Internet Culture

Social 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. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry.

What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens' lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert Danah Boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, Boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers' ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions.

The digital revolution poses a mortal threat to the major creative industries - music, publishing, television, and the movies. The ease with which digital files can be copied and distributed has unleashed a wave of piracy with disastrous effects on revenue. Cheap, easy self-publishing is eroding the position of these gatekeepers and guardians of culture. Does this revolution herald the collapse of culture, as some claim? In Digital Renaissance, Joel Waldfogel argues that digital technology is enabling a new golden age of popular culture, a veritable digital renaissance.

In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.

In the very near future, smart “technologies and big data” will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such “solutionism” affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency?

Acclaimed futurist, author, and digital strategist Bernard Marr delivers a compelling and engaging discussion of the technologies driving the impending—and ongoing—transformation of the internet, including blockchain, augmented reality (AR), and more. In the book, you'll explore the risks and opportunities presented by these game-changing techs and how they might impact you, your organization, and community.

Steve Jobs, adopted in infancy by a family in San Francisco, packed a lot of life into 56 short years. In this Who Was...? biography, children will learn how his obsession with computers and technology at an early age led him to cofound and run Apple in addition to turning Pixar into a groundbreaking animation studio. A college dropout, Jobs took unconventional steps in his path to success and inspired the best and the brightest to come with him and "change the world".

From former Vice journalist and executive producer of hit Netflix documentary Fyre comes an eye-opening look at the con artists, grifters, and snake-oil salesmen of the digital age - and why we can’t stop falling for them.

Just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television, Virginia Heffernan (called one of the "best living writers of English prose") reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet. Since its inception, the Internet has morphed from merely an extension of traditional media into its own full-fledged civilization. It is among mankind's great masterpieces - a massive work of art. As an idea, it rivals monotheism.

Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation - to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? Find out.

Ever feel like you don’t even own the hardware and software you paid dearly for? Ever get the impression that you have to ask for permission before installing or changing a program on your device? Ever feel like Facebook and Instagram are listening to your conversations to show you relevant ads? You’re not alone. Half-baked products and services that chip away at your sense of ownership, independence and privacy are a part of a global wave of corporate indifference that micromanages and spies on honest, uniformed customers.

The machine that kills secrets is a powerful cryptographic code that hides the identities of leakers and hacktivists as they spill the private files of government agencies and corporations bringing us into a new age of whistle blowing. With unrivaled access to figures like Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and Jacob Applebaum, investigative journalist Andy Greenberg unveils the group that brought the world WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, and BalkanLeaks.

If you want to learn about the internet of things, then pay attention.... You were just woken up in the middle of the night by smart light bulbs in your house blasting at full power for no reason. Your bleary-eyed investigation shows they tried to download a firmware update and failed. At that moment, Alexa starts quietly whispering sweet nonsense to herself in the corner and Roomba starts slamming into the nearest wall. What do you do? Is your house haunted or have the machines finally started an uprising? Neither - it’s just another day in the IoT wonderland.

This engrossing book explores the profound implications of personal information on the Internet, preserved forever even if it is false, biased, or humiliating. Brimming with examples of online gossip, slander, and rumor, the book discusses the tensions between privacy and free speech and proposes how to balance the two. What information about you is on the Internet?

Envision reducing your screen time while enriching your real-life experiences. Imagine the satisfaction of engaging in deep, uninterrupted work or the joy of fully present moments with loved ones, all because you took control of your digital life. Your mental space can be more than a battleground for notifications and newsfeeds; it can be a sanctuary of thought, creativity, and peace. With Gabrielle Townsend's boxset, you hold the key to unlocking the full potential of your cognitive freedom and your impact on your own life.

A smart, lively history of the Internet free culture movement and its larger effects on society - and the life and shocking suicide of Aaron Swartz, a founding developer of Reddit and Creative Commons - from Slate correspondent Justin Peters.

Do you want to learn about business intelligence but don't feel like reading a boring textbook? In the modern business world, the pace of action continues to quicken. Businesses need to be able to get actionable insights from their data in order to make the right decisions to act rapidly and effectively. In this audiobook, you will be introduced to the concept of business intelligence.

Whether you called it electro, indie dance, or were too busy scouring the internet for MP3s to care about a genre name, Never Be Alone Again: How Bloghouse United the Internet and the Dancefloor connects the disparate parts of an under-documented era in the first book focused on the musical and cultural phenomenon called bloghouse.

The advent of the internet has been one of the most significant technological developments in history. In this thought-provoking and ground-breaking work David Eagleman, author of international best seller Sum, presents six ways in which the net saves us from major existential threats: pandemics, poor information flow, natural disasters, political corruption, resource depletion and economic meltdown.

Using lessons from tested and proven disciplines like military kill-chain analysis, counterterrorism analysis, industrial safety programs, and more, Ira Winkler and Dr. Tracy Celaya's You CAN Stop Stupid provides a methodology to analyze potential losses and determine appropriate countermeasures to implement.