The Dark Side Of Our Digital World

An all-in-one guide to understanding and managing the dark side of our digital lives. It all started out so well: the online world began as an effective tool for communication that carried with it a great promise to level the playing field and eliminate borders. But it’s morphed into something totally unintended. We’ve all had to endure the troll that derails a generally benign conversation; or received that scam email from a wealthy Nigerian prince; or felt the strange feeling of being watched and tracked by advertising companies as we navigate the web. Welcome to the modern internet. These are but a few of the topics that The Dark Side of Our Digital World: And What You Can Do about It examines to get at the root causes of our current problems with information technology, social media, and problematic online behavior. The book explores the issues raised by the negative side of information technology, including surveillance and spying, declining privacy, information overload, surveillance capitalism and big data analytics, conspiracy theories and fake news, misinformation and disinformation, trolling and phishing. What’s ultimately at stake is how we are able to cope with increasingly invasive anti-social behaviors, the overall decline of privacy in the face of total surveillance technologies, and the lack of a quality online experience that doesn’t devolve into flame wars and insults. The future of the internet as well as our societies depends upon our ability to discern truth from lies and reality from propaganda. The book will therefore also examine the possible directions we could take to improve the situation, looking at solutions in the areas of psychology and behavioral conditioning, social engineering through nudging techniques, the development of e-democracy movements, and the implementation of public policy.

Marketing in a Digital World consists of nine essays on how the digital revolution has affected marketing theory and practice. Leading marketing scholars, including several editors of premier academic journals, provide fresh insights for both scholars and managers seeking to enhance their understanding of marketing in a digital world.

This volume presents a broad coverage of theoretical issues that deal with digital culture, representation and ideology in art and museums, and other cultural sites, offering new insights into issues of representation in the digitization of art. It critically examines the roles of museum and archives in the digital age and reexamines the intricate relations between sight and site in art, museums, exhibitions, theme parks, theatre performances, music videos, and films. The collection represents a multidisciplinary approach to the complex issues underlying the advent of technologies and digital culture. The rise of visual culture since the twentieth century can be accounted for by the advent of technology in film, TV, museum exhibitions, and the wide use of websites, but it can also be understood as a paradigmatic shift toward representation as a visual means to interpret culture, with new understandings of the site-sight dilemma and the co-implications in related tensions. Complicating the issue of representation is the rise of digital culture, as digital sites replace actual physical sites. This book explores how the virtual has replaced the actual, and in what ways, and to what effects, the digital has displaced the physical. With contributions by museum curators, communications scholars, visual artists, theatre artists, filmmakers, literary critics, and historians, this volume is of appeal to academics and graduate students in information science, art, media, performance, literary and cultural studies, and history. “The book binds together different concepts such as site, sight and digitalization in a very original way. It convincingly gathers contributions from academics and practitioners, artists and museum specialists. The chapters are theoretically well-founded, show an interesting breadth of content and are also dealing with current developments.” — Monika Gänssbauer, Professor of Chinese and Head of the Institute of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden “The chapters raise important and latest questions and discussions on the impact of digital technology has on art, culture, creativity, representation and innovation. They are original in dealing with latest examples in recent years, especially during the pandemic, with reflections and philosophical discussions on the transformation digital culture undergoes in relation to human and posthuman contexts, with examinations of art works, archives and museum collections, exhibitions, theme parks, theatre performances, films and music videos that encompass cultures from ancient to contemporary, from the West to the East, and from physical to digital.” — Jack Leong, Associate Dean of Research and Open Scholarship, York University Libraries, Toronto, Canada

The Dark Side of Media and Technology: A 21st Century Guide to Media and Technological Literacy is Herculean in its effort to survey for landmines in a rapidly changing media landscape. The book identifies four dark outcomes related to media and technology use in the 21st century, and balances the dark side with four points of light that are the keys to taking ownership of a media- and technology-saturated world. The text contains an impressive list of multi-disciplinary experts and cutting-edge researchers who approach 25 separate dark side issues with concise, highly readable chapters, replete with unique recommendations for navigating our mediated present and future. The Dark Side of Media and Technology is grounded in theory and current research, but possesses an appeal similar to a page-turning dystopian novel; as a result, this volume should be of interest to scholars, students, and curious lay-readers alike. It should be the "go-to" text for anyone who is interested in learning what the research says about how we use media and technology, as well as how media and technology use us.

As technology continues to advance, we are becoming increasingly reliant on it in our daily lives. While this presents many benefits and conveniences, it also comes with risks. One of the biggest threats facing us today is cyber security attacks. As an ethical hacker with years of experience working for companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta-Facebook and Instagram etc., I have seen firsthand how easily cybercriminals can exploit vulnerabilities in our systems and steal sensitive information or cause damage. This book aims to provide readers with a comprehensive guide to understanding cyber security from the perspective of a hacker. By exploring common attack techniques used by cybercriminals, as well as best practices for defending against them, readers will gain valuable insights into how these attacks work and what they can do to protect themselves. We will cover various topics ranging from hacking fundamentals such as types of hackers & basic terminology used in hacking; network

Off the Network is a fresh and authoritative examination of how the hidden logic of the Internet, social media, and the digital network is changing users' understanding of the world--and why that should worry us. Ulises Ali Mejias suggests how we might begin to rethink the logic of the network and question its ascendancy.

The resources race is on. Powering our digital lives and green technologies are some of the Earth's most precious metals -- but they are running out. And what will happen when they do? The green-tech revolution has been lauded as the silver bullet to a new world. One that is at last free of oil, pollution, shortages, and cross-border tensions. Now updated after several years of research across a dozen countries, this book cuts across conventional green thinking to probe the hidden, dark side of green technology. By breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence -- on rare metals such as cobalt, gold, and palladium. They are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. China has captured the lion's share of the rare metals industry, but consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or their environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs. The Rare Metals Waris a vital exposé of the ticking time-bomb that lies beneath our new technological order. It uncovers the reality of our lavish and ambitious environmental quest that involves risks as formidable as those it seeks to resolve.

In the digital age, surveillance is becoming increasingly pervasive through the growing presence of big data, electronic devices and wireless technologies. Simultaneously, a rising number of individuals is highly dependent on social media and deeply immersed in virtual spaces – with visible effects on their psyche, perception, and ability to communicate. This thesis examines popular surveillance theories discussed within the academic field of surveillance studies and attempts to integrate them into a coherent framework to analyse surveillance in the digital age and its impact on individuals. The main part applies this framework to three contemporary digital dystopias which are by no means just plain and farfetched novels. Already mirroring our reality to some extent, they can be seen as premonitions of what could potentially happen if humankind decided to give up privacy for convenience, attention-seeking, self-presentation, and the ideals of total interconnection and transparency propagated by tech companies.