Newton Lee: Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · data mining, facebook, internet, privacy, search, social media, social networks, surveillance, web
“President Barack Obama, in his 2011 State of the Union Address, called America “the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers” and “of Google and Facebook.” U.S. Chief Information Officer, Steven VanRoekel, said that America has become a “Facebook nation” that demands increased transparency and interactivity from the federal government. Facebook as a nation in 2012 would be the third largest country in the world with over 900 million citizens, after China and India. This book portrays the social media ecosystem as a world of increasing Total Information Awareness, which is essentially a civilian version of the controversial Total Information Awareness program unveiled in 2002 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at the U.S. Department of Defense. Back in the 60’s, DARPA initiated and funded the research and development of Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) that went online in 1969. The success of ARPANET gave rise to the global commercial Internet in the 90’s and the new generation of Fortune 500 companies today including Amazon.com, Google, eBay, and Yahoo!. As if life comes full circle in the 21st century, private businesses and the ubiquity of social networks such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and YouTube are creating the technologies and infrastructures necessary for the DARPA-proposed Total Information Awareness program.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called Facebook “the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.” Indeed, military and civilian technologies have interwoven into every fabric of our society, as Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We exist at the intersection of technology and social issues.” This book offers discourse and practical advice on the privacy issue in the age of big data, the rise of Facebook nation, and Total Information Awareness. Opening with President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 National Security Decision Directive and ending with George Orwell’s novel 1984, the author takes us on a roller-coaster ride through Facebook’s botched IPO, Carrier IQ, Kony 2012, SOPA/PIPA blackout, cyber bullying, crime fighting, and a host of other timely issues facing our Facebook nation. Social media strategists, information architects, social scientists, policymakers, and academic scholars in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) will find this book a valuable asset.”
Publisher Springer, 2013
ISBN 1461453089, 9781461453086
235 pages
review (Will M, AllFacebook.com)
Comment (0)Michael Mandiberg (ed.): The Social Media Reader (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · blogging, copyright, free culture, hacking, indymedia, internet, labour, memes, open source, peer production, phreaking, social media, social networks, wikipedia, youtube
With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major thinkers in the field.
Culling a broad range and incorporating different styles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with contributions from Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reilly, Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, and Fred von Loehmann, to name a few. It covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free Culture and copyright politics, and labor and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labor, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of surveillance and control.
Publisher NYU Press, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license
ISBN 0814763022, 9780814763025
289 pages
Eric Gordon, Adriana de Souza e Silva: Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · facebook, gps, locative media, mobile technology, privacy, social networks, sousveillance
Provides an introduction to the new theory of Net Locality and the profound effect on individuals and societies when everything is located or locatable.
– Describes net locality as an emerging form of location awareness central to all aspects of digital media, from mobile phones, to Google Maps, to location-based social networks and games, such as Foursquare and facebook.
– Warns of the threats these technologies, such as data surveillance, present to our sense of privacy, while also outlining the opportunities for pro-social developments.
– Provides a theory of the web in the context of the history of emerging technologies, from GeoCities to GPS, Wi-Fi, Wiki Me, and Google Android.
Publisher John Wiley & Sons, 2011
ISBN 1405180609, 9781405180603
200 pages
PDF (updated on 2013-2-6)
Comment (0)