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Author: Megan Finn
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262552752
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
An examination of how changing public information infrastructures shaped people's experience of earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989. When an earthquake happens in California today, residents may look to the United States Geological Survey for online maps that show the quake's epicenter, turn to Twitter for government bulletins and the latest news, check Facebook for updates from friends and family, and count on help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). One hundred and fifty years ago, however, FEMA and other government agencies did not exist, and information came by telegraph and newspaper. In Documenting Aftermath, Megan Finn explores changing public information infrastructures and how they shaped people's experience of disaster, examining postearthquake information and communication practices in three Northern California earthquakes: the 1868 Hayward Fault earthquake, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. She then analyzes the institutions, policies, and technologies that shape today's postdisaster information landscape. Finn argues that information orders—complex constellations of institutions, technologies, and practices—influence how we act in, experience, and document events. What Finn terms event epistemologies, constituted both by historical documents and by researchers who study them, explain how information orders facilitate particular possibilities for knowledge. After the 1868 earthquake, the Chamber of Commerce telegraphed reassurances to out-of-state investors while local newspapers ran sensational earthquake narratives; in 1906, families and institutions used innovative techniques for locating people; and in 1989, government institutions and the media developed a symbiotic relationship in information dissemination. Today, government disaster response plans and new media platforms imagine different sources of informational authority yet work together shaping disaster narratives.
Author: Megan Finn
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262552752
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Get Book Here
Book Description
An examination of how changing public information infrastructures shaped people's experience of earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989. When an earthquake happens in California today, residents may look to the United States Geological Survey for online maps that show the quake's epicenter, turn to Twitter for government bulletins and the latest news, check Facebook for updates from friends and family, and count on help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). One hundred and fifty years ago, however, FEMA and other government agencies did not exist, and information came by telegraph and newspaper. In Documenting Aftermath, Megan Finn explores changing public information infrastructures and how they shaped people's experience of disaster, examining postearthquake information and communication practices in three Northern California earthquakes: the 1868 Hayward Fault earthquake, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. She then analyzes the institutions, policies, and technologies that shape today's postdisaster information landscape. Finn argues that information orders—complex constellations of institutions, technologies, and practices—influence how we act in, experience, and document events. What Finn terms event epistemologies, constituted both by historical documents and by researchers who study them, explain how information orders facilitate particular possibilities for knowledge. After the 1868 earthquake, the Chamber of Commerce telegraphed reassurances to out-of-state investors while local newspapers ran sensational earthquake narratives; in 1906, families and institutions used innovative techniques for locating people; and in 1989, government institutions and the media developed a symbiotic relationship in information dissemination. Today, government disaster response plans and new media platforms imagine different sources of informational authority yet work together shaping disaster narratives.
Author: Elizabeth Ellcessor
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479811637
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
"In Case of Emergency argues that emergency media are profoundly cultural artifacts that shape the very definition of "emergency" as an opposite of "normal." The normalizing ideologies produced and reinforced by emergency media result in unequal access to emergency services and discriminatory assumptions about who or what is a threat and who deserves care and protection. Thus, a primary function of emergency media is to produce feelings of safety in some while designating others as targets of surveillance and control"--
Author: Kristin Asdal
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1529764653
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213
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Book Description
Uniting methods from disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, this hands-on guide develops a novel approach to doing document analysis. The authors present a framework for studying documents that enables you to conduct a rich and systematic analysis of documents in all their diversity. Focussing on document analysis both in practice and as practice, the book provides you with an innovative and versatile toolkit for analysing print and digital documents. It also: Highlights the impacts of digitalisation on documents themselves and the methods used to study them Has a strong focus on research ethics and critical engagement with digital sources Offers practical guidance on preparing and doing a document analysis research project. The book offers insightful perspectives both on the indispensable role of documents in our society and practical advice on how you can best analyse documents and their significance.
Author: Laura Watts
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262552655
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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Book Description
Making local energy futures, from marine energy to hydrogen fuel, at the edge of the world. The islands of Orkney, off the northern coast of Scotland, are closer to the Arctic Circle than to London. Surrounded by fierce seas and shrouded by clouds and mist, the islands seem to mark the edge of the known world. And yet they are a center for energy technology innovation, from marine energy to hydrogen fuel networks, attracting the interest of venture capitalists and local communities. In this book, Laura Watts tells a story of making energy futures at the edge of the world. Orkney, Watts tells us, has been making technology for six thousand years, from arrowheads and stone circles to wave and tide energy prototypes. Artifacts and traces of all the ages—Stone, Bronze, Iron, Viking, Silicon—are visible everywhere. The islanders turned to energy innovation when forced to contend with an energy infrastructure they had outgrown. Today, Orkney is home to the European Marine Energy Centre, established in 2003. There are about forty open-sea marine energy test facilities in the world, many of which draw on Orkney expertise. The islands generate more renewable energy than they use, are growing hydrogen fuel and electric car networks, and have hundreds of locally owned micro wind turbines and a decade-old smart grid. Mixing storytelling and ethnography, empiricism and lyricism, Watts tells an Orkney energy saga—an account of how the islands are creating their own low-carbon future in the face of the seemingly impossible. The Orkney Islands, Watts shows, are playing a long game, making energy futures for another six thousand years.
Author: Jordan Frith
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262551284
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
How RFID, a ubiquitous but often invisible mobile technology, identifies tens of billions of objects as they move through the world. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is ubiquitous but often invisible, a mobile technology used by more people more often than any flashy smartphone app. RFID systems use radio waves to communicate identifying information, transmitting data from a tag that carries data to a reader that accesses the data. RFID tags can be found in credit cards, passports, key fobs, car windshields, subway passes, consumer electronics, tunnel walls, and even human and animal bodies—identifying tens of billions of objects as they move through the world. In this book, Jordan Frith looks at RFID technology and its social impact, bringing into focus a technology that was designed not to be noticed. RFID, with its ability to collect unique information about almost any material object, has been hyped as the most important identification technology since the bar code, the linchpin of the Internet of Things—and also seen (by some evangelical Christians) as a harbinger of the end times. Frith views RFID as an infrastructure of identification that simultaneously functions as an infrastructure of communication. He uses RFID to examine such larger issues as big data, privacy, and surveillance, giving specificity to debates about societal trends. Frith describes how RFID can monitor hand washing in hospitals, change supply chain logistics, communicate wine vintages, and identify rescued pets. He offers an accessible explanation of the technology, looks at privacy concerns, and pushes back against alarmist accounts that exaggerate RFID's capabilities. The increasingly granular practices of identification enabled by RFID and other identification technologies, Frith argues, have become essential to the working of contemporary networks, reshaping the ways we use information.
Author: Sebastian Giessmann
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262381087
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 445
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Book Description
A media history of the material and infrastructural features of networking practices, a German classic translated for the first time into English. Nets hold, connect, and catch. They ensnare, bind, and entangle. Our social networks owe their name to a conceivably strange and ambivalent object. But how did the net get into the network? And how can it reasonably represent the connectedness of people, things, institutions, signs, infrastructures, and even nature? The Connectivity of Things by Sebastian Giessmann, the first media history that addresses the overwhelming diversity of networks, attempts to answer all these questions and more. Reconstructing the decisive moments in which networking turned into a veritable cultural technique, Giessmann takes readers below the street to the Parisian sewers and to the Suez Canal, into the telephone exchanges of Northeast America, and on to the London Underground. His brilliant history explains why social networks were discovered late, how the rapid rise of mathematical network theory was able to take place, how improbable the invention of the internet was, and even what diagrams and conspiracy theories have to do with it all. A primer on networking as a cultural technique, this translated German classic explains everything one ever could wish to know about networks.
Author: Blake Atwood
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262366096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
How Iranians forged a vibrant, informal video distribution infrastructure when their government banned all home video technology in 1983. In 1983, the Iranian government banned the personal use of home video technology. In Underground, Blake Atwood recounts how in response to the ban, technology enthusiasts, cinephiles, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens forged an illegal but complex underground system for video distribution. Atwood draws on archival sources including trade publications, newspapers, memoirs, films, and laws, but at the heart of the book lies a corpus of oral history interviews conducted with participants in the underground. He argues that videocassettes helped to institutionalize the broader underground within the Islamic Republic. As Atwood shows, the videocassette underground reveals a great deal about how people construct vibrant cultures beneath repressive institutions. It was not just that Iranians gained access to banned movies, but rather that they established routes, acquired technical knowledge, broke the law, and created rituals by passing and trading plastic videocassettes. As material objects, the videocassettes were a means of negotiating the power of the state and the agency of its citizens. By the time the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance lifted the ban in 1994, millions of videocassettes were circulating efficiently and widely throughout the country. The very presence of a video underground signaled the failure of state policy to regulate media. Embedded in the informal infrastructure--even in the videocassettes themselves--was the triumph of everyday people over the state.
Author: Aynne Kokas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197620507
Category : Business intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
"Trafficking Data argues that the movement of human data across borders for political and financial gain is disenfranchising consumers, eroding national autonomy, and destabilizing sovereignty. Focusing on the United States and China, it traces how US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley's disruption fetish, and Wall Street's addiction to growth have yielded an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather data in the United States and quietly send it back to China, and by extension, the Chinese government. Such "data trafficking," as the book names this insidious phenomenon, is enabled by the competing governance models of the world's two largest economies: mass government data aggregation in China and impenetrable corporate data management policies in the United States. China is stepping up its data trafficking efforts through national regulations, soft power persuasion, and tech investment, extending the scope of state control over domestic and international data and tech infrastructure, and thereby expanding its global influence. The United States, by contrast, is retreating from participation in foreign alliances, international organizations, and the systemic regulation of the tech industry-practices with the potential to counter data trafficking. Confronting data trafficking as the defining international competition of the twenty-first century, this book ultimately advocates for an alternative future of data stabilization. To stem data trafficking and stabilize data flows, it shows, policymakers can synthesize tools from across the private sector, public sector, multi-national organizations, and consumers to protect users, secure national sovereignty, and establish valuable international standards"--
Author: Ryan Ellis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262538547
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
An examination of how post-9/11 security concerns have transformed the public view and governance of infrastructure. After September 11, 2001, infrastructures—the mundane systems that undergird much of modern life—were suddenly considered “soft targets” that required immediate security enhancements. Infrastructure protection quickly became the multibillion dollar core of a new and expansive homeland security mission. In this book, Ryan Ellis examines how the long shadow of post-9/11 security concerns have remade and reordered infrastructure, arguing that it has been a stunning transformation. Ellis describes the way workers, civic groups, city councils, bureaucrats, and others used the threat of terrorism as a political resource, taking the opportunity not only to address security vulnerabilities but also to reassert a degree of public control over infrastructure. Nearly two decades after September 11, the threat of terrorism remains etched into the inner workings of infrastructures through new laws, regulations, technologies, and practices. Ellis maps these changes through an examination of three U.S. infrastructures: the postal system, the freight rail network, and the electric power grid. He describes, for example, how debates about protecting the mail from anthrax and other biological hazards spiraled into larger arguments over worker rights, the power of large-volume mailers, and the fortunes of old media in a new media world; how environmental activists leveraged post-9/11 security fears over shipments of hazardous materials to take on the rail industry and the chemical lobby; and how otherwise marginal federal regulators parlayed new mandatory cybersecurity standards for the electric power industry into a robust system of accountability.
Author: Morgan G. Ames
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537443
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences. In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why—despite its failures—the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development. Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap laptop computer, powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many ways—starting with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who were captivated by its claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind its promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should play in learning. Drawing on fifty years of history and a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves—rather than the children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.
