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More objects and devices are connected to digital networks than ever before. Things - from your phone to your car, from the heating to the lights in your house - have gathered the ability to sense their environments and create information about what is happening. Things have become media, able to both generate and communicate information. This has become known as 'the internet of things'. In this accessible introduction, Graham Meikle and Mercedes Bunz observe its promises of convenience and the breaking of new frontiers in communication. They also raise urgent questions regarding ubiquitous surveillance and information security, as well as the transformation of intimate personal information into commercial data. Discussing the internet of things from a media and communication perspective, this book is an important resource for courses analysing the internet and society, and essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand the rapidly changing roles of our networked lives.
On contemporary communication in its various human and nonhuman forms Contemporary communication puts us not only in conversation with one another but also with our machinery. Machine communication—to communicate not just via but also with machines—is therefore the focus of this volume. Diving into digital communications history, Finn Brunton brings to the fore the alienness of computational communication by looking at network timekeeping, automated trolling, and early attempts at communication with extraterrestrial life. Picking up this fascination with inhuman communication, Mercedes Bunz then performs a close reading of interaction design and interfaces to show how technology addresses humans (as very young children). Finally, Paula Bialski shares her findings from a field study of software development, analyzing the communicative forms that occur when code is written by separate people. Today, communication unfolds merely between two or more conscious entities but often includes an invisible third party. Inspired by this drastic shift, this volume uncovers new meanings of what it means “to communicate.”
Through algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), objects and digital services now demonstrate new skills they did not have before, right up to replacing human activity through pre-programming or by making their own decisions. As part of the internet of things, AI applications are already widely used today, for example in language processing, image recognition and the tracking and processing of data.This policy brief illustrates the potential negative and positive impacts of AI and reviews related policy strategies adopted by the UK, US, EU, as well as Canada and China. Based on an ethical approach that considers the role of AI from a democratic perspective and considering the public interest, the authors make policy recommendations that help to strengthen the positive impact of AI and to mitigate its negative consequences.
This book explores the future of critique in view of our planetary condition. How are we to intervene in contemporary constellations of finance capitalism, climate change and neoliberalism? Think we must! To get to the symptoms, the book's 38 terms ranging from affect and affirmation to world and work provide the reader with a critical toolbox to be continued. Negativity, judgment and opposition as modes of critique have run out of steam. Critique as an attitude and a manner of enquiry has not.
Critically engaging, illustrative and with numerous examples, The Silent Revolution delivers a philosophically informed introduction to current debates on digital technology and calls for a more active role of humans towards technology.
Traces the revolution in statistics that gave rise to artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms refiguring contemporary capitalism. Our finances, politics, media, opportunities, information, shopping and knowledge production are mediated through algorithms and their statistical approaches to knowledge; increasingly, these methods form the organizational backbone of contemporary capitalism. Revolutionary Mathematics traces the revolution in statistics and probability that has quietly underwritten the explosion of machine learning, big data and predictive algorithms that now decide many aspects of our lives. Exploring shifts in the philosophical understanding of probability in the late...
This Handbook explores the largely unchartered territory of media, technology, and organization studies, and interrogates their foundational relations, their forms, and their consequences. The chapters consider how specific mediating technological objects such as the Clock or the Smartphone help us to create organizational form.
Postdigital Aesthetics is a contribution to questions raised by our newly computational everyday lives and the aesthetics which reflect both the postdigital nature of this age, but also critical perspectives of a post-internet world.
How do artistic experiments with artificial intelligence problematize human-centered notions of creative agency, authorship, and ownership? Offering a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary digital art practices, philosophical and technical considerations of AI, posthumanist thought, and emerging issues of intellectual property and the commons, this book is firmly positioned against the anthropomorphic spectacle of "creative AI." It proposes instead the concept of the posthumanist agential assemblage, and invites readers to consider what new types of creative practice, what reconfigurations of the author function, and what critical interventions become possible when AI art provokes tactical entanglements between aesthetics, law, and capital.
How big data and machine learning encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage. In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine lear...