Technology companies claim to connect people through touchscreens, but by conflating physical contact with emotional sentiments, they displace the constructed aspects of devices and women and other oppressed individuals’ critiques of how such technologies function. Technology companies and device designers correlate touchscreens and online sites with physical contact and emotional sentiments, promising unmediated experiences in which the screen falls away in favor of visceral materiality and co...
This book is an update, extension and radicalization of Guattari’s philosophy of the postmedia. It is the first of its kind to comprehensively apply Guattari’s thought on postmedia to post-millennium technological developments. Given the considerable interest in Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s work and its influence in Asia and South-East Asia and beyond, the book is a timely contribution and update of Guattari’s essential concepts. It offers a fresh approach to applying Guattari and Deleuze...
In The Risk Perception of Artificial Intelligence, Hugo Neri examines how society has come to understand artificial intelligence by studying how cultural productions, intellectuals, and the media have shaped society's views, understandings, and fears of artificial intelligence. As an abstract term, artificial intelligence has been understood both as a discipline and a "robot's mind." In the twenty and twenty-first centuries, cultural representations in comics, television shows, and movies conver...
David L. Morton examines the process of invention, innovation, and diffusion of communications technology, using the history of sound recording as the focus. Off the Record demonstrates how the history of both the hardware and the ways people used it is essential for understanding why any particular technology became a fixture in everyday life or faded into obscurity. Morton's approach to the topic differs from most previous works, which have examined the technology's social impact, but not the...
The history of information is a rapidly emerging new subfield of history. Historians are identifying the issues they need to examine, crafting novel research agendas, and locating research materials relevant to their work. Like the larger world around them, historians are discovering what it means to live and work in a world that increasingly sees itself as an information society. Long a discussion point among sociologists, economists, political leaders, and media experts, historians are integra...
A thousand years before Isaac Asimov set down his Three Laws of Robotics, real and imagined automata appeared in European courts, liturgies, and literary texts. Medieval robots took such forms as talking statues, mechanical animals, and silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed disciplinary or surveillance functions. Variously ascribed to artisanal genius, inexplicable cosmic forces, or demonic powers, these marvelous fabrications raised fundamental ques...
Consumers and Nanotechnology
by Harald Throne-Holst, Eivind Soto, Pal Strandbakken, and Gerd Scholl
In recent years, questions about democratic influence on science and technology have received much attention. The lesson from the European unrest over GMO is that consumer-citizens will react negatively to being forced to accept the introduction of new, partly untested technologies. A number of political bodies have started to involve citizens and
Our attention has been hijacked by the tsunami of devices, games and social media which now dominate our lives. This new technology brings efficiency, cost-savings and instantaneous information. But when our attention is the currency being traded by big tech firms, what price are we willing to pay for convenience? Addiction, anxiety, depression, loneliness, low self-esteem, empathy development, troubled relationships, fake news, propaganda and even threats to democracy are just some of challenge...
Gen Z, Explained
by Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead, MBE
Born since the mid-1990s, Generation Z is the first generation never to know the world without the internet, and it is the most diverse generation yet. As Gen Z starts to emerge into adulthood and enter the workforce, what do we really know about them? And what can we learn from them? Gen Z, Explained is the authoritative portrait of this significant generation. It draws on extensive interviews that display this generation's candor, surveys that explore their views and attitudes, and a vast data...
Military, Education, Business, and Health Implications of the Internet of Bodies
Digitization of the human body, philosophically is "mating" with technology, and it represents the fusion of electronic technology with human biology, which reduces the barriers of physical, digital and biological life. The Internet of Bodies, that is the imminent development of the field of digitization of the human body on a large scale, is the inevitable future of technology at this moment. Instead of devices being connected to the Internet as in Internet of Things (IoT), human bodies can be...
El Valor de la Atención: Por Qué Nos La Robaron Y Cómo Recuperarla
by Johann Hari
The de Gruyter Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Identity and Technology Studies (de Gruyter Handbooks of Digital Transformation, #1)
Lightning Flowers weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such technology possible. What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator.In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisibl...
How those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is included--and who is excluded--in the future. Our world is built on an array of standards we are compelled to share. In Proxies, Dylan Mulvin examines how we arrive at those standards, asking, "To whom and to what do we delegate the power to stand in for the world?" Mulvin shows how those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is inclu...