We are often expected to trust technologies, and how they are used, even if we have good reason not to. There is no room to mistrust.Exploring relations between trust and mistrust in the context of data, AI and technology at large, this book defines a process of ‘trustification’ used by governments, corporations, researchers and the media to legitimize exploitation and increase inequalities.Aimed at social scientists, computer scientists and public policy, the book aptly re...

This book outlines a new conception of the cyborg in terms of consciousness as the parallax gap between physical and digital worlds. The contemporary subject constructs its own internal reality in the interplay of the Virtual and the Real. Reinterpreting the work of Slavoj Žižek and Gilles Deleuze in terms of the psychological and ontological construction of the digital, alongside the philosophy of quantum physics, this book offers a challenge to materialist perspectives in the fluid cyber...

How do we evaluate ambiguous concepts such as wellbeing, freedom, and social justice? How do we develop policies that offer everyone the best chance to achieve what they want from life? The capability approach, a theoretical framework pioneered by the philosopher and economist Amartya Sen in the 1980s, has become an increasingly influential way to think about these issues.Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined is both an introduction to t...

Paradoxes of Media and Information Literacy contributes to ongoing conversations about control of knowledge and different ways of knowing. It does so by analysing why media and information literacy (MIL) is proposed as a solution for addressing the current information crisis.Questioning why MIL is commonly believed to wield such power, the book throws into sharp relief several paradoxes that are built into common understandings of such literacies. Haider and Sundin take th...

This critical reassessment of digital proliferation calls for a new approach to technology that includes marginalized, non-western communities.In the digital age, technology has shrunk the physical world into a "global village," where we all seem to be connected as an online community. Yet while we think of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as open and accessible to all, they are in fact commercial entities developed primarily by and for the Western world. Cons...

A comprehensive and practical guide to ethnographic research, this book guides you through the process, starting with the fundamentals of choosing and proposing a topic and selecting a research design. It describes methods of data collection (taking notes, participant observation, interviewing, identifying themes and issues, creating ethnographic maps and tables and charts, and referring to secondary sources) and analyzing and writing ethnography (sorting and coding data, answering questio...

This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life.Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, dat...

Distrusting Educational Technology critically explores the optimistic consensus that has arisen around the use of digital technology in education. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives, this book shows how apparently neutral forms of educational technology have actually served to align educational provision and practices with neo-liberal values, thereby eroding the nature of education as a public good and moving it instead toward the individualistic tenden...

Online technologies excite the public imagination with narratives of democratization. The Internet is a political medium, borne of democracy, but is it democratizing?Late modern democracies are characterized by civic apathy, public skepticism, disillusionment with politics, and general disinterest in conventional political process. And yet, public interest in blogging, online news, net-based activism, collaborative news filtering, and online networking reveal an el...

The digital revolution has not only transformed multiple aspects of social life – it also shakes sociological theory, transforming the most basic assumptions that have underlain it. In this timely book, Ori Schwarz explores the main challenges digitalization poses to different strands of sociological theory and offers paths to adapt them to new social realities.What would symbolic interactionism look like in a world where interaction no longer takes place within bounded situations ...

Smart Urbanism (SU) – the rebuilding of cities through the integration of digital technologies with buildings, neighbourhoods, networked infrastructures and people – is being represented as a unique emerging ‘solution’ to the majority of problems faced by cities today. SU discourses, enacted by technology companies, national governments and supranational agencies alike, claim a supremacy of urban digital technologies for managing and controlling infrastructures, achieving greater effective...

In a clear and rewarding style, Albrechts and Mandelbaum consider the challenges that the new paradigm of the Network Society creates for Urban and Regional Planning. Chapters grouped into five themes discuss theoretical and practical perspectives on the contemporary organization of social, economic, cultural, political and physical spaces. These sections are:models of the Network Societythe impact of physical networks such as transportchallenges for Plann...