A History of the Internet and the Digital Future tells the story of the development of the Internet from the 1950s to the present and examines how the balance of power has shifted between the individual and the state in the areas of censorship, copyright infringement, intellectual freedom, and terrorism and warfare. Johnny Ryan explains how the Internet has revolutionized political campaigns; how the development of the World Wide Web enfranchised a new online population of assertive, niche consumers; and how the dot-com bust taught smarter firms to capitalize on the power of digital artisans. From the government-controlled systems of the Cold War to today’s move towards cloud computing, user-driven content, and the new global commons, this book reveals the trends that are shaping the businesses, politics, and media of the digital future.

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this-it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone's behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.

A highly engaging tour through progressive history in the service of emancipating our digital tomorrow Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, Australia When we talk about technology we always talk about tomorrow and the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to even get there. In Future Histories, public interest lawyer and digital specialist Lizzie O'Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and progressive social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O'Shea constructs a “usable past” that can help us determine our digital future. What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources—like the Internet—in common? How can Frantz Fanon's theories of anti colonial self-determination help us build digital world in which everyone can participate equally? Can debates over equal digital access be helped by American revolutionary Tom Paine's theories of democratic, economic redistribution? What can indigenous land struggles teach us about stewarding our digital climate? And, how is Elon Musk not a future visionary but a steampunk throwback to Victorian-era technological utopians? In engaging, sparkling prose, O'Shea shows us how very human our understanding of technology is, and how when we draw on the resources of the past, we can see the potential for struggle, for liberation, for art and poetry in our technological present. Future Histories is for all of us—makers, coders, hacktivists, Facebook-users, self-styled Luddites—who find ourselves in a brave new world.

A sociotechnical investigation of ubiquitous computing as a research enterprise and as a lived reality. Ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp) is the label for a “third wave” of computing technologies. Following the eras of the mainframe computer and the desktop PC, ubicomp is characterized by small and powerful computing devices that are worn, carried, or embedded in the world around us. The ubicomp research agenda originated at Xerox PARC in the late 1980s; these days, some form of that vision is a reality for the millions of users of Internet-enabled phones, GPS devices, wireless networks, and "smart" domestic appliances. In Divining a Digital Future, computer scientist Paul Dourish and cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell explore the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research program and the contemporary practices that have emerged—both the motivating mythology and the everyday messiness of lived experience. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the authors' collaboration, the book takes seriously the need to understand ubicomp not only technically but also culturally, socially, politically, and economically. Dourish and Bell map the terrain of contemporary ubiquitous computing, in the research community and in daily life; explore dominant narratives in ubicomp around such topics as infrastructure, mobility, privacy, and domesticity; and suggest directions for future investigation, particularly with respect to methodology and conceptual foundations.

In the early 1990s, people predicted the death of privacy, an end to the current concept of 'property,' a paperless society, 500 channels of high-definition interactive television, world peace, and the extinction of the human race after a takeover engineered by intelligent machines. Imagining the Internet zeroes in on predictions about the Internet's future and revisits past predictions—and how they turned out. It gives the history of communications in a nutshell, illustrating the serious impact of pervasive networks and how they will change our lives over the next century.

How are widely popular social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram transforming how teachers teach, how kids learn, and the very foundations of education? What controversies surround the integration of social media in students' lives? The past decade has brought increased access to new media, and with this, new opportunities and challenges for education. In this book, leading scholars from education, law, communications, sociology, and cultural studies explore the digital transformation now taking place in a variety of educational contexts. The contributors examine such topics as social media usage in schools, online youth communities, and distance learning in developing countries; the disruption of existing educational models of how knowledge is created and shared; privacy; accreditation; and the tension between the new ease of sharing and copyright laws. Case studies examine teaching media in K-12 schools and at universities; tuition-free, open education powered by social media, as practiced by University of the People; new financial models for higher education; the benefits and challenges of MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses); social media and teacher education; and the civic and individual advantages of teens' participatory play.

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.