Already in just a decade of existence, cryptocurrencies have been the world’s best-performing financial asset, outperforming stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. This comprehensive yet concise book will enable the reader to learn about the nuts and bolts of cryptocurrencies, including their history, technology, regulations and economics. Additionally, this book teaches sound investment strategies that already work along with the spectrum of risks and returns.This book provide...

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 ...

This edited collection examines how fantasy sports play has established a prominent and promising foothold in the larger sports ecology. Often considered an isolated activity for the hardcore sports fan, fantasy sports play have since been incorporated into sports broadcasting and editorial coverage, sports marketing and promotions, and even into the very sports themselves with athletes and teams using the activities to draw fans further into the sports experience. This edited collection i...

Understanding Esports: An Introduction to the Global Phenomenon places professional Esports, a rapidly growing industry, in both the cultural and athletic landscape. This book explores how the rise of professional gaming has shaped—and been shaped by—media trends, interpersonal communication, and what it means to be classified as an athlete. Ryan Rogers has assembled contributors from a variety of backgrounds and experiences in order to provide a broad view of the history, experie...

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

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...

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 ...

The Internet is facilitating a generational transition among American political advocacy organizations. This book provides a detailed exploration of how “netroots” advocacy groups - MoveOn.org, DailyKos.com, DemocracyforAmerica.com, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee - differ from “legacy” peer organizations. It also explains the partisan character of these technological innovations.