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A daily battle for rights and freedoms in cyberspace is being waged in Asia. At the epicenter of this contest is China—home to the world’s largest Internet population and what is perhaps the world’s most advanced Internet censorship and surveillance regime in cyberspace. Resistance to China’s Internet controls comes from both grassroots activists and corporate giants such as Google. Meanwhile, similar struggles play out across the rest of the region, from India and Singapore to Thailand and Burma, although each national dynamic is unique. This book is the third volume from the OpenNet Initiative (a collaborative partnership of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the SecDev Group in Ottawa), and it examines the interplay of national security, social and ethnic identity, and resistance in Asian cyberspace, offering accounts of national struggles against Internet controls as well as updated country reports by ONI researchers. The contributors examine such topics as Internet censorship in Thailand, the Malaysian blogosphere, surveillance and censorship around gender and sexuality in Malaysia, Internet governance in China, corporate social responsibility and freedom of expression in South Korea and India, cyber attacks on independent Burmese media, and distributed-denial-of-service attacks and other digital control measures across Asia.

The use of biometric technology for identification has gone from Orwellian fantasy to everyday reality. This technology, which verifies or recognizes a person's identity based on physiological, anatomical, or behavioral patterns (including fingerprints, retina, handwriting, and keystrokes) has been deployed for such purposes as combating welfare fraud, screening airplane passengers, and identifying terrorists. The accompanying controversy has pitted those who praise the technology's accuracy and efficiency against advocates for privacy and civil liberties. This book investigates the complex public responses to biometric technology. The author uses societal perceptions of this particular identification technology to explore the values, beliefs, and ideologies that influence public acceptance of technology. Drawing on her own extensive research with focus groups and a national survey, she finds that considerations of privacy, anonymity, trust and confidence in institutions, and the legitimacy of paternalistic government interventions, are extremely important to users and potential users of the technology. The author examines the long history of government systems of identification and the controversies they have inspired; the effect of the information technology revolution and the events of September 11, 2001; the normative value of privacy (as opposed to its merely legal definition); the place of surveillance technologies in a civil society; trust in government and distrust in the expanded role of government; and the balance between the need for government to act to prevent harm and the possible threat to liberty in the government's actions.

This book traces the evolution of the archive across the centuries by looking at primitive, Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian and contemporary archives. Crucially, the book evidences the fluidity and potential inter-changeability between libraries, archives and museums. A number of case studies offer an insight into the operation of a variety of different types of archives, including cabinets of curiosity, archival artforms, architectures, performances, road-shows, time capsules, social media documentation practices, databases, and a variety of museological web-based heritage platforms. The archive is shown to play a crucial role in how individuals and social groups administer themselves through and within a burgeoning social memory apparatus. This is why at the heart of every industrial revolution thus far, the archive continues to contribute to the way we store, preserve and generate knowledge through an accumulation of documents, artifacts, objects, as well as ephemera and even debris. The archive has always been strategic for different types of economies, including the digital economy and the internet of things. Shown here to increasingly affect to the way we map, produce, and share knowledge, the apparatus of the archive, which allows us to continuously renew who we are in relation to the past, so that new futures may become possible, now effectively pervades almost every aspect of our lives.

How should we think about authorship, use and piracy in an era of media convergence? How does the growing focus on amateur creativity impact on existing legal and cultural understandings of around creation? And why are the author, user and pirate so prominent in debates around copyright law? Authors, Users, Pirates: Copyright Law and Subjectivity presents a new way of thinking about these three central subjects of copyright. It outlines a relational approach to subjectivity, charting connections between the author, user and pirate through a series of historical and contemporary case studies, moving from early regulatory debates around radio spectrum and nineteenth century cases on book abridgments to the controversial reuse of Instagram photos and the emergence of multi-channel networks on YouTube. The book draws on legal scholarship, cultural theory and media studies research to provide a new way of thinking about subjectivity and copyright. It also offers insights into a range of critical issues that sit at the intersection of copyright law and digital media including online copyright infringement, amateur media production and the potential futures of creative industries.

Bioethical dilemmas, including those over genetic screening, compulsory vaccination, and abortion, have been the subject of ongoing debates in the media, and among the public, professionals, and academic communities. But the paramount bioethical issue in an age of digital technology and new media is the transformation of the very notion of life. This book examines many of the ethical challenges that technology poses to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human. In doing so, it goes beyond the traditional understanding of bioethics as a matter for moral philosophy and medicine to propose an “ethics of life” rooted in the relationship between the human and the non-human (both animals and machines) that new technology prompts us to develop. The author describes three cases of “bioethics in action,” through which the concepts of “the human,” “animal,” and “life” are being redefined: the reconfiguration of bodily identity by plastic surgery in a TV makeover show; the reduction of the body to two-dimensional genetic code; and the use of biological material in such examples of “bioart” as Eduardo Kac’s infamous fluorescent green bunny. The book addresses ethics from the interdisciplinary perspective of media and cultural studies, drawing on the writings of thinkers from Agamben and Foucault to Haraway and Hayles. Taking theoretical inspiration in particular from the philosophy of alterity as developed by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Bernard Stiegler, the author makes the case for a new non-systemic, non-hierarchical bioethics that encompasses the kinship of humans, animals, and machines.

Digital production tools and online networks have dramatically increased the general visibility, accessibility, and diversity of pornography, which can be accessed for free, anonymously, and in a seemingly endless range of niches, styles, and formats. This book moves beyond the usual debates over the legal, political, and moral aspects of pornography to address online pornography in a media historical framework, investigating its modalities, its affect, and its visceral and disturbing qualities. Countering theorizations of pornography as emotionless, affectless, detached, and cold, it addresses experiences of pornography, largely through the notion of affect as gut reactions, intensities of experience, bodily sensations, resonances, and ambiguous feelings. The author links these investigations to considerations of methodology (ways of theorizing and analyzing online pornography and affect), questions of materiality (bodies, technologies, and inscriptions), and the evolution of online pornography. She discusses the development of online pornography, focusing on the figure of the pornography consumer, and considers user-generated content and amateur pornography. The author maps out the modality of online pornography as hyperbolic, excessive, stylized, and repetitive, arguing that literal readings of the genre misunderstand its dynamics and appeal. She also analyzes viral videos and extreme and shock pornography, arguing for the centrality of disgust and shame in the affective dynamics of pornography. The book’s analysis makes clear the crucial role of media technologies—digital production tools and networked communications in particular—in the forms that pornography takes, the resonances it stirs, and the experiences it makes possible.

This book draws on live performance practice, digital technologies, and the philosophical approach of phenomenology. The human body is placed at the center of explorations of interactive interfaces, responsive systems, and affective computing. The author asks what can be discovered as we become closer to our computers—as they become extensions of our ways of thinking, moving, and touching. Performance can act as a catalyst for understanding wider social and cultural uses of digital technology. Taking this one step further, performative acts of sharing the body through our digital devices foster a collaborative construction of new physical states, levels of conscious awareness, and even ethics. We reencounter ourselves and others through our interactive computer systems. What we need now are conceptual and methodological frameworks to reflect this. The book offers a reworking of the phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This method, based on a respect for lived experience, begins by listening to the senses and noting insights that arrive in the midst of dance, or quite simply in the midst of life. The combination of performance and phenomenology yields entwinements between experience and reflection that shed light on, problematize, or restructure scholarly approaches to human bodies using digital technologies. After outlining her approach and methodology and clarifying the key concepts of performance, technologies, and virtuality, the author applies the phenomenological method to the experience of designing and performing in a range of computational systems: telematics, motion capture, responsive architectures, and wearable computing.

After a little more than half a century since its initial development, computer code is extensively and intimately woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. From the digital alarm clock that wakes us to the air traffic control system that guides our airplane in for a landing, software is shaping our world: It creates new ways of undertaking tasks, speeds up and automates existing practices, transforms social and economic relationships, and offers new forms of cultural activity, personal empowerment, and modes of play. This book examines software from a spatial perspective, analyzing the dyadic relationship of software and space. The production of space, the authors argue, is increasingly dependent on code, and code is written to produce space. Examples of code/space include airport check-in areas, networked offices, and cafés that are transformed into workspaces by laptops and wireless access. The book argues that software, through its ability to work universally, transduces space. The authors have developed a set of conceptual tools for identifying and understanding the interrelationship between software, space, and everyday life, and illustrate their arguments with empirical material. Finally, they issue a manifesto, calling for critical scholarship into the production and workings of code rather than simply the technologies it enables—a new kind of social science focused on explaining the social, economic, and spatial contours of software.

The study of combinatorial auctions—auctions in which bidders can bid on combinations of items or “packages”—draws on the disciplines of economics, operations research, and computer science. This book integrates these three perspectives, offering a survey of developments in combinatorial auction theory and practice. Combinatorial auctions (CAs), by allowing bidders to express their preferences more fully, can lead to improved economic efficiency and greater auction revenues. However, challenges arise in both design and implementation. This book addresses each of these challenges. After describing and analyzing various CA mechanisms, it addresses bidding languages and questions of efficiency. Possible strategies for solving the computationally intractable problem of how to compute the objective-maximizing allocation (known as the winner determination problem) are considered, as are questions of how to test alternative algorithms. The book discusses five important applications of CAs: spectrum auctions, airport takeoff and landing slots, procurement of freight transportation services, the London bus routes market, and industrial procurement.

This book addresses the conditions of knowledge that make the concept of the “information economy” possible while at the same time obscuring its deleterious effects on material social spaces. In so doing, the book traces three intertwined threads: the relationships among information, labor, and social management that emerged in the nineteenth century; the mid-twentieth-century diffusion of computational metaphors; and the appearance of informatic principles in certain contemporary socioeconomic and cultural practices. Drawing on critical theory, media theory, and the history of science, the book names control as the episteme grounding late capitalism. Beyond any specific device or set of technically mediated practices, digitality functions within this episteme as the logical basis for reshaped concepts of labor, subjectivity, and collectivity, as well as for the intensification of older modes of exclusion and dispossession. In tracking the pervasiveness of this logical mode into the present, the book locates the cultural traces of control across a diverse body of objects and practices, from cybernetics to economic theory and management styles, and from concepts of language and subjectivity to literary texts, films, and video games.

If the gaze can be understood to mark the disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others, the cosmetic gaze—in this book’s formulation—is one through which the act of looking at our bodies and the bodies of others is already informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies (often surgical) of bodily modification. It is, the author says, also a moralizing gaze, a way of looking at bodies as awaiting both physical and spiritual improvement. The book charts this synthesis of outer and inner transformation. It shows how the cosmetic gaze underlies the “rebirth” celebrated in today’s makeover culture and how it builds upon a body concept which has collapsed into its mediality. In today’s beauty discourse—on reality TV and websites that collect “bad plastic surgery”—we yearn to experience a bettered self which has been reborn from its own flesh and is now itself, like a digitally remastered character in a classic Hollywood movie, immortal. The author traces the cosmetic gaze from eighteenth-century ideas about physiognomy through television makeover shows and facial-recognition software to cinema—which, like our other screens, never ceases to show us our bodies as they could be, drawing life from the very cosmetic gaze it transmits.

This book shows how data people leave on the Internet is being employed to answer questions of health and medicine. When we use search engines such as Google or Bing, post messages on social networks, read email or browse the web, we generate a digital trail that is reflective of our activities both online and offline. In the last few years, these digital trails have been used to advance medical research in a variety of ways, including the discovery new side effects of medical drugs, demonstration of the links between eating disorders and the portrayal of celebrities in the media, and the monitoring infectious diseases. More generally, the questions Internet data can answer are difficult and even impossible to answer using traditional tools of medical research, because these data provide unprecedented access to the daily activities of very large populations with fewer biases than those of traditional research tools. Much of the recent discussions on the use of Internet data have been focused on the dangers to personal privacy as a result of the collection of these data. This books shows that this information can serve as a benefit to mankind, without sacrificing the privacy of individuals. As evidence, the book discusses studies that utilized Internet data to advance medical research in a variety of areas, ranging from personal questions to those of public health.

Just south of San Francisco lies California’s Salinas Valley, the heart of a multi-billion dollar agricultural industry that dominates U. S. vegetable production. How did this sleepy valley become the nation’s “salad bowl?” This book explores the ways that science helped build the Salinas Valley and California’s broader farm industry. The author focuses on the case of University of California “farm advisors,” scientists stationed in counties throughout the state who have stepped forward to help growers deal with crises ranging from labor shortages to plagues of insects. These disruptions in what he terms industrial agriculture’s “ecology of power” provide a window into how agricultural scientists and growers have collaborated—and struggled—in shaping this industry. Through these interventions, science has served as a mechanism of repair for industrial agriculture. Basing his analysis on detailed ethnographic and historical research, the author examines the history of state-sponsored farm advising—in particular, its roots in Progressive Era politics—and looks at both past and present practices by farm advisors in the Salinas Valley. He goes on to examine specific examples, including the resolution of a farm labor crisis during World War II at the Spreckels Sugar Company, the use of field trials for promoting new farming practices, and farm advisors’ and growers’ responses to environmental issues. Beyond this, the book argues that the concept of repair is broadly applicable to other cases and that expertise can be deployed more generally to encourage change for the future of American agriculture.

Whether by accidental keystroke or deliberate tinkering, technology is often used in ways that are unintended and unimagined by its designers and inventors. In this book, Jessa Lingel offers an account of digital technology use that looks beyond Silicon Valley and college dropouts-turned-entrepreneurs. Instead, Lingel tells stories from the margins of countercultural communities that have made the Internet meet their needs, subverting established norms of how digital technologies should be used. Lingel presents three case studies that contrast the imagined uses of the web to its lived and often messy practicalities. She examines a social media platform (developed long before Facebook) for body modification enthusiasts, with early web experiments in blogging, community, wikis, online dating, and podcasts; a network of communication technologies (both analog and digital) developed by a local community of punk rockers to manage information about underground shows; and the use of Facebook and Instagram for both promotional and community purposes by Brooklyn drag queens. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Lingel explores issues of alterity and community, inclusivity and exclusivity, secrecy and surveillance, and anonymity and self-promotion. By examining online life in terms of countercultural communities, Lingel argues that looking at outsider experiences helps us to imagine new uses and possibilities for the tools and platforms we use in everyday life.

Attention has been paid to the emergence of “Internet activism,” but scholars and pundits disagree about whether online political activity is different in kind from more traditional forms of activism. Does the global reach and blazing speed of the Internet affect the essential character or dynamics of online political protest? This book examines key characteristics of Web activism, and investigates their impacts on organization and participation. It argues that the Web offers two key affordances relevant to activism: Sharply reduced costs for creating, organizing, and participating in protest; and the decreased need for activists to be physically together in order to act together. A rally can be organized and demonstrators recruited entirely online, without the cost of printing and mailing; an activist can create an online petition in minutes and gather e-signatures from coast to coast using only his or her laptop. Drawing on evidence from samples of online petitions, boycotts, and letter-writing and e-mailing campaigns, the authors show that the more these affordances are leveraged, the more transformative the changes to organizing and participating in protest; the less these affordances are leveraged, the more superficial the changes. The rally organizers, for example, can save money on communication and coordination, but the project of staging the rally remains essentially the same. Tools that allow a single activist to create and circulate a petition entirely online, however, enable more radical changes in the process. The transformative nature of these changes demonstrates the need to revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions about social movements.

The past ten years have brought significant growth in access to Web technology and in the educational possibilities of social media. These changes challenge previous conceptualizations of education and the classroom, and pose practical questions for learners, teachers, and administrators. Today, the unique capabilities of social media are influencing learning and teaching in ways previously unseen. Social media is transforming sectors outside education by changing patterns in personal, commercial, and cultural interaction. These changes offer a window into the future(s) of education, with new means of knowledge production and reception, and new roles for learners and teachers. Surveying the uses to which social media has been applied in these early years, we see a need to re-envision education for the coming decades. To date, no book has systematically and accessibly examined how the cultural and technological shift of social media is influencing educational practices. With this book, we aim to fill that gap. This book critically explores the future of education and online social media, convening leading scholars from the fields of education, law, communications, and cultural studies. We believe that this interdisciplinary edited volume will appeal to a broad audience of scholars, practitioners, and policy makers who seek to understand the opportunities for learning and education that exist at the intersection of social media and education. The book will examine educational institutions, access and participation, new literacies and competencies, cultural reproduction, international accreditation, intellectual property, privacy and protection, new business models, and technical architectures for digital education.

This book argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes. Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, the author states that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as “futures.” By June of 2004, derivative contracts totaling USD 273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. The author suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories which gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities. The book examines the role played by finance theory in the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. It also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream—chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot’s model of “wild” randomness.

This book explores technology’s influence on artistic performance practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The author shows that technologies, from the mechanical to the computational—from a “ballet of objects and lights” staged by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1917 to contemporary, technologically enabled “responsive environments”—have been entangled with performance across a wide range of disciplines. The author examines the rich and extensive history of performance experimentation in theatre, music, dance, the visual and media arts, architecture, and other fields; explores the political, social, and economic context for the adoption of technological practices in art; and shows that these practices have a set of common histories despite their disciplinary borders. Each chapter in the book focuses on a different form: theaterscenography, architecture, video and image making, music and sound composition, body-based arts, mechanical and robotic art, and interactive environments constructed for research, festivals, and participatory urban spaces. The author shows that the survey and analysis of performance traditions have much to teach other emerging practices—in particular in the burgeoning fields of new media. Students of digital art need to master not only electronics and code but also dramaturgy, lighting, sound, and scenography.

The Cold War was not simply a stand-off between the two superpowers. Its theaters were not just in Washington and in Moscow, but also in the social, economic, political, and cultural arenas of geographically far-flung countries emerging from colonial rule. Moreover, tensions surrounding the Cold War were manifest not only in global political disputes but also in the struggles over technology. Technological systems and expertise offered a powerful tool to shape countries—politically, economically, socially, and culturally. This book explores how Cold War politics, imperialism, and postcolonial nation building became enmeshed in technologies and considers the legacies of those entanglements for today’s new global order. It addresses such topics as the the taking over of islands and atolls for military and technological purposes by the supposedly non-imperial United States, efforts to achieve international legitimacy as a nuclear nation by South Africa during apartheid, international technoscientific assistance and Cold War politics, the Saudi irrigation system that spurred a Shi’i rebellion, and the “technopolitics” of emergency as signified by the portable medical kits used by Medecins sans Frontières in the killing fields of the Cold War. The contributors—coming from such diverse fields of study as anthropology, the history of development, diplomatic history, international history, imperial history, and science and technology studies (STS)—chart the course of these historical and geographical entanglements with technology during the Cold War.

Based on several rounds of academic interview and conversations with Trevor Pinch, the book introduces the reader to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and in particular to the social constructionist approach to science, technology and sound. Through the lenses of Pinch’s lifetime work, STS students, and scholars in fields dealing with technological mediation, are provided with an in-depth overview, and with suggestions for further reading, on the most relevant past and ongoing debates in the field. The book starts presenting the approach launched by the Bath School in the early sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and follows the development of the field up to the so called “Science wars” of the ‘90s, and to the popularization of the main acquisitions of the field by Trevor Pinch and Harry Collins’ Golem trilogy. Then, it deals with the sociology of technology, and presents the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach, launched by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker in 1984 and developed in more than 30 years of research, comparing it with alternative approaches like Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory. Five issues are addressed in depth: relevant social groups in the social construction of technology; the intertwining of social representations and practices; the importance of tacit knowledge in SCOT’s approach to the nonrepresentational; the controversy over nonhuman agency; and the political implications of SCOT. Finally, it presents the main current debates in STS, in particular in the study of materiality and ontology, and presents Pinch’s more recent work in sound studies.