How are families responding to the challenges of parenting young people in the digital age? This book draws on in-depth interviews with families from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in order to ...trace the difference that social class makes in how families are making decisions about digital and mobile media use. This book finds that upper income families employ an ethic of expressive empowerment, in which parents encourage their children to use these media in relation to education and self-development and to avoid use that might distract them from goals of achievement. Lower income families, in contrast, embrace an ethic of respectful connectedness, in which family members are encouraged to use digital and mobile media in ways that are respectful, compliant toward parents, and family focused. Each approach has its own benefits and drawbacks, as upper income families are increasingly tempted to employ communication technologies in helicopter and surveillance parenting, and lower income families may use technologies in ways that strengthen interfamilial and neighborhood bonds while inadvertently reinforcing social isolation from other groups. The book challenges the hope that digital and mobile media might assist in bridging cultural and economic divides. It concludes that as U.S. families experience lives that are increasingly isolated from those whose economic circumstances differ from their own, the different roles that digital and mobile media are playing in family lives are reinforcing rather than alleviating what continues to be a troubling economic and social gap in U.S. society.
A compelling argument that the Internet of things threatens human rights and security and that suggests policy prescriptions to protect our future The Internet has leapt from human-facing display ...screens into the material objects all around us. In this so-called Internet of Things-connecting everything from cars to cardiac monitors to home appliances-there is no longer a meaningful distinction between physical and virtual worlds. Everything is connected. The social and economic benefits are tremendous, but there is a downside: an outage in cyberspace can result not only in a loss of communication but also potentially a loss of life. Control of this infrastructure has become a proxy for political power, since countries can easily reach across borders to disrupt real-world systems. Laura DeNardis argues that this diffusion of the Internet into the physical world radically escalates governance concerns around privacy, discrimination, human safety, democracy, and national security, and she offers new cyber-policy solutions. In her discussion, she makes visible the sinews of power already embedded in our technology and explores how hidden technical governance arrangements will become the constitution of our future.
An eye-opening look at the invisible workers who protect us from seeing humanity's worst on today's commercial internetSocial media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield ...against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material-sometimes thousands of items per day. Sarah T. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she contextualizes this hidden industry and examines the emotional toll it takes on its workers. This revealing investigation of the people "behind the screen" offers insights into not only the reality of our commercial internet but the future of globalized labor in the digital age.
What is online risk? How can we best protect children from it? Who should be responsible for this protection? Is all protection good? Can Internet users trust the industry? These and other ...fundamental questions are discussed in this book. Beginning with the premise that the political and democratic processes in a society are affected by the way in which that society defines and perceives risks, Children in the Online World offers insights into the contemporary regulation of online risk for children (including teens), examining the questions of whether such regulation is legitimate and whether it does in fact result in the sacrifice of certain fundamental human rights. The book draws on representative studies with European children concerning their actual online risk experiences as well as an extensive review of regulatory rationales in the European Union, to contend that the institutions of the western European welfare states charged with protecting children have changed fundamentally, at the cost of the level of security that they provide. In consequence, children at once have more rights with regard to their personal decision making as digital consumers, yet fewer democratic rights to participation and protection as ’digital citizens’. A theoretically informed, yet empirically grounded study of the relationship between core democratic values and the duty to protect young people in the media-sphere, Children in the Online World will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences with interests in new technologies, risk and the sociology of childhood and youth. Book: The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
The current statuses and future promises of the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Everything (IoE) and Internet of Nano-Things (IoNT) are extensively reviewed and a summarized survey is ...presented. The analysis clearly distinguishes between IoT and IoE, which are wrongly considered to be the same by many commentators. After evaluating the current trends of advancement in the fields of IoT, IoE and IoNT, this paper identifies the 21 most significant current and future challenges as well as scenarios for the possible future expansion of their applications. Despite possible negative aspects of these developments, there are grounds for general optimism about the coming technologies. Certainly, many tedious tasks can be taken over by IoT devices. However, the dangers of criminal and other nefarious activities, plus those of hardware and software errors, pose major challenges that are a priority for further research. Major specific priority issues for research are identified.
The Netflix Effect Kevin McDonald, Daniel Smith-Rowsey / Kevin McDonald, Daniel Smith-Rowsey
2016, 2016-08-11
eBook
Netflix is the definitive media company of the 21st century. It was among the first to parlay new Internet technologies into a successful business model, and in the process it changed how consumers ...access film and television. It is now one of the leading providers of digitally delivered media content and is continually expanding access across a host of platforms and mobile devices. Despite its transformative role, however, Netflix has drawn very little critical attention-far less than competitors such as YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Comcast, and HBO. This collection addresses this gap, as the essays are designed to critically explore the breadth and diversity of Netflix's effect from a variety of different scholarly perspectives, a necessary approach considering the hybrid nature of Netflix, its inextricable links to new models of media production, distribution, viewer engagement and consumer behavior, its relationship to existing media conglomerates and consumer electronics, its capabilities as a web-based service provider and data network, and its reliance on a broader technological infrastructure.
The internet is facilitating a generational transition within America’s advocacy group system. New “netroots” political associations have arisen in the past decade and play an increasingly prominent ...role in citizen political mobilization. At the same time, the organizations that mediate citizen political engagement and sustained collective action are changing. They rely upon modified staff structures and work routines. They employ novel strategies and tactical repertoires. Rather than “organizing without organizations,” the new media environment has given rise to “organizing through different organizations.” This book provides a richly detailed analysis of this disruptive transformation. It highlights changes in membership and fundraising regimes—established industrial patterns of supporter interaction and revenue streams—that were pioneered by MoveOn.org and have spread broadly within the advocacy system. Through interviews, content analysis, and direct observation of the leading netroots organizations, the book offers fresh insights into 21st-century political organizing. The book highlights important variations among the new organizations—including internet-mediated issue generalists like MoveOn, community blogs like DailyKos.com, and neo-federated groups like DemocracyforAmerica.com. It also explores a wider set of netroots infrastructure organizations that provide supporting services to membership-based advocacy associations. The rise of the political netroots has had a distinctly partisan character: conservatives have repeatedly tried and failed to build equivalents to the organizations and infrastructure of the progressive netroots. The book investigates these efforts, as well as the late-forming Tea Party movement, and introduces the theory of Outparty Innovation Incentives as an explanation for the partisan adoption of political technology.
This book presents the previously untold history of the use of new media in Democratic electoral campaigning over the last decade. Drawing on open-ended interviews with more than fifty political ...staffers, fieldwork during the 2008 electoral cycle, and archival research, the book follows a group of technically skilled Internet staffers who came together on the Howard Dean campaign and created a series of innovations in campaign organization, tools, and practice. After the election, these individuals founded an array of consulting firms and training organizations and staffed a number of prominent Democratic campaigns. In the process, they carried their innovations across Democratic politics and contributed to a number of electoral victories, including Barack Obama’s historic bid for the presidency. The book contributes to an interdisciplinary body of scholarship from communication, sociology, and political science. The book theorizes processes of innovation in online electoral politics. It shows how the innovations of the Dean and Obama campaigns were the product of the movement of staffers between industries, organizational structures that provided a space for technical development, and incentives for experimentation. The book also analyzes how Dean’s former staffers created an infrastructure for Democratic new media campaigning after the 2004 elections that helped transfer knowledge, practice, and tools across electoral cycles and campaigns. The book shows how organizational contexts shaped the use of tools by the Obama campaign, analyzes the emergence of data systems that facilitate electoral coordination, and reveals how cultural work mobilizes supporters to participate in collective action.
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