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Mediation : a concept for information and communication sciences
\"Mediation is a very old practice that has been reborn to meet the needs of the contemporary world. It is thus increasingly present in today's societies. This book presents the theoretical foundations of mediation, as well as the way in which teachers and researchers in Information and Communication Sciences (ICS) have taken up this concept. Whether it is communicational, informational, cultural, organizational or societal, mediation belongs to a field of research, instituted by ICS, which sees in it a process of overcoming conflict, restoring communication and deconstructing social connections. Mediation: A Concept for Information and Communication Sciences inaugurates this set through its contribution to a state of the art of the theory and concepts used by the ICS community. It is addressed to teachers, researchers and students, as well as information professionals wishing to think about their daily practice.\"--Page 4 of cover.
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Educating librarians in the contemporary university : an essay on iSchools and emancipatory resilience in library and information science
Library education is changing. At a time when librarianship is increasingly seen as part of the information industry, Library and Information Science is also searching for its place in a new and rapidly developing university landscape.
This book analyzes the development of the contemporary university in light of present critical social theory, focusing on such aspects as academic acceleration, organizational accretion and the rise of an ”entrepreneurial spirit,” all of which have both epistemological and organizational consequences. Library and Information Science has proven well-suited to meet this development. One way has been through the rapid international growth of the iSchool movement, now counting close to a hundred member schools all across the world. iSchools not only meet the requirements of contemporary university development, but also contribute to a recontextualization of librarianship and library education. As the iSchool movement relates to a view of information as a commodity and the ”iField” to increased economic growth, it recontextualizes the library sector, traditionally connected to democratic development based on the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Educating librarians in the Contemporary University is written from a European perspective, and examples such as the EU research platform, Horizon 2020, Government Research Proposals, and policy documents from European iSchools are used in an attempt to understand the current development in Library and Information Science and its relevance for librarianship. As the European Research and Development Sector increasingly connects universities to the solution of various ”social challenges” with emphasis on commercial collaborations, the view on knowledge and use of university resources are affected in a way which seemingly make critical analyses difficult.
Questions are asked about the relation between iSchools, late capitalism and the development of Critical Librarianship. Is there a way of fulfilling the ambitions of the critical theory classics and achieve research and an education environment which encourage emancipatory goals within the iSchool movement?
eBook
How we became our data : a genealogy of the informational person
We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are? Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. Koopman explores the emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. This all culminates in what Koopman calls the \"informational person\" and the \"informational power\" we are now subject to. The recent explosion of digital technologies that are turning us into a series of algorithmic data points is shown to have a deeper and more turbulent past than we commonly think. Blending philosophy, history, political theory, and media theory in conversation with thinkers like Michel Foucault, J rgen Habermas, and Friedrich Kittler, Koopman presents an illuminating perspective on how we have come to think of our personhood - and how we can resist its erosion.
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Indexing It All
In this book, Ronald Day offers a critical history of the modern tradition of documentation. Focusing on the documentary index (understood as a mode of social positioning), and drawing on the work of the French documentalist Suzanne Briet, Day explores the understanding and uses of indexicality. He examines the transition as indexes went from being explicit professional structures that mediated users and documents to being implicit infrastructural devices used in everyday information and communication acts. Doing so, he also traces three epistemic eras in the representation of individuals and groups, first in the forms of documents, then information, then data. Day investigates five cases from the modern tradition of documentation. He considers the socio-technical instrumentalism of Paul Otlet, \"the father of European documentation\" (contrasting it to the hermeneutic perspective of Martin Heidegger); the shift from documentation to information science and the accompanying transformation of persons and texts into users and information; social media's use of algorithms, further subsuming persons and texts; attempts to build android robots--to embody human agency within an information system that resembles a human being; and social \"big data\" as a technique of neoliberal governance that employs indexing and analytics for purposes of surveillance. Finally, Day considers the status of critique and judgment at a time when people and their rights of judgment are increasingly mediated, displaced, and replaced by modern documentary techniques.
eBook
Critical theory and the digital
\"This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume offers an original analysis of the role of the digital in today's society. It rearticulates critical theory by engaging it with the challenges of the digital revolution to show how the digital is changing the ways in which we lead our politics, societies, economies, media, and even private lives. In particular, the work examines how the enlightenment values embedded within the culture and materiality of digital technology can be used to explain the changes that are occurring across society.Critical Theory and the Digital draws from the critical concepts developed by critical theorists to demonstrate how the digital needs to be understood within a dialectic of potentially democratizing and totalizing technical power. By relating critical theory to aspects of a code-based digital world and the political economy that it leads to, the book introduces the importance of the digital code in the contemporary world to researchers in the field of politics, sociology, globalization and media studies\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Reality Mining
Big Data is made up of lots of little data: numbers entered into cell phones, addresses entered into GPS devices, visits to websites, online purchases, ATM transactions, and any other activity that leaves a digital trail. Although the abuse of Big Data -- surveillance, spying, hacking -- has made headlines, it shouldn't overshadow the abundant positive applications of Big Data. InReality Mining, Nathan Eagle and Kate Greene cut through the hype and the headlines to explore the positive potential of Big Data, showing the ways in which the analysis of Big Data (\"Reality Mining\") can be used to improve human systems as varied as political polling and disease tracking, while considering user privacy.Eagle, a recognized expert in the field, and Greene, an experienced technology journalist, describe Reality Mining at five different levels: the individual, the neighborhood and organization, the city, the nation, and the world. For each level, they first offer a nontechnical explanation of data collection methods and then describe applications and systems that have been or could be built. These include a mobile app that helps smokers quit smoking; a workplace \"knowledge system\"; the use of GPS, Wi-Fi, and mobile phone data to manage and predict traffic flows; and the analysis of social media to track the spread of disease. Eagle and Greene argue that Big Data, used respectfully and responsibly, can help people live better, healthier, and happier lives.
eBook
Algorithms of Oppression
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for \"black girls\"—what will you find? \"Big Booty\" and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in \"white girls,\" the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about \"why black women are so sassy\" or \"why black women are so angry\" presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
eBook
New technologies in developing societies : from theory to practice
\"New Technologies in Developing Societies examines critically, and from theoretical, practical and policy perspectives how new technologies are transforming day-to-day human activities in Africa and other developing regions. In particular it addresses how technologies are harnessed to enhance socioeconomic conditions, and how people use technologies to empower themselves and to foster a strong deliberative democracy. It also studies how they deal with the challenges that new technologies pose to the protection of intellectual property rights of indigenous people, and the struggles between tradition and modernity in the HIV/AIDS prevention campaign. \"-- Provided by publisher.
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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