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Key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts for understanding smart cities, along with discussions of both drawbacks and benefits of this approach to urban problems. Over the past ten years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliber...
Situated at the intersection of library and information science (LIS), Wikipedia studies, and fandom studies, this book is a digital (auto)ethnography that documents the information behavior of Wikipedia “fan editors”—that is, individuals who edit articles about pop culture media. Given Wikipedia’s prominence in LIS and fan studies scholarship, both as one of the world’s most heavily used reference sources and as an important archive for fan communities, fan editors are a crucial component of this ecosystem as some of Wikipedia’s most active contributors. Through a combination of fieldwork observations, insight from key informants, and the author’s own experiences as a Wikipedia editor, this monograph provides a rich articulation of fan editor information behavior and offers a significant contribution to scholarship in a number of fields. Scholars of library and information science, media studies, fandom studies, and popular culture will find this book of particular interest.
"In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of "emergency" as an opposite of "normal." The normalizing ideologies produced and reinforced by emergency media result in unequal access to emergency services and discriminatory assumptions about who or what is a threat and who deserves care and protection. Thus, a primary function of emergency media is to produce feelings of safety in some while designating others as targets of surveillance and control"--
Studies from around the world show how the social media tools of Web 2.0 are shaping engagement with cities, communities, and spaces. Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, and photo sharing and social networking sites, have made possible a more participatory Internet experience. Much of this technology is available for mobile phones, where it can be integrated with such device-specific features as sensors and GPS. From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen examines how this increasingly open, collaborative, and personalizable technology is shaping not just our social interactions but new kinds of civic engagement with cities, communities, and spaces. It offers analyses and studies from around...
How reconsidering digital media and participatory cultures from the standpoint of disability allows for a full understanding of accessibility. While digital media can offer many opportunities for civic and cultural participation, this technology is not equally easy for everyone to use. Hardware, software, and cultural expectations combine to make some technologies an easier fit for some bodies than for others. A YouTube video without closed captions or a social network site that is incompatible with a screen reader can restrict the access of users who are hard of hearing or visually impaired. Often, people with disabilities require accommodation, assistive technologies, or other forms of aid...
This handbook systematically introduces readers to the key concepts, substantive topics, central methods and prime debates.
“Net neutrality,” a dry but crucial standard of openness in network access, began as a technical principle informing obscure policy debates but became the flashpoint for an all-out political battle for the future of communications and culture. Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet is a critical cultural history of net neutrality that reveals how this intentionally “boring” world of internet infrastructure and regulation hides a fascinating and pivotal sphere of power, with lessons for communication and media scholars, activists, and anyone interested in technology and politics. While previous studies and academic discussions of net neutrality have been dominated by legal, economic, and technical perspectives, Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet offers a humanities-based critical theoretical approach, telling the story of how activists and millions of everyday people, online and in the streets, were able to challenge the power of the phone and cable corporations that historically dominated communications policy-making to advance equality and justice in media and technology.
From dial-up to wi-fi, an engaging cultural history of the commercial web industry In the 1990s, the World Wide Web helped transform the Internet from the domain of computer scientists to a playground for mass audiences. As URLs leapt off computer screens and onto cereal boxes, billboards, and film trailers, the web changed the way many Americans experienced media, socialized, and interacted with brands. Businesses rushed online to set up corporate “home pages” and as a result, a new cultural industry was born: web design. For today’s internet users who are more familiar sharing social media posts than collecting hotlists of cool sites, the early web may seem primitive, clunky, and gra...
Everything in its Right Place identifies the secret to Radiohead's immense commercial and critical success in the band's ability to navigate a sweet spot between expectation and surprise. The author uses tools from musical perception, semiotics, and music theory to demonstrate this reconciliation of extremes, and analyzes musical meaning with lyrics, biographical details, and intertextual relationships.
This book explores the relevance of social networking from the perspective of its users to reveal the sociological significance of (inter)active experiences on Facebook. In doing so, the work examines obscure aspects of Facebook by addressing such questions as: What constitutes keeping in touch?; how is knowing of the other different from being with the other?; and why is the presence of others such an important element of Facebook? Social Ties in Online Networking discusses the significance of social networking activity through a collection of interviews with the users of Facebook. It analyses what they do, what they like and watch, but first and foremost how they intend their own actions and others’ actions to be perceived within the realm of social media. This book is an exploration of relationships, which will be of interest to academics and students in sociology, social theory, human geography, social networking, media studies and social psychology.