The Smartphone Paradox is a critical examination of our everyday mobile technologies and the effects that they have on our thoughts and behaviors. Alan J. Reid presents a comprehensive view of smartphones: the research behind the uses and gratifications of smartphones, the obstacles they present, the opportunities they afford, and how everyone can achieve a healthy, technological balance. It includes interviews with smartphone users from a variety of backgrounds, and translates scholarly research into a conversational tone, making it easy to understand a synthesis of key findings and conclusions from a heavily-researched domain. All in all, through the lens of smartphone dependency, the book makes the argument for digital mindfulness in a device age that threatens our privacy, sociability, attention, and cognitive abilities.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online. This book investigates the profound effects 21st century digital technology is having on our individual and collective lives and seeks to confront the realities of a new digital age.

Paradoxes, contrary propositions that are not contestable separately but that are inconsistent when conjoined, constitute a pervasive feature of contemporary organizational life. When contradictory elements are constituted as equally important in day-to-day work, organizational actors frequently experience acute tensions in engaging with these contradictions. This Element discusses the presence of paradoxes in the life of organizations, introduces the reader to the notion of paradox in theory and practice, and distinguishes paradox and adjacent conceptualizations such as trade-off, dilemma, dialectics, ambiguity, etc. This Element also covers what triggers paradoxes and how they come into being whereby the Element distinguishes latent and salient paradoxes and how salient paradoxes are managed. This Element discusses key methodological challenges and possibilities of studying, teaching, and applying paradoxes and concludes by considering some future research questions left unexplored in the field.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Development Informatics Association Conference, IDIA 2018, held in Tshwane, South Africa, in August 2018. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ICT adoption and impact; mobile education; e-education; community development; design; innovation and maturity; data.

A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of a tech-besotted culture. With razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy is “Carr’s best hits for those who missed the last decade of his stream of thoughtful commentary about our love affair with technology and its effect on our relationships” (Richard Cytowic, New York Journal of Books). Carr draws on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology. Carr’s favorite targets are those zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they may be, are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse. Utopia Is Creepy compels us to question the technological momentum that has trapped us in its flow. “Resistance is never futile,” argues Carr, and this book delivers the proof.

Communication and Learning in an Age of Digital Transformation provides cross-disciplinary perspectives on digitization as social transformation and its impact on communication and learning. This work presents openness within its interpretation of the digital and its impact on learning and communication, acknowledging historical contexts and contemporary implications emerging from discourse on digitization. The book presents a triangulation of different research perspectives. These perspectives, which range from digital resistance parks and cyber-religious questions to cultural-scientific media-theoretical reflections, point to the performative openness of the analysis. The book represents an interdisciplinary approach and opens a space for understanding the social complexity of digital transformations in teaching and learning. This book will be of great interest to academics, post graduate students and researchers in the field of digital learning, communication and education research.

The challenges of teaching a successful introductory sociology course today demand materials from a publisher very different from the norm. Texts that are organized the way the discipline structures itself intellectually no longer connect with the majority of student learners. This is not an issue of pandering to students or otherwise seeking the lowest common denominator. On the contrary, it is a question of again making the practice of sociological thinking meaningful, rigorous, and relevant to today’s world of undergraduates. This comparatively concise, highly visual, and affordable book offers a refreshingly new way forward to reach students, using one of the most powerful tools in a sociologist’s teaching arsenal—the familiar stuff in students’ everyday lives throughout the world: the jeans they wear to class, the coffee they drink each morning, or the phones their professors tell them to put away during lectures. A focus on consumer culture, seeing the strange in the familiar, is not only interesting for students; it is also (the authors suggest) pedagogically superior to more traditional approaches. By engaging students through their stuff, this book moves beyond teaching about sociology to helping instructors teach the practice of sociological thinking. It moves beyond describing what sociology is, so that students can practice what sociological thinking can do. This pedagogy also posits a relationship between teacher and learner that is bi-directional. Many students feel a sense of authority in various areas of consumer culture, and they often enjoy sharing their knowledge with fellow students and with their instructor. Opening up the sociology classroom to discussion of these topics validates students’ expertise on their own life-worlds. Teachers, in turn, gain insight from the goods, services, and cultural expectations that shape students’ lives. While innovative, the book has been carefully crafted to make it as useful and flexible as possible for instructors aiming to build core sociological foundations in a single semester. A map on pages ii–iii identifies core sociological concepts covered so that a traditional syllabus as well as individual lectures can easily be maintained. Theory, method, and active learning exercises in every chapter constantly encourage the sociological imagination as well as the "doing" of sociology.

Paradoxes are poems of science and philosophy that collectively allow us to address broad multidisciplinary issues within a microcosm. A true paradox is a source of creativity and a concise expression that delivers a profound idea and provokes a wild and endless imagination. The study of paradoxes leads to ultimate clarity and, at the same time, indisputably challenges your mind. Paradoxes in Scientific Inference analyzes paradoxes from many different perspectives: statistics, mathematics, philosophy, science, artificial intelligence, and more. The book elaborates on findings and reaches new and exciting conclusions. It challenges your knowledge, intuition, and conventional wisdom, compelling you to adjust your way of thinking. Ultimately, you will learn effective scientific inference through studying the paradoxes.

The technologically tethered, iPhone-addicted figure is an image we can easily conjure. Most of us complain that there aren't enough hours in the day and too many e-mails in our thumb-accessible inboxes. This widespread perception that life is faster than it used to be is now ingrained in our culture, and smartphones and the Internet are continually being blamed. But isn't the sole purpose of the smartphone to give us such quick access to people and information that we'll be free to do other things? Isn't technology supposed to make our lives easier? In Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. She argues that we are not mere hostages to communication devices, and the sense of always being rushed is the result of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set rather than the machines that help us set them. Indeed, being busy and having action-packed lives has become valorized by our productivity driven culture. Wajcman offers a bracing historical perspective, exploring the commodification of clock time, and how the speed of the industrial age became identified with progress. She also delves into the ways time-use differs for diverse groups in modern societies, showing how changes in work patterns, family arrangements, and parenting all affect time stress. Bringing together empirical research on time use and theoretical debates about dramatic digital developments, this accessible and engaging book will leave readers better versed in how to use technology to navigate life's fast lane.