The Smartphone Society

The Smartphone Society
Author: Nicole Aschoff
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2020-03-10
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0807061964

Addresses how tech empowers community organizing and protest movements to combat the systems of capitalism and data exploitation that helped drive tech’s own rise to ubiquity. Our smartphones have brought digital technology into the most intimate spheres of life. It’s time to take control of them, repurposing them as pathways to a democratically designed and maintained digital commons that prioritizes people over profit. Smartphones have appeared everywhere seemingly overnight: since the first iPhone was released, in 2007, the number of smartphone users has skyrocketed to over two billion. Smartphones have allowed users to connect worldwide in a way that was previously impossible, created communities across continents, and provided platforms for global justice movements. However, the rise of smartphones has led to corporations using consumers’ personal data for profit, unmonitored surveillance, and digital monopolies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon that have garnered control over our social, political, and economic landscapes. But people are using their smartphones to fight back. New modes of resistance are emerging, signaling the possibility that our pocket computers could be harnessed for the benefit of people, not profit. From helping to organize protests against the US-Mexico border wall through Twitter to being used to report police brutality through Facebook Live, smartphones open a door for collective change.

iGen

iGen
Author: Jean M. Twenge
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2017-08-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501152025

As seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR, iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation. With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. With the first members of iGen just graduating from college, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation—and the world.

Smartland Korea

Smartland Korea
Author: Dal Yong Jin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2017-02-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 047205337X

An engaging and comprehensive look at the Korean smartphone industry and culture

The Mobile Connection

The Mobile Connection
Author: Rich Ling
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2004-06-25
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0080518931

Has the cell phone forever changed the way people communicate? The mobile phone is used for "real time coordination while on the run, adolescents use it to manage their freedom, and teens "text to each other day and night. The mobile phone is more than a simple technical innovation or social fad, more than just an intrusion on polite society. This book, based on world-wide research involving tens of thousands of interviews and contextual observations, looks into the impact of the phone on our daily lives. The mobile phone has fundamentally affected our accessibility, safety and security, coordination of social and business activities, and use of public places. Based on research conducted in dozens of countries, this insightful and entertaining book examines the once unexpected interaction between humans and cell phones, and between humans, period. The compelling discussion and projections about the future of the telephone should give designers everywhere a more informed practice and process, and provide researchers with new ideas to last years.*Rich Ling (an American working in Norway) is a prominent researcher, interviewed in the new technology article in the November 9 issue of the New York Times Magazine. *A particularly "good read", this book will be important to the designers, information designers, social psychologists, and others who will have an impact on the development of the new third generation of mobile telephones. *Carefully and wittily written by a senior research scientist at Telenor, Norway's largest telecommunications company, and developer of the first mobile telephone system that allowed for international roaming.

The Global Smartphone

The Global Smartphone
Author: Daniel Miller
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2021-05-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1787359611

The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young. The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide ‘perpetual opportunism’, as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is more than an ‘app device’ and explore differences between what people say about smartphones and how they use them. The smartphone is unprecedented in the degree to which we can transform it. As a result, it quickly assimilates personal values. In order to comprehend it, we must take into consideration a range of national and cultural nuances, such as visual communication in China and Japan, mobile money in Cameroon and Uganda, and access to health information in Chile and Ireland – all alongside diverse trajectories of ageing in Al Quds, Brazil and Italy. Only then can we know what a smartphone is and understand its consequences for people’s lives around the world.

The New Prophets of Capital

The New Prophets of Capital
Author: Nicole Aschoff
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2015-03-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1781688117

A deft and caustic takedown of the new prophets of profit, from Bill Gates to Oprah As severe environmental degradation, breathtaking inequality, and increasing alienation push capitalism against its own contradictions, mythmaking has become as central to sustaining our economy as profitmaking. Enter the new prophets of capital: Sheryl Sandberg touting the capitalist work ethic as the antidote to gender inequality; John Mackey promising that free markets will heal the planet; Oprah Winfrey urging us to find solutions to poverty and alienation within ourselves; and Bill and Melinda Gates offering the generosity of the 1 percent as the answer to a persistent, systemic inequality. The new prophets of capital buttress an exploitative system, even as the cracks grow more visible.

The Burnout Society

The Burnout Society
Author: Byung-Chul Han
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 69
Release: 2015-08-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0804797501

Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.

India Connected

India Connected
Author: Ravi Agrawal
Publisher:
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0190858656

With the rise of low-cost smartphones and cheap data plans, millions of Indians are now discovering the internet for the first time, and the implications are as vast as the country itself.

The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Communication and Society

The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Communication and Society
Author: Rich Ling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 731
Release: 2020-04-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0190864400

Mobile communication has dramatically changed over the past decade with the diffusion of smartphones. Unlike the basic 2G mobile phones, which "merely" facilitated communication between individuals on the move, smartphones allow individuals to communicate, to entertain and inform themselves, to transact, to navigate, to take photos, and countless other things. Mobile communication has thus transformed society by allowing new forms of coordination, communication, consumption, social interaction, and access to news/entertainment. All of this is regardless of the space in which users are immersed. Set in the context of the developed and the developing world, The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Communication and Society updates current scholarship surrounding mobile media and communication. The 43 chapters in this handbook examine mobile communication and its evolving impact on individuals, institutions, groups, societies, and businesses. Contributors examine the communal benefits, social consequences, theoretical perspectives, organizational potential, and future consequences of mobile communication. Topics covered include, among many other things, trends in the Global South, location-based services, and the "appification" of mobile communication and society.

New Media and Society

New Media and Society
Author: Deana A. Rohlinger
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479897876

A sociological approach to understanding new media’s impact on society We use cell phones, computers, and tablets to access the Internet, read the news, watch television, chat with our friends, make our appointments, and post on social networking sites. New media provide the backdrop for most of our encounters. We swim in a technological world yet we rarely think about how new media potentially change the ways in which we interact with one another or shape how we live our lives. In New Media and Society, Deana Rohlinger provides a sociological approach to understanding how new media shape our interactions, our experiences, and our institutions. Using case studies and in-class exercises, Rohlinger explores how new media alter everything from our relationships with friends and family to our experiences in the workplace. Each chapter takes up a different topic – our sense of self and our relationships, education, religion, law, work, and politics – and assesses how new media alter our worlds as well as our expectations and experiences in institutional settings. Instead of arguing that these changes are “good” or “bad” for American society, the book uses sociological theory to challenge readers to think about the consequences of these changes, which typically have both positive and negative aspects. New Media and Society begins with a brief explanation of new media and social institutions, highlighting how sociologists understand complex, changing relationships. After outlining the influence of new media on our identities and relationships, it discusses the effects new media have on how we think about education, practice our religions, understand police surveillance, conceptualize work, and participate in politics. Each chapter includes key sociological concepts, engaging activities that illustrate the ideas covered in the chapter, as well as links, films, and references to additional online material.