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.
Inspired by the ever-evolving concerns surrounding data privacy, this study analyzes Apple’s and Google’s ads for their iPhone and Android devices, respectively, as well as each company’s privacy ...policies. Findings via critical discourse analysis reveal that the ads conflate privacy with security, relying on powerful imageries that depict the phones as safes from which data cannot travel. These depictions, however, do not align with the policies that provide separate sections for privacy and security. With these findings in mind, I propose a widespread adoption of “privacy-washing” to promote a newfound literacy of granular data types.
The hope and hype about African digital entrepreneurship, contrasted with the reality on the ground in local ecosystems.
In recent years, Africa has seen a digital entrepreneurship boom, with ...hundreds of millions of dollars poured into tech cities, entrepreneurship trainings, coworking spaces, innovation prizes, and investment funds. Politicians and technologists have offered Silicon Valley–influenced narratives of boundless opportunity and exponential growth, in which internet-enabled entrepreneurship allows Africa to “leapfrog” developmental stages to take a leading role in the digital revolution. This book contrasts these aspirations with empirical research about what is actually happening on the ground. The authors find that although the digital revolution has empowered local entrepreneurs, it does not untether local economies from the continent’s structural legacies.
Drawing on a five-year research project, the authors show how entrepreneurs creatively and productively adapt digital technologies to local markets rather than dreaming of global dominance, achieving sustainable businesses by scaling based on relationships and customizing digital platform business models for African infrastructure challenges. The authors examine African entrepreneurial ecosystems; show that African digital entrepreneurs have begun to form a new professional class, becoming part of a relatively exclusive cultural and economic elite; and discuss the impact of Silicon Valley’s mythologies and expectations. Finally, they consider the implications of their findings and offer recommendations to policymakers and others.
Future 5G networks will likely include mmWave radio access communication links, because of their potential multi-gigabit-per-second capacity. However, these frequencies are characterized by very ...dynamic channel conditions which lead to wide fluctuations in the received signal quality. This article explains how the end-to-end user experience in mobile mmWave networks could be affected by a sub-optimal interaction between the most widely used transport protocol, TCP, and mmWave links. It also provides insights on the throughput-latency trade-off when Multipath TCP (MP-TCP) is used judiciously across various links (e.g., LTE and mmWave).
This open access book presents a number of case studies on digital transformation in Norway, one of the fore-runners in the digital progress index established by the European Commission in 2020. They ...explore the process of adoption, diffusion and value generation from digital technologies, and how the use of different digital solutions has enabled Norwegian enterprises to digitally transform their operations and business models. The book starts with an introductory chapter summarizing a vast body of literature in order to synthesize what is already known about digital transformation before exploring the Norwegian context in more detail. Then a series of case studies from the private and public sector in Norway is presented. They document a process perspective which describes the sequence of events during and after adoption of digital solutions, as well as the types of business value that were realized. Through these single studies, the process of digital transformation is illustrated, a number of key findings highlighted, and eventually theoretical and practical recommendations based on these cases emphasized. The book closes with a brief overview of some emerging technologies, and comments on how they are likely to change different sectors. Digital transformation has been one of the priority areas for the Norwegian government over the past years and puts Norwegian enterprises upfront in adopting novel technologies and utilizing them for achieving organizational goals. This experience accumulated over the years makes the Norwegian context a particularly interesting one in understanding how private and public organizations make use of new digital solutions, what lessons can be learnt during the process, and what are some of the key success and failure factors. This way the book is written for practitioners who are currently involved in digital transformation projects in their organizations, researchers of information systems and management, as well as master students in degrees of informatics and technology management.
At the request of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has, since 1959, annually assembled panels of experts from ...academia, industry, medicine, and other scientific and engineering environments to assess the quality and effectiveness of the NIST measurements and standards laboratories, of which there are now seven, as well as the adequacy of the laboratories' resources. Review of Three Divisions of the Information Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology: Fiscal Year 2015 assesses the organization's technical programs, the portfolio of scientific expertise within the organization, the adequacy of the organization's facilities, equipment, and human resources, and the effectiveness by which the organization disseminates its program outputs.
Innovations create new possibilities for the welfare state. Digital technologies, however, can create a range of surprising and unintended effects. Lost in Digital Translations: Studies of Digital ...Resistance and Accommodation to the Welfare State in Practice is an exploration of what happens when digital technologies intersect with welfare state practices. This book seeks to develop a creative critique of digital welfare. Digitalising welfare runs the risk of undermining or suppressing knowledge dimensions that are central in the distribution of welfare – in short, knowledge can be ‘lost in digital translation’. The universal welfare state is intended for all citizens. By sensitizing us to what is lost in digital translation, we are made aware of some of the exclusionary mechanisms that impact our digital society. In this anthology a group of researchers investigate how digitalisation influences the most ambitious welfare state in the world: Norway. Given Norway’s extensive welfare system, the process of digitalisation has had a profound impact. Digital technologies are used to enhance cooperation and coordination between health trusts and municipalities, standardizing communication between frontline workers and citizens, and even altering the architectural design of public buildings, all of which influences the quality of welfare services. At the same time, patient security is endangered, vulnerable groups experience even more exclusion from society, and for others, the quality of welfare deteriorates.
Innovation in information and communication technology (ICT) fuels the growth of the global economy. How ICT markets evolve depends on politics and policy, and since the 1950s periodic overhauls of ...ICT policy have transformed competition and innovation. For example, in the 1980s and the 1990s a revolution in communication policy (the introduction of sweeping competition) also transformed the information market. Today, the diffusion of Internet, wireless, and broadband technology, growing modularity in the design of technologies, distributed computing infrastructures, and rapidly changing business models signal another shift. This pathbreaking examination of ICT from a political economy perspective argues that continued rapid innovation and economic growth require new approaches in global governance that will reconcile diverse interests and enable competition to flourish. The authors (two of whom were architects of international ICT policy reforms in the 1990s) discuss this crucial turning point in both theoretical and practical terms.
Language learning and translation have always been complementary pillars of multilingualism in the European Union. Both have been affected by the increasing availability of machine translation (MT): ...language learners now make use of free online MT to help them both understand and produce texts in a second language, but there are fears that uninformed use of the technology could undermine effective language learning. At the same time, MT is promoted as a technology that will change the face of professional translation, but the technical opacity of contemporary approaches, and the legal and ethical issues they raise, can make the participation of human translators in contemporary MT workflows particularly complicated. Against this background, this book attempts to promote teaching and learning about MT among a broad range of readers, including language learners, language teachers, trainee translators, translation teachers, and professional translators. It presents a rationale for learning about MT, and provides both a basic introduction to contemporary machine-learning based MT, and a more advanced discussion of neural MT. It explores the ethical issues that increased use of MT raises, and provides advice on its application in language learning. It also shows how users can make the most of MT through pre-editing, post-editing and customization of the technology.
Recently,despite huge incentives and subsequent increases in investment in customer relationship management technology, many firms have not been able to increase their customer satisfaction index ...ratings. The purpose of this paper is to gauge whether IT management practices differ among firms where IT has a major role in transforming marketing, operations, or both, which give the firms advantage by affecting their customer service. Several research hypotheses are tested using data obtained from a survey of 213 IT-leaders in the financial services industry. The results clearly indicate that the IT-leader firms have a higher level of IT management sophistication and a higher role for their IT-leaders compared to IT-enabled customer focus, IT-enabled operations focus, and IT-laggard firms. This paper concludes with the implications for both researchers and practitioners.
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