Digital Futures

In the contemporary city, the physical infrastructure and sensorial experiences of two millennia are now interwoven within an invisible digital matrix. This matrix alters human perceptions of the city, informs our behavior, and increasingly influences the urban designs we ultimately inhabit. Digital Futures and the City of Today cuts through these issues to analyze the work of architects, designers, media specialists, and a growing number of community activists, laying out a multifaceted view of the complex integrated phenomenon of the contemporary city. Split into three relevant sections, the book interrogates the concept of the "smart" city, examines innovative digital projects from around the world, documents experimental visions for the future, and describes projects that engage local communities in the design process.

Disruptive digital technologies are poised to reshape world energy markets. A new wave of industrial innovation, driven by the convergence of automation, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics, is remaking energy and transportation systems in ways that could someday end the age of oil. What are the consequences—not only for the environment and for daily life but also for geopolitics and the international order? Amy Myers Jaffe provides an expert look at the promises and challenges of the future of energy, highlighting what the United States needs to do to maintain its global influence in a post-oil era. She surveys new advances coming to market in on-demand travel services, automation, logistics, energy storage, artificial intelligence, and 3-D printing and explores how this rapid pace of innovation is altering international security dynamics in fundamental ways. As the United States vacillates politically about its energy trajectory, China is proactively striving to become the global frontrunner in a full-scale global energy transformation. In order to maintain its leadership role, Jaffe argues, the United States must embrace the digital revolution and foster American achievement. Bringing together analyses of technological innovation, energy policy, and geopolitics, Energy’s Digital Future gives indispensable insight into the path the United States will need to pursue to ensure its lasting economic competitiveness and national security in a new energy age.

This book provides an integrated overview of key trends in digital transformation, taking into consideration five interrelated dimensions: strategy and business models, society, organization, technology and regulation. As such, it provides a framework for the analysis of digital business transformation and its emerging factors, analyzing twenty-five key trends in terms of their future impact. On that basis, the book then delineates a new approach centered on the mutually accelerating links between multiple value creation spaces. It proposes a new mode of production – accelerated production of links (acceluction) – and analyzes it with respect to the still-dominant concept of lean production. Based on the results of the international CIGREF research program ISD, the book presents a valuable perspective of the expected impact of the abundance of networks and data as critical resources for enterprises beyond 2020.

Beyond the hype about dot-coms, WAP phones and dot-com entrepreneurs, what impacts will e-commerce have on society? How will it affect jobs and local communities? What will it mean for the environment - for energy use, transport and the future shape of our cities? How can we ensure that everyone enjoys the benefits of the new digital technologies? This is a groundbreaking exploration of the social and environmental impacts and opportunities of the new economy. It brings together the leading thinkers and visionaries from the worlds of policy, business and academia in an insightful, vigorous and at times controversial examination of the impact e-commerce will have on the way we live and work, and on the environment on which we all depend.

Digital Futures for Learning offers a methodological and pedagogical way forward for researchers and educators who want to work imaginatively with "what’s next" in higher education and informal learning. Today’s debates around technological transformations of social, cultural and educational spaces and practices need to be informed by a more critical understanding of how visions of the future of learning are made and used, and how they come to be seen as desirable, inevitable or impossible. Integrating innovative methods, key research findings, engaging theories and creative pedagogies across multiple disciplines, this book argues for and explores speculative approaches to researching and analysing post-compulsory and informal learning futures – where we are, where we might go and how to get there.

Digital politics is rarely explored holistically and interdisciplinary beyond a focus on digital activism, digital warfare or Internet governance. Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures addresses this gap, initiating conversations about digital politics to a range of disciplines, developing new pedagogy for the field.

A co-branded book project with Jisc (formerly the Joint Information Systems Commitee), off the back of DigiFest 2014, a digital festival run by Jisc for the first time in 2014. The aim of the book is to bring cutting-edge discussion as heard at DigiFest to the information professional/academic librarian readership. Digital Futures will provide expert briefings to information professionals on the emerging trends in the digital technologies that are transforming teaching and research in higher education. Written by subject experts working at the forefront in emerging trends and digital technologies Encompasses issues that impact across the higher education institution: learning, research and network security Aids strategic thinking and informs decision making

An ambitious rendering of the digital future from a pioneer of media and cultural studies, a wise and witty take on a changing field, and our orientation to it Investigates the uses of multimedia by creative and productive citizen-consumers to provide new theories of communication that accommodate social media, participatory action, and user-creativity Leads the way for new interdisciplinary engagement with systems thinking, complexity and evolutionary sciences, and the convergence of cultural and economic values Analyzes the historical uses of multimedia from print, through broadcasting to the internet Combines conceptual innovation with historical erudition to present a high-level synthesis of ideas and detailed analysis of emergent forms and practices Features an international focus and global reach to provide a basis for students and researchers seeking broader perspectives