The Synchronized Society traces the history of the synchronous broadcast experience of the twentieth century and the transition to the asynchronous media that dominate today. Broadcasting grew out of the latent desire by nineteenth-century industrialists, political thinkers, and social reformers to tame an unruly society by controlling how people used their time. The idea manifested itself in the form of the broadcast schedule, a managed flow of information and entertainment that required audiences to be in a particular place – usually the home – at a particular time and helped to create “water cooler” moments, as audiences reflected on their shared media texts. Audiences began disconnecting from the broadcast schedule at the end of the twentieth century, but promoters of social media and television services still kept audiences under control, replacing the schedule with surveillance of media use. Author Randall Patnode offers compelling new insights into the intermingled roles of broadcasting and industrial/post-industrial work and how Americans spend their time.

The origin of the word synchronization is a greek root, meaning "to share the common time". The original meaning of synchronization has been maintained up to now in the colloquial use of this word, as agreement or correlation in time of different processes. Historically, the analysis of synchronization phenomena in the evolution of dynamical systems has been a subject of active investigation since the earlier days of physics. Recently, the search for synchronization has moved to chaotic systems. In this latter framework, the appearance of collective (synchronized) dynamics is, in general, not trivial. Indeed, a dynamical system is called chaotic whenever its evolution sensitively depends on the initial conditions. The above said implies that two trajectories emerging from two different closeby initial conditions separate exponentially in the course of the time. As a result, chaotic systems intrinsically defy synchronization, because even two identical systems starting from slightly different initial conditions would evolve in time in a unsynchronized manner (the differences in the systems' states would grow exponentially). This is a relevant practical problem, insofar as experimental initial conditions are never known perfectly. The setting of some collective (synchronized) behavior in coupled chaotic systems has therefore a great importance and interest.The subject of the present book is to summarize the recent discoveries involving the study of synchronization in coupled chaotic systems.Not always the word synchronization is taken as having the same colloquial meaning, and one needs to specify what synchrony means in all particular contexts in which we will describe its emergence.The book describes the complete synchronization phenomenon, both for low and for high dimensional situations, and illustrates possible applications in the field of communicating with chaos.Furthermore, the book summarizes the concepts of phase synchronization, lag synchronization, imperfect phase synchronization, and generalized synchronization, describing a general transition scenario between a hierarchy of different types of synchronization for chaotic oscillators.These concepts are extended to the case of structurally different systems, of uncoupled systems subjected to a common external source, of space extended nonlinearly evolving fields, and of dynamical units networking via a complex wiring of connections, giving thus a summary of all possible situations that are encountered in real life and in technology. Technical, but not specialistic language About 100 illustrative Figures Full overview on synchronization phenomena Review of the main tools and techniques used in the field Paradigmatic examples and experiments illustrating the basic concepts Full Reference to the main publications existing in the literature on the subject

The book describes synchronization phenomena using both classical results and more recent developments.

This book introduces the reader to the concept of functional synchronization and how it operates on very different levels in psychological and social systems – from the emergence of thought to the formation of social relations and the structure of societies. For years, psychologists have investigated phenomena such as self-concept, social judgment, social relations, group dynamics, and cooperation and conflict, but have discussed these phenomena seoarately.This book shows how synchronization provides a foundational approach to these otherwise distinct and diverse psychological processes.This work shows that there is a basic tendency with many processes to become coordinated and progressively integrated into increasingly larger units through well-defined processes. For these larger units, new and largely adaptive functions emerge. Although synchronization affords progressive integration of system elements to enable correspondingly higher-order functions, the trajectory of synchronization is often characterized by periods of assembly and disassembly of system elements. This occurs when a task is completed and synchronization is no longer essential so that the elements once again operate in an independent fashion. It is argued that the disassembly-resynchronization scenario occurs at all levels of psychological and social reality. The implications of this approach for important issues in interpersonal relations and societal processes are discussed.