How wireless technology is redefining the relationship of communication, technology, and society around the world—in everyday work and life, in youth culture, in politics, and in the developing world.Wireless networks are the fastest growing communications technology in history. Are mobile phones expressions of identity, fashionable gadgets, tools for life—or all of the above? Mobile Communication and Society looks at how the possibility of multimodal comm...

The Development Communication Sourcebook illlustrates why the field of development communication is important and how its tools and methods enhance long-term and sustainable results. The book presents basic concepts and explains key challenges faced in daily practice. Each of the four modules is self-contained, with examples, toolboxes, and more.

Mobile phones are close to ubiquitous in developing countries; Internet and broadband access are becoming commonplace. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) thus represent the fastest, broadest and deepest technical change experienced in international development. They now affect every development sector – supporting the work of hundreds of millions of farmers and micro-entrepreneurs; creating millions of ICT-based jobs; assisting healthcare workers and teachers; facilitating p...

Internet Studies has been one of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding interdisciplinary fields to emerge over the last decade. The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies has been designed to provide a valuable resource for academics and students in this area, bringing together leading scholarly perspectives on how the Internet has been studied and how the research agenda should be pursued in the future. The Handbook aims to focus on Internet Studies as an emerging field, e...

Large-scale development projects oftentimes end up creating negative impacts that affect vulnerable populations with particular intensity. Projects likely to displace families from their homes, degrade the living conditions of indigenous peoples or intensify social conflicts at local levels are not uncommon. Social safeguards are intended to prevent these and other unintended impacts, and when the impacts cannot be averted, to develop appropriate measures to mitigate them. However, the pra...

Editors Peter A. Bruck and Madanmohan Rao bring together an extraordinary cast of thought leaders and practitioners in this sweeping survey of mobile technology and its impacts on human life, work, and society. Global Mobile examines the foundations of the worldwide mobile ecosystem through an array of case studies and perspectives on how mobile is transforming human enterprise—from business and healthcare to education, employment, entertainment, government, and the media. Contributors des...

The recent, rapid rise in the use of digital technology among citizens and civil society organizations offers the possibility of strengthening citizens' voice in politics, carving out new political space for activism and promoting more government accountability. It is clear that these technologies are increasingly complementing citizens' political participation, changing relationships between citizens, organizations and public institutions, and expanding notions of political behavior and p...

The global economic system is experiencing a profound period of rapid change. The emergence of globalised production and distribution systems, which bring together diverse constellations of economic actors through a complex regime of global corporate governance, state regulation and new international divisions of labour, demands corresponding and innovative explanatory models. Global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks (GPNs) have been particularly useful as conceptual frame...

The second volume in the SIRCA book series investigates the impact of information society initiatives by extending the boundaries of academic research into the realm of practice. Global in scope, it includes contributions and research projects from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The international scholarly community has taken a variety of approaches to question the impact of information society initiatives on populations in the Global South. This book addresses two aspects— Impact of rese...

Much of the discussion about new technologies and social equality has focused on the oversimplified notion of a "digital divide." Technology and Social Inclusion moves beyond the limited view of haves and have-nots to analyze the different forms of access to information and communication technologies. Drawing on theory from political science, economics, sociology, psychology, communications, education, and linguistics, the book examines the ways in which differing access to techno...

We have been living and working in the information society for decades, yet still we struggle to understand and keep up in the face of its constant flux and vast scope. In this unique interdisciplinary text, three scholars at the forefront of this dynamic field provide a clear conceptual framework and interpretation of the global information society. They explain the three pillars of the information society—technology, knowledge, and mobility—and the global information society as a whole, ...

Connecting Canadians represents the work of the Community Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN), the largest national and international research effort to examine the burgeoning field of community informatics, a cross-disciplinary approach to the mobilization of information and communications technologies (ICT) for community change.Funded for four years by the SSHRC's Initiative for the New Economy, CRACIN systematically studied a wide variety ...