Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
8,122
result(s) for
"Computer networks Social aspects."
Sort by:
The Wealth of Networks
With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today's emerging networked information environment.
In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing-and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained-or lost-by the decisions we make today.
eBook
Signal Traffic
The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure--transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like--intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails.
Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.
Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.
eBook
Trust, computing, and society
\"Do new forms of connection need more regulation and control? These fascinating essays explore the question from technical, socio-philosophical, and design perspectives\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Cyberchiefs
People are inventing new ways of working together on the internet. Decentralised production thrives on weblogs, wikis and free software projects. In Cyberchiefs, Mathieu O’Neil focuses on the regulations of these working relationships. He examines the transformation of leadership and expertise in online networks, and the emergence of innovative forms of participatory politics. What are the costs and benefits of alternatives to hierarchical organisation? Using case studies of online projects or ‘tribes’ such as the radical Primitivism archive, the Daily Kos political weblog, the Debian free software project, and Wikipedia, O’Neil shows that leaders must support maximum autonomy for participants, and he analyses the tensions generated by this distribution of authority.
eBook
Dot Com Mantra
Billions of dollars are being spent nationally and globally on providing computing access to digitally disadvantaged groups and cultures with an expectation that computers and the Internet can lead to higher socio-economic mobility. This ethnographic study of social computing in the Central Himalayas, India, investigates alternative social practices with new technologies and media amongst a population that is for the most part undocumented. In doing so, this book offers fresh and critical perspectives in areas of contemporary debate: informal learning with computers, cyberleisure, gender access and empowerment, digital intermediaries, and glocalization of information and media.
eBook
Virtual Intimacies
Virtual Intimacies tells the stories of gay men, including
the author, who navigate social worlds in which the boundaries
between real and virtual have been thoroughly confounded. Shaka
McGlotten analyzes intimate connection and disconnection across an
array of media sites, including mass mediated public sex scandals,
online spaces, Do-It-Yourself porn, and smartphone apps in order to
show the ordinary ways people challenge and rework sexuality and
technology. The book frames \"virtual intimacy\" in terms of the
mocking disapproval that looks at using technology to connect as
something shameful or as a means of last resort. However, where
many see a dead end, Virtual Intimacies argues on behalf
of more extensive understandings of intimacy, thereby contributing
to many feminist and queer approaches that seek to expand the scope
of what counts as connection, belonging, or love. The author also
highlights the creative and resilient ways that queer people build
social worlds using spaces and technologies in ways they were not
intended.
eBook