Internet telephony is the integration and convergence of voice and data networks, services, and applications. The rapidly developing technology can convert analog voice input to digital data, send it over available networked channels, and then convert it back to voice output. Traditional circuit-switching networks such as telephone lines can be used together with packet-switching networks such …
"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 …
This volume explores alternative cultural encounters with and around information technologies, encounters that counter dominant, Western-oriented notions of media consumption. The contributors include media practices as forms of cultural resistance and subversion, 'DIY cultures', and other non-mainstream models of technology production and consumption. The contributors - leading thinkers in sci…
"Our encounters with websites, avatars, videos, mobile apps, discussion forums, GIFs, and nonhuman intelligent agents allow us to experience sensations of connectivity, interest, desire, and attachment -- as well as detachment, boredom, fear, and shame. Some affective online encounters may arouse complex, contradictory feelings that resist dualistic distinctions. In this book, leading scholars …
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…
How the future of the information economy will take place at the intersection of technology, law, and economics: lessons to be learned from the Microsoft antitrust trial, open-source software, and Napster.While we were waiting for the Internet to make us rich--back when we thought all we had to do was to buy lottery tickets called dotcom shares--we missed the real story of the information econo…
An investigation of how governments, organizations, and groups use the Internet to promote civic and political engagement among young people. There has been widespread concern in contemporary Western societies about declining engagement in civic life; people are less inclined to vote, to join political parties, to campaign for social causes, or to trust political processes. Young people in part…
This title provides an account of how young people in Ghana's capital city adopt and adapt digital technology in the margins of the global economy. The book captures the flexibility of technology by users in the margins but also highlights how their invisibility puts limits on their full inclusion into a global network society.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.