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A concise introduction to crowdsourcing that goes beyond social media buzzwords to explain what crowdsourcing really is and how it works. Ever since the term “crowdsourcing” was coined in 2006 by Wired writer Jeff Howe, group activities ranging from the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary to the choosing of new colors for M&Ms have been labeled with this most buzz-generating of media buzzwords. In this accessible but authoritative account, grounded in the empirical literature, Daren Brabham explains what crowdsourcing is, what it is not, and how it works. Crowdsourcing, Brabham tells us, is an online, distributed problem solving and production model that leverages the collective in...
The Participatory Cultures Handbook will help students and scholars navigate this rapidly changing media and cultural terrain. Composed of newly commissioned essays from contributors across disciplines, this handbook will introduce students to the concept of participatory culture, explain how researchers approach participatory culture studies, and provide original examples of participatory culture in action. The wide range of topics explored in participatory culture include crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, fanfiction, wikis, video games, video sharing, transmedia storytelling, and much more.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. At present cyberculture is a dominating cultural paradigm and nothing seems to be able to replace it. We globally share the same cyberspace but there is a question whether we all together–the whole humankind–are really living in the same cyberculture? This book proves that we rather tend to define the contemporary state of culture as cybercultures. The process of spreading technologies, trends and ideas is not the same in all parts of the world. The varying speeds of this process and cultural diversity of its forms are created by different social, political, economic and cultural contexts. By representing different perspectives the authors depict a wide spectrum of the most important current problems connected with networked life, global sharing of data, loss of privacy, new meanings of community and developments in narrative structures and social behaviours arising from new communication possibilities, instantaneity of information and global viral sensitivity.
This volume gets beyond simple descriptions of the values and processes involved in community media and is deliberately seeking argument and structured debate around the issues of this vibrant sector of the media. The contributors examine the dilemmas that have emerged within this sector and provide an incisive overview. The chapters use case studies and data research to illustrate the major debates facing community media, along with a sideways look at the dilemmas that community media practitioners and their audiences must engage with. This collection provides an international perspective and covers the traditional formats as well as newer media technologies. It also gives some intriguing examples of community media, which get beyond simple good practices.
An accessible introduction to algorithms, explaining not just what they are but how they work, with examples from a wide range of application areas. Digital technology runs on algorithms, sets of instructions that describe how to do something efficiently. Application areas range from search engines to tournament scheduling, DNA sequencing, and machine learning. Arguing that every educated person today needs to have some understanding of algorithms and what they do, in this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Panos Louridas offers an introduction to algorithms that is accessible to the nonspecialist reader. Louridas explains not just what algorithms are but also how they work,...
An accessible guide to the major issues and arguments surrounding school choice. The issues and arguments surrounding school choice are sometimes hijacked to make political points about government control, democratic ideals, the public good, and privatization. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, David Garcia avoids partisan arguments to offer an accessible, objective, and comprehensive guide to school choice. He first outlines the different types of school choice, including home schooling, private schools, freedom-of-choice plans, magnet schools, charter schools, vouchers, and education savings accounts. Two themes emerge as particularly resonant in the American schoo...
This compulsively readable introduction to extremism explains how these ideologies are constructed and how they escalate, offering both historical and contemporary examples In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, J. M. Berger offers a nuanced introduction to the extremist movements threatening to destabilize civil societies around the globe. He explains what extremism is, how extremist ideologies are constructed, and why extremism can escalate into violence. Berger shows that although the ideological content of extremist movements varies widely, there are common structural elements. Berger describes the evolution of identity movements and individual and group radicalizati...
Everything we need to know about metadata, the usually invisible infrastructure for information with which we interact every day. When “metadata” became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was “only” collecting metadata about phone calls—information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location—and not recordings of the conversations themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems? In this book, Jeffrey Pomerantz offers an accessible and conci...
The De Gruyter Handbook of Robots in Society and Culture provides a comprehensive discussion of how social robots take form, function, and meaning for individuals, relationships, cultures, and societies. Through a path-breaking integration of perspectives coming from sociology, communication and media, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, political science, and science and technology studies, it focuses on the critical and social meaning of present developments in social robotic technologies. This book looks at artificial agents – from voice-based assistants to humanoid robots— as their use transforms private and public contexts and gives rise to both new possibilities and n...
The non-economist’s accessible, pocket-sized refresher on the basics of macroeconomics and how it affects local and global economies—from an academic economist and 2-time Chilean Finance Minister. Macroeconomics takes a broad perspective on the economy of a country or region; it studies economic changes in the aggregate, collecting data on production, unemployment, inflation, consumption, investment, trade, and other aspects of national and international economic life. Policymakers depend on macroeconomists’ knowledge when making decisions about such issues as taxes and the public budget, monetary and exchange rate policies, and trade policies—all of which, in turn, affect decisions ...