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Twenty-first-century Western culture is characterized by profound transformations in its forms of collective organization. While traditional institutions of Western liberal democracies still wield significant political power, new forms of collective agency – most visible in progressive social protest movements, but also in the global rise of populism – have increasingly put pressure on established systems of collective organization. The contributors to this volume explore the social, political, and aesthetic forms that collective agency takes in the twenty-first century across a variety of media, including social platforms such as TikTok, multiplayer video games, and contemporary lyric poetry.
Across several industries, we are observing a paradigm shift from traditional, firm-centric and top-down value creation to more open and collaborative approaches, also referred to as bottom-up economics. The boundaries of firms dissolve and external actors (customers, user, suppliers etc.) enter the domain of value creation by means of advanced information and communication technologies. These new and evolving patterns require a renewed and interdisciplinary understanding of how co-creation enables organizations to reshape business and society. With contributions from industrial and academic experts, this book provides deep insights into the theory and practice of bottom-up economics, and ad...
This book is intended for business professionals that want to understand the fundamental concepts of Artificial Intelligence, their applications and limitations. Built as a collaborative effort between academia and the industry, this book bridges the gap between theory and business application, demystifying AI through fundamental concepts and industry examples. The reader will find here an overview of the different AI techniques to search, plan, reason, learn, adapt, understand and interact. The book covers the two traditional paradigms in AI: the statistical and data-driven AI systems, which learn and perform by ingesting millions of data points into machine learning algorithms, and the consciously modelled AI systems, known as symbolic AI systems, which use explicit symbols to represent the world and make conclusions. Rather than opposing those two paradigms, the book will also show how those different fields can complement each other. All royalties go to a charity. "Demystifying AI reveals its true power: not as a mysterious force, but as a tool for human progress, accessible to all who seek to understand it." Dr. Barak Chizi, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, KBC Group
In view of progressive research advances in biotechnology and medicine, the prospect of living longer, increased longevity, increased health span, and even biologic immortality has become more real than ever before. The Secrets of Immortality evaluates humankind’s continuous quest for immortality—an integral part of human nature. With hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on anti-aging and immortality research, some futurists believe that within a few decades, man will be able to live up to 150 years, if not more. Some believe that the first person to live up to 1000 years old is already alive today. While this sounds like a premise from science fiction, The Secrets of Immortality ...
Society, Regulation and Governance brings together sociologists, political scientists, legal scholars and historians for an interdisciplinary critical evaluation of alleged ‘new modes’ of social change, specifically risk, publics and participation. The editors’ aim is to refocus scholarly attention on the possibility of intentional social change in contemporary society which underpin all novelty claims in regulation and governance research and practice. This book gives significant insight into the new methods of social change, suiting a wide range of social science academics due to its collaborative nature.
Digital fabrication combines virtual and material worlds; transforming thoughts into things, and things into data. It fosters complex and varied communities while enabling the pursuit of unique individual outputs. Current literature on digital fabrication concentrates on its technical and economic potential, with little attention yet being paid to the fundamental questions of how the technology might affect our understanding of identity, embodiment, or creative processes. Using case studies and experiences gained from ground-breaking fieldwork, "In the Making" explores these processes and their products from both cultural and aesthetic perspectives; with emphasis on its human interactions, n...
Radicalization has become an important part of the twenty-first-century security and political landscape. It is a seemingly ubiquitous term, employed by academics, policymakers, civil society actors, practitioners and media alike, in ever-expanding ways--describing everything from changing domestic social movements to the growth of international terrorism. This volume provides a comprehensive treatment of "radicalization": the processes during which individuals or groups adopt increasingly extreme political, social or religious beliefs, positions or aspirations, particularly in cases associated with the use of violence. Adopting a multifaceted and comparative approach, the contributors inter...
In The New Collective Behavior in Digital Society: Connection, Contagion, Control, Raymond L.M. Lee offers an updated view on the sociology of crowds. While the era of crowds that Le Bon famously wrote about more than a century ago reflected the social and political crises of his time, in the twenty-first century we encounter a completely new scenario with crowds forming online or morphing into swarms in digital space. Lee confronts large gatherings that are only virtually present and investigates collective behaviors that are not always palpable and visceral. This is the age of digital dominance where the collective becomes reduced to ones and zeros to become more vulnerable to the social and political interventions of our time. This book attempts to discern and dissect those interventions, focusing on the power of virality that sustains networks, assemblages, and platforms to generate new collective behaviors in an era of smartphones, surveillance, and pandemics that were never imagined in Le Bon’s time.
Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. The Silicon Valley dream of universal connection – the dream of connecting everyone and everything to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time – is rapidly becoming a reality. In this wide-ranging and sharply argued book, Rogers Brubaker develops an original interpretive account of the pervasive and unsettling changes brought about by hyperconnectivity. He traces transformations of the self, social relations, culture, economics, and politics, giving special attention to underexplored themes of abundance, miniaturization, convenience, quantification, and discipline. He shows how hyperconnectivity prepared us for the pandemic and how the pandemic, in turn, has prepared us for an even more fully digitally mediated future. Throughout, Brubaker underscores the ambivalence of digital hyperconnectivity, which opens up many new and exciting possibilities, yet at the same time threatens human freedom and flourishing. Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents will be essential reading for everyone interested in the constellation of socio-technical forces that are profoundly remaking our world.
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, concerns about fake news have fostered calls for government regulation and industry intervention to mitigate the influence of false content. These proposals are hindered by a lack of consensus concerning the definition of fake news or its origins. Media scholar Nolan Higdon contends that expanded access to critical media literacy education, grounded in a comprehensive history of fake news, is a more promising solution to these issues. The Anatomy of Fake News offers the first historical examination of fake news that takes as its goal the effective teaching of critical news literacy in the United States. Higdon employs a critical-historical media ecosystems approach to identify the producers, themes, purposes, and influences of fake news. The findings are then incorporated into an invaluable fake news detection kit. This much-needed resource provides a rich history and a promising set of pedagogical strategies for mitigating the pernicious influence of fake news.