Scholars from communication and media studies join those from science and technology studies to examine media technologies as complex, sociomaterial phenomena. In recent years, scholarship around media technologies has finally shed the assumption that these technologies are separate from and powerfully determining of social life, looking at them instead as produced by and embedded in distinc…
"At the beginning of 2000, the U.S. economy was enjoying the longest period of sustained growth and economic prosperity in its history. According to The Internet Upheaval, part of the explanation for this phenomenon is a consequence of how information technologies, in particular the Internet, are upending fundamental economic and social structures.These research studies explore some of the tele…
"When the prevailing system of governing divides the planet into mutually exclusive territorial monopolies of force, what institutions can govern the Internet, with its transnational scope, boundless scale, and distributed control? Given filtering/censorship by states and concerns over national cybersecurity, it is often assumed that the Internet will inevitably be subordinated to the tradition…
"Almost anyone with a $40 mobile phone and a nearby cell tower can get online with an ease unimaginable just twenty years ago. An optimistic narrative has proclaimed the mobile phone as the device that will finally close the digital divide. Yet access and effective use are not the same thing, and the digital world does not run on mobile handsets alone. In After Access, Jonathan Donner examines …
Complex communicating computer systems -- computers connected by data networks and in constant communication with their environments -- do not always behave as expected. This book introduces behavioral modeling, a rigorous approach to behavioral specification and verification of concurrent and distributed systems. It is among the very few techniques capable of modeling systems interaction at a …
Schiller traces the transformation of the Internet from government, military, and educational tool to agent of "digital capitalism" through three critically important and interlinked realms.The networks that comprise cyberspace were originally created at the behest of government agencies, military contractors, and allied educational institutions. Over the past generation or so, however, a growi…
"Dolphin researchers have collected an impressive amount of data over the last twenty years, thanks to advances in technology for monitoring, recording, and analyzing dolphin behavior as well as increasing interest in exploring and modeling dolphins' cognitive capacities. This volume offers a comprehensive reference to the latest research on dolphin communication and cognition, reporting on fin…
"How family video game play promotes intergenerational communication, connection, and learning. Video games have a bad reputation in the mainstream media. They are blamed for encouraging social isolation, promoting violence, and creating tensions between parents and children. In this book, Sinem Siyahhan and Elisabeth Gee offer another view. They show that video games can be a tool for connecti…
"Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation -- to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists…
The message from educators, the tech community, and even politicians is clear: everyone should learn to code. To emphasize the universality and importance of computer programming, promoters of coding for everyone often invoke the concept of "literacy," drawing parallels between reading and writing code and reading and writing text. In this book, Annette Vee examines the coding-as-literacy analo…