The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Book by Jeff Jarvis: “The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.

To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass – mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on – that came to dominate the public sphere.

What can we glean from the captivating, profound, and challenging history of our devotion to print? Could it be that we are returning to a time before mass media, to a society built on conversation, and that we are relearning how to hold that conversation with ourselves? Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis’ exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power…(More)”

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book edited by Stephen Boucher, Carina Antonia Hallin, and Lex Paulson: “…explores the concepts, methodologies, and implications of collective intelligence for democratic governance, in the first comprehensive survey of this field.

Illustrated by a collection of inspiring case studies and edited by three pioneers in collective intelligence, this handbook serves as a unique primer on the science of collective intelligence applied to public challenges and will inspire public actors, academics, students, and activists across the world to apply collective intelligence in policymaking and administration to explore its potential, both to foster policy innovations and reinvent democracy…(More)”.

Digital Technologies in Emerging Countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book edited by Francis Fukuyama and Marietje Schaake: “…While there has been a tremendous upsurge in scholarly research into the political and social impacts of digital technologies, the vast majority of this work has tended to focus on rich countries in North America and Europe. Both regions had high levels of internet penetration and the state capacity to take on—potentially, at any rate—regulatory issues raised by digitization….The current volume is an initial effort to rectify the imbalance in the way that centers and programs such as ours look at the world, by focusing on what might broadly be labeled the “global south,” which we have labeled “emerging countries” (ECs). Countries and regions outside of North America and Europe face similar opportunities and challenges to those developed regions, but also problems that are unique to themselves…(More)”.

The History of Rules

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview with Lorraine Daston: “The rules book began with an everyday observation of the dazzling variety and ubiquity of rules. Every culture has rules, but they’re all different.

I eventually settled on three major meanings of rules: rules as laws, rules as algorithms, and finally, rules as models. The latter meaning was predominant in the Western tradition until the end of the 18th century, and I set out to trace what happened to rules as models, but also the rise of algorithmic rules. It’s hard to imagine now, but the word algorithm didn’t even have an entry in the most comprehensive mathematical encyclopedias of the late 19th century.

To get at these changes over time, I cast my nets very wide. I looked at cookbooks, I looked at the rules of warfare. I looked at rules of games. I looked at rules of monastic orders and traffic regulations, sumptuary regulations, spelling rules, and of course algorithms for how to calculate. And if there’s one take-home message from the book, it is a distinction between thick and thin rules.

Thick rules are rules that come upholstered with all manner of qualifications, examples, caveats, and exceptions. They are rules that are braced to confront a world in which recalcitrant particulars refuse to conform to universals—as opposed to thin rules, of which algorithms are perhaps the best prototype: thin rules are formulated without attention to circumstances. Thin rules brook no quarter, they offer no sense of a variable world. Many bureaucratic rules, especially bureaucratic rules in their Kafkaesque exaggeration, also fit this description.

The arc of the book is not to describe how thick rules became thin rules (because we still have thick and thin rules around us all the time), but rather to determine the point at which thick rules become necessary—when you must anticipate high variability and therefore must tweak your rule to fit circumstances—as opposed to the stable, predictable settings in which we turn to thin rules.

In some historically exceptional cases, thin rules can actually get a job done because the context can be standardized and stabilized…(More)”.

Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal: “AI is now a global phenomenon. Yet Hollywood narratives dominate perceptions of AI in the English-speaking West and beyond, and much of the technology itself is shaped by a disproportionately white, male, US-based elite. However, different cultures have been imagining intelligent machines since long before we could build them, in visions that vary greatly across religious, philosophical, literary and cinematic traditions. This book aims to spotlight these alternative visions.

Imagining AI draws attention to the range and variety of visions of a future with intelligent machines and their potential significance for the research, regulation, and implementation of AI. The book is structured geographically, with each chapter presenting insights into how a specific region or culture imagines intelligent machines. The contributors, leading experts from academia and the arts, explore how the encounters between local narratives, digital technologies, and mainstream Western narratives create new imaginaries and insights in different contexts across the globe. The narratives they analyse range from ancient philosophy to contemporary science fiction, and visual art to policy discourse.

The book sheds new light on some of the most important themes in AI ethics, from the differences between Chinese and American visions of AI, to digital neo-colonialism. It is an essential work for anyone wishing to understand how different cultural contexts interplay with the most significant technology of our time…(More)”.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tamara Kneese: “Since the internet’s earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists’ plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism.
 
Big Tech has authority not only over people’s lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies’ policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes readers on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?..(More)”.

Principles of Knowledge Auditing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Patrick Lambe: “A knowledge audit provides an “at a glance” view of an organization’s needs and opportunities. Its purpose is to improve an organization’s effectiveness through a better understanding of the dynamics and levers of knowledge production, access, and use. However, this developing field is hampered by the lack of a common language about the origins and nature of knowledge auditing. In Principles of Knowledge Auditing, Patrick Lambe integrates the theory and practices of the field, laying out principles and guidelines for a clearer and more pragmatic approach to knowledge auditing that makes it more accessible to practitioners and researchers.

Lambe examines knowledge auditing in the context of the development of communications, information, and knowledge management in the twentieth century. He critiques and clarifies ambiguities in how knowledge audits are approached and described, as well as how the results are conveyed within organizations. He discusses the benefits and risks of knowledge management standards. Knowledge auditors, he says, need a common frame of reference more than they need standards. Standards have their uses, but they provide only markers and signposts and are poor representations of the richness of the landscape. He concludes with a set of guiding principles for practitioners…(More)”.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson” A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear. Progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.

The wealth generated by technological improvements in agriculture during the European Middle Ages was captured by the nobility and used to build grand cathedrals while peasants remained on the edge of starvation. The first hundred years of industrialization in England delivered stagnant incomes for working people. And throughout the world today, digital technologies and artificial intelligence undermine jobs and democracy through excessive automation, massive data collection, and intrusive surveillance.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Power and Progress demonstrates that the path of technology was once—and may again be—brought under control. The tremendous computing advances of the last half century can become empowering and democratizing tools, but not if all major decisions remain in the hands of a few hubristic tech leaders.With their breakthrough economic theory and manifesto for a better society, Acemoglu and Johnson provide the vision needed to reshape how we innovate and who really gains from technological advances…(More)”.

The Rise of Virtual Communities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Amber Atherton: “Uncover the fascinating history of virtual communities and how we connect to each other online. The Rise of Virtual Communities, explores the earliest online community platforms, mapping the technological evolutions, and the individuals, that have shaped the culture of the internet.

Read in-depth interviews with the visionary founders of iconic online platforms, and uncover the history of virtual communities and how the industry has developed over time. Featuring never-before told stories, this exploration introduces new ideas and predictions for the future, explaining how we got here and challenging what we think we may know about building online communities….(More)”.

Regulating Cross-Border Data Flows

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Bryan Mercurio, and Ronald Yu: “Data is now one of, if not the world’s most valuable resource. The adoption of data-driven applications across economic sectors has made data and the flow of data so pervasive that it has become integral to everything we as members of society do – from conducting our finances to operating businesses to powering the apps we use every day. For this reason, governing cross-border data flows is inherently difficult given the ubiquity and value of data, and the impact government policies can have on national competitiveness, business attractiveness and personal rights. The challenge for governments is to address in a coherent manner the broad range of data-related issues in the context of a global data-driven economy.

This book engages with the unexplored topic of why and how governments should develop a coherent and consistent strategic framework regulating cross-border data flows. The objective is to fill a very significant gap in the legal and policy setting by considering multiple perspectives in order to assist in the development of a jurisdiction’s coherent and strategic policy framework…(More)“.