An information society is a society or subculture where the usage,creation,distribution,manipulation and integration of information is a significant activity. Its main drivers are information and communication technologies,which have resulted in rapid growth of a variety of forms of information. Proponents of this theory posit that these technologies are impacting most important forms of social organization,including education,economy,health,government,warfare,and levels of democracy. The people who are able to partake in this form of society are sometimes called either computer users or even digital citizens,defined by K. Mossberger as “Those who use the Internet regularly and effectively”. This is one of many dozen internet terms that have been identified to suggest that humans are entering a new and different phase of society.
The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control,originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single corrections officer,without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.
Technocapitalism or tech-capitalism refers to changes in capitalism associated with the emergence of new technology sectors,the power of corporations,and new forms of organization. Technocapitalism is characterised by constant innovation,global competition,the digitisation of information and communication,and the growing importance of digital networks and platforms.
Social peer-to-peer processes are interactions among humans with a peer-to-peer dynamic. Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a term that originated from the popular concept of the P2P distributed computer application architecture which partitions tasks or workloads between peers. This application structure was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster,the first of its kind in the late 1990s.
Hal Ronald Varian is Chief Economist at Google and holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California,Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information. Varian is an economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics.
Criticism of capitalism is a critique of political economy that involves the rejection of,or dissatisfaction with the economic system of capitalism and its outcomes. Criticisms typically range from expressing disagreement with particular aspects or outcomes of capitalism to rejecting the principles of the capitalist system in its entirety.
The Social Study of Information Systems (SSIS) is interested in people developing and using technology and the "culture" of those people.
Informating is a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff in her book In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988). It is the process that translates descriptions and measurements of activities,events and objects into information. By doing so,these activities become visible to the organization.
PublicAffairs is a book publishing company located in New York City and has been a part of the Hachette Book Group since 2016.
Jillian C. York is an American free-expression activist and author. She serves as Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),and a founding member of Deep Lab. She is the author of Silicon Values:The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism and Morocco - Culture Smart!:the essential guide to customs &culture.
Cross-device tracking is technology that enables the tracking of users across multiple devices such as smartphones,television sets,smart TVs,and personal computers.
Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance,although the two can be mutually reinforming. The concept of surveillance capitalism,as described by Shoshana Zuboff,is driven by a profit-making incentive,and arose as advertising companies,led by Google's AdWords,saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.
Data politics encompasses the political aspects of data including topics ranging from data activism,open data and open government. The ways in which data is collected,accessed,and what we do with that data has changed in contemporary society due to a number of factors surrounding issues of politics. An issue that arises from political data is often how disconnected people are from their own data,rarely gaining access to the data they produce. Large platforms like Google have a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" stance on data collection to which the greater population is largely ignorant,leading to movements within data activism.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power is a 2018 non-fiction book by Shoshana Zuboff which looks at the development of digital companies like Google and Amazon,and suggests that their business models represent a new form of capitalist accumulation that she calls "surveillance capitalism".
Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist,author,and Professor and holds the Chair in Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University. She is the co-founder of FemLab,a feminist future of work initiative. Her work focuses on internet usage in the Global South,specifically on global digital cultures,inequality and data governance. She is Indian,American,and Irish and currently lives in Amsterdam.
Platform capitalism refers to the activities of companies such as Google,Facebook,Apple,Microsoft,Uber,Airbnb,Amazon and others to operate as platforms. In this business model both hardware and software are used as a foundation (platform) for other actors to conduct their own business.
Ethics of quantification is the study of the ethical issues associated to different forms of visible or invisible forms of quantification. These could include algorithms,metrics/indicators,statistical and mathematical modelling,as noted in a review of various aspects of sociology of quantification.
A digital platform is a software-based online infrastructure that facilitates user interactions and transactions.
The Real Facebook Oversight Board is an entity founded in 2020 by British journalist Carole Cadwalladr,in response to Facebook's announcement of the creation of its Oversight Board to address contentious content decisions made by the company through an independent appellate process.
Benedetta Brevini is an Italian academic,author,journalist,and media and technology reformer. Brevini is currently an Associate professor of political economy of communication at The University of Sydney and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
