Herbert Schiller, long one of America's leading critics of the communications industry, here offers a salvo in the battle over information. In Information Inequality he explains how privatization and the corporate economy directly affect our most highly prized democratic institutions: schools and libraries, media, and political culture. A master media-watcher, Schiller presents a crisp and far-reaching indictment of the "data deprivation" corporate interests are inflicting on the social fabric.
The Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society explains why the digital divide is still widening and, in advanced high-tech societies, deepening. Taken from an international perspective, the book offers full coverage of the literature and research and a theoretical framework from which to analyze and approach the issue. Where most books on the digital divide only describe and analyze the issue, Jan van Dijk presents 26 policy perspectives and instruments designed to close the divide itself.
Beneficial to scholars and students in the fields of media and communication, politics and technology, this book outlines the significant role of search engines in general and Google in particular in widening the digital divide between individuals, organisations and states. It uses innovative methods and research approaches to assess and illustrate the digital divide by comparing the popular search queries in Google and Yahoo in different countries as well as analysing the various biases in Google News and Google Earth. The different studies developed and presented in this book provide various indications of the increasing customisation and popularisation mechanisms employed by popular search engines, which together with "organising the world's information inevitably also intensify information inequalities and reinforce commercial and US-centric priorities and agendas. - Develops an extensive historical investigation of information, power and the digital divide - Provides new social and political perspectives to understand search engines in general and Google in particular - Suggests original methods to study and assess the digital divide as well as the extent of commercialisation and Americanisation worldwide
Concentration of Measure Inequalities in Information Theory, Communications, and Coding focuses on some of the key modern mathematical tools that are used for the derivation of concentration inequalities, on their links to information theory, and on their various applications to communications and coding.
Contrary to optimistic visions of a free internet for all, the problem of the ‘digital divide’ – the disparity between those with access to internet technology and those without – has persisted for close to twenty-five years. In this textbook, Jan van Dijk considers the state of digital inequality and what we can do to tackle it. Through an accessible framework based on empirical research, he explores the motivations and challenges of seeking access and the development of requisite digital skills. He addresses key questions such as: Does digital inequality reduce or reinforce existing, traditional inequalities? Does it create new, previously unknown social inequalities? While digital inequality affects all aspects of society and the problem is here to stay, Van Dijk outlines policies we can put in place to mitigate it. The Digital Divide is required reading for students and scholars of media, communication, sociology, and related disciplines, as well as for policymakers.
TCC 2009, the 6th Theory of Cryptography Conference, was held in San Fr- cisco, CA, USA, March 15–17, 2009. TCC 2009 was sponsored by the Inter- tional Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and was organized in - operation with the Applied Crypto Group at Stanford University. The General Chair of the conference was Dan Boneh. The conference received 109 submissions, of which the Program Comm- tee selected 33 for presentation at the conference. These proceedings consist of revised versions of those 33 papers. The revisions were not reviewed, and the authors bear full responsibility for the contents of their papers. The conference program also included two invited talks: “The Di?erential Privacy Frontier,” given by Cynthia Dwork and “Some Recent Progress in Lattice-Based Crypt- raphy,” given by Chris Peikert. I thank the Steering Committee of TCC for entrusting me with the resp- sibility for the TCC 2009 program. I thank the authors of submitted papers for their contributions. The general impression of the Program Committee is that the submissions were of very high quality, and there were many more papers we wanted to accept than we could. The review process was therefore very - warding but the selection was very delicate and challenging. I am grateful for the dedication, thoroughness,and expertise ofthe ProgramCommittee. Obse- ing the way the members of the committee operated makes me as con?dent as possible of the outcome of our selection process.
Inequality in income, earnings, and wealth has risen dramatically in the United States over the past three decades. Most research into this issue has focused on the causes—global trade, new technology, and economic policy—rather than the consequences of inequality. In Social Inequality, a group of the nation's leading social scientists opens a wide-ranging inquiry into the social implications of rising economic inequality. Beginning with a critical evaluation of the existing research, they assess whether the recent run-up in economic inequality has been accompanied by rising inequality in social domains such as the quality of family and neighborhood life, equal access to education and health care, job satisfaction, and political participation. Marcia Meyers and colleagues find that many low-income mothers cannot afford market-based child care, which contributes to inequality both at the present time—by reducing maternal employment and family income—and through the long-term consequences of informal or low-quality care on children's educational achievement. At the other end of the educational spectrum, Thomas Kane links the growing inequality in college attendance to rising tuition and cuts in financial aid. Neil Fligstein and Taek-Jin Shin show how both job security and job satisfaction have decreased for low-wage workers compared with their higher-paid counterparts. Those who fall behind economically may also suffer diminished access to essential social resources like health care. John Mullahy, Stephanie Robert, and Barbara Wolfe discuss why higher inequality may lead to poorer health: wider inequality might mean increased stress-related ailments for the poor, and it might also be associated with public health care policies that favor the privileged. On the political front, Richard Freeman concludes that political participation has become more stratified as incomes have become more unequal. Workers at the bottom of the income scale may simply be too hard-pressed or too demoralized to care about political participation. Social Inequality concludes with a comprehensive section on the methodological problems involved in disentangling the effects of inequality from other economic factors, which will be of great benefit to future investigators. While today's widening inequality may be a temporary episode, the danger is that the current economic divisions may set in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of social disadvantage. The most comprehensive review of this quandary to date, Social Inequality maps out a new agenda for research on inequality in America with important implications for public policy.
