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Information Technology in Context: Studies from the Perspective of Developing Countries (Routledge Revivals)
by Chrisanthi Avgerou Geoff WalshamThis title was first published in 2000. A discussion of information technology (IT) in developing countries. The contributors can be considered to share the following set of broad premises: information and communication technologies, and related systems, have significant potential to aid the economic growth and improvement of social conditions in the developing world; however, such potential is not released by simply transferring technologies and processes from advanced economies; in order to better serve development needs, people involved with the design, implementation and management of IT-related projects and systems in developing countries must improve their capacity to address the specific contextual characteristics of the organization, sector, country or region within which their work is located. The text thus emphasizes the importance of context in examining the role and value of IT in the developing countries. It focuses attention on the fusion of the activities of "professionals" (technical experts, managers, policy makers) and "users" (more broadly, all other groups affecting or affected by the technologies and systems), with the intention of facilitating locally meaningful and effective change.
Information Technology In The Third World: Can I.T. Lead To Humane National Development?
by William James StoverMass media, telecommunications, and computer technology can effect change in poor countries, but Third World leaders are often disappointed in the results. Professor Stover looks closely at information technology and communication as agents of economic, social, and political development in Third World countries, stressing that definitions of "communication" and "development" must include participation in the exchange of information and the attainment of humane values. He examines reasons why the current world information order does not meet the needs of the Third World and argues that the major difficulty in achieving the potential of information technology for humane development is a cyclical pattern involving technology and values. When countries acquire the physical means of communication, their leaders are tempted to control them, resulting in censorship that prevents genuine communication. Breaking this cycle is a major requirement in using information technology for development, and Dr. Stover discusses how this may be accomplished practically in developmental, Western, and Soviet contexts.
The Information Trade: How Big Tech Conquers Countries, Challenges Our Rights, and Transforms Our World
by Alexis Wichowski"A timely, compelling, and expertly researched passport to the tech companies that rule today's digital landscape."—Blake Harris, bestselling author of Console Wars and The History of the Future.In this provocative book about our new tech-based reality, political insider and tech expert Alexis Wichowski considers the unchecked rise of tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla—what she calls “net states”— and their unavoidable influence in our lives. Rivaling nation states in power and capital, today’s net states are reaching into our physical world, inserting digital services into our lived environments in ways both unseen and, at times, unknown to us. They are transforming the way the world works, putting our rights up for grabs, from personal privacy to national security. Combining original reporting and insights drawn from more than 100 interviews with technology and government insiders, including Microsoft president Brad Smith, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the former Federal Trade Commission chair under President Obama, and the managing director of Jigsaw—Google’s Department of Counter-terrorism against extremism and cyber-attacks—The Information Trade explores what happens we give up our personal freedom and individual autonomy in exchange for an easy, plugged-in existence, and shows what we can do to control our relationship with net states before they irreversibly change our future.
Information Visualisation: From Theory, To Research, To Practice and Back
by Maria dos Santos LonsdaleIn a world of information overload, this book will help you to cut through the noise and communicate information with clear, efficient, and engaging visualisations. Taking you on a journey through a full range of different types of visualisations including infographics and motion graphics, the book: • Explains the underlying principles behind information visualisation, including the science of visual perception and cognition • Provides easy-to-digest guidelines that bring research and best practice together • Showcases a range of real-world applied examples, and outlines the do’s and don’ts of different approaches • Shows how to use research methods to design with and for your target audience. From an expert with years of experience researching, teaching, and doing information visualisation, learn how to make better and informed decisions around visualisation design that are appropriate for both your data and audience.
Information Visualisation: From Theory, To Research, To Practice and Back
by Maria dos Santos LonsdaleIn a world of information overload, this book will help you to cut through the noise and communicate information with clear, efficient, and engaging visualisations. Taking you on a journey through a full range of different types of visualisations including infographics and motion graphics, the book: • Explains the underlying principles behind information visualisation, including the science of visual perception and cognition • Provides easy-to-digest guidelines that bring research and best practice together • Showcases a range of real-world applied examples, and outlines the do’s and don’ts of different approaches • Shows how to use research methods to design with and for your target audience. From an expert with years of experience researching, teaching, and doing information visualisation, learn how to make better and informed decisions around visualisation design that are appropriate for both your data and audience.
Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech and Opinion Control Since 9-11 (Open Media Series)
by Greg Palast Nancy SnowIn Information War, former United States Information Agency employee Nancy Snow describes how U.S. propaganda efforts and covert operations are expanding more rapidly today than at any other time in U.S. history, as the Bush administration attempts to increase U.S. dominance by curbing dissent and controlling opinion. Snow lays out the propaganda techniques that the government uses to control dissent in the twenty-first century, spotlights the key players and their spinmeistering abilities in the information war, and describes memorable "leaks" in the Administration's efforts to conduct stealth propaganda programs and control information at home. Ultimately she shows that dissent and true democracy are the early casualties of these policies.
Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It
by Richard StengelA “well-told” insider account of the State Department’s twenty-first-century struggle to defend America against malicious propaganda and disinformation (The Washington Post).Disinformation is nothing new. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But today, social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious. In a disturbing turn of events, authoritarian governments are increasingly using it to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it.During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time, was an Under Secretary of State on the front lines of this new global information war—tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS’s messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, during the 2016 election, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we know the rest.In Information Wars, Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Mohamed bin Salman, to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea—a scheme that would became a model for future endeavors. An urgent book for our times, now with a new preface from the author, Information Wars challenges us to combat this ever-growing threat to democracy.“[A] refreshingly frank account . . . revealing.” —Kirkus Reviews“This sobering book is indeed needed to help individuals better understand how information can be massaged to produce any sort of message desired.” —Library Journal
Information Work With Unpublished Reports
by A. H. HollowayThe Monograph Series has been planned and organized by the Institute of Information Scientists, in consultation with the pub-lishers. The aim is to provide a series of texts to fill (so far as may be practicable) the considerable gaps in the monograph literature of this fairly new subject, which have greatly complicated the teaching of it; the monographs should be suitable also for people learning on the job, and for information scientists who want to brush up their knowledge of particular fields.
Information Worlds: Behavior, Technology, and Social Context in the Age of the Internet (Routledge Studies in Library and Information Science)
by Paul T. Jaeger Gary BurnettThe authors present a multi-level theory of "Information Worlds" to investigate the ways in which information creates the social worlds of people. Building upon the foundational works of Library and Information Studies (LIS) scholar and theorist Elfreda Chatman and philosopher Jurgen Habermas, as well as from theory and research from a wide range of other fields, the theory of information worlds can serve as a theoretical driver both in LIS studies and across other disciplines that study information issues, enriching and expanding our understanding of the multi-layered role of information in society. Testing their theory through application to a variety of real-world issues, Burnett and Jaeger tackle the topics of libraries and information provision, the value assigned to information by differing social groups, information access and exchange, international information policies, the role of information in democracy, and technological change. Information Worlds provides a framework for empirical investigations into the fascinating and very real social dimensions of information.
Informational Tracking
by Sylvie Leleu-Merviel“What is colour?”, “What is the precise meaning of the statement ‘the stock exchange closes at a 5% drop this evening’?”, “How are TV viewers defined?”, or “How can images produce meaning?” Such everyday questions are examined in this book. To make our analysis intuitive and understandable, numerous concrete examples illustrate our theoretical framework and concepts. The examples include gaming, fictional skits in leisure entertainment, and enigmas. The golden thread running through the text revisits the informational process and places the datum as its pivot. The epistemological perspective of our novel approach is that of “radical relativity”. This is based on the precept that a perceptual trace carries with it the spectrum of the process that has engendered it. Given this, the informational tracking endeavour tracks the meaning-making process, notably through interpretive scaffoldings that leads to plausible realities.
Informe Tapia
by Marcelo Mellado SuazoNueva edición revisada de la gran novela de Marcelo Mellado Leopoldo Tapia, maestro de educación básica y poeta con aficiones ferroviarias, recibe la misión de preparar un reporte sobre el acoso del que estaría siendo víctima -por parte de oscuros funcionarios públicos- la Asociación de Poetas de la Cuenca del Maipo, liderada por un tal Badilla o Padilla. El pormenorizado relato de este mundo, de las jergas en que se comunican sus personajes y de los modos en que operan, hace de Informe Tapia un fresco incomparable de un cierto Chile que bien podría ser Chile entero. Publicada originalmente hace quince años, esta novela es una pieza señera en el proyecto literario de Mellado, enfocado perspicazmente en la pequeñez humana -en particular la que puede surgir en el mundo burocrático y cultural-, pero siempre atento a la comicidad y la singularidad que son su correlato objetivo, de manera que la grisura no es aquí la tónica, sino más bien cierto tono carnavalesco, paródico, hilarante.
Informers: Policing, policy, practice
by Roger Billingsley Teresa Nemitz Philip BeanThe police rely heavily on paid and unpaid informers: without them clear-up rates would plummet, and many crimes would remain undetected. Yet little is known about the informer system and how it works, for example: who are these informers? how are they recruited? how are they handled? who handles them? what sort of information do they provide? Recent high profile cases have drawn attention to the use of informers, there has been a growing debate about the subject, and many feel that stricter controls are needed - but how is this to be achieved without undermining the effectiveness of the system? This is the first book of its kind on informers in Britain, providing an invaluable source of information and analysis from key authorities in the field.
Informing Cultural Policy: The Information and Research Infrastructure
by J. Mark SchusterIn any policy arena, the crafting of effective policy depends on the quality of the information infrastructure that is available to the participants in that arena. Such an information infrastructure is designed, developed, and managed as a critical element in policy formulation and implementation. While various attempts have been made to map the extent of the existing cultural policy information infrastructure in the United States, no structured attempt has been made to conduct a cross-national analysis intended to draw on the more highly developed models already in operation elsewhere.A cross-national comparative look provides valuable information on how this infrastructure has evolved, on what has succeeded and what has had less success, on what is sustainable and what is not, and on how the range of interests of the various individuals and institutions involved in the cultural policy arena can best be accommodated through careful design of the information infrastructure.In Informing Cultural Policy, international cultural policy scholar and researcher J. Mark Schuster relates the findings of a study that took him from North America to Europe to gain understanding of the cultural policy information infrastructure in place abroad. His findings are structured into a taxonomy that organizes the array of research and information models operating throughout the world into a logical framework for understanding how the myriad cultural agencies collect, analyze, and disseminate cultural policy data. Schuster discusses private- and public-sector models, including research divisions of government cultural funding agencies, national statistics agencies, independent nonprofit research institutes, government-designated university-based research centers, private consulting firms, cultural ""observatories,"" non-institutional networks, research programs, and publications. For each case study undertaken, the author provides the Internet address, names, and information for key conta
Informing the Global Citizen: A Selection from The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom (To the Point)
by Joel SimonToday, anyone with an iPhone can provide firsthand accounts from the world's front lines. Despite our increased access to events around the world, journalists are more vital than ever as they bring context and perspective and help to set the humanitarian agenda. However, threats to journalists are mounting with record numbers killed and imprisoned each year. From the drug wars of Mexico to Iraq and Tahrir Square, Joel Simon explores the new challenges and dangers to the future of journalistic freedom.
Informing the Global Citizen: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom
by Joel SimonToday, anyone with an iPhone can provide firsthand accounts from the world's front lines. Despite our increased access to events around the world, journalists are more vital than ever as they bring context and perspective and help to set the humanitarian agenda. However, threats to journalists are mounting with record numbers killed and imprisoned each year. From the drug wars of Mexico to Iraq and Tahrir Square, Joel Simon explores the new challenges and dangers to the future of journalistic freedom.
Informing the News
by Thomas E. PattersonAs the journalist Walter Lippmann noted nearly a century ago, democracy falters "if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news." Today's journalists are not providing it. Too often, reporters give equal weight to facts and biased opinion, stir up small controversies, and substitute infotainment for real news. Even when they get the facts rights, they often misjudge the context in which they belong. Information is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. Public opinion and debate suffer when citizens are misinformed about current affairs, as is increasingly the case. Though the failures of today's communication system cannot be blamed solely on the news media, they are part of the problem, and the best hope for something better. Patterson proposes "knowledge-based journalism" as a corrective. Unless journalists are more deeply informed about the subjects they cover, they will continue to misinterpret them and to be vulnerable to manipulation by their sources. In this book, derived from a multi-year initiative of the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation, Patterson calls for nothing less than a major overhaul of journalism practice and education. The book speaks not only to journalists but to all who are concerned about the integrity of the information on which America's democracy depends.
Informing Water Policies in South Asia
by Anjal Prakash Chanda Gurung Goodrich Sreoshi SinghThis book analyzes water policies in South Asia from the perspective of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). It seeks to address the problems of water scarcity, conflict and pollution resulting from the gross mismanagement and over-exploitation of this finite resource. Highlighting the need for IWRM in mitigating abuse and ensuring sustainable use, it discusses issues relating to groundwater management; inter-state water conflicts; peri-urban water use; local traditional water management practices; coordination between water users and uses; and water integration at the grassroots level. With case studies from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal, the innovative, painstaking and transnational researches presented in the volume deal with questions of equity, gender, sustainability, and democratic governance in water policy interventions. It will interest researchers and students of development studies, environmental studies, natural resource management, water governance, and public administration, as also water sector professionals, policymakers, civil society activists and governmental and nongovernmental organizations.
Infrastructural Being: Rethinking dwelling in a naturecultural world
by Jarno Valkonen Veera Kinnunen Heikki Huilaja Teemu LoikkanenThis book provides a comprehensive insight into the contemporary naturecultural world by exploring infrastructures through the dwelling approach. The notion of naturecultures has been utilized in environmental humanities and social sciences to emphasize the inherent messiness of the lived world and the inseparability of social and biophysical elements. Concept of naturecultures stresses that seemingly “natural” is always simultaneously “cultural” and vice versa. This approach allows fleshing out the messy engagements with infrastructures, which in this book is conceptualized as infrastructural being. This book is a contribution to emerging discussions on infrastructures in the fields of environmental social sciences and humanities. It sensitizes to the peculiarities of modern dwelling and modern, yet often overlooked, ways of being connected with nature. Moreover, it provides tools for speculating, how could things be otherwise. The book is a topical response to the urgent call for developing new forms of human-nature relations in times of environmental turbulence.
Infrastructural Times: Temporality and the Making of Global Urban Worlds
by Jean-Paul D. Addie, Michael R. Glass, and Jen NellesWhether waiting for the train or planning the future city, infrastructure orders—and depends on—multiple urban temporalities. This agenda-setting volume disrupts conventional notions of time through a robust examination of the relations between temporality, infrastructure, and urban society. Conceptually rich and empirically detailed, its interdisciplinary dialogue encompasses infrastructural systems including transportation, energy, and water to bridge often-siloed technical, political-economic and lived perspectives. With global coverage of diverse cities and regions from Berlin to Jayapura, this book is an essential provocation to re-evaluate urban theory, politics, and practice and better account for the temporal complexities that shape our infrastructured worlds.
Infrastructure and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
by Antonio Estache Quentin WodonInfrastructure and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa analyzes the extent to which, how, and how fast the infrastructure needs of the poor have been met in Sub-Saharan Africa. Estache and Wodon explore the extent to which some key policies have hurt or helped progress in trying to speed the expansions of coverage so clearly needed in the region. They focus on electricity, water, sanitation, and other services at the core of the day-to-day needs of the population, examining the extent to which reforms of the last 15-20 years have managed to reduce the infrastructure gap. They anchor their analysis on the evidence available about the macroeconomic importance of infrastructure for the region, the policies that have been adopted to accelerate coverage, and a detailed assessment of the poverty dimensions of infrastructure.
Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene (Experimental Futures)
by Kregg HetheringtonInfrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene explores life in the age of climate change through a series of infrastructural puzzles—sites at which it has become impossible to disentangle the natural from the built environment. With topics ranging from breakwaters built of oysters, underground rivers made by leaky pipes, and architecture gone weedy to neighborhoods partially submerged by rising tides, the contributors explore situations that destabilize the concepts we once relied on to address environmental challenges. They take up the challenge that the Anthropocene poses both to life on the planet and to our social-scientific understanding of it by showing how past conceptions of environment and progress have become unmoored and what this means for how we imagine the future. Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Andrea Ballestero, Bruce Braun, Ashley Carse, Gastón R. Gordillo, Kregg Hetherington, Casper Bruun Jensen, Joseph Masco, Shaylih Muehlmann, Natasha Myers, Stephanie Wakefield, Austin Zeiderman
Infrastructure in Archaeological Discourse: Framing Society in the Past (Persistent Questions of the Past)
by M. Grace Ellis Carly M. DeSanto Howey, Meghan C. L.This volume expands perspectives on infrastructure that are rooted in archaeological discourse and material evidence.The compiled chapters represent new and emerging ideas within archaeology about what infrastructure is, how it can materialize, and how it impacts and reflects human behavior, social organization, and identity in the past as well as the present. Three goals central to the work include: (1) expand the definition of infrastructure using archaeological frameworks and evidence from a wide range of social, historical, and geographic contexts; (2) explore how new archaeological perspectives on infrastructure can help answer anthropological questions pertaining to social organization, group collaboration, and community consensus and negotiation; and (3) examine the broader implications of an archaeological engagement with infrastructure and contributions to contemporary infrastructural studies. Chapters explore important aspects of infrastructure, including its relationality, scale, history, and relevance, and provide archaeological case studies that examine the social repercussions of infrastructure and the various ways it has materialized in the past. This compilation ultimately expands the discourse of infrastructure in archaeology and social sciences more broadly.Social scientists can turn to this volume for insights into an archaeologically informed perspective on infrastructure relevant to the study of past and current human behavior.
Infrastructure of Injustice: State and Politics in Manipur and Northeast India
by Raile Rocky ZiipaoThis book examines the dynamics of infrastructure development in Northeast India especially Manipur from a socio-anthropological perspective. It looks at the pattern and distribution of infrastructure in the region to analyse the impact of education, roads and healthcare on the livelihoods, ecosystems, governance, and social futures of communities. The volume examines the infrastructure deficit in the conflict-ridden state of Manipur, focusing especially on electricity and roads. The author shows how problems arising from poor infrastructure are further complicated on account of corruption, insurgency, ethnic unrest and the politics of marginalization. Looking at the discourse around development in the Northeast, the volume also highlights the structural inequality in Manipur and other states. It further shows how infrastructure development can become a means for enabling trade, creating markets, diluting boundaries between varied ethnic groups and connecting people. This book will be useful for researchers and scholars of development studies, economics, social anthropology, sociology and public policy; particularly those interested in India’s Northeast.
Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion (CRESC)
by Penelope Harvey Casper Bruun Jensen Atsuro MoritaContemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters explore both the promises and failures of infrastructure. Tracing the experimental histories of a wide range of infrastructures and documenting their variable outcomes, the volume offers a unique set of analytical perspectives on contemporary infrastructural complications. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.
Infrastructures for Peace in Sub-Saharan Africa
by Mediel Hove Geoff HarrisCultures of violence are characteristic of many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and attempts to move towards cultures of peace have often proved difficult and ineffectual. And yet, the wide variations in levels of violence within and between countries show that it is not inevitable; rather, it is the result of choices made at individual, community and societal levels. This book examines the potential of peace infrastructures as vehicles to strengthen and spread progress towards cultures of peace. Peace infrastructures vary hugely in sophistication and level. The examples examined in this book range from tiny structures which help resolve conflicts between individuals and within community organisations, peace committees which serve local communities, peace education and peace club programmes in schools, mediation mechanisms to prevent election violence and to ministries of peace to coordinate government and non-government efforts in peacemaking and peacebuilding. The overall finding is that the development of peace infrastructures at all levels has great potential to build cultures of peace. 1. It is the only book available which documents the experience and potential of nonviolence in post-independence sub-Saharan Africa. 2. It makes a persuasive case for the development of various peace infrastructures in order to make peace sustainable. 3. It explains how strategic planning can be utilised, both to bring about change and to institutionalise it.