Showing titles in Technology & Society

Radical connectivity - our ability to connect instantly, constantly, and globally - is altering the exercise of power with dramatic speed and reshaping our biggest institutions. Governments, corporations, centers of knowledge, and expertise are eroding before the power of the individual. In some cases this is a positive development, but as Mele reveals, the promise of the Internet comes with a troubling downside. He asks: How do we trust information when journalists are replaced by bloggers, phone videos, and tweets?

Never before has so much been known about so many. CCTV cameras, TSA scanners, NSA databases, big data marketers, predator drones, "stop and frisk" tactics, Facebook algorithms, hidden spyware, and even old-fashioned nosy neighbors - surveillance has become so ubiquitous that we take its presence for granted. While many types of surveillance are pitched as ways to make us safer, almost no one has examined the unintended consequences of living under constant scrutiny and how it changes the way we think and feel about the world.

If you've ever read a book on an e-reader, unleashed your inner rock star playing Guitar Hero, built a robot with LEGO Mindstorms, or ridden in a vehicle with child-safe air bags, then you've experienced first hand just a few of the astounding innovations that have come out of the Media Lab over the past 25 years. But that’s old hat for today’s researchers, who are creating technologies that will have a much deeper impact on the quality of people’s lives over the next quarter century.

America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, analyze those challenges - globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation’s chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption - and spell out what we need to do now to rediscover America and rise to this moment.

The benefits of living in a digital, globalised society are enormous; so too are the dangers. The world has become a law enforcer’s nightmare and every criminal’s dream. We bank online, shop online, date, learn, work and live online. But have the institutions that keep us safe on the streets learned to protect us in the burgeoning digital world? Have we become complacent about our personal security – sharing our thoughts, beliefs and the details of our daily lives with anyone who cares to relieve us of them?

Is human computer interactions what you want to learn? Always wondered how one understand computers proficiently? Does it interest you how HCI works? Download HCI to discover everything you need to know about it. Step by step to increase your computer skill set. Learn how to operate computer systems socially. All your basic knowledge in one download!

Over the last 20 years, our economy and our society, from how we shop and pay our bills to how we communicate, have been completely revolutionized by technology. As Aneesh Chopra shows in Innovative State, once it became clear how much this would change America, a movement arose around the idea that these same technologies could reshape and improve government. But the idea languished, and while the private sector innovated, our government stalled, trapped in a model designed for the America of the 1930s and 1960s.

Do systems have souls? This book, based on a popular elective at IIM Ahmedabad, looks for answers in the hard trade-offs inherent in the design of operating systems and business models. It encourages business leaders to ask two different sets of existential questions: Does the organization that I am managing have a soul, and if so, what are the strategic choices that enable its synthesis (external orientation)? And, do I have a soul, and if so, who am I (internal orientation)?

Bill McKibben, examines the dangers inherent in an array of technologies that threaten not just our survival, but our identity. Imagine a future where lab workers can reprogram human embryos to make our children "smarter" or "more sociable" or "happier." Enough examines such possibilities, and explains how we can avoid their worst consequences while still enjoying the fruits of our new scientific understandings.

An exhilarating, elegant memoir and a significant polemic on how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and of who we are. Bitwise is a wondrous ode to the computer languages and codes that captured technologist David Auerbach's imagination. 

In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today's new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement.

In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman's uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology surveys this history in all its medical, practical, and ethical complexity, and offers a look at state-of-the-art fertility technology in various social and political contexts around the world.

Far from the catchy television spots and sleek magazine spreads are the comparatively modest ads that pop up on websites and in Internet searches. But don't be fooled - online advertising is exploding. Growing at a compound annual rate near 20%, it is now the second-largest advertising channel in the United States. Part history, part guidebook, part prediction for the future, Targeted tells the story of the companies, individuals, and innovations driving this revolution.

In modern history, the story of capitalism has been a story of firms and financiers. That's all going to change thanks to the Big Data revolution. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, best-selling author of Big Data, and Thomas Ramge, who writes for The Economist, show, data is replacing money as the driver of market behavior. Big finance and big companies will be replaced by small groups and individual actors who make markets instead of making things: think Uber instead of Ford, or Airbnb instead of Hyatt. Will this be an age of prosperity or of calamity?

The New York Times best-selling author heralds the future of business in Free. In his revolutionary best seller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them.

Joanna Landau and Michael Golden guide you through the actual steps needed to successfully counter one of the greatest threats facing the Jewish people today: a Next Generation that is less and less connected to both Israel and their own Jewish identity. Whether you’re a devoted advocate for Israel, a Jewish community leader, or just a concerned parent or grandparent, this book is for you.

You are a four-dimensional human. Each of us exists in three-dimensional physical space. But as a constellation of everyday digital phenomena rewires our lives, we are increasingly coaxed from the containment of our predigital selves into a wonderful and eerie fourth dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information, and global connection.

No one has failed to notice that the current generation of youth is deeply - some would say totally - involved with digital media. Professors Howard Gardner and Katie Davis name today’s young people The App Generation, and in this spellbinding book they explore what it means to be “app-dependent” versus “app-enabled” and how life for this generation differs from life before the digital era.

Humans are hard-wired for collaboration, and new technologies of communication act as a super-amplifier of our natural collaborative mindset. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series examines the emergence of a new kind of social collaboration enabled by networked technologies. This new collaborative society might be characterized as a series of services and startups that enable peer-to-peer exchanges and interactions though technology.

Ever since the earliest days of the Cold War, American intelligence agencies have launched spies in the sky, implanted spies in the ether, burrowed spies underground, sunk spies in the ocean, and even tried to control spies' minds by chemical means. But these weren't human spies. Instead, the United States expanded its reach around the globe through techno-spies. Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach investigates how America's technophiles inadvertently created a global espionage empire: one based on technology, not land.