical thinking: a technological utopia will come about simply because we want it to. This vision of the miraculous power of high-tech development is driven by flawed assumptions about race, class, and gender. The realities of the information age are more complicated, particularly for poor and working-class women and families. For them, information technology can be both a tool of liberation and a means of oppression. But despite the inequities of the high-tech global economy, optimism and innovation flourished when Eubanks worked with a community of resourceful women living at her local YWCA. Eubanks describes a new approach to creating a broadly inclusive and empowering “technology for people,” popular technology, which entails shifting the focus from teaching technical skill to nurturing critical technological citizenship, building resources for learning, and fostering social movement. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images found in the physical edition.

Digital Dead End

Digital Dead End
Author: Virginia Eubanks
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-09-14
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0262518139

The realities of the high-tech global economy for women and families in the United States. The idea that technology will pave the road to prosperity has been promoted through both boom and bust. Today we are told that universal broadband access, high-tech jobs, and cutting-edge science will pull us out of our current economic downturn and move us toward social and economic equality. In Digital Dead End, Virginia Eubanks argues that to believe this is to engage in a kind of magical thinking: a technological utopia will come about simply because we want it to. This vision of the miraculous power of high-tech development is driven by flawed assumptions about race, class, and gender. The realities of the information age are more complicated, particularly for poor and working-class women and families. For them, information technology can be both a tool of liberation and a means of oppression. But despite the inequities of the high-tech global economy, optimism and innovation flourished when Eubanks worked with a community of resourceful women living at her local YWCA. Eubanks describes a new approach to creating a broadly inclusive and empowering “technology for people,” popular technology, which entails shifting the focus from teaching technical skill to nurturing critical technological citizenship, building resources for learning, and fostering social movement. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images found in the physical edition.

Dead End in Norvelt

Dead End in Norvelt
Author: Jack Gantos
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2011-09-13
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 142996250X

Dead End in Norvelt is the winner of the 2012 Newbery Medal for the year's best contribution to children's literature and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction! Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is "grounded for life" by his feuding parents, and whose nose spews bad blood at every little shock he gets. But plenty of excitement (and shocks) are coming Jack's way once his mom loans him out to help a fiesty old neighbor with a most unusual chore—typewriting obituaries filled with stories about the people who founded his utopian town. As one obituary leads to another, Jack is launced on a strange adventure involving molten wax, Eleanor Roosevelt, twisted promises, a homemade airplane, Girl Scout cookies, a man on a trike, a dancing plague, voices from the past, Hells Angels . . . and possibly murder. Endlessly surprising, this sly, sharp-edged narrative is the author at his very best, making readers laugh out loud at the most unexpected things in a dead-funny depiction of growing up in a slightly off-kilter place where the past is present, the present is confusing, and the future is completely up in the air.

Dead Ends

Dead Ends
Author: Erin Jade Lange
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-09-03
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1619630818

A riddle rarely makes sense the first time you hear it. The connection between Dane, a bully, and Billy D, a guy with Down Syndrome, doesn't even make sense the second time you hear it. But it's a collection of riddles that solidify their unlikely friendship. Dane doesn't know who his dad is. Billy doesn't know where his dad is. So when Billy asks for Dane's help solving the riddles his dad left in an atlas, Dane can't help but agree. The unmarked towns lead them closer to secrets of the past. But there's one secret Billy isn't sharing. It's a secret Dane might have liked to know before he stole his mom's car and her lottery winnings and set off on a road trip that will put him face to face with Billy's dad.

Automating Inequality

Automating Inequality
Author: Virginia Eubanks
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-01-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1466885963

WINNER: The 2019 Lillian Smith Book Award, 2018 McGannon Center Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: "The single most important book about technology you will read this year." Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: "A must-read." A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination?and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect. Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values. This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.

Print Is Dead

Print Is Dead
Author: Jeff Gomez
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2009-06-09
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0230614469

For over 1500 years books have weathered numerous cultural changes remarkably unaltered. Through wars, paper shortages, radio, TV, computer games, and fluctuating literacy rates, the bound stack of printed paper has, somewhat bizarrely, remained the more robust and culturally relevant way to communicate ideas. Now, for the first time since the Middle Ages, all that is about to change. Newspapers are struggling for readers and relevance; downloadable music has consigned the album to the format scrap heap; and the digital revolution is now about to leave books on the high shelf of history. In Print Is Dead, Gomez explains how authors, producers, distributors, and readers must not only acknowledge these changes, but drive digital book creation, standards, storage, and delivery as the first truly transformational thing to happen in the world of words since the printing press.

Digital Disconnect

Digital Disconnect
Author: Robert W. McChesney
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2013-03-05
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1595588914

Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world. McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect McChesney returns to this provocative thesis in light of the advances of the digital age, incorporating capitalism into the heart of his analysis. He argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems, and other policies and massive indirect subsidies have made the Internet a place of numbing commercialism. A small handful of monopolies now dominate the political economy, from Google, which garners an astonishing 97 percent share of the mobile search market, to Microsoft, whose operating system is used by over 90 percent of the world's computers. This capitalistic colonization of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism, and made the Internet an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance, and a disturbingly anti-democratic force. In Digital Disconnect Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking analysis and critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.

Digital Data Collection and Information Privacy Law

Digital Data Collection and Information Privacy Law
Author: Mark Burdon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-04-23
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108417922

Calling for future law reform, Burdon questions if you will have privacy in a world of ubiquitous data collection.

Digital Culture & Society (DCS)

Digital Culture & Society (DCS)
Author: Annika Richterich
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2017-06-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839438209

Digital Culture & Society is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for inquiries into digital media theory, methodologies, and socio-technological developments. The fourth issue "Making and Hacking" sheds light on the communities and spaces of hackers, makers, DIY enthusiasts, and 'fabbers'. Academics, artists, and hackerspace members examine the meanings and entanglements of maker and hacker cultures - from conceptual, methodological as well as empirical perspectives. With contributions by Sabine Hielscher, Jeremy Hunsinger, Kat Braybrooke, Tim Jordan, among others, and an interview with Sebastian Kubitschko.

Crossing the Bridge of the Digital Divide

Crossing the Bridge of the Digital Divide
Author: Anthony H. Normore
Publisher: IAP
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2018-09-01
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1641133929

Crossing the Bridge of the Digital Divide: A Walk with Global Leaders explores the combined effect of the rapid growth of information as an increasingly fragmented information base, a large component of which is available only to people with money and/or acceptable institutional affiliations. In the recent past, the outcome of these challenges has been characterized as the "digital divide" between the information “haves” and “have nots” along racial and socio economic lines that seem to widen as time passes. To address the issues of digital equity and digital inequality in an effort to bridge the digital divide, educational scholars, researchers and practitioners are in positions to ensure equitable opportunities are made available for people of all ages, races, ability, sexual orientation, and ethnicity in support of social justice for bridging the digital divide. The digital divide addresses issues concerning equal opportunity, equity and access that have an effect on the development of marginalized and otherwise disenfranchised populations within and across systems nationally and internationally. The contributing authors- representing Unites States, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and the UK - posit that education institutions can serve as the bridge to close the digital divide for students who do not have access to information technology in their homes. At a time when more computers are made available in schools than ever before, the digital divide continues to widen and fewer people in the lowest SES groups are given the opportunity to join the world of computer technology and the internet. As a result, the influence of leadership activity on institutional racism, gender discrimination, inequality of opportunity, inequity of educational processes, digital exclusion, and justice have gained currency and attention. The contributing national and international authors examine the digital divide in terms of social justice leadership, equity and access. It is within this context that the authors offer discussions from a lens of their choice, i.e. conceptual, review of literature, epistemological, etc. By adopting an educational approach to bridging the digital divide, researchers and practitioners can connect and extend long established lines of conceptual and empirical inquiry aimed at improving organizational practices and thereby gain insights that might be otherwise overlooked, or assumed. This holds great promise for generating, refining, and testing theories of leadership for equity and access, and helps strengthen already vibrant lines of inquiry on social justice.