Every year, perhaps even every week, there is some new gadget, device, service, or other digital offering intended to make our lives easier, better, more fun, or more instantaneous--making it that much harder to question how anything digital can be bad for us. Digital has created some wonderful things and we can hardly imagine life without them. But digital—the most relentless social and economic juggernaut humanity has unleashed in centuries—is also destroying much we had taken for granted. And what is your place in this brave new world? In Digital Is Destroying Everything, futurist and digital marketing consultant Andrew Edwards tours the “blasted heath” digital is leaving behind and takes a fearless look at the troubled landscape that may lie ahead. The book is not, despite its title, a dystopian rant against all things digital and technological. Instead, expect to find a lively investigation into the ways digital has opened us to new and sometimes quite wonderful experiences, driven down costs for consumers, and given information a chance to be free. But the book also takes a clear-eyed look at many of the good (and sometimes bad) things—businesses and behaviors—digital has destroyed, and how the world may be diminished, compromised, and altered forever in its wake. This tour of the effects of digital technologies on our lives is sure to raise questions, touch a nerve, and enlighten even the most dedicated digital enthusiasts.

Unregulated technology threatens truth, democracy, and humanity itself... Following up on his groundbreaking book Digital is Destroying Everything, Army of Liars now unveils the sinister agenda of an army of liars, the digitally-driven bad actors seeking to destabilize the United States by eroding the very foundations of liberal democracy with a relentless barrage of fabricated narratives and poisonous, digitally promoted disinformation. Pulling no punches, Edwards identifies the culprits: social media platforms protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, audience targeting, real-time content recommendation, foreign state actors, and radical factions fueled by hate. Today’s social media has been weaponized by enemies of the United States and hate and discord are now the currency of thousands of anonymous “content providers.” Army of Liars unpacks how we got here, what exactly is wrong with digital enterprise, and how to go about fixing it so that humanity may survive even in an age of artificial intelligence and digital command and control. Should we implement an “engagement tax” on social media platforms and generative AI? These funds could be used to help fight off the worst types of disinformation and to help fund the efforts of content creators whose work has been scraped, stolen, and reconfigured by generative AI and large language models (LLMs). It’s a safe bet the tech giants won’t want to hear it. Army of Liars is designed to help humans not only survive in a digital age but to conquer digital and prosper in an age of truth in media.

The Untold Story of Everything Digital: Bright Boys, Revisited celebrates the 70th anniversary (1949-2019) of the world "going digital" for the very first time—real-time digital computing’s genesis story. That genesis story is taken from the 2010 edition of Bright Boys: The Making of Information Technology, 1938-1958, and substantially expanded upon for this special, anniversary edition. Please join us for the incredible adventure that is The Untold Story of Everything Digital, when a band of misfit engineers, led by MIT's Jay Forrester and Bob Everett, birthed the digital revolution. The bright boys were the first to imagine an electronic landscape of computing machines and digital networks, and the first to blaze its high-tech trails.

This collection presents a range of essays on contemporary music distribution and consumption patterns and practices. The contributors to the collection use a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, discussing the consequences and effects of the digital distribution of music as it is manifested in specific cultural contexts. The widespread circulation of music in digital form has far-reaching consequences: not least for how we understand the practices of sourcing and consuming music, the political economy of the music industries, and the relationships between format and aesthetics. Through close empirical engagement with a variety of contexts and analytical frames, the contributors to this collection demonstrate that the changes associated with networked music are always situationally specific, sometimes contentious, and often unexpected in their implications. With chapters covering topics such as the business models of streaming audio, policy and professional discourses around the changing digital music market, the creative affordances of format and circulation, and local practices of accessing and engaging with music in a range of distinct cultural contexts, the book presents an overview of the themes, topics and approaches found in current social and cultural research on the relations between music and digital technology.

The Company Interleger has created a real time game called Digital Dreams -DD for short-. All the players spend most of their time inside the game than living their real lives. One day, the daily activities inside DD are interrupted by an entity that not only affect the game but also their life offline.

Survive the coming Digipocalypse! The combined power of all things digital is destroying and remaking everything: business, society, and your life. And it won't all be for the better. Think you've seen the biggest changes? You're wrong. The digital juggernaut is only beginning to accelerate. Don't get flattened: read Digital is Destroying Everything. One institution, industry, and idea at a time, this explosive book reveals how digital is wiping out virtually everything you or anyone else ever held dear. Drawing on his unique perspective as both a futurist, entrepreneur, and Big Data pioneer, Edwards shows how digital is wiping out conventional media industries; long-cherished ideas of privacy, history, and human interaction; governments and the national consensuses they're founded upon; approaches to education that have survived for centuries; professions like law, medicine, and accounting; foundational ideas of value and profit and more. Along the way, Edwards reveals the explosive implications of technical innovations like Google Glasses, previews the cyberwars and mass knowledge worker unemployment headed our way, and imagines the deep implications of a world where virtually all media is available all the time. Above all, he offers powerful advice for surviving the coming "Digipocalypse" in both your business and personal life - and maybe even coming away a winner.

A lively, up-to-date investigation of the expanding influence of social media in the Islamic world The role of social media in the events of the Arab Spring and its aftermath in the Muslim world has stimulated much debate, yet little in the way of useful insight. Now Haroon Ullah, a scholar and diplomat with deep knowledge of politics and societies in the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, draws the first clear picture of the unprecedented impact of Twitter, Facebook, and other means of online communication on the recent revolutions that blazed across Muslim nations. The author carefully analyzes the growth of social media throughout the Muslim world, tracing how various organizations learned to employ such digital tools to grow networks, recruit volunteers, and disseminate messages. In Egypt, where young people rose against the regime; in Pakistan, where the youth fought against the intelligence and military establishments; and in Syria, where underground Islamists had to switch alliances, digital communications played key roles. Ullah demonstrates how social media have profoundly changed relationships between regimes and voters, though not always for the better. Looking forward he identifies trends across the Muslim world and the implications of these for regional and international politics.