How the internet's memory infrastructure developed—averting a "digital dark age"—and introduced a golden age of historical memory. In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material from the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how Western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today. By the mid-1990s, the specter of a "digital dark age" haunted libraries, portending a bleak future with no historical record that threatened cyber obsolescence, deletion, and apathy. People around the world worked to solve this impending problem. In San Francisco, technology entrepreneur Brewster Kahle launched his scrappy nonprofit, Internet Archive, filling tape drives with internet content. Elsewhere, in Washington, Canberra, Ottawa, and Stockholm, librarians developed innovative new programs to safeguard digital heritage. Cataloging worries among librarians, technologists, futurists, and writers from WWII onward, through early practitioners, to an extended case study of how September 11 prompted institutions to preserve thousands of digital artifacts related to the attacks, Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how the web gained a long-lasting memory. By understanding this history, we can equip our society to better grapple with future internet shifts.
This annual edited volume presents an overview of cutting-edge research areas within digital ethics as defined by the Digital Ethics Lab of the University of Oxford. It identifies new challenges and opportunities of influence in setting the research agenda in the field. The 2020 edition of the yearbook presents research on the following topics: governing digital health, visualising governance, the digital afterlife, the possibility of an AI winter, the limits of design theory in philosophy, cyberwarfare, ethics of online behaviour change, governance of AI, trust in AI, and Emotional Self-Awareness as a Digital Literacy. This book appeals to students, researchers and professionals in the field.
The digital cultural record has a powerful role to play in both new and future strategies of creating new homes within the digital milieu. For example, the development and establishment of new digital archives around South Asian studies not only allows us to create new archives of the past but also to remember and commemorate the past differently. New maps transform how we understand space and place. And new digital comfort zones facilitate connections for those whose family and loved ones are only accessible online. Such interventions are essential to the recuperation of the integrity and soul of a people who have lived through and continue to shoulder the fraught and painful legacies of the British Empire and the communal bloodshed wrought by its demise. Building on the important history of digital humanities scholarship in South Asia and its diasporas that precedes this work, this book contends that South Asian studies is further positioned to offer a new genealogy of digital humanities, demonstrated through this assemblage of essays that reveal how the digital continues to shape notions of home, belonging, nation, identity, memory, and diaspora through a variety of humanistic methodologies and digital techniques. South Asian Digital Humanities thus demonstrates that postcolonial digital humanities has great possibility for creating some of the most important social justice scholarship in South Asian studies of the past century. It offers these essays as innovative interventions that complicate the digital cultural record while lodging a 'homelanding' for South Asians within it, positioning digital humanities as a method through which South Asian studies can strategically participate in the ongoing struggle for representation within digital knowledge production. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.
“New Dark Age is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about the Internet, which is to say that it is among the most unsettling and illuminating books I’ve read about contemporary life.” – New Yorker As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world. In reality, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the apparent accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age. From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.
An exploration of Metamodernism, the philosophical framework based on the post-2000 historical and cultural moment, helps in understanding digital citizenship beyond postmodernism and into the future. Research on best practices for learning in digital culture at a time of rapid transition is critical to the future of education and civilization, and an awareness of the philosophical era in which we live provides a foundation for understanding best practices in formal education as well as in personal lives. Without an awareness of Metamodernism, the overwhelming information encountered daily is nearly impossible to tackle, organize, or archive individually or collectively. Metamodernism explored through the lens of changing literacy impacts the field of library and information science as well as media communications. Metamodernism and Changing Literacy: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a critical scholarly publication that advocates for new thinking about literacy for all age groups through an exploration of global digital participatory culture and Metamodernism. A thorough examination of both the advantages and disadvantages of new media, new technologies, and virtual environments, with emphasis on metaliteracy, arms educators and learners of all ages with critical skills and keen perspectives. Featuring a wide range of topics such as digital citizenship, information consumption, and philosophy, successful educators and learners will find this book valuable for navigating virtual landscapes and identifying best practices for learning and life in a digitally connected world. The target audience includes administrators, educators, librarians, students, artists, and lifelong learners.
This state-of-the-art book explores the implications of contemporary trends that are shaping the future of museum experiences. In four separate sections, it looks into how museums are developing dialogical relationships with their audiences, reaching out beyond their local communities to involve more diverse and broader audiences. It examines current practices in involving crowds, not as passive audiences but as active users, co-designers and co-creators; it looks critically and reflectively at the design implications raised by the application of novel technologies, and by museums becoming parts of connected museum systems and large institutional ecosystems. Overall, the book chapters deal with aspects such as sociality, creation and sharing as ways of enhancing dialogical engagement with museum collections. They address designing experiences – including participatory exhibits, crowd sourcing and crowd mining – that are meaningful and rewarding for all categories of audiences involved. Museum Experience Design reflects on different approaches to designing with novel technologies and discusses illustrative and diverse roles of technology, both in the design process as well as in the experiences designed through those processes. The trend of museums becoming embedded in ecosystems of organisations and people is dealt with in chapters that theoretically reflect on what it means to design for ecosystems, illustrated by design cases that exemplify practical and methodological issues in doing so. Written by an interdisciplinary group of design researchers, this book is an invaluable source of inspiration for researchers, students and professionals working in this dynamic field of designing experiences for and around museums.
Digital Memory in Brazil draws on the results of three case studies to determine the strategies and practices applied by the Brazilian far-right government of Bolsonaro (2019-2023) to construct a negationist digital memory of the Brazilian dictatorship.
Every profession needs an introductory text to its core body of knowledge. This definitive textbook is the most up-to-date introduction to the profession of librarianship for students and new entrants to the profession available. It is also the first to give a complete overview of all aspects of professional librarianship in the 21st century, and to offer authoritative analysis of modern libraries and librarianship. Key areas covered include: libraries and information services: evolution or revolution? information resources and services information organization and access library and Information users and society library technologies library and information management LIS education and training. Each chapter in this user-friendly text features clear learning aims and objectives and a list of revision questions to test and consolidate knowledge and understanding. Readership: Mapping onto course content for library and information studies in the US, UK and Australasia, this textbook also supports CILIP's Body of Knowledge and provides a single source of introductory explanations of library and information concepts for students. It is also the quintessential primer for new professionals.
From the bestselling author of The Dark Net comes a book that explains all the dangers of the digital revolution and offers concrete solutions on how we can protect our personal privacy, and democracy itself. The internet was meant to set us free. But have we unwittingly handed too much away to shadowy powers behind a wall of code, all manipulated by a handful of Silicon Valley utopians, ad men, and venture capitalists? And, in light of recent data breach scandals around companies like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, what does that mean for democracy, our delicately balanced system of government that was created long before big data, total information, and artificial intelligence? In this urgent polemic, Jamie Bartlett argues that through our unquestioning embrace of big tech, the building blocks of democracy are slowly being removed. The middle class is being eroded, sovereign authority and civil society is weakened, and we citizens are losing our critical faculties, maybe even our free will. The People Vs Tech is an enthralling account of how our fragile political system is being threatened by the digital revolution. Bartlett explains that by upholding six key pillars of democracy, we can save it before it is too late. We need to become active citizens, uphold a shared democratic culture, protect free elections, promote equality, safeguard competitive and civic freedoms, and trust in a sovereign authority. This essential book shows that the stakes couldn't be higher and that, unless we radically alter our course, democracy will join feudalism, supreme monarchies and communism as just another political experiment that quietly disappeared.