Product Description: The (Dis)information Age challenges prevailing notions about the impact of new information and media technologies. The widespread acceptance of ideas about the socially transformative power of these technologies demands a close and critical interrogation...read more

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Product Description: The new digital media offers us an unprecedented memory capacity, an ubiquitous communication channel and a growing computing power. How can we exploit this medium to augment our personal and social cognitive processes at the service of human development? Combining a deep knowledge of humanities and social sciences as well as a real familiarity with computer science issues, this book explains the collaborative construction of a global hypercortex coordinated by a computable metalanguage...read more

Product Description: With the emergence and development of information and communications technologies, the arrival of the Information Age has been proclaimed as a distinct new epoch to match the Agricultural and Industrial Ages in significance. To reflect this new development we are now said to live in an Information Society and communication resources will be easily accessible, and fundamental improvements in living standards will take place...read more

Product Description: Emergent technologies, including ambient intelligence and pervasive computing, promise a considerable advance in the way people use virtual communities, and new, innovative applications are making virtual communities more dynamic and usable than ever...read more

Product Description: Recent developments in new media have led to the rise of what has become known as ‘social media’. The shift towards mass self-communication has lowered the technological thresholds for everyday users to connect and to become ‘produsers’ in media life...read more

This is more than just another book on Internet studies. Tracing the pervasive influence of 'digital culture' throughout contemporary life, this text integrates socio-economic understandings of the 'information society' with the cultural studies approach to production, use, and consumption of digital media and multimedia. Refreshingly readable and packed with examples from profiling databases and mashups to cybersex and the truth about social networking, Understanding Digital Culture: • crosses disciplines to give a balanced account of the social, economic and cultural dimensions of the information society • illuminates the increasing importance of mobile, wireless and converged media technologies in everyday life • unpacks how the information society is transforming and challenging traditional notions of crime, resistance, war and protest, community, intimacy and belonging • charts the changing cultural forms associated with new media and its consumption, including music, gaming, microblogging and online identity • illustrates the above through a series of contemporary, in-depth case studies of digital culture. This is the perfect text for students looking for a full account of the information society, virtual cultures, sociology of the Internet and new media.

Product Description: To speak of participation today raises a series of questions on how the presence and use of new media affect modes of social participation. From a variety of theoretical, empirical and methodological perspectives, the contributions in this volume explore participation in different social realms – from everyday life, interpersonal relationships, work and leisure activities to collective and political action...read more

Product Description: With the spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs) comes the potential both for new social and economic equalities and new forms of inequalities. Information, Power, and Politics: Technological and Institutional Mediations demonstrates that ICTs can act as an impetus for democratizing information and knowledge, while at the same time new institutional frameworks can limit one's use of and access to strategic information and knowledge...read more

Product Description: In 2003 and again in 2005, the international community was called by the United Nations to take part in a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). This two-phased summit placed an unprecedented global spotlight on information and communication issues...read more

Product Description: This major collection brings together contributions on post-industrial society and the 'techno-economic' realm from an impressive range of key thinkers, including Marx, Penty, Riesman, Bell, Castells, Touraine, Dahrendorf, Giddens, Gorz and Lyotard...read more

Product Description: The topic of "information society" is of very high importance in the dawn of the new era. It is a highly innovative tendency which leans on information as an energy in the fullest sense of the word. As a result, a way of thinking, a life style, an immaterial economy, and a specific societal model ensued...read more

Product Description: This book discusses the personal and social lives of e-actors interacting within the socio-technical structures of the evolving broadband society by exploring the different ways in which individuals, social groups, institutions, operators, manufactures, policy makers, designers and other parties contribute to human communication and social interaction in contemporary media societies...read more

What is information? Who are the information rich and who are the information poor? Set against a broad historical backdrop, this study explores the information society in the light of the economic and social pressures which are placed upon information gatherers and keepers. This third edition has been revised to take account of further rapid change in mass media in general and in the World Wide Web in particular. The commercial value of information to those who wish to access it and to those who wish to process and disseminate it becomes increasingly important in a world where information can be transmitted in split seconds. Information can become a political tool which can be abused as easily as it is used. In examining the differing threads that make up the information society, the author looks at the ehtics of information transfer in the context of the social relationship between the citizen and the state. Major contemporary issues examined include censorship, copyright, freedom of information and access to information. The inquisitive nature of this examination of the information profession and its exploration beyond the traditional boundaries of librarianship should make it useful to all information providers. It is also suitable for students of information, librarianship and information studies.