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Off the Network is a fresh and authoritative examination of how the hidden logic of the Internet, social media, and the digital network is changing users' understanding of the world--and why that should worry us. Ulises Ali Mejias suggests how we might begin to rethink the logic of the network and question its ascendancy.
Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to 'connect' through digital means. But this convenience is not free-it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this 'data colonialism', and its designs for controlling our lives-our ways of knowing, our means of production, our political participation. Data colonialism is, in essence, an emerging order for the appropriation of human life so that data can be continuously extracted from it for profit. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriat...
Inside Culture offers a fresh and stimulating reassessment of the direction of cultural studies. Nick Couldry argues without apology for cultural studies as a discipline centred around the interrelations of culture and power, with a clear focus on accountable empirical research that deals with the real complexities of contemporary lives - `inside' culture. Chapters discuss the broad conceptual issues around `cultures', `texts', `the self', and the individual. There are detailed discussions of a range of cultural studies authors which demystify the elaborate language of contemporary cultural studies, with suggestions for further thinking at the end of chapters.
Describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing. The author shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront.
One of the best books I have read in years about what it means to engage neoliberalism through a critical framework that highlights those narratives and stories that affirm both our humanity and our longing for justice. It should be read by everyone concerned with what it might mean to not only dream about democracy but to engage it as a lived experience and political possibility. - Henry Giroux, McMaster University "An important and original book that offers a fresh critique of neoliberalism and its contribution to the contemporary crisis of ‘voice’. Couldry’s own voice is clear and impassioned - an urgent must-read." - Rosalind Gill, King’s College London For more than thirty years...
As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The...
How technology companies profit from our increasing dependence on digital infrastructure and the privatization of data The Crimes of Digital Capitalism proposes the first comprehensive theory of corporate crime for the digital age. Aitor Jiménez explores the criminal structure of digital capitalism fostered by states and corporations along the supply chain, illustrating how the rise of algorithmic racism, the Googlization of education, and the deployment of AI surveillance/killing technologies brutally impacts the lives of millions of people around the world. Under the label of digital capitalism, argues Jiménez, lives a system of exploitation that, standing on digital technologies, is pus...
The power of information -- Data alchemy -- Schumpeter's nightmare -- Data capitalism -- Might and machines -- Access rules -- Open data reloaded -- The end of data colonialism.
As AI takes hold across the planet and wealthy nations seek to position themselves as global leaders of this new technology, the gap is widening between those who benefit from it and those who are subjugated by it. As Rachel Adams shows in this hard-hitting book, growing inequality is the single biggest threat to the transformative potential of AI. Not only is AI built on an unequal global system of power, it stands poised to entrench existing inequities, further consolidating a new age of empire. AI’s impact on inequality will not be experienced in poorer countries only: it will be felt everywhere. The effects will be seen in intensified international migration as opportunities become increasingly concentrated in wealthier nations; in heightened political instability and populist politics; and in climate-related disasters caused by an industry blind to its environmental impact across supply chains. We need to act now to address these issues. Only if the current inequitable trajectory of AI is halted, the incentives changed and the production and use of AI decentralized from wealthier nations will AI be able to deliver on its promise to build a better world for all.
Infrastructures are fundamental means through which societies create spaces, but little is known about the precise ways in which this occurs. How have infrastructures animated certain understandings of space? How do infrastructures stabilize, or undermine, the spatial formats in which we live, which shape our everyday practices and which regulate access to services and resources? And, conversely, how do spaces frame the ways infrastructural provision is organized? How do existing spaces shape infrastructural development and the scope and forms of access to vital services such as transport and water? In this volume, historians and sociologists draw on a range of fascinating case studies and provide compelling answers to these questions. Exploring, among others, the provision of irrigation water in nineteenth-century Los Angeles, the invention of airport transit zones, and the infrastructural practices of homeless people in Berlin, the book demonstrates how the making of spaces through infrastructure is deeply political. Intent on revealing uneven geographies of provision and hierarchies of access, the contributors highlight how infrastructures are products of global entanglements.