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Contemporary life is increasingly shaped through attunement to the atmospheric affordances of the media environment. Ambient Media delves into the use of music, video, film, and literature as tools to tune this atmospheric self. The book traces the emergence of mood-regulating media in Japan from the environmental art and Erik Satie boom of the 1960s and 70s to the more recent emphasis on “healing” styles. Focusing on how ambience reshapes those dwelling within it, Ambient Media explores the working of atmospheres designed for affective calm, rhythmic attunement, embodied security, and urban coexistence. The book argues for understanding ambient media as a specifically neoliberal response to mood regulation, serving as a way to atmospherically shape collective behavior while providing resources for emotional autonomy and attention restoration at the individual level. Ambient Media considers the adaptive side of atmosphere as an approach to self-care and social mobility. At the same time, the book considers the limits of mood regulation and the low-affect lifestyle when it comes to interpersonal life. Musicians, video artists, filmmakers, and writers in Japan have expanded on Brian Eno’s original idea of a style affording “calm, and a space to think,” providing materials to cultivate sensory serenity within the uncertain horizons of the contemporary social landscape. Offering a new way of understanding Japanese social demands to “read the air,” the book documents both the adaptive and the alarming sides of this turn to mediated moods.

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.

Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo’s Commuter Train Network is an exploration of collective life formed at the interstices of human and machine operation within one of the most complex and large-scale technical infrastructures in the world. Adopting a simultaneous critical and optimistic approach, it is an attempt to think with the specific quality of relations formed within Tokyo’s commuter rail infrastructure in order to develop a mode of analysis adequate to the technological complexity of contemporary society and to explore emergent ontologies of human and machine co-constitution. In so doing, it draws attention not only to Tokyo’s commuter train network’s infamously packed trains and precision schedule but more importantly its operation at the extreme edge of sustainability beyond its structural capacity. Such a system, it posits, embodies the contradictory and unsustainable logic defining our contemporary relationship with technology. At the same time, through a theoretically novel approach that emphasizes the generative gaps within the network’s immersive mediation, Anthropology of the Machine advances Tokyo’s commuter train network as a unique setting through which to question received discourses on technology and to re-conceptualize the human relationship with machines toward a more sustainable future.

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.

We are in the middle of a major, long-term food crisis—how do we get out of it? The goal of Balancing on a Planet is to empower readers to analyze the challenges facing the agrifood system so they can ask better questions, find more useful answers, and participate in discussion and decision making more effectively in order to contribute to solving the food crisis. This book is an interdisciplinary primer on critical thinking and effective action for the future of our global agrifood system that integrates biophysical, social, economic, cultural, and philosophical components. It explains the fundamental concepts needed for understanding the history, current situation, and possible futures of our agrifood systems—from local to global—and analyzes opposing perspectives. It covers a range of topics, including population, the Neolithic and subsequent revolutions, sustainability, plant breeding and biotechnology, agroecosystems management, common property management, climate change, and localization. A key component of the book is a thorough analysis of the assumptions underlying different perspectives on problems related to food and agriculture around the world and a discussion of alternative solutions. For example, the author argues that combining selected aspects of small-scale traditional agriculture with modern scientific agriculture can help balance our biological need for food with its environmental impact—and it can continue to fulfill cultural, social, and psychological needs related to food.

As exemplary representatives of a form of critical feminism, Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway offer entry into the great crises of contemporary society, politics, and culture through their writings. Butler leads readers to rethink the boundaries of the human in a time of perpetual war. Hayles turns herself into a “writing machine” in order to find a dwelling place for the digital humanities within the austere landscape of the culture of the code. Haraway is the one contemporary thinker to have begun the necessary ethical project of creating a new language of potential reconciliation among previously warring species. This book states that the postmodernism of Judith Butler, the posthumanism of Katherine Hayles, and the companionism of Donna Haraway are possible pathways to the posthuman future that is captured by the specter of body drift. Body drift refers to the fact that individuals no longer inhabit a body in any meaningful sense of the term, but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies: gendered, sexualized, laboring, disciplined, imagined, and technologically augmented. Body drift is constituted by the blast of information culture envisioned by artists, communicated by social networking, and signified by its signs. It is lived daily by remixing, resplicing, and redesigning the codes: codes of gender, sexuality, class, ideology, and identity. The writings of Butler, Hayles, and Haraway, this text reveals, provide the critical vocabulary and political context for understanding the deep complexities of body drift and challenging the current emphasis on the material body.

This Handbook is the definitive source of major academic research on university technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship, featuring chapters from the leading scholars in this field. Given that the literature on university technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship is highly interdisciplinary, another important aspect of this Handbook is that our contributors represent a variety of social sciences (e.g., economics, sociology, psychology, and political science), fields in business administration (e.g., strategy, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, marketing, and finance), and other professional programs and areas of study (e.g., law, public administration, and engineering). Since university technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon, the Handbook also includes a substantial amount of international evidence, which reflects a variety of national perspectives on this topic.

On January 18, 2012, millions of people participated in the now-infamous “Internet blackout” to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the rights it would have given intellectual property holders to shape how people use the Internet. SOPA’s withdrawal was heralded as a victory for an open Internet. However, as Natasha Tusikov documents in Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet, rather than accept defeat, a small group of corporations, tacitly backed by the U.S. and other governments, have implemented much of SOPA via a series of secret, handshake agreements among powerful corporations, including Google, PayPal, and Microsoft. This book is the first to explore these agreements. Drawing on extensive interviews with corporate and government officials, Tusikov details the emergence of a new realm of global governance, in which large Internet firms act as global regulators for powerful intellectual property owners like Nike, and raises questions about the threat these new global regimes pose to democratic accountability itself. The book argues that these global regulators are significantly altering the ways in which governments and corporations regulate content and information on the Internet.

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.

Coin-Operated Americans centers on the reframing of boyhood that took place in the popular discourse surrounding early video gaming, but it is not another story about young men. Rather, it charts Americans’ efforts to make sense of video gaming as an emergent medium through news coverage, films, television programs, and other media. The book explains how video gaming both challenged and reinforced existing ideals of masculinity, and how efforts by industry advocates and cultural critics alike to make sense of gaming helped shape and restrict gamer identity. Using diverse archival sources alongside popular films and television programs and a series of original oral history interviews, Coin-Operated Americans offers insight into the construction of gaming in popular imagination. Early coin-operated video games like PONG (Atari, 1972) emerged from the same industry that popularized pool and foosball tables and pinball machines in bars and bowling alleys. As this book details, the transition by which video gaming became strongly associated with boyhood was heavily influenced both by the coin-op industry’s efforts to establish respectability and by existing cultural narratives surrounding technology, masculinity, and youth.

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.

The construction of tens of thousands of large dams across the planet’s surface brought about one of the largest biophysical transformations of the twentieth century and has irrevocably altered human-environment relations. The geopolitical dimensions of this “concrete revolution” have remained largely hidden. The history of large dams and more generally river basin development is simultaneously environmental, social, technical and geopolitical. This book focuses on the activities of the United States government, in particular the Bureau of Reclamation, America’s premier water development agency, to exercise and disseminate technical expertise regarding large hydroelectric dams and river basin planning and development to the world’s “underdeveloped regions” from the 1930s to the 1970s. The Bureau’s water resource development activities, which ranged from short-term consultations to intensive multi-year programs, were deeply influenced by the imperatives of US foreign policy during the Cold War era. Detailed cases presented in the book—including Bureau interventions in China, Lebanon, Ethiopia and the Mekong Basin—underscore how the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War facilitated an alignment of economic and technical networks of development that were highly favorable to the dissemination of large dams. Large dams and other technology-centered development projects are never purely technical undertakings whose successes or failures hinge on the ingenuity of the engineers who design and build them or the motivations of state officials who fund and promote them. The lessons of the history presented here are that large dams and river basin planning are complex hybrids of nature, technology and society.

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.

Digital social media afford unprecedented opportunities for groups of citizens to collaborate locally and internationally in innovative ways in countless domains. This book seeks to evaluate this potential, drawing upon a broad conceptual analysis and a series of co-creative case studies undertaken by a multi-disciplinary research team with community partners in different parts of the UK. Creative citizenship is shown to be a widespread, even global phenomenon, though the term itself is recent in origin. Creative citizens are active across the whole of society, making distinctive contributions in politics, education, media, environment, urban development, journalism, planning, business and many other dimensions. In its closing chapter, the book draws together the insights from case studies and a wider reflection upon policy options open to government and others to ‘unbind’ creative citizenship. The authors argue for re-consideration of official statistics to reflect the significant but largely uncounted contribution to the creative economy made by creative citizens. The book then identifies other ways in which the potential of creative citizens can be ‘unbound’, in fields such as community journalism, planning and education.

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.

The financial crisis of 2007–2008 shook the idea that advanced information and communications technology (ICT) is solely a source of economic rejuvenation and uplift, instead introducing the world to the once-unthinkable idea of a technological revolution wrapped inside an economic collapse. This book delves into the ways networked systems and ICTs have transformed global capitalism during the so-called Great Recession. It focuses on capitalism's crisis tendencies to confront the contradictory matrix of a technological revolution and economic stagnation making up the current political economy and demonstrates digital technology's central role in the global political economy. As the book shows, the forces at the core of capitalism—exploitation, commodification, and inequality—are ongoing and accelerating within the networked political economy.

This book examines the impact of new media and communication technologies on the spatial, strategic, and organizational fabric of social movements. It begins with the rise of the Zapatistas in the mid-1990s, and how aspects of the movement—network organizational structure, participatory democratic governance, and the use of communication tools as a binding agent—became essential parts of Indymedia and all Cyber Left organizations. From there the book charts the media-based think tanks and experiments that continued the Cyber Left's evolution through the Independent Media Center's birth around the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. After examining the historical antecedents and rise of the global Indymedia network, the book melds virtual and traditional ethnographic practice to explore the Cyber Left's cultural logic, mapping the social, spatial and communicative structure of the Indymedia network and detailing its operations on the local, national and global level. It also looks at the participatory democracy that governs global social movements and the ways the movement's twin ideologies, democracy and decentralization, have come into tension, and how what the book calls the switchboard of struggle conducts stories of shared struggle from the hyper-local and dispersed worldwide. As the book shows, understanding the intersection of Indymedia and the Global Social Justice Movement illuminates their foundational role in the Occupy struggle, Arab Spring uprising, and the other emergent movements that have in recent years re-energized radical politics.

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.

This volume introduces the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to help explain the divergent ways in which states and societies conceptualize futures achievable through and supportive of advances in science and technology. Sociotechnological imaginaries add a new dimension to work in anthropology and political theory dealing with collective beliefs about social order. Work in these fields has not been properly attentive to the role of science and technology in shaping human possibilities. At the same time, sociotechnical imaginaries supplement more micro-focused work in Science and Technology Studies (STS), showing how developments in science and technology take place within wider cultural understandings of how societies ought to live, and how such developments are bound up with existing structures of normativity and power. Through a mix of case studies, together with a theoretical introduction and a synoptic conclusion, the volume demonstrates how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the politics of science and technology. The case studies illustrate how different imaginations of the goals, priorities, benefits and risks of social life are co-produced along with the construction of science and technology—at scales ranging from institutional to national to global. Chapters ask how the work of collective imagining responds to and accommodates some of the salient political challenges of modernity: democracy, the expert/lay divide, novel understandings of life, public ethics, and institutional accountability. The book thereby opens up a fertile space for the comparative analysis of science, technology, politics, and political cultures, as well as for methodological cross-fertilization among diverse STS-related disciplines.