The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data

Author: Michael P. Lynch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1631491865
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
"An intelligent book that struggles honestly with important questions: Is the net turning us into passive knowers? Is it degrading our ability to reason? What can we do about this?" —David Weinberger, Los Angeles Review of Books We used to say "seeing is believing"; now, googling is believing. With 24/7 access to nearly all of the world’s information at our fingertips, we no longer trek to the library or the encyclopedia shelf in search of answers. We just open our browsers, type in a few keywords and wait for the information to come to us. Now firmly established as a pioneering work of modern philosophy, The Internet of Us has helped revolutionize our understanding of what it means to be human in the digital age. Indeed, demonstrating that knowledge based on reason plays an essential role in society and that there is more to “knowing” than just acquiring information, leading philosopher Michael P. Lynch shows how our digital way of life makes us value some ways of processing information over others, and thus risks distorting the greatest traits of mankind. Charting a path from Plato’s cave to Google Glass, the result is a necessary guide on how to navigate the philosophical quagmire that is the "Internet of Things."

US Power and the Internet in International Relations

Author: M. Carr
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137550244
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
Despite the pervasiveness of the Internet and its importance to a wide range of state functions, we still have little understanding of its implications in the context of International Relations. Combining the Philosophy of Technology with IR theories of power, this study explores state power in the information age.

Who Controls the Internet?

Author: Jack Goldsmith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198034806
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea--that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google's struggles with the French government and Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay's struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them. While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils of anarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance. Well written and filled with fascinating examples, including colorful portraits of many key players in Internet history, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.

Pax Technica

Author: Philip N. Howard
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300213662
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
Should we fear or welcome the internet’s evolution? The “internet of things” is the rapidly growing network of everyday objects—eyeglasses, cars, thermostats—made smart with sensors and internet addresses. Soon we will live in a pervasive yet invisible network of everyday objects that communicate with one another. In this original and provocative book, Philip N. Howard envisions a new world order emerging from this great transformation in the technologies around us. Howard calls this new era a Pax Technica. He looks to a future of global stability built upon device networks with immense potential for empowering citizens, making government transparent, and broadening information access. Howard cautions, however, that privacy threats are enormous, as is the potential for social control and political manipulation. Drawing on evidence from around the world, he illustrates how the internet of things can be used to repress and control people. Yet he also demonstrates that if we actively engage with the governments and businesses building the internet of things, we have a chance to build a new kind of internet—and a more open society.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Internet

Author: Barney Warf
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1526450437
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 2343

Book Description
The Internet needs no introduction, and its significance today can hardly be exaggerated. Today, more people are more connected technologically to one another than at any other time in human existence. For a large share of the world’s people, the Internet, text messaging, and various other forms of digital social media such as Facebook have become thoroughly woven into the routines and rhythms of daily life. The Internet has transformed how we seek information, communicate, entertain ourselves, find partners, and, increasingly, it shapes our notions of identity and community. The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Internet addresses the many related topics pertaining to cyberspace, email, the World Wide Web, and social media. Entries will range from popular topics such as Alibaba and YouTube to important current controversies such as Net neutrality and cyberterrorism. The goal of the encyclopedia is to provide the most comprehensive collection of authoritative entries on the Internet available, written in a style accessible to academic and non-academic audiences alike.

Because Internet

Author: Gretchen McCulloch
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735210942
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!! Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, and The Washington Post A Wired Must-Read Book of Summer “Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” —Jonny Sun, author of everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time. Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer "LOL" or "lol," why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Author: Nicholas Carr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393079368
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”—Michael Agger, Slate “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet

Author: Jeff Kosseff
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501735780
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Book Description
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Did you know that these twenty-six words are responsible for much of America's multibillion-dollar online industry? What we can and cannot write, say, and do online is based on just one law—a law that protects online services from lawsuits based on user content. Jeff Kosseff exposes the workings of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has lived mostly in the shadows since its enshrinement in 1996. Because many segments of American society now exist largely online, Kosseff argues that we need to understand and pay attention to what Section 230 really means and how it affects what we like, share, and comment upon every day. The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet tells the story of the institutions that flourished as a result of this powerful statute. It introduces us to those who created the law, those who advocated for it, and those involved in some of the most prominent cases decided under the law. Kosseff assesses the law that has facilitated freedom of online speech, trolling, and much more. His keen eye for the law, combined with his background as an award-winning journalist, demystifies a statute that affects all our lives –for good and for ill. While Section 230 may be imperfect and in need of refinement, Kosseff maintains that it is necessary to foster free speech and innovation. For filings from many of the cases discussed in the book and updates about Section 230, visit jeffkosseff.com

Digital Cosmopolitans: Why We Think the Internet Connects Us, Why It Doesn't, and How to Rewire It

Author: Ethan Zuckerman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393240622
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
“One of our most important books on globalization.” —Steve O’Keefe, New York Journal of Books The enormous scope of the Internet can lead us to assume that as the online community grows, our world grows smaller and more cosmopolitan. In Digital Cosmopolitans, Ethan Zuckerman explains why the technological ability to communicate with someone does not guarantee human interaction or the healthy exchange of information and ideas. Combining the latest psychological and sociological research with current trends both online and off, Digital Cosmopolitans highlights the challenges we face and the headway being made in creating a world that is truly connected.

Inventing the Internet

Author: Janet Abbate
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262261332
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
Janet Abbate recounts the key players and technologies that allowed the Internet to develop; but her main focus is always on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internet's design and use. Since the late 1960s the Internet has grown from a single experimental network serving a dozen sites in the United States to a network of networks linking millions of computers worldwide. In Inventing the Internet, Janet Abbate recounts the key players and technologies that allowed the Internet to develop; but her main focus is always on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internets design and use. The story she unfolds is an often twisting tale of collaboration and conflict among a remarkable variety of players, including government and military agencies, computer scientists in academia and industry, graduate students, telecommunications companies, standards organizations, and network users. The story starts with the early networking breakthroughs formulated in Cold War think tanks and realized in the Defense Department's creation of the ARPANET. It ends with the emergence of the Internet and its rapid and seemingly chaotic growth. Abbate looks at how academic and military influences and attitudes shaped both networks; how the usual lines between producer and user of a technology were crossed with interesting and unique results; and how later users invented their own very successful applications, such as electronic mail and the World Wide Web. She concludes that such applications continue the trend of decentralized, user-driven development that has characterized the Internet's entire history and that the key to the Internet's success has been a commitment to flexibility and diversity, both in technical design and in organizational culture.