The False Promises of the Digital Revolution

The False Promises of the Digital Revolution
Author: C. A. Bowers
Publisher: Counterpoints
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Digital media
ISBN: 9781433126130

The False Promises of the Digital Revolution examines what currently goes largely unnoticed because of the many important uses of digital technologies. While many people interpret digital technologies as accelerating the global rate of progress, C. A. Bowers focuses attention on how they reinforce the deep and ecologically problematic cultural assumptions of the West: the myth of progress, the substitution of data for different cultural traditions of wisdom, the connections between print and abstract thinking, the myth of individual autonomy, the conduit view of language that hides how words (metaphors) reproduce earlier misconceptions, and a Social Darwinian justification for colonizing other cultures that is now leading to armed resistance - which, in turn, strengthens the ties between corporations, the military, and the computer science industry. The book also investigates how to understand the cultural non-neutrality of digital technologies; how print and the emphasis on data undermine awareness of the tacit information pathways between cultural and natural ecologies; and how to identify educational reforms that will contribute to a more informed public about the uses of digital technologies.

The Limits of the Digital Revolution

The Limits of the Digital Revolution
Author: Derek Hrynyshyn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2017-03-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 144083296X

This academic analysis explores social media, specifically examining its influence on the cultural, political, and economic organization of our society and the role capitalism plays within its domain. In this examination of society and technology, author and educator Derek Hrynyshyn explores the ways in which social media shapes popular culture and how social power is expressed within it. He debunks the misperception of the medium as a social equalizer—a theory drawn from the fact that content is created by its users—and compares it to mass media, identifying the capitalist-driven mechanisms that drive both social media and mass media. The work captures his assessment that social media legitimizes the inequities among the social classes rather than challenging them. The book scrutinizes the difference between social media and mass media, the relationship between technologies and social change, and the role of popular culture in the structure of political and economic power. A careful look at social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google suggests that these tools are systems of surveillance, monitoring everyday activities for the benefit of advertisers and the networks themselves. Topics covered within the book's 10 detailed chapters include privacy online, freedom of expression, piracy, the digital divide, fragmentation, and social cohesion.

The Economics of R&D Policy

The Economics of R&D Policy
Author: Gregory Tassey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 262
Release: 1997-11-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0313370435

Industry officials and government policymakers have for some time decried the lack of a framework for establishing and defending Research and Development (R&D) policies. Effective policy requires an understanding of the underlying economics. This book offers models and analysis of the economic elements that drive technology-based growth with emphasis on their implications for policy analysis. It also compares existing U.S. policies with those used in Europe and Japan. The results of these models and analysis is a framework for matching various forms of underinvestment with efficient strategic and policy responses. This market-failure based approach enables industry and government R&D initiatives to be developed, analyzed, and implemented with greater success than previously attained. The first part of the book analyzes economic trends to show how they are affected by technological change and the evolving nature of foreign competition. R&D spending patterns are studied to identify and characterize market failures that prevent adequate private-sector investments in technology. A model is presented for a typical technology-based industry. The second part looks at specific technologies and policies that impact R&D investment and that have been the subject of intense policy debate.

Digital Disconnect

Digital Disconnect
Author: Robert W. McChesney
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 319
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.

Hyperconnectivity and Digital Reality

Hyperconnectivity and Digital Reality
Author: Kathrin Otrel-Cass
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2019-08-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030241432

This book addresses the topic of hyperconnectivity by building on, expanding, and critically examining issues that have to do with information communication technology (ICT) and networked societies. The book explores questions relating to attention and consciousness, techno-capitalism and communicative action taking. Adopting different philosophical angles to assess the challenges we face due to our entanglement with hyperconnected technologies, the book studies performance and performativity in a digitised world by considering the unfolding of our onlife and by looking at what this means to educated future scientists and engineers in a hyperconnected world. The book further discusses digital activities as the new constructs of ourselves and poses questions about how much literacy is needed for us not to be enslaved by those constructs. The book also explores the challenges of hyperconnectivity and the health sector to showcase the vulnerabilities we are increasingly exposed to. It makes clear that - since the boundaries between on- and offline are becoming increasingly blurred - we will require new, flexible frameworks that reconsider what it means to be human in a hyperconnected world.

The Copyright Pentalogy

The Copyright Pentalogy
Author: Michael Geist
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2013-04-27
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0776620843

In the summer of 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada issued rulings on five copyright cases in a single day. The cases represent a seismic shift in Canadian copyright law, with the Court providing an unequivocal affirmation that copyright exceptions such as fair dealing should be treated as users’ rights, while emphasizing the need for a technology neutral approach to copyright law. The Court’s decisions, which were quickly dubbed the “copyright pentalogy,” included no fees for song previews on services such as iTunes, no additional payment for music included in downloaded video games, and that copying materials for instructional purposes may qualify as fair dealing. The Canadian copyright community soon looked beyond the cases and their litigants and began to debate the larger implications of the decisions. Several issues quickly emerged. This book represents an effort by some of Canada’s leading copyright scholars to begin the process of examining the long-term implications of the copyright pentalogy. The diversity of contributors ensures an equally diverse view on these five cases, contributions are grouped into five parts. Part 1 features three chapters on the standard of review in the courts. Part 2 examines the fair dealing implications of the copyright pentalogy, with five chapters on the evolution of fair dealing and its likely interpretation in the years ahead. Part 3 contains two chapters on technological neutrality, which the Court established as a foundational principle of copyright law. The scope of copyright is assessed in Part 4 with two chapters that canvas the exclusive rights under the copyright and the establishment of new “right” associated with user-generated content. Part 5 features two chapters on copyright collective management and its future in the aftermath of the Court’s decisions. This volume represents the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the five rulings. Edited by Professor Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, the volume includes contributions from experts across Canada. This indispensable volume identifies the key aspects of the Court's decisions and considers the implications for the future of copyright law in Canada.

Acoustic Properties

Acoustic Properties
Author: Tom McEnaney
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2017-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081013540X

Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas discovers the prehistory of wireless culture. It examines both the coevolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, and the various populist political climates in which the emerging medium of radio became the chosen means to produce the voice of the people. Based on original archival research in Buenos Aires, Havana, Paris, and the United States, the book develops a literary media theory that understands sound as a transmedial phenomenon and radio as a transnational medium. Analyzing the construction of new social and political relations in the wake of the United States’ 1930s Good Neighbor Policy, Acoustic Properties challenges standard narratives of hemispheric influence through new readings of Richard Wright’s cinematic work in Argentina, Severo Sarduy’s radio plays in France, and novels by John Dos Passos, Manuel Puig, Raymond Chandler, and Carson McCullers. Alongside these writers, the book also explores Che Guevara and Fidel Castro’s Radio Rebelde, FDR’s fireside chats, Félix Caignet’s invention of the radionovela in Cuba, Evita Perón’s populist melodramas in Argentina, Orson Welles’s experimental New Deal radio, Cuban and U.S. “radio wars,” and the 1960s African American activist Robert F. Williams’s proto–black power Radio Free Dixie. From the doldrums of the Great Depression to the tumult of the Cuban Revolution, Acoustic Properties illuminates how novelists in the radio age converted writing into a practice of listening, transforming realism as they struggled to channel and shape popular power.

The Revolution That Wasn’t

The Revolution That Wasn’t
Author: Jen Schradie
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2019-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674240448

This surprising study of online political mobilization shows that money and organizational sophistication influence politics online as much as off, and casts doubt on the democratizing power of digital activism. The internet has been hailed as a leveling force that is reshaping activism. From the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, digital activism seemed cheap, fast, and open to all. Now this celebratory narrative finds itself competing with an increasingly sinister story as platforms like Facebook and Twitter—once the darlings of digital democracy—are on the defensive for their role in promoting fake news. While hashtag activism captures headlines, conservative digital activism is proving more effective on the ground. In this sharp-eyed and counterintuitive study, Jen Schradie shows how the web has become another weapon in the arsenal of the powerful. She zeroes in on workers’ rights advocacy in North Carolina and finds a case study with broad implications. North Carolina’s hard-right turn in the early 2010s should have alerted political analysts to the web’s antidemocratic potential: amid booming online organizing, one of the country’s most closely contested states elected the most conservative government in North Carolina’s history. The Revolution That Wasn’t identifies the reasons behind this previously undiagnosed digital-activism gap. Large hierarchical political organizations with professional staff can amplify their digital impact, while horizontally organized volunteer groups tend to be less effective at translating online goodwill into meaningful action. Not only does technology fail to level the playing field, it tilts it further, so that only the most sophisticated and well-funded players can compete.