Since its popularization in the mid 1990s, the Internet has impacted nearly every aspect of our cultural and personal lives. Over the course of two decades, the Internet remained an unregulated medium whose characteristic openness allowed numerous applications, services, and websites to flourish. By 2005, Internet Service Providers began to explore alternative methods of network management that would permit them to discriminate the quality and speed of access to online content as they saw ...

The Internet revolution has come. Some say it has gone. In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the revolution has produced a counterrevolution of potentially devastating power and effect. Creativity once flourished because the Net protected a commons on which widest range of innovators could experiment. But now, manipulating the law for their own purposes, corporations have established themselves as virtual gatekeepers of the Net while Congress, in the pocket...

Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world.McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect

Canada's creative industries encompass book, periodical, and newspaper publishing; radio and television broadcasting; the music industry; video game production; filmmaking and video production; telecommunications; and the new media. These industries represent a major sector in the Canadian economy and exert a profound influence on many aspects of Canadian life.In Cultural Industries.ca, thirteen contributors take a thought-provoking look at the industries that form this im...

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial...

The rapid expansion of the Internet has fueled the emergence of electronic government at all levels in Canada. E-government's first decade featured online service underpinned by a technically secure infrastructure. This service-security nexus entails internal governance reforms aimed at realizing more customer-centric delivery via integration and coordination across departments and agencies. Yet, as online networking has become more pervasive and public demands for participation rise, pres...

Much of what constitutes Big Data is information about us. Through our online activities, we leave an easy-to-follow trail of digital footprints that reveal who we are, what we buy, where we go, and much more. This eye-opening book explores the raging privacy debate over the use of personal data, with one undeniable conclusion: once data's been collected, we have absolutely no control over who uses it or how it is used.Personal data is the hottest commodity on the market today—trul...

Is the Internet democratizing American politics? Do political Web sites and blogs mobilize inactive citizens and make the public sphere more inclusive? The Myth of Digital Democracy reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the Internet has done little to broaden political discourse but in fact empowers a small set of elites--some new, but most familiar.Matthew Hindman argues that, though hundreds of thousands of Americans blog about politics, blogs receive only a miniscul...

Publicity pervades our political and public culture, but little has been written that critically examines the basis of the modern Canadian “publicity state.” This collection is the first to focus on the central themes in the state’s relationship with publicity practices and the “permanent campaign,” the constant search by politicians and their strategists for popular consent. Central to this political popularity contest are publicity tools borrowed from private enterprise, turning politica...

The Logic of Connective Action explains the rise of a personalized digitally networked politics in which diverse individuals address the common problems of our times such as economic fairness and climate change. Rich case studies from the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany illustrate a theoretical framework for understanding how large-scale connective action is coordinated. In many of these mobilizations, communication operates as an organizational process that may replace or su...

Digital communications technology has immeasurably enhanced our capacity to store, retrieve, and exchange information. But who controls our access to information, and who decides what others have a right to know about us? In Controlling Knowledge, author Lorna Stefanick offers a thought-provoking and user-friendly overview of the regulatory regime that currently governs freedom of information and the protection of privacy.Aiming to clarify rather than mystify, Stefanick outlines the histor...

Wal-Mart is America’s largest retailer. The national chain of stores is a powerful stand-in of both the promise and perils of free market capitalism. Yet it is also often the target of public outcry for its labor practices, to say nothing of class-action lawsuits, and a central symbol in America’s increasingly polarized political discourse over consumption, capitalism and government regulations. In many ways the battle over Wal-Mart is the battle between “Main Street” and “Wall Street” as ...