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What happens when people turn their everyday experience into data: an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of self-tracking. People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. This book examines how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, looking at the tools they use and the communities they become part of. Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus describe what happens when people turn their everyday experienceâ...
Why employees of pioneering Internet companies chose to invest their time, energy, hopes, and human capital in start-up ventures. In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups took risks—left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to end up unemployed a year later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (that shortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be creative over the stability of a set schedule. In Venture Labor, Gina Neff investigates choices like these made by high-tech workers in New York City's “Silicon Alley” in the 1990s. Why did these workers exhibit entrepreneurial behavior in their ...
Best practices for addressing the bias and inequality that may result from the automated collection, analysis, and distribution of large datasets. Human-centered data science is a new interdisciplinary field that draws from human-computer interaction, social science, statistics, and computational techniques. This book, written by founders of the field, introduces best practices for addressing the bias and inequality that may result from the automated collection, analysis, and distribution of very large datasets. It offers a brief and accessible overview of many common statistical and algorithmic data science techniques, explains human-centered approaches to data science problems, and present...
Sharing is central to how we live today: it is what we do online; it is a model of economic behaviour; and it is also a type of therapeutic talk. Sharing embodies positive values such as empathy, communication, fairness, openness and equality. The Age of Sharing shows how and when sharing became caring, and explains how its meanings have changed in the digital age. But the word sharing also camouflages commercial or even exploitative relations. Websites say they share data with advertisers, although in reality they sell it, while parts of the sharing economy look a great deal like rental services. Ultimately, it is argued, practices described as sharing and critiques of those practices have ...
Every new technology invites its own sets of hopes and fears, and raises as many questions as it answers revolving around the same theme: Will technology fundamentally alter the essence of what it means to be human? This volume draws inspiration from the work of the many luminaries who approach augmented, alternative forms of intelligence and consciousness. Scholars contribute their thoughts on how human augmentic technologies and artificial or sentient forms of intelligence can be used to enable, reimagine, and reorganize how we understand our selves, how we conceive the meaning of "human", and how we define meaning in our lives.
The dot-com boom of the late 1990s marked the coming of age of the much-heralded New Economy, an economic, technological, and social transformation that was decades in the making. A highly mobile, and in many cases highly compensated, workforce faces a multitude of new risks: Jobs are no longer secure nor insulated from global competition, employer-provided health benefits are drying up, and retirement planning is almost entirely the responsibility of employees themselves. This timely book examines the challenges facing high-tech workers and other professionals and the relevance of these struggles for the future of the economy. Written by leading experts, Surviving the New Economy shows how people working in technology industries are addressing their concerns via both traditional collective bargaining and through innovative actions. Using case studies from the United States and abroad, the authors in this collection examine how highly skilled workers are surviving in a global economy in which the rules have changed-and how they are reshaping their workplaces in the process.
Technology scholars declare an emergency: attention must be paid to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems. This book sounds an alarm: we can no longer afford to be lulled into complacency by narratives of techno-utopianism, or even techno-neutrality. We should not be reassured by such soothing generalities as "human error," "virtual reality," or "the cloud." We need to realize that nothing is virtual: everything that "happens online," "virtually," or "autonomously" happens offline first, and often involves human beings whose labor is deliberately kept invisible. Everything is IRL. In Your Computer Is on Fire, technology scholars train a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.
How amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Aside from the exceptional history of Tetris, very little is known about gaming culture behind the Iron Curtain. But despite the scarcity of home computers and the absence of hardware and software markets, Czechoslovakia hosted a remarkably active DIY microcomputer scene in the 1980s, producing more than two hundred games that were by turns creative, inventive, and politically subversive. In Gaming the Iron Curtain, Jaroslav Ĺ velch offers the first social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, and the first book-lengt...
The Times and Financial Times Book of the Year 'Enticing' Sunday Times | 'Engaging' Financial Times | 'Essential' Reid Hoffman ___ As technology accelerates, the human mind struggles to keep up - and our companies, workplaces and democracies get left behind. This is the exponential gap. Now, a leading technologist explores how this exponential gap is rewiring our world - and reveals how we should respond. ___ 'The sheer might of technology giants is one of the great challenges of our time . . . Azeem Azhar's excellent book Exponential offers some solutions' Amol Rajan, BBC News 'Azhar has a knack for interrogating and inverting conventional thinking . . . A convincing case that something extraordinary is taking place in business and society' Economist 'Deft and clear-eyed . . . Perhaps Azhar's most valuable insight is that conservatively managing the individual risks posed by new technologies will not suffice' Financial Times 'Speaks powerfully about how we need to shape technology to put it back in the service of society' Guardian 'Valuable and timely . . . A diligent and comprehensive definition of a new phase in human affairs' Sunday Times
'Society Online' is not exclusively devoted to a particular technology, or specifically the Internet, but to a range of technologies and technological possibilities labelled 'new media'.