Today such companies as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter play an increasingly important role in how users form and express opinions, encounter information, debate, disagree, mobilize, ...and maintain their privacy. What are the human rights implications of an online domain managed by privately owned platforms? According to the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, adopted by the UN Human Right Council in 2011, businesses have a responsibility to respect human rights and to carry out human rights due diligence. But this goal is dependent on the willingness of states to encode such norms into business regulations and of companies to comply. In this volume, contributors from across law and internet and media studies examine the state of human rights in today's platform society.
This open access book aims to set an agenda for research and action in the field of Digital Humanism through short essays written by selected thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including ...computer science, philosophy, education, law, economics, history, anthropology, political science, and sociology. This initiative emerged from the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism and the associated lecture series. Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationships between people and machines in digital times. It acknowledges the potential of information technology. At the same time, it points to societal threats such as privacy violations and ethical concerns around artificial intelligence, automation and loss of jobs, ongoing monopolization on the Web, and sovereignty. Digital Humanism aims to address these topics with a sense of urgency but with a constructive mindset. The book argues for a Digital Humanism that analyses and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind toward a better society and life while fully respecting universal human rights. It is a call to shaping technologies in accordance with human values and needs.
Paradoxes of Media and Information Literacy contributes to ongoing conversations about control of knowledge and different ways of knowing. It does so by analysing why media and information literacy ...(MIL) is proposed as a solution for addressing the current information crisis. Questioning why MIL is commonly believed to wield such power, the book throws into sharp relief several paradoxes that are built into common understandings of such literacies. Haider and Sundin take the reader on a journey across different fields of practice, research and policymaking, including librarianship, information studies, teaching and journalism, media and communication and the educational sciences. The authors also consider national information policy proposals and the recommendations of NGOs or international bodies, such as UNESCO and the OECD. Showing that MIL plays an active role in contemporary controversies, such as those on climate change or vaccination, Haider and Sundin argue that such controversies challenge existing notions of fact and ignorance, trust and doubt, and our understanding of information access and information control. The book thus argues for the need to unpack and understand the contradictions forming around these notions in relation to MIL, rather than attempting to arrive at a single, comprehensive definition. Paradoxes of Media and Information Literacy combines careful analytical and conceptual discussions with an in-depth understanding of information practices and of the contemporary information infrastructure. It is essential reading for scholars and students engaged in library and information studies, media and communication, journalism studies and the educational sciences.
The Outsourcer Sharma, Dinesh C
2015, 20150320, 20150306, 2015-03-20, 2015-04-17
eBook
The rise of the Indian information technology industry is a remarkable economic success story. Software and services exports from India amounted to less than $100 million in 1990, and today come ...close to $100 billion . But, as Dinesh Sharma explains in The Outsourcer , Indian IT's success has a long prehistory; it did not begin with software support, or with American firms' eager recruitment of cheap and plentiful programming labor, or with India's economic liberalization of the 1990s. The foundations of India's IT revolution were laid long ago, even before the country's independence from British rule in 1947, as leading Indian scientists established research institutes that became centers for the development of computer science and technology. The "miracle" of Indian IT is actually a story about the long work of converting skills and knowledge into capital and wealth. With The Outsourcer , Sharma offers the first comprehensive history of the forces that drove India's IT success. Sharma describes India's early development of computer technology, part of the country's efforts to achieve national self-sufficiency, and shows that excessive state control stifled IT industry growth before economic policy changed in 1991. He traces the rise and fall (and return) of IBM in India and the emergence of pioneering indigenous hardware and software firms. He describes the satellite communication links and state-sponsored, tax-free technology parks that made software-related outsourcing by foreign firms viable, and the tsunami of outsourcing operations at the beginning of the new millennium. It is the convergence of many factors, from the tradition of technical education to the rise of entrepreneurship to advances in communication technology, that have made the spectacular growth of India's IT industry possible.
In this second part of the INFINITECH book series, which is a series of three books, the basic concepts for Fintech referring to the diversity in the use of technology to underpin the delivery of ...financial services are reviewed. The demand and the supply side in the financial sector are demonstrated, and further discussed is why Fintech is the focus of industry nowadays and the meaning for waves of digitization. Financial technology (FinTech) and insurance technology (InsuranceTech) are rapidly transforming the financial and insurance services industry. An overview of Reference Architecture (RA) for BigData, IoT and AI applications in the financial and insurance sectors (INFINITECH-RA) is also provided. Moreover, the book reviews the concept of innovation and its application in INFINITECH, and innovative technologies provided by the project for financial sector practical examples.
The tendency to overestimate immediate utility is a common cognitive bias. As a result people behave inconsistently over time and fail to reach long-term goals. Behavioral economics tries to help ...affected individuals by implementing external incentives. However, designing robust incentives is often difficult due to imperfect knowledge of the parameter β ∈ (0, 1 quantifying a person’s present bias. Using the graphical model of Kleinberg and Oren 8, we approach this problem from an algorithmic perspective. Based on the assumption that the only information about β is its membership in some set B ⊂ (0, 1, we distinguish between two models of uncertainty: one in which β is fixed and one in which it varies over time. As our main result we show that the conceptual loss of effi- ciency incurred by incentives in the form of penalty fees is at most 2 in the former and 1 + max B/ min B in the latter model. We also give asymptotically matching lower bounds and approximation algorithms.
The alignment between a firm's business and information technology (IT) strategies continues to be important for research and practice. Prior research investigating the performance consequences of ...strategic IT alignment (SITA) has produced inconsistent results. This paper distinguishes between two roles of SITA: (1) as a state of congruence between business and IT, which is the primary focus of empirical studies, and (2) as reflecting a capability that may enable or inhibit the leveraging of IT investments, as has been discussed theoretically but not examined empirically. Based on the resource-based view (RBV), IT investment (ITI) is explicitly included as the resource that SITA as a capability can inherently help leverage. Also based on RBV, we argue that environmental uncertainty, which is examined in terms of dynamism, complexity, and munificence, moderates the effect of SITA on the relationship between ITI and firm performance. The research model is tested through panel-data analyses of data from 1999–2008, including 758 firm-year observations from 242 firms. This study is the first to find that SITA as a state directly improves firm performance even when considering ITI and its interaction with SITA. Moreover, the effect of the interaction between SITA and ITI on firm performance increases with an increase in environmental dynamism or complexity and with a decrease in environmental munificence. We also find that the effect of the interaction between SITA and ITI can be negative under some environments. Specifically, the results suggest that (1) in dynamic, complex, and hostile environments, SITA does reflect a capability that enhances the positive effect of ITI on firm performance, but (2) in stable, simple, and munificent environments, SITA reflects a rigidity that reduces the positive effect of ITI on firm performance. The results are robust under a variety of statistical specifications and estimations.
The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue or candidate specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political ...life. This book is a critical assessment of the role that information technologies have come to play in contemporary campaigns. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data, and social network analysis, Howard examines the evolving act of political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies, and constructed complex relational databases. The contemporary political campaign adopts digital technologies that improve reach and fundraising, and at the same time adapts their organizational behavior. The new system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation.
Today almost every aspect of life for which data exists can be rendered as a network. Financial data, social networks, biological ecologies: all are visualized in links and nodes, lines connecting ...dots. A network visualization of a corporate infrastructure could look remarkably similar to that of a terrorist organization. In An Aesthesia of Networks , Anna Munster argues that this uniformity has flattened our experience of networks as active and relational processes and assemblages. She counters the "network anaesthesia" that results from this pervasive mimesis by reinserting the question of experience, or aesthesia, into networked culture and aesthetics. Rather than asking how humans experience computers and networks, Munster asks how networks experience -- what operations they perform and undergo to change and produce new forms of experience. Drawing on William James's radical empiricism, she asserts that networked experience is assembled first and foremost through relations, which make up its most immediately sensed and perceived aspect. Munster critically considers a range of contemporary artistic and cultural practices that engage with network technologies and techniques, including databases and data mining, the domination of search in online activity, and the proliferation of viral media through YouTube. These practices -- from artists who "undermine" data to musicians and VJs who use intranetworked audio and video software environments -- are concerned with the relationality at the core of today's network experience.
We focus on an emerging trend in the context of domestic violence—the use of technology to facilitate stalking and other forms of abuse. Surveys with 152 domestic violence advocates and 46 victims ...show that technology—including phones, tablets, computers, and social networking websites—is commonly used in intimate partner stalking. Technology was used to create a sense of the perpetrator’s omnipresence, and to isolate, punish, and humiliate domestic violence victims. Perpetrators also threatened to share sexualized content online to humiliate victims. Technology-facilitated stalking needs to be treated as a serious offense, and effective practice, policy, and legal responses must be developed.
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