Book by Mart Susi: “…offers a novel non-coherence theory of digital human rights to explain the change in meaning and scope of human rights rules, principles, ideas and concepts, and the interrelationships and related actors, when moving from the physical domain into the online domain. The transposition into the digital reality can alter the meaning of well-established offline human rights to a wider or narrower extent, impacting core concepts such as transparency, legal certainty and foreseeability. Susi analyses the ‘loss in transposition’ of some core features of the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. The non-coherence theory is used to explore key human rights theoretical concepts, such as the network society approach, the capabilities approach, transversality, and self-normativity, and it is also applied to e-state and artificial intelligence, challenging the idea of the sameness of rights…(More)”.
The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms
Book by Olivier Roy: “Are we confronting a new culture—global, online, individualistic? Or is our existing concept of culture in crisis, as explicit, normative systems replace implicit, social values?
Olivier Roy’s new book explains today’s fractures via the extension of individual political and sexual freedoms from the 1960s. For Roy, twentieth-century youth culture disconnected traditional political protest from class, region or ethnicity, fashioning an identity premised on repudiation rather than inheritance of shared history or values. Having spread across generations under neoliberalism and the internet, youth culture is now individualised, ersatz.
Without a shared culture, everything becomes an explicit code of how to speak and act, often online. Identities are now defined by socially fragmenting personal traits, creating affinity-based sub-cultures seeking safe spaces: universities for the left, gated communities and hard borders for the right.
Increased left- and right-wing references to ‘identity’ fail to confront this deeper crisis of culture and community. Our only option, Roy argues, is to restore social bonds at the grassroots or citizenship level…(More)”.
Narratives Online. Shared Stories in Social Media
Book by Ruth Page: “Stories are shared by millions of people online every day. They post and re-post interactions as they re-tell and respond to large-scale mediated events. These stories are important as they can bring people together, or polarise them in opposing groups. Narratives Online explores this new genre – the shared story – and uses carefully chosen case-studies to illustrate the complex processes of sharing as they are shaped by four international social media contexts: Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Building on discourse analytic research, Ruth Page develops a new framework – ‘Mediated Narrative Analysis’ – to address the large scale, multimodal nature of online narratives, helping researchers interpret the micro- and macro-level politics that are played out in computer-mediated communication…(More)”.
God-like: A 500-Year History of Artificial Intelligence in Myths, Machines, Monsters
Book by Kester Brewin: “In the year 1600 a monk is burned at the stake for claiming to have built a device that will allow him to know all things.
350 years later, having witnessed ‘Trinity’ – the first test of the atomic bomb – America’s leading scientist outlines a memory machine that will help end war on earth.
25 years in the making, an ex-soldier finally unveils this ‘machine for augmenting human intellect’, dazzling as he stands ‘Zeus-like, dealing lightning with both hands.’
AI is both stunningly new and rooted in ancient desires. As we finally welcome this ‘god-like’ technology amongst us, what can learn from the myths and monsters of the past about how to survive alongside our greatest ever invention?…(More)”.
The New Fire: War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI
Book by Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie: “Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the modern world. It is ubiquitous—in our homes and offices, in the present and most certainly in the future. Today, we encounter AI as our distant ancestors once encountered fire. If we manage AI well, it will become a force for good, lighting the way to many transformative inventions. If we deploy it thoughtlessly, it will advance beyond our control. If we wield it for destruction, it will fan the flames of a new kind of war, one that holds democracy in the balance. As AI policy experts Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie show in The New Fire, few choices are more urgent—or more fascinating—than how we harness this technology and for what purpose.
The new fire has three sparks: data, algorithms, and computing power. These components fuel viral disinformation campaigns, new hacking tools, and military weapons that once seemed like science fiction. To autocrats, AI offers the prospect of centralized control at home and asymmetric advantages in combat. It is easy to assume that democracies, bound by ethical constraints and disjointed in their approach, will be unable to keep up. But such a dystopia is hardly preordained. Combining an incisive understanding of technology with shrewd geopolitical analysis, Buchanan and Imbrie show how AI can work for democracy. With the right approach, technology need not favor tyranny…(More)”.
New Horizons
An Introduction to the 2nd Edition of the State of Open Data by Renata Avila and Tim Davies: “The struggle to deliver on the vision that data, this critical resource of modern societies, should be widely available, well structured, and shared for all to use, has been a long one. It has been a struggle involving thousands upon thousands of individuals, organisations, and communities. Without their efforts, public procurement would be opaque, smart-cities even more corporate controlled, transport systems less integrated, and pandemic responses less rapid. Across numerous initiatives, open data has become more embedded as a way to support accountability, enable collaboration, and to better unlock the value of data.
However, much like the climber reaching the top of the foothills, and for the first time seeing the hard climb of the whole mountain coming into view, open data advocates, architects, and community builders have not reached the end of their journey. As we move into the middle of the 2020s, action on open data faces new and significant challenges if we are to see a future in which open and enabling data infrastructures and ecosystems are the norm rather than a sparse patchwork of exceptions. Building open infrastructures to power social change for the next century is no small task, and to meet the challenges ahead, we will need all that the lessons we can gather from more than 15 years of open data action to date…Across the collection, we can find two main pathways to broader participation explored. On the one hand are discussions of widening public engagement and data literacy, creating a more diverse constituency of people interested and able to engage with data projects in a voluntary capacity. On the other, are calls for more formalisation of data governance, embedding citizen voices within increasingly structured data collaborations and ensuring that affected stakeholders are consulted on, or given a role in, key data decisions. Mariel García-Montes (Data Literacy) underscores the case for an equity-first approach to the first pathway, highlighting how generalist data literacy can be used for or against the public good, and calling for approaches to data literacy building that centre on an understanding of inequality and power. In writing on urban development, Stefaan G. Verhulst and Sampriti Saxena (Urban Development) point to a number of examples of the latter approach in which cities are experimenting with various forms of deliberative conversations and processes…(More)”.
The Future of Trust
Book by Ros Taylor: “In a society battered by economic, political, cultural and ecological collapse, where do we place our trust, now that it is more vital than ever for our survival? How has that trust – in our laws, our media, our governments – been lost, and how can it be won back? Examining the police, the rule of law, artificial intelligence, the 21st century city and social media, Ros Taylor imagines what life might be like in years to come if trust continues to erode.
Have conspiracy theories permanently damaged our society? Will technological advances, which require more and more of our human selves, ultimately be rejected by future generations? And in a world fast approaching irreversible levels of ecological damage, how can we trust the custodians of these institutions to do the right thing – even as humanity faces catastrophe?…(More)”.
Scaling Up Development Impact
Book by Isabel Guerrero with Siddhant Gokhale and Jossie Fahsbender: “Today, nearly one billion people lack electricity, over three billion lack clean water, and 750 million lack basic literacy skills. Many of these challenges could be solved with existing solutions, and technology enables us to reach the last mile like never before. Yet, few solutions attain the necessary scale to match the size of these challenges. Scaling Up Development Impact offers an analytical framework, a set of practical tools, and adaptive evaluation techniques to accompany the scaling process. It presents rich organizational experiences that showcase real-world journeys toward increased impact…(More)”.
All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists
Book by Caitlin Petre: “Journalists today are inundated with data about which stories attract the most clicks, likes, comments, and shares. These metrics influence what stories are written, how news is promoted, and even which journalists get hired and fired. Do metrics make journalists more accountable to the public? Or are these data tools the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch wielded by a factory boss, worsening newsroom working conditions and journalism quality? In All the News That’s Fit to Click, Caitlin Petre takes readers behind the scenes at the New York Times, Gawker, and the prominent news analytics company Chartbeat to explore how performance metrics are transforming the work of journalism.
Petre describes how digital metrics are a powerful but insidious new form of managerial surveillance and discipline. Real-time analytics tools are designed to win the trust and loyalty of wary journalists by mimicking key features of addictive games, including immersive displays, instant feedback, and constantly updated “scores” and rankings. Many journalists get hooked on metrics—and pressure themselves to work ever harder to boost their numbers.
Yet this is not a simple story of managerial domination. Contrary to the typical perception of metrics as inevitably disempowering, Petre shows how some journalists leverage metrics to their advantage, using them to advocate for their professional worth and autonomy…(More)”.
Evaluation in the Post-Truth World
Book edited by Mita Marra, Karol Olejniczak, and Arne Paulson:”…explores the relationship between the nature of evaluative knowledge, the increasing demand in decision-making for evaluation and other forms of research evidence, and the post-truth phenomena of antiscience sentiments combined with illiberal tendencies of the present day. Rather than offer a checklist on how to deal with post-truth, the experts found herein wish to raise awareness and reflection throughout policy circles on the factors that influence our assessment and policy-related work in such a challenging environment. Journeying alongside the editor and contributors, readers benefit from three guiding questions to help identify specific challenges but tools to deal with such challenges: How are policy problems conceptualized in the current political climate? What is the relationship between expertise and decision-making in today’s political circumstances? How complex has evaluation become as a social practice? Evaluation in the Post-Truth World will benefit evaluation practitioners at the program and project levels, as well as policy analysts and scholars interested in applications of evaluation in the public policy domain…(More)”.