Emerging Pervasive Information and Communication Technologies (PICT)

Emerging Pervasive Information and Communication Technologies (PICT)

Author: Kenneth D. Pimple

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-08-26

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9400768338

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This book provides a wide and deep perspective on the ethical issues raised by pervasive information and communication technology (PICT) – small, powerful, and often inexpensive Internet-connected computing devices and systems. It describes complex and unfamiliar technologies and their implications, including the transformative potential of augmented reality, the power of location-linked information, and the uses of “big data,” and explains potential threats, including privacy invaded, security violated, and independence compromised, often through widespread and lucrative manipulation. PICT is changing how we live, providing entertainment, useful tools, and life-saving systems. But the very smartphones that connect us to each other and to unlimited knowledge also provide a stream of data to systems that can be used for targeted advertising or police surveillance. Paradoxically, PICT expands our personal horizons while weaving a web that may ensnare whole communities. Chapters describe particular cases of PICT gone wrong, but also highlight its general utility. Every chapter includes ethical analysis and guidance, both specific and general. Topics are as focused as the Stuxnet worm and as broad as the innumerable ways new technologies are transforming medical care. Written for a broad audience and suitable for classes in emerging technologies, the book is an example of anticipatory ethics – “ethical analysis aimed at influencing the development of new technologies” (Deborah Johnson 2010). The growth of PICT is outpacing the development of regulations and laws to protect individuals, organizations, and nations from unintended harm and malicious havoc. This book alerts users to some of the hazards of PICT; encourages designers, developers, and merchants of PICT to take seriously their ethical responsibilities – if only to “do no harm” – before their products go public; and introduces citizens and policy makers to challenges and opportunities that must not be ignored.


Ethics, Medicine, and Information Technology

Ethics, Medicine, and Information Technology

Author: Kenneth W. Goodman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-01-14

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1316432661

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Information technology is transforming the practices of medicine, nursing, and biomedical research. Computers can now render diagnoses and prognoses more accurately than humans. The concepts of privacy and confidentiality are evolving as data moves from paper to silicon to clouds. Big data promises financial wealth, as well as riches of information and benefits to science and public health. Online access and mobile apps provide patients with an unprecedented connection to their health and health records. This transformation is as unsettling as it is exhilarating. This unique new book is essential for anyone who uses computers in health care, biomedical research or public health, and cares about the ethical issues that arise in their work. With chapters spanning issues from professionalism and quality to mobile health and bioinformatics, it establishes what will become the 'core curriculum' in ethics and health informatics, a growing field which encourages truly inter- and multidisciplinary inquiry.


Protests in the Information Age

Protests in the Information Age

Author: Lucas Melgaço

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-03-09

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1351815423

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Information and communication technologies have transformed the dynamics of contention in contemporary society. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and devices such as smartphones have increasingly played a central role in facilitating and mobilizing social movements throughout different parts of the world. Concurrently, the same technologies have been taken up by public authorities (including security agencies and the police) and have been used as surveillance tools to monitor and suppress the activities of certain demonstrators. This book explores the complex and contradictory relationships between communication and information technologies and social movements by drawing on different case studies from around the world. The contributions analyse how new communication and information technologies impact the way protests are carried out and controlled in the current information age. The authors focus on recent events that date from the Arab Spring onwards and pose questions regarding the future of protests, surveillance and digital landscapes.


Work and Labour Relations in Global Platform Capitalism

Work and Labour Relations in Global Platform Capitalism

Author: Haidar, Julieta

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2021-11-19

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1802205136

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This engaging and timely book provides an in-depth analysis of work and labour relations within global platform capitalism with a specific focus on digital platforms that organise labour processes, known as labour platforms. Well-respected contributors thoroughly examine both online and offline platforms, their distinct differences and the important roles they play for both large transnational companies and those with a smaller global reach.


The Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics

The Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics

Author: Anna C. Mastroianni

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019-08-20

Total Pages: 939

ISBN-13: 0190245190

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Natural disasters and cholera outbreaks. Ebola, SARS, and concerns over pandemic flu. HIV and AIDS. E. coli outbreaks from contaminated produce and fast foods. Threats of bioterrorism. Contamination of compounded drugs. Vaccination refusals and outbreaks of preventable diseases. These are just some of the headlines from the last 30-plus years highlighting the essential roles and responsibilities of public health, all of which come with ethical issues and the responsibilities they create. Public health has achieved extraordinary successes. And yet these successes also bring with them ethical tension. Not all public health successes are equally distributed in the population; extraordinary health disparities between rich and poor still exist. The most successful public health programs sometimes rely on policies that, while improving public health conditions, also limit individual rights. Public health practitioners and policymakers face these and other questions of ethics routinely in their work, and they must navigate their sometimes competing responsibilities to the health of the public with other important societal values such as privacy, autonomy, and prevailing cultural norms. This Oxford Handbook provides a sweeping and comprehensive review of the current state of public health ethics, addressing these and numerous other questions. Taking account of the wide range of topics under the umbrella of public health and the ethical issues raised by them, this volume is organized into fifteen sections. It begins with two sections that discuss the conceptual foundations, ethical tensions, and ethical frameworks of and for public health and how public health does its work. The thirteen sections that follow examine the application of public health ethics considerations and approaches across a broad range of public health topics. While chapters are organized into topical sections, each chapter is designed to serve as a standalone contribution. The book includes 73 chapters covering many topics from varying perspectives, a recognition of the diversity of the issues that define public health ethics in the U.S. and globally. This Handbook is an authoritative and indispensable guide to the state of public health ethics today.


Spotify Teardown

Spotify Teardown

Author: Maria Eriksson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-02-12

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0262349698

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An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.


Crisis Vision

Crisis Vision

Author: Torin Monahan

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2022-08-29

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 1478023384

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In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores how artists confront the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance. He focuses on artists ranging from Kai Wiedenhöfer, Paolo Cirio, and Hank Willis Thomas to Claudia Rankine and Dread Scott, who engage with what he calls crisis vision—the regimes of racializing surveillance that position black and brown bodies as targets for police and state violence. Many artists, Monahan contends, remain invested in frameworks that privilege transparency, universality, and individual responsibility in ways that often occlude racial difference. Other artists, however, disrupt crisis vision by confronting white supremacy and destabilizing hierarchies through the performance of opacity. Whether fostering a recognition of a shared responsibility and complicity for the violence of crisis vision or critiquing how vulnerable groups are constructed and treated globally, these artists emphasize ethical relations between strangers and ask viewers to question their own place within unjust social orders.


Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence

Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence

Author: Simon Lindgren

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2023-11-03

Total Pages: 941

ISBN-13: 1803928565

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As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to seep into more areas of society and culture, critical social perspectives on its technologies are more urgent than ever before. Bringing together state-of-the-art research from experienced scholars across disciplines, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of critical AI studies.


Dis/organization as Communication

Dis/organization as Communication

Author: Consuelo Vásquez

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-13

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0429960557

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This book accounts for the transformation of organizations in a post-bureaucratic era by bringing a communicational lens to the ontological discussion on organization/disorganization, offering a conceptual and methodological toolbox for studying dis/organization as communication. Increasingly, scholars acknowledge that communication is constitutive of organization; because meaning is always indeterminate, communication also (and simultaneously) generates disorganization. The book synthesizes the major theoretical trends and empirical studies in communication that engage with dis/organization. Drawing on dialectics, relational ontologies, critical theory, systems theory, and affect thinking, the first part of the book offers communicational explanations of how dis/organization unfolds. The second part of the book grounds this theoretical reflection, providing empirical studies that mobilize diverse methodological and analytical frameworks (e.g., ethnography, situational, interactional and genre analysis) for studying the practices of dis/organization. Overall, the book exposes organizations (and organizing processes) as significantly messier, irrational (or a-rational), and paradoxical than scholars of organization typically think. It also offers readers the conceptual and methodological tools to understand these complex processes as communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars in organizational communication or management and organization studies, together with senior undergraduate and graduate students studying organizational communication, organizational discourse, discourse analysis (including rhetoric, semiotics, pragmatism, narratology) and courses in management studies. It will also be richly rewarding for organizational consultants, managers and executives.


The Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful

The Routledge International Handbook of the Crimes of the Powerful

Author: Gregg Barak

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-06-05

Total Pages: 812

ISBN-13: 1317807316

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Across the world, most people are well aware of ordinary criminal harms to person and property. Often committed by the powerless and poor, these individualized crimes are catalogued in the statistics collected annually by the FBI and by similar agencies in other developed nations. In contrast, the more harmful and systemic forms of injury to person and property committed by powerful and wealthy individuals, groups, and national states are neither calculated by governmental agencies nor annually reported by the mass media. As a result, most citizens of the world are unaware of the routinized "crimes of the powerful", even though they are more likely to experience harms and injuries from these types of organized offenses than they are from the atomized offenses of the powerless. Research on the crimes of the powerful brings together several areas of criminological focus, involving organizational and institutional networks of powerful people that commit crimes against workers, marketplaces, taxpayers and political systems, as well as acts of torture, terrorism, and genocide. This international handbook offers a comprehensive, authoritative and structural synthesis of these interrelated topics of criminological concern. It also explains why the crimes of the powerful are so difficult to control. Edited by internationally acclaimed criminologist Gregg Barak, this book reflects the state of the art of scholarly research, covering all the key areas including corporate, global, environmental, and state crimes. The handbook is a perfect resource for students and researchers engaged with explaining and controlling the crimes of the powerful, domestically and internationally.