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...

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...

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...

In this exceptional study, Christian Fuchs discusses how the internet has transformed the lives of human beings and social relationships in contemporary society. By outlining a social theory of the internet and the information society, he demonstrates how the ecological, economic, political, and cultural systems of contemporary society have been transformed by new ICTs. Fuchs highlights how new forms of cooperation and competition are advanced and supported by the internet in subsystems of...

Commercial social media platforms have become integral to contemporary forms of protests. They are intensely used by advocacy groups, non-governmental organisations, social movements and other political actors who increasingly integrate social media platforms into broader practices of organizing and campaigning. But, aside from the many advantages of extensive mobilization opportunities at low cost, what are the implications of social media corporations being involved in these grassroots m...

Just what is the “participatory condition”? It is the situation in which taking part in something with others has become both environmental and normative. The fact that we have always participated does not mean we have always lived under the participatory condition. What is distinctive about the present is the extent to which the everyday social, economic, cultural, and political activities that comprise simply being in the world have been thematized and organized around the priority of pa...

Amartya Sen’s Inequality Re-Examined is a seminal text setting out a theory to evaluate social arrangements and inequality. By asking the question, ‘equality of what’?, Sen shows that (in)equality should be assessed as human freedom; for people to have the ability to pursue and achieve goals they value or have reason to value.The text lays out the fundamental ideas to Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach. This approach is celebrated in diverse academic disciplines because of ...