Kategoria BISAC: Technology & Engineering >> Social Aspects

This study seeks to explain three models of network governance embedded in digital practices that the mainstream monotheistic religions Judaism, Catholic Christianity, and Islam have used to lead and manage the worldwide distribution of their local nodes, exploring the connection between network governance and its digital embeddedness and showing how the latter enhances the performance of the former.

Advances in nanotechnology are transforming the ways of creating materials and products, leading society to the threshold of a second industrial revolution. However, future opportunities will depend significantly on how nanotechnology stakeholders deal with the short-term and long-term benefits, limitations, uncertainties and risks of nanotechnology. They will be tasked with navigating a variety of new social and ethical challenges associated with areas such as privacy, the environment, energy, population, genetics, agriculture, food, and security.

Unique in its depth, breadth, and...

Nuclear energy, stem cell technology, GMOs: the more science advances, the more society seems to resist. But are we really watching a death struggle between opposing forces, as so many would have it? Can today s complex technical policy decisions coincide with the needs of a participatory democracy? Are the two sides even equipped to talk to each other?

Beyond Technocracy: Science, Politics and Citizens answers these questions with clarity and vision. Drawing upon a broad range of data and events from the United States and Europe, and noting the blurring of the expert/lay...

Mobile Communication covers a wide range of topics. These include the replacement of co-present interaction with mediated contact and analysis of mobile-based cohesion and gender. The authors also explore the role of media choice and its effect on the quality as well as quantity of social cohesion. Other topics include mobile communication and communities of interest; and mobile communication, cohesion, and youth.

This volume brings together scholars from around the world to consider how mobile communication both builds and destroys our sense of social cohesion. There is no question...

Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an...

Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev's famous "kitchen debate" in 1958 involved more than the virtues of American appliances. Both Nixon and Khrushchev recognized the political symbolism of the modern kitchen; the kind of technological innovation represented in this everyday context spoke to the political system that produced it. The kitchen connects the "big" politics of politicians and statesmen to the "small" politics of users and interest groups. Cold War Kitchen looks at the kitchen as material object and symbol, considering the politics and the practices of one of the most...

Twitter, Facebook, e-publishing, blogs, distance-learning and other social media raise some of the most divisive cultural questions of our time. Some see the technological breakthroughs we live with as hopeful and democratic new steps in education, information gathering, and human progress. But others are deeply concerned by the eroding of civility online, declining reading habits, withering...