Deceitful Media

"Since its inception, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been nurtured by the dream - cherished by some scientists while dismissed as unrealistic by others - that it will lead to forms of intelligence similar or alternative to human life. However, AI might be more accurately described as a range of technologies providing a convincing illusion of intelligence - in other words, not much the creation of intelligent beings, but rather of technologies that are perceived by humans as such. Deceitful Media argues that AI resides also and especially in the perception of human users. Exploring the history of AI from its origins in the Turing Test to contemporary AI voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri, Simone Natale demonstrates that our tendency to project humanity into things shapes the very functioning and implications of AI. He argues for a recalibration of the relationship between deception and AI that helps recognize and critically question how computing technologies mobilize specific aspects of users' perception and psychology in order to create what we call "AI." Introducing the concept of "banal deception," which describes deceptive mechanisms and practices that are embedded in AI, the book shows that deception is as central to AI's functioning as the circuits, software, and data that make it run. Delving into the relationship between AI and deception, Deceitful Media thus reformulates the debate on AI on the basis of a new assumption: that what machines are changing is primarily us, humans. If 'intelligent' machines might one day revolutionize life, the book provocatively suggests, they are already transforming how we understand and carry out social interactions"--

This two-volume set charts a cross-disciplinary discursive terrain that proffers rich insights about deceit in contemporary postcolonial Sub-Saharan African politics. In an attempt to produce a nuanced and multi-faceted academic dialoguing platform, the two volumes have a particular focus on the aspects of treachery, fear of difference (oppositional politics), and discourses/ semiotics of mis/self- representation. The major aim of the proposed volumes is to contribute toward the often problematised conversations about the unfolding (post)colonial Sub-Saharan world which is topical in decolonial and Pan-African studies. The volumes seek to place political thinking and postcolonial political systems under the scholarly gaze with the view to highlight and enhance the participation of African cross-disciplinary scholarship in the postcolonial political processes of the continent. Most significantly, it is through such probing of the limitations of our own disciplinary perspectives which can help us appreciate the complexity of the postcolonial Sub-Saharan African politics. The first volume uses Zimbabwe as a case study, while the second volume broadens to examine postcolonial politics in Sub-Saharan Africa more broadly.

This volume interrogates the intertwining of the local and the digital in environmental communication. It starts by introducing a wave metaphor to tease out major shifts in the field, and situates the intersections of local places and digital networks in the beginning of a third wave. Investigations that feature the centrality of place and digital communication platforms show how we today, as researchers and practitioners, communicate the environment. Contributions identify the need for critical approaches that engage with the wider consequences of this changing media landscape, unpacking local and global tensions in environmental communication research. This empirical case study collection from different parts of the world shows that environmental activists and citizens creatively use digital technologies for campaign purposes. It identifies new environmental communication challenges and opportunities, as well as practices, of environmental activists, NGOs, citizens and local communities, in the fight for social and environmental justice.

As the Internet has become flooded with untrustworthy information, some of which is intentionally misleading or erroneous, this book teaches Web surfers how inaccurate data can affect their health, privacy, investments, business decisions, online purchases, and legal affairs.

Bringing together a multidisciplinary group of scholars, this collection examines the Victorians' profound fascination with automata.

What happens when Washington, D.C. pundits and journalists run in the same social circles as the powerful people they cover? When the President and his administration trade press access for loyalty? You get a complicit, uncritical press greasing the skids to a brutal war, conspiring to out a CIA agent, and muddying the waters of a grand jury investigation. In the fearful aftermath of 9/11, much of America’s pride -- its free press -- became an unquestioning propaganda arm. Marcy Wheeler’s Anatomy of Deceit documents how the media promoted the Bush administration’s justification for war -- that Iraq was on the verge of acquiring weapons of mass destruction -- even though much of it was debunked. And it provides a play-by-play account of how Vice President Dick Cheney’s office first used the media to target a critic, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and then to avoid criminal charges in the CIA leak case. While the media was beating the drums of war and cozying up to the administration, citizen journalists were digging for the truth. Wheeler's compelling account tells the story, as it needs to be told -- from outside the Beltway's cocktail circuit.

Following the 9/11 attacks, approximately four million Americans have turned eighteen each year and more than fifty million children have been born. These members of the millennial and post-millennial generation have come of age in a moment marked by increased anxiety about terrorism, two protracted wars, and policies that have raised questions about the United States's role abroad and at home. Young people have not been shielded from the attacks or from the wars and policy debates that followed. Instead, they have been active participants—as potential military recruits and organizers for social justice amid anti-immigration policies, as students in schools learning about the attacks or readers of young adult literature about wars. The War of My Generation is the first essay collection to focus specifically on how the terrorist attacks and their aftermath have shaped these new generations of Americans. Drawing from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and literary studies, the essays cover a wide range of topics, from graphic war images in the classroom to computer games designed to promote military recruitment to emails from parents in the combat zone. The collection considers what cultural factors and products have shaped young people's experience of the 9/11 attacks, the wars that have followed, and their experiences as emerging citizen-subjects in that moment. Revealing how young people understand the War on Terror—and how adults understand the way young people think—The War of My Generation offers groundbreaking research on catastrophic events still fresh in our minds.