What shapes the role of Information and Communication Technologies in our everyday life? Despite the speed with which information and communication technologies such as the PC, mobile telephone and internet have found their way into society, there remains a good deal of debate surrounding their adoption and use. Through empirical studies covering a broad range of everyday life and work settings, this volume provides grounded insights into the social dynamics influencing how ICTs are both shaped and experienced. Specifically, the book examines the contributions of diverse disciplines to our understanding of these processes, the symbolic nature of technologies, the influence of design on the experience of ICTs, the role of users in influencing that design, the social constraints affecting the use of those technologies, and strategies for evaluating the social consequences of ICT innovations.

What shapes the role of Information and Communication Technologies in our everyday life? Despite the speed with which information and communication technologies such as the PC, mobile telephone and internet have found their way into society, there remains a good deal of debate surrounding their adoption and use. Through empirical studies covering a broad range of everyday life and work settings, this volume provides grounded insights into the social dynamics influencing how ICTs are both shaped and experienced. Specifically, the book examines the contributions of diverse disciplines to our understanding of these processes, the symbolic nature of technologies, the influence of design on the experience of ICTs, the role of users in influencing that design, the social constraints affecting the use of those technologies, and strategies for evaluating the social consequences of ICT innovations.

What shapes the role of Information and Communication Technologies in our everyday life? Despite the speed with which information and communication technologies such as the PC, mobile telephone and internet have found their way into society, there remains a good deal of debate surrounding their adoption and use. Through empirical studies covering a broad range of everyday life and work settings, this volume provides grounded insights into the social dynamics influencing how ICTs are both shaped and experienced. Specifically, the book examines the contributions of diverse disciplines to our understanding of these processes, the symbolic nature of technologies, the influence of design on the experience of ICTs, the role of users in influencing that design, the social constraints affecting the use of those technologies, and strategies for evaluating the social consequences of ICT innovations.

In recent decades, digital technologies have permeated daily routines, whether at school, at work, or during personal engagements. Stakeholders in education are promoting innovative pedagogical practices, the business sector is utilizing updated processes. Even the public is improving their lifestyles by utilizing innovative technology. In a knowledge construction setting, technology becomes a tool to assist the user to access information, communicate information, and collaborate with others towards human development and knowledge management. In this context, ubiquitous computing has emerged to support humans in their daily life activities in a personal, unattended, and remote manner. Ubiquitous Technologies for Human Development and Knowledge Management serves as an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on the widespread incorporation of technological innovations around the globe. It examines how the application of ubiquitous computing technologies affects various aspects of human lives, specifically in human development and knowledge management. The chapters demonstrate how these ubiquitous technologies, networks, and associated systems have proliferated and have woven themselves into the very framework of everyday life. It covers categorized investigations ranging from e-governance, knowledge management, ICTs, public services, innovation, and ethics. This book is essential for ICT specialists, technologists, teachers, instructional designers, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the latest technologies and how they are impacting human development and knowledge management across different disciplines.

The production and consumption of Information and Communication Technologies (or ICTs) have become embedded within our societies. The influence and implications of this have an impact at a macro level, in the way our governments, economies, and businesses operate, and in our everyday lives. This handbook is about the many challenges presented by ICTs. It sets out an intellectual agenda that examines the implications of ICTs for individuals, organizations, democracy, and the economy. Explicity interdisciplinary, and combining empirical research with theoretical work, it is organised around four themes covering the knowledge economy; organizational dynamics, strategy, and design; governance and democracy; and culture, community and new media literacies. It provides a comprehensive resource for those working in the social sciences, and in the physical sciences and engineering fields, with leading contemporary research informed principally by the disciplines of anthropology, economics, philosophy, politics, and sociology.

" -Chris Coward, Director, Center for Internet Studies, University of Washington 'Peizer shares his considerable global experience and ICT expertise in a highly readable, illuminating book. A must read!" - Stefaan Verhulst, Chief of Research, Markle Foundation.

This book is the first general social analysis that seriously considers the daily experience of information disruption and software failure within contemporary Western society. Through an investigation of informationalism, defined as a contemporary form of capitalism, it describes the social processes producing informational disorder. While most social theory sees disorder as secondary, pathological or uninteresting, this book takes disordering processes as central to social life. The book engages with theories of information society which privilege information order, offering a strong counterpoint centred on "disinformation." Disorder and the Disinformation Society offers a practical agenda, arguing that difficulties in producing software are both inherent to the process of developing software and in the social dynamics of informationalism. It outlines the dynamics of software failure as they impinge on of information workers and on daily life, explores why computerized finance has become inherently self-disruptive, asks how digital enclosure and intellectual property create conflicts over cultural creativity and disrupt informational accuracy and scholarship, and reveals how social media can extend, but also distort, the development of social movements.

Information and Communication Technologies, Society and Human Beings: Theory and Framework addresses the extensive area of effects of ICT on human beings and the interaction between ICT, individuals, organizations, and society. This premier reference source features contributions from over 45 distinguished researchers from around the world, each presenting high quality research on Social Informatics, Human Computer Interaction, Organizational Behavior, and Macro-ergonomics. This unique publication is perfect for students, teachers, researchers, engineers, practitioners, managers, policy-makers, and media alike.

How data science and the analysis of networks help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences. Social life is full of paradoxes. Our intentional actions often trigger outcomes that we did not intend or even envision. How do we explain those unintended effects and what can we do to regulate them? In Decoding the Social World, Sandra González-Bailón explains how data science and digital traces help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences—offering the solution to a social paradox that has intrigued thinkers for centuries. Communication has always been the force that makes a collection of people more than the sum of individuals, but only now can we explain why: digital technologies have made it possible to parse the information we generate by being social in new, imaginative ways. And yet we must look at that data, González-Bailón argues, through the lens of theories that capture the nature of social life. The technologies we use, in the end, are also a manifestation of the social world we inhabit. González-Bailón discusses how the unpredictability of social life relates to communication networks, social influence, and the unintended effects that derive from individual decisions. She describes how communication generates social dynamics in aggregate (leading to episodes of “collective effervescence”) and discusses the mechanisms that underlie large-scale diffusion, when information and behavior spread “like wildfire.” She applies the theory of networks to illuminate why collective outcomes can differ drastically even when they arise from the same individual actions. By opening the black box of unintended effects, González-Bailón identifies strategies for social intervention and discusses the policy implications—and how data science and evidence-based research embolden critical thinking in a world that is constantly changing.