Digital Freedom

In Digital Freedom, N. D. Batra explores the tension between the boundlessness of the Internet and the boundaries of the marketplace, as well as the resulting impact on human expression, privacy, and social controls. Batra's thought-provoking book looks at these issues--including surveillance, intellectual property, and copyright--from the perspective of an evolutionary, self-organizing social system. This system both creates and assimilates innovations and, in the process, undergoes reorganization and renewal. Above all, Digital Freedom is an exploration of and meditation on the question: How much freedom does a person need?

In the present age of the digital era, the terms digitalization, emerging technologies, and social media have become buzzwords. Among all the innovations in our history, digital technology has advanced the fastest. With the freedom of digitalization, emerging technologies, and high-speed internet, computing devices may now work remotely. Every industry, including banking and finance, healthcare, agriculture, logistics, academia, government sectors, and businesses, has recognized the need for innovative digital technologies for their development, boosting efficiency and speed and cutting costs. Digitalization has also converted non-digital applications into digital ones to make things easier for people, at the same time that social media has an increasingly significant impact on human lives and industries. Consequently, the primary goal of this book is to explain to readers how newly emerging digital technologies and social media have significantly altered and aided in the growth of today’s organizations and how the freedom of using these technologies has proved to be beneficial, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic that has affected the entire world. This book demonstrates its argument by providing real-world cases from both developed and developing nations, particularly India. The book also investigates how digital transformation may help every industry and organization be more agile and efficient. Readers will learn about the main goals of digital initiatives that have been launched to create a digitally empowered society worldwide. In this book, the benefits and challenges of digitization, digital tools, and other technologies in diverse fields are also examined.

Digitalization now affects nearly all aspects of our lives. Much has been changing in the world – and this has led to the reassessment of crucial ethical questions: How are people to treat one another and what responsibility do we bear for the environment and the living world? And how can we shape our ongoing digital transformation in freedom and responsibility? This is the overarching concern of the publication, published by the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany. The publication touches on timeless questions to be reassessed in the context of digitalization: How to address issues on securing our future, work and leisure, trust and betrayal, truth and lies. It encourages readers to avail themselves of the opportunities provided by digitalization, while not glossing over its critical facets. In doing so, the publication connects these developments with a text central to the biblical tradition, the Ten Commandments. Even in our times of digital transformation, the Decalogue provides us with a basic ethical orientation for lives in freedom and responsibility.

How we lost control of the internet--and how to win it back. The internet has become a battleground. Although it was unlikely to live up to the hype and hopes of the 1990s, only the most skeptical cynics could have predicted the World Wide Web as we know it today: commercial, isolating, and full of, even fueled by, bias. This was not inevitable. The Gentrification of the Internet argues that much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it. Jessa Lingel uses the politics and debates of gentrification to diagnose the massive, systemic problems blighting our contemporary internet: erosions of privacy and individual ownership, small businesses wiped out by wealthy corporations, the ubiquitous paywall. But there are still steps we can take to reclaim the heady possibilities of the early internet. Lingel outlines actions that internet activists and everyday users can take to defend and secure more protections for the individual and to carve out more spaces of freedom for the people--not businesses--online.

The Internet is a new battleground between governments that censor online content and those who advocate Internet freedom. This report examines the implications of Internet freedom for state-society relations in nondemocratic regimes.

This report examines the portfolio of tools funded by the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor that help support Internet freedom and assesses the impact of these tools in promoting U.S. interests (such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the free flow of information) without enabling criminal activity.