William Aspray, Barbara M. Hayes (eds.): Everyday Information: The Evolution of Information Seeking in America (2011)

All day, every day, Americans seek information. We research major purchases. We check news and sports. We visit government Web sites for public information and turn to friends for advice about our everyday lives. Although the Internet influences our information-seeking behavior, we gather information from many sources: family and friends, television and radio, books and magazines, experts and community leaders. Patterns of information seeking have evolved throughout American history and are shaped by a number of forces, including war, modern media, the state of the economy, and government regulation. This book examines the evolution of information seeking in nine areas of everyday American life.

Chapters offer an information perspective on car buying, from the days of the Model T to the present; philanthropic and charitable activities; airline travel and the complex layers of information available to passengers; genealogy, from the family Bible to Ancestry.com; sports statistics, as well as fantasy sports leagues and their fans’ obsession with them; the multimedia universe of gourmet cooking; governmental and publicly available information; reading, sharing, and creating comics; and text messaging among young people as a way to exchange information and manage relationships. Taken together, these case studies provide a fascinating window on the importance of information in the past century of American life.

Publisher MIT Press, 2011
ISBN 026251561X, 9780262515610
359 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-9-11)

Rebecca MacKinnon: Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (2012)

Google has a history of censoring at the behest of Communist China. Research in Motion happily opens up the BlackBerry to such stalwarts of liberty as Saudi Arabia. Yahoo has betrayed the email accounts of dissidents to the PRC. Facebook’s obsession with personal transparency has revealed the identities of protestors to governments. For all the overheated rhetoric of liberty and cyber-utopia, it is clear that the corporations that rule cyberspace are making decisions that show little or no concern for their impact on political freedom. In Consent of the Networked, internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it’s time for us to demand that our rights and freedoms are respected and protected before they’re sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away. The challenge is that building accountability into the fabric of cyberspace demands radical thinking in a completely new dimension. The corporations that build and operate the technologies that create and shape our digital world are fundamentally different from the Chevrons, Nikes, and Nabiscos whose behavior and standards can be regulated quite effectively by laws, courts, and bureaucracies answerable to voters.The public revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace will be useless if it focuses downstream at the point of law and regulation, long after the software code has already been written, shipped, and embedded itself into the lives of millions of people. The revolution must be focused upstream at the source of the problem. Political innovation—the negotiated relationship between people with power and people whose interests and rights are affected by that power—needs to center around the point of technological conception, experimentation, and early implementation.The purpose of technology—and of the corporations that make it—is to serve humanity, not the other way around. It’s time to wake up and act before the reversal becomes permanent.

Publisher Basic Books, 2012
ISBN 0465024424, 9780465024421
352 pages

review (Adam Thierer, Technology Liberation Front)
review (John Kampfner, The Guardian)

Let’s take back the Internet! (author’s TED talk)
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Afterword to the Paperback Edition (HTML, added on 2013-4-19)

Alessio Lunghi, Seth Wheeler (eds.): Occupy Everything! Reflections on why it’s kicking off everywhere (2012)

Penned after the 2010 European student unrest and before what is now commonly referred to as the “Arab spring” began to escalate, BBC Newsnight economist Paul Mason’s “20 Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere” sought to establish an understanding of the motivations behind these globally disparate, yet somehow connected struggles.

What roles do the “graduate with no future,” the “digital native” or the “remainder of capital” play in the current wave of unrest? What are the ideas, ideologies, motivations or demands driving these movements? How is struggle organized and coordinated in the age of memetic politics and viral ad campaigns?

This collection of essays seeks to further explore Paul Mason’s original 20 Reasons in an attempt to better understand our turbulent present.

Contributors: 500 Hammers – Thomas Gillespie & Victoria Habermehl – The Free Association – Deterritorial Support Group – Ben Lear & Raph Schlembach – Camille Barbagallo & Nicholas Beuret – David Robertshaw, Rohan Orton & Will Barker – Antonis Vradis – Tabitha Bast & Hannah McClure – Andre Pusey & Bertie Russell – Federico Campagna – Emma Dowling

Publisher Minor Compositions, an imprint of Autonomedia, 2012
ISBN 978-1-57027-251-6
98 pages

Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere by Paul Mason (BBC Newsnight, February 2011)

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