Social Technology

“Read this if you want to understand how to shape our technological future and reinvigorate democracy along the way.”—Reed Hastings, cofounder and CEO of Netflix ""A triumph: an analysis of the critical challenges facing our digital society that is as accessible as it is sophisticated.""...

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto.

Hippias of Elis travels throughout the Greek world practicing and teaching the art of making beautiful speeches. On a rare visit to Athens, he meets Socrates, who questions him about the nature of his art. Socrates is especially curious about how Hippias would define beauty. They agree that beauty makes all beautiful things beautiful, but when Socrates presses him to say precisely what he means, Hippias is unable to deliver such a definition.

In this expanded edition of Let Go, best-selling author and successful online entrepreneur Pat Flynn explores what it means to let go of the things that keep us from the journeys we yearn to forge and the achievements we aspire to attain. With eight new chapters, Flynn shares with listeners the wisdom he’s learned during the years since he was let go from his architecture job during the height of the US economic downturn.

Have iPads replaced conversation at the dinner table? What do infants observe when their parents are on their smartphones? Should you be your child's Facebook friend? As the focus of family has turned to the glow of the screen—children constantly texting their friends, parents working online...

In a world where AI is revolutionizing every industry, there's a thin line between those who thrive and those who fall behind. This exclusive three-audiobook bundle is your access key to the AI winners' club. This isn't just about “using ChatGPT and AI”—millions of people do that. It's about mastering it completely, turning it into a money-making machine that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even while you sleep.

Small business owners and solo professionals know they're supposed to use social media to increase sales, but how should they start? Using a unique Rule of 30 approach, 30 Days to Social Media Success is the perfect resource for busy people who want quick results. Thirty short chapters (one for each day of the month) are packed with real-world tips and proven techniques you can use right away. This book makes it easy to tap into the power of today's hottest social media sites.

We live in complicated, dangerous times. They are also hyper-technical times. As citizens who will elect future presidents of the most powerful and influential world, we need to know - truly understand, not just rely on television's talking heads - if Iran's nascent nuclear capability is a genuine threat to the West, if biochemical weapons are likely to be developed by terrorists, if there are viable alternatives to fossil fuels that should be nurtured and supported by the government, if nuclear power should be encouraged, and if global warming is actually happening.

In the very near future, smart “technologies and big data” will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such “solutionism” affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency?

Whether it's Kim Kardashian uploading picture after picture to Instagram or your roommate posting a mid-vacation shot to Facebook, selfies receive mixed reactions. But are selfies more than, as many critics lament, a symptom of a self-absorbed generation? Digital native Alicia Eler's The Selfie Generation is the first book to delve fully into this ubiquitous and much-maligned part of social media, including why people take them in the first place and the ways they can change how we see ourselves.

Chinese society has been shaped by the interplay of the EAST—exams, autocracy, stability, and technology—from ancient times through the present. Beginning with the Sui dynasty's introduction of the civil service exam, known as Keju, in 587 CE—and continuing through the personnel management system used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—Chinese autocracies have developed exceptional tools for homogenizing ideas, norms, and practices. But this uniformity came with a huge downside: stifled creativity.

When Grace @FilthyBlueBird tweeted her dirtiest, most delicious secret desires to MovieStar @VaughnAsher she never expected a reply, let alone a face-to-face meeting and an offer of a lifetime. And when MovieStar @VaughnAsher figured out the woman vacationing at his family’s St. Thomas resort was the author of all those dirty hashtags a fan was relentlessly tweeting at him...well that was a challenge he couldn’t pass up. He was more than happy to #RockHerFilthyWorld.

Sleep is the most important part of anyone’s journey to a healthy and happy life, and with this book you can learn how to fix your sleep schedule and recover precious hours of relaxation. If you're like most people, odds are you aren't getting enough sleep. Thanks to shifts in our culture...

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have redefined social interaction. But what if "machines" like automobiles, bicycles, health monitors, appliances, instruments, and anything else you can connect to the Internet, could all become members of your social network, collect data you care about, and feed it back to you at just the right time?

Discover how you can start your own YouTube channel, grow it, and make money! Have you ever surfed through YouTube and wondered just what it would be like to have your own videos on there? Do you watch YouTubers and believe you can do the same thing, if not better? Are you a camera lover who can create great works of art you’d like to showcase to the world? Then this is the audiobook for you!

Ever since the earliest days of the Cold War, American intelligence agencies have launched spies in the sky, implanted spies in the ether, burrowed spies underground, sunk spies in the ocean, and even tried to control spies' minds by chemical means. But these weren't human spies. Instead, the United States expanded its reach around the globe through techno-spies. Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach investigates how America's technophiles inadvertently created a global espionage empire: one based on technology, not land.

Born in 1905 in the center of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, Viktor Frankl was a witness to the great political, philosophical, and scientific upheavals of the 20th century. In these stirring recollections, Frankl describes how as a young doctor of neurology in prewar Vienna, his disagreements with Freud and Adler led to the development of "the third Viennese School of Psychotherapy", known as logotherapy; recounts his harrowing trials in four concentration camps during the War; and reflects on the celebrity brought by Man's Search for Meaning in 1945.

What part of memory is reliable fact, what part creative embellishment? Which favorite presuppositions are unfounded, which statistically biased? By conjoining two opposing mind-sets - the suspension of disbelief required in storytelling and the skepticism inherent in the scientific method - best-selling mathematician John Allen Paulos has created an unusual hybrid, a composite of personal memories and mathematical approaches to reevaluating them.

Summer 2017: computer screens go blank in 150 countries. The NHS is so affected that hospitals can only take in patients for A&E. Ambulances are grounded. Computer screens turn on spontaneously and warnings appear. Employees who desperately pull the plugs are too late. Restarting is pointless; the computers are locked. And now the attackers ask each victim for money. This is hijack software. It is just one example of how vulnerable the digital world has made us.

Today's computers are composing music that sounds "more Bach than Bach", turning photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and even writing screenplays. But are computers truly creative - or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers? Miller, an authority on creativity, identifies the key factors essential to the creative process, from "the need for introspection" to "the ability to discover the key problem." He talks to people on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and explores the riches of computer-created art.