Digital Futures – serie

Digital technologies are a key feature of contemporary education. Schools, colleges and universities operate along high-tech lines, while alternate forms of online education have emerged to challenge the dominance of traditional institutions. According to many experts, the rapid digitization of education over the past ten years has undoubtedly been a ‘good thing’. Is Technology Good For Education? offers a critical counterpoint to this received wisdom, challenging some of the central ways in which digital technology is presumed to be positively affecting education. Instead Neil Selwyn considers what is being lost as digital technologies become ever more integral to education provision and engagement. Crucially, he questions the values, agendas and interests that stand to gain most from the rise of digital education. This concise, up-to-the-minute analysis concludes by considering alternate approaches that might be capable of rescuing and perhaps revitalizing the ideals of public education, while not denying the possibilities of digital technology altogether.

Digital technologies are a key feature of contemporary education. Schools, colleges and universities operate along high-tech lines, while alternate forms of online education have emerged to challenge the dominance of traditional institutions. According to many experts, the rapid digitization of education over the past ten years has undoubtedly been a ‘good thing’. Is Technology Good For Education? offers a critical counterpoint to this received wisdom, challenging some of the central ways in which digital technology is presumed to be positively affecting education. Instead Neil Selwyn considers what is being lost as digital technologies become ever more integral to education provision and engagement. Crucially, he questions the values, agendas and interests that stand to gain most from the rise of digital education. This concise, up-to-the-minute analysis concludes by considering alternate approaches that might be capable of rescuing and perhaps revitalizing the ideals of public education, while not denying the possibilities of digital technology altogether.

Where many critics see the Internet as an instrument of corporate hegemony, Michael Strangelove sees something else: an alternative space inhabited by communities dedicated to anarchic freedom, culture jamming, alternative journalism, and resistance to authoritarian forms of consumer capitalism and globalization. In The Empire of Mind, "Dr. Strangelove," the scholar Canadian Business referred to as the "acknowledged dean of Internet entrepreneurs" and Wired called "the Canadian guru of Internet advertising," presents the compelling argument that the Internet and new digital communication technology actually undermine the power of capital, producing an alternative symbolic economy.Strangelove contends that the Internet breaks with the capitalist logic of commodification and that, while television produces a passive consumer audience, Internet audiences are more active, creative, and subversive. Writers, activists, and artists on the Internet undermine commercial media and its management of consumer behaviour, a behaviour that is challenged by the Web's tendency toward the disintegration of intellectual property rights. Case studies describe the invention of new meaning given to cultural and consumer icons like Barbie and McDonald's and explore how novel modes of online news production alter the representation of the world as it is produced by the mainstream, corporate press.In the course of exploring new media, The Empire of Mind also makes apparent that digital piracy will not be eliminated. The Internet community effectively converts private property into public, thereby presenting serious obstacles for the management of consumer behaviour and significantly eroding brand value. Much to the dismay of the corporate sector, online communities are disinterested in the ethics of private property. In fact, the entire philosophical framework on which capitalism is based is threatened by these alternative means of cultural production.

In Insurgency Online, Michael Dartnell focuses on a new form of conflict made possible by global communications. The Internet, Dartnell argues, is affecting extensive changes to the way politics are carried out, by inserting a range of non-state actors onto the global political stage. He demonstrates that Web activism raises issues about the organization of societies and the distribution of power and contends that the development of online activism has far-reaching social and political implications, with parallels to the influence of the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.Dartnell concentrates on Web activists who use the Net as a media tool, distinguishing this use from information terrorism, which threatens or harasses through 'hacking' or electronic sabotage. Using the examples of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which opposed the Taliban, the Peruvian Movimento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA) and its campaign against the Fujimori government, and the Irish Republican Socialist Movement (IRSM), Dartnell evaluates the political implications and general character of Web activism among non-state actors. Insurgency Online shows that online activism is a ripe, new territory for non-governmental actors to raise awareness and develop support around the world.

In The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, Arthur Kroker explores the future of the 21st century in the language of technological destiny. Presenting Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche as prophets of technological nihilism, Kroker argues that every aspect of contemporary culture, society, and politics is coded by the dynamic unfolding of the 'will to technology.'Moving between cultural history, our digital present, and the biotic future, Kroker theorizes on the relationship between human bodies and posthuman technology, and more specifically, wonders if the body of work offered by thinkers like Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche is a part of our past or a harbinger of our technological future. Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche intensify our understanding of the contemporary cultural climate. Heidegger's vision posits an increasingly technical society before which we have become 'objectless objects'– driftworks in a 'culture of boredom.' In Marx, the disciplining of capital itself by the will to technology is a code of globalization, first announced as streamed capitalism. Nietzsche mediates between them, envisioning in the gathering shadows of technological society the emergent signs of a culture of nihilism. Like Marx, he insists on thinking of the question of technology in terms of its material signs.In The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, Kroker consistently enacts an invigorating and innovative vision, bringing together critical theory, art, and politics to reveal the philosophic apparatus of technoculture.

In Insurgency Online, Michael Dartnell focuses on a new form of conflict made possible by global communications. The Internet, Dartnell argues, is affecting extensive changes to the way politics are carried out, by inserting a range of non-state actors onto the global political stage. He demonstrates that Web activism raises issues about the organization of societies and the distribution of power and contends that the development of online activism has far-reaching social and political implications, with parallels to the influence of the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.Dartnell concentrates on Web activists who use the Net as a media tool, distinguishing this use from information terrorism, which threatens or harasses through 'hacking' or electronic sabotage. Using the examples of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which opposed the Taliban, the Peruvian Movimento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA) and its campaign against the Fujimori government, and the Irish Republican Socialist Movement (IRSM), Dartnell evaluates the political implications and general character of Web activism among non-state actors. Insurgency Online shows that online activism is a ripe, new territory for non-governmental actors to raise awareness and develop support around the world.

DNA testing and banking has become institutionalized in the Canadian criminal justice system. As accepted and widespread though the practice is, there has been little critique or debate of this practice in a broad public forum on the potential infringement of individual rights or civil liberties. Neil Gerlach's The Genetic Imaginary takes up this challenge, critically examining the social, legal, and criminal justice origins and effects of DNA testing and banking. Drawing on risk analysis, Gerlach explains why Canadians have accepted DNA technology with barely a ripple of public outcry.Despite promises of better crime control and protections for existing privacy rights, Gerlach's examination of police practices, courtroom decisions, and the changing role of scientific expertise in legal decision-making reveals that DNA testing and banking have indeed led to a measurable erosion of individual rights. Biogovernance and the biotechnology of surveillance almost inevitably lead to the empowerment of state agent control and away from due process and legal protection. The Genetic Imaginary demonstrates that the overall effect of these changes to the criminal justice system has been to emphasize the importance of community security at the expense of individual rights. The privatization and politicization of biogovernance will certainly have profound future implications for all Canadians.

As evidenced by the clientele in any urban coffee shop, devices such as cell phones, BlackBerries, and Wi-Fi-enabled laptops have proliferated, particularly during the past ten years. The Wireless Spectrum explores how wireless technologies have modified both individual and public life, transforming our experiences of space, time, and place, while reshaping our day-to-day interactions.Bringing together visual artists, designers, activists, and communication and humanities scholars to reflect on mobile media, this collection engages a new terrain of interdisciplinary research. Interrogating these new forms of community and communication practices as they are emerging in Canada and around the world, the essays in The Wireless Spectrum ask how these new technologies transfigure subjectivities, creating new forms of social behaviour and provocative aesthetic practices.

An anonymous musician plays Pachelbel's Canon on the electric guitar in a clip that has been viewed over sixty million times. The Dramatic Gopher is viewed over sixteen million times, as is a severely inebriated David Hasselhoff attempting to eat a hamburger. Over 800 variations, parodies, and parodies-of-parodies are uploaded of Beyonce Knowles' Single Ladies dance. Tay Zonday sings Chocolate Rain in a video viewed almost forty million times and scores himself a record deal. Obama Girl enters the political arena with contributions such as I Got a Crush on Obama and gets coverage in mainstream news networks.In Watching YouTube, Michael Strangelove provides a broad overview of the world of amateur online videos and the people who make them. Dr. Strangelove, the Governor General Literary Award-nominated author that Wired Magazine called a 'guru of Internet advertising,' describes how online digital video is both similar to and different from traditional home-movie-making and argues that we are moving into a post-television era characterized by mass participation. Strangelove draws from television, film, cultural, and media studies to help define an entirely new field of research. Online practices of representation, confessional video diaries, gendered uses of amateur video, and debates over elections, religion, and armed conflicts make up the bulk of this groundbreaking study, which is supplemented by an online blog at strangelove.com/blog. An innovative and timely study, Watching YouTube raises questions about the future of cultural memory, identity, politics, warfare, and family life when everyday representational practices are altered by four billion cameras in the hands of ordinary people.

Since its initial publication, Critical Digital Studies has proven an indispensable guide to understanding digitally mediated culture. Bringing together the leading scholars in this growing field, internationally renowned scholars Arthur and Marilouise Kroker present an innovative and interdisciplinary survey of the relationship between humanity and technology. The reader offers a study of our digital future, a means of understanding the world with new analytic tools and means of communication that are defining the twenty-first century.The second edition includes new essays on the impact of social networking technologies and new media. A new section – “New Digital Media” – presents important, new articles on topics including hacktivism in the age of digital power and the relationship between gaming and capitalism. The extraordinary range and depth of the first edition has been maintained in this new edition. Critical Digital Studies will continue to provide the leading edge to readers wanting to understand the complex intersection of digital culture and human knowledge.

Photographing Ambiguity examines photography as a metaphor for technological culture, arguing that a relational exploration of the medium can shed light on the dominant ideological tendencies of our time. The book advocates for photographic practices that emphasize ambiguity, suggesting that this approach fosters more conscientious, ecological, and creative relationships within the technological ecosystem of contemporary life. Ted Hiebert critiques the notion that images should primarily serve to verify or document the external world. He contends that these quantifiable perspectives, while rooted in historical trends towards technology and data, have become so pervasive that they represent a dominant ideological bias in the twenty-first century. In response to this data-driven consciousness, the book presents a series of exercises designed to cultivate an embodied experience with digital living – not in opposition to the flood of images but within it. Ultimately, Photographing Ambiguity encourages readers to understand photographs not as benchmarks of reality but as ambiguous constructions of our present and future imaginaries.

Photographing Ambiguity examines photography as a metaphor for technological culture, arguing that a relational exploration of the medium can shed light on the dominant ideological tendencies of our time. The book advocates for photographic practices that emphasize ambiguity, suggesting that this approach fosters more conscientious, ecological, and creative relationships within the technological ecosystem of contemporary life. Ted Hiebert critiques the notion that images should primarily serve to verify or document the external world. He contends that these quantifiable perspectives, while rooted in historical trends towards technology and data, have become so pervasive that they represent a dominant ideological bias in the twenty-first century. In response to this data-driven consciousness, the book presents a series of exercises designed to cultivate an embodied experience with digital living – not in opposition to the flood of images but within it. Ultimately, Photographing Ambiguity encourages readers to understand photographs not as benchmarks of reality but as ambiguous constructions of our present and future imaginaries.

With astonishing speed, we have been projected into a new reality where interactions with drones, robotic bodies, and high-level surveillance are increasingly mainstream. In this age of groundbreaking developments in robotic technologies, synthetic biology is merging with artificial intelligence, forming a newly blended reality of machines, bodies, and affect.Technologies of the New Real draws from critical intersections of technology and society – including drones, surveillance, DIY bodies, and innovations in robotic technology – to explore what these advances can tell us about our present reality, or what authors Arthur and Marilouise Kroker deem the "new real" of digital culture in the twenty-first century.Technologies of the New Real explores the many technologies of our present reality as they infiltrate the social, political, and economic static of our everyday lives, seemingly eroding traditionally conceived boundaries between humans and machines, and rendering fully ambivalent borders between the human mind and simulated data.

Focusing on the entanglement of art, technology, and culture, The Quantum Revolution illuminates the contemporary scientific imagination as a new way of understanding everyday life.

We are currently riders of the information storm. AI fascinates us, images mesmerize us, data defines us, algorithms remember us, news bombards us, devices connect us, isolation saddens us. Deeply embedded in digital technology, we are the very first inhabitants of life in the quantum zone. The Quantum Revolution is about life today – its entanglements, creativity, politics, and artistic vision.Arthur Kroker and David Cook explore a new way of thinking drawn directly from the quantum imaginary itself. They explain the quantum revolution as everyday life, where technology moves fast, and where, under cover of the digital devices that connect us, the most sophisticated concepts of technology and science originating in mathematics, astrophysics, and biogenetics have swiftly flooded human consciousness, shaped social behavior, and crafted individual identity. The book discusses the concept of the quantum zone as a new way of understanding digital culture, and presents stories about art, technology, and society, as well as a series of reflections on art as a gateway to understanding the quantum imaginary. Richly illustrated with sixty images of critically engaged photos and artwork, The Quantum Revolution privileges a new way of understanding and seeing politics, society, and culture through the lens of the duality that is the essence of the quantum imaginary.

The Internet has united the world as never before. But is it in danger of breaking apart? Cybersecurity, geopolitical tensions, and calls for data sovereignty have made many believe that the Internet is fragmenting.In this incisive new book, Milton Mueller argues that the “fragmentation” diagnosis misses the mark. The rhetoric of “fragmentation” camouflages the real issue: the attempt by governments to align information flows with their jurisdictional boundaries. The fragmentation debate is really a power struggle over the future of national sovereignty. It pits global governance and open access against the traditional territorial institutions of government. This conflict, the book argues, can only be resolved through radical institutional innovations.Will the Internet Fragment? is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communications, international relations, political science and STS, as well as anyone concerned about the quality of Internet governance.

The Internet has united the world as never before. But is it in danger of breaking apart? Cybersecurity, geopolitical tensions, and calls for data sovereignty have made many believe that the Internet is fragmenting.In this incisive new book, Milton Mueller argues that the “fragmentation” diagnosis misses the mark. The rhetoric of “fragmentation” camouflages the real issue: the attempt by governments to align information flows with their jurisdictional boundaries. The fragmentation debate is really a power struggle over the future of national sovereignty. It pits global governance and open access against the traditional territorial institutions of government. This conflict, the book argues, can only be resolved through radical institutional innovations.Will the Internet Fragment? is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communications, international relations, political science and STS, as well as anyone concerned about the quality of Internet governance.

Developments in AI, robotics and big data are changing the nature of education. Yet the implications of these technologies for the teaching profession are uncertain. While most educators remain convinced of the need for human teachers, outside the profession there is growing anticipation of a technological reinvention of the ways in which teaching and learning take place.Through an examination of technological developments such as autonomous classroom robots, intelligent tutoring systems, learning analytics and automated decision-making, Neil Selwyn highlights the need for nuanced discussions around the capacity of AI to replicate the social, emotional and cognitive qualities of human teachers. He pushes conversations about AI and education into the realm of values, judgements and politics, ultimately arguing that the integration of any technology into society must be presented as a choice.Should Robots Replace Teachers? is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of education and work in our increasingly automated times.

Developments in AI, robotics and big data are changing the nature of education. Yet the implications of these technologies for the teaching profession are uncertain. While most educators remain convinced of the need for human teachers, outside the profession there is growing anticipation of a technological reinvention of the ways in which teaching and learning take place.Through an examination of technological developments such as autonomous classroom robots, intelligent tutoring systems, learning analytics and automated decision-making, Neil Selwyn highlights the need for nuanced discussions around the capacity of AI to replicate the social, emotional and cognitive qualities of human teachers. He pushes conversations about AI and education into the realm of values, judgements and politics, ultimately arguing that the integration of any technology into society must be presented as a choice.Should Robots Replace Teachers? is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of education and work in our increasingly automated times.

Every day we are inundated by propaganda that claims life will be better once we are connected to digital technology. Poverty, famine, and injustice will end, and the economy will be “green.” All anyone needs is the latest smartphone. In this succinct and lively book, Maxwell and Miller take a critical look at contemporary gadgets and the systems that connect them, shedding light on environmental risks. Contrary to widespread claims, consumer electronics and other digital technologies are made in ways that cause some of the worst environmental disasters of our time – conflict-minerals extraction, fatal and life-threatening occupational hazards, toxic pollution of ecosystems, rising energy consumption linked to increased carbon emissions, and e-waste. Nonetheless, a greener future is possible, in which technology meets its emancipatory and progressive potential. How Green is Your Smartphone? encourages us to look at our phones in a wholly new way, and is important reading for anyone concerned by the impact of everyday technologies on our environment.

Every day we are inundated by propaganda that claims life will be better once we are connected to digital technology. Poverty, famine, and injustice will end, and the economy will be “green.” All anyone needs is the latest smartphone. In this succinct and lively book, Maxwell and Miller take a critical look at contemporary gadgets and the systems that connect them, shedding light on environmental risks. Contrary to widespread claims, consumer electronics and other digital technologies are made in ways that cause some of the worst environmental disasters of our time – conflict-minerals extraction, fatal and life-threatening occupational hazards, toxic pollution of ecosystems, rising energy consumption linked to increased carbon emissions, and e-waste. Nonetheless, a greener future is possible, in which technology meets its emancipatory and progressive potential. How Green is Your Smartphone? encourages us to look at our phones in a wholly new way, and is important reading for anyone concerned by the impact of everyday technologies on our environment.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is presented as a solution to the greatest challenges of our time, from global pandemics and chronic diseases to cybersecurity threats and the climate crisis. But AI also contributes to the climate crisis by running on technology that depletes scarce resources and by relying on data centres that demand excessive energy use.Is AI Good for the Planet? brings the climate crisis to the centre of debates around AI, exposing its environmental costs and forcing us to reconsider our understanding of the technology. It reveals why we should no longer ignore the environmental problems generated by AI. Embracing a green agenda for AI that puts the climate crisis at centre stage is our urgent priority.Engaging and passionately written, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of AI, environmental studies, politics, and media studies and for anyone interested in the connections between technology and the environment.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is presented as a solution to the greatest challenges of our time, from global pandemics and chronic diseases to cybersecurity threats and the climate crisis. But AI also contributes to the climate crisis by running on technology that depletes scarce resources and by relying on data centres that demand excessive energy use.Is AI Good for the Planet? brings the climate crisis to the centre of debates around AI, exposing its environmental costs and forcing us to reconsider our understanding of the technology. It reveals why we should no longer ignore the environmental problems generated by AI. Embracing a green agenda for AI that puts the climate crisis at centre stage is our urgent priority.Engaging and passionately written, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of AI, environmental studies, politics, and media studies and for anyone interested in the connections between technology and the environment.